Actor Charles Dance: Charles is Dr Clemens in Aliens 3...interview

Reminded of this salient fact, Dance shows his appreciation by letting out the cackle of a mad scientist on strong coffee.

Yeah," he says, "and then they kill him off!" He reflects on the film, easily one of the most unnecessary sequels ever made."

Poor David Fincher, who is a director I greatly admire. He was really up against it.

You're dealing with a franchise and he did his damnedest to make the film that he wanted to make."

It was a much more interesting film on the page. Vincent Ward's original screenplay was fantastic, but he made the grave mistake of making Ripley a relatively minor character, and you can't really do that.

The whole thing was written and Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room) came in and did his best, but he was dealing with the people (at Fox). They'd call him at 3am, wake the poor bugger and there'd be (Fox honcho) Joe Roth on the other end of the phone saying 'You can't do this, you gotta do this'

"Actually, this script has retained the look of a religious community," explains Dance, who's best remembered by genre fans for his title turn in NBC's Phantom of the Opera miniseries and as the villain Sardo in The Golden Child. "The men have embraced a sort of strange religious cult in this prison. Some of the prison inmates are homosexual, but they've all taken a vow of celibacy, so nobody does anything to anybody. All the costumes are very monklike, colored in grays and browns. We have these wonderful hooded coasts which reach right to the floor, and which are made out of government surplus tents. The look is both monklike and menacing."

Dance describes his character, prison physician Clemens, as "very much a loner, and not at all popular with the other members of the staff." For reasons explained midway through the film, Clemens is condemned to spend the rest of his life amongst some of the galaxy's most horrible criminals. "They're all double-Y chromosome types," chuckles Dance. "Murders, rapists, and other generally unsavory characters."

"To be honest, the powers that be at 20th Century Fox simply decided it was time that Ripley had a man," Dance candidly admits. "That's my principal role in this picture. We find each other, because neither of us has had a partner in God knows how long, and we're drawn to each other. Clemens reacts to this pretty nervously - he's not sure whether he can handle it, since it's been such a long time for him. The other men on the colony are very threatened by Ripley's presence, and to some extent, they blame her for bringing this disaster - the Alien - with her."

"The audience must wait and see how ingenious these characters are going to be," Dance elaborates. "The whole set is a cocoon of tunnels and shafts, divided up by lockable steel doors. Basically, what they try to do this time is to trap the creature."

"I'm a great fan of Alien, but I didn't really like the second one very much," he confesses. "When the first one was made, it was totally original. As far as I know, it was the first time you'd ever seen the chestburster effect, and there was a feeling throughout the film of imminent danger, although you were never quite sure what form the danger would take. Also, Alien had a small group of characters who were very real, and very well-written.

"The second one really got Ramboesque," Dance continues. "There were too many guys charging around with bandanas and heavy armaments, blowing away a creature that before was not supposed to be able to be killed by regular gunfire. Also, you saw too much of the creaturs in Aliens. Alien 3 is very much a return to the style of the first film. You hardly ever see the creature, and that works much better."

"Well, I do know that some people think completely the reverse of what I believe," Dance admits. "But Alien 3 features a sufficiently interesting bunch of people who will grab your sympathies. They're a pretty sad lot, but they've all managed to survive long-term imprisonment against all odds in this dreadful environment."

"For the first time, we have Alien point-of-view shots," he enthuses. "These are shown as having a slight fish-eye quality. For much of the time, the camera was slung upside down on the rig, and it was traveling along these ventilation shafts at a phenomenal speed while spinning 360 degrees. It's a great effect! There's one extended chase sequence which is really exhilarating. Once the first kill happens, the pace never drops at all; it's quite relentless."

"a couple of moments of real repulsion, both graphic and weird." For one of these, Dance himself happily submitted to the usual latex indignities. "They had to make a full head mold of me for one scene which is, let's say, very violent," he relates. "But actually, I've had head molds done three times before for films, and once in the theater, so it wasn't a problem."

"She's incredibly gutsy, and she works really hard," he says with admiration. "Sigourney really carries these films - there wouldn't have been an Alien 3 if she hadn't agreed to do it. Along with the Alien itself, she is the principal pulling power for these movies. At one point during filming, she had to wear this really uncomfortable full-eye contact lens to simulate a bad eye injury. That thing was hell to wear! All the sets that we were working on were very cold and very dusty. For everybody, working in that environment for 15 weeks was pretty hard, but Sigourney was there all the time, every day. That took a lot of stamina."

"The movie originally began with me walking along this strange, weird, desolate beach, with a lot of huge, derricklike construction all around. We were going to shoot it in Newcastle, but Fox decided they couldn't afford it, so in the end we built this wonderful, great big beach on the backlot of Pinewood. It was very cold, and we had these huge wind machines, so I was breathing in dust all the time. And I was running along this ridge carrying Sigourney, having just rescued her from the crashed ship. The scene was shot over two days, and was very uncomfortable."

"The principal reason for the reshoots was that the original ending was thought to be too much like the end of Terminator 2," he explains, adding, "I think you'll like the new ending."

"Fox's presence was felt quite a bit," Dance states. "There were always at least three executives around. And because of the time difference between LA and London, David was always getting phone calls at 3 a.m. So he very rarely got a decent night's sleep. The company was spending a lot of money, so they wanted to know how the production was going.

"But I really haven't got enough superlatives to describe David Fincher," Dance adds. "He's only 29, and I honestly think he's another Steven Spielberg. I would jump off Waterloo Bridge for him! He was an apprentice at Industrial Light & Magic when he was 17, so he has an extensive knowledge of special effects. Also, he's been making home movies since he was about 8, so he's very much a film animal. This is his first feature, with a budget which is now $53 million. David wasn't fazed by that, nor was he fazed by the pressure of having people from Fox on his back all the time. He could walk onto one of three $5-million sets at Pinewood at 8:00 a.m. with a three-camera crew of about 60 people, and 25 actors, and reel off a list of 12 shots with utter confidence."

"Well, obviously, David doesn't have final cut on the film," Dance concedes. "In my opinion, it's often a case of too many cooks in the kitchen with many big-studio movies - the film ends up being made by committee. But David has actually been very clever with Alien 3; he's shot the picture in such an original way that it would be very difficult for the studio to cut it any way other than how he intended it to be cut."

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SB: Two pretty good looking guys but you don’t have any physical contact, while in this picture within ten minutes of the start you’ve met a bald ex junkie and you’re in the sack together.

SW: Oh, I think Charles holds his own, while with Hicks it’s just hinted at, and if Jim [Cameron] had been directing the third one we would have continued that relationship, but it was so much his view of life that I guess we felt we couldn’t continue, and as for Ridley [Scott's] film there was a scene in the original script where myself and Tom Skerritt had a love scene.

SB: As in the first one, your leading man gets killed off rather early in Alien 3.

SW: Well, killing Charles Dance is very similar to the first one when John Hurt was the obvious hero, and the same sadistic writers [laughs] really pulled the rug out from under the audience. When he was the one that everyone thought would go on to the end and that also applied to Tom Skerritt. And it’s the same case with Charles Dance, as brilliant as he is in the film, everyone expects that he will continue, and the next step would be that Ripley tells him about the Alien and gets his support, and in the end I guess the writers just didn’t want it to go that way.

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