‘Alien’ was Ridley Scott’s big break, but it very nearly wasn’t. In fact, the director only had one feature-length movie on his portfolio, ‘The Duellists’, and so the studio set him aside in favour of Walter Hill and Peter Yates. However, once both directors declined the project, Ridley gladly accepted, though later admitted he wasn’t sure why he had been chosen on the basis of his previous work. He said: “I’m still, to this day, baffled about how someone who is at Cannes seeing 'The Duellists' had put two and two together and said, ‘You know what? You might want to meet this guy, because he may be the right one for ‘Alien’.’ That’s how it happened.”

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