Species Turns 30: Seven Bucks Worth?
A pre-release interview with Roger Donaldson
Species shouldn't work. But it does: it's a hodgepodge of science fiction, sex, violence, comedy and giddy acting, the smartest popcorn-flying-in-the-air movie of the summer— so far. The cast of arthouse heavies alone ("starring in alphabetical order") suggests intelligence at work: Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Alfred Molina and Forest Whitaker (as well as television's Marg Helgenberger). And director Roger Donaldson, who has made compelling movies that range from the cranky relationship drama Smash Palace to the elegantly machined No Way Out.
Dennis Feldman's script, dipping into the daringly perverse, grew from a kernel of fact: in 1974, the United States government sent a message into outer space about Earth and its inhabitants, including what we look like, where we are located, and the patterns of DNA that make up human cells. Feldman's plot has another civilization returning the message, complete with their own DNA pattern. Movie scientists being the misguided seekers of knowledge we have learned they are, combine the DNA with human cells and wait for the results.
The storyline plays its own recombinant games in brazen fashion, suggesting bits and pieces from Alien (As with that film, H.R. Giger designed the creature, as well as several startling dream sequences.) and the fish-out-of-water Starman, invoking the classic seventies science-fiction backdrop of Los Angeles, even recalling Journey to the Center of the Earth (but under a parking garage) and even Ben. There's a hint of Frankenstein with a libido, and just a dollop of contemporary fear of strong women. The villain, Sil, posits the supermodel waif as an impervious mutant creature, a beautiful woman whose only desire is to have sex with every healthy man she meets.
In other words, Species starts at the preposterous and torques upward from there—the crew searching Los Angeles for Sil is composed of a biologist, an anthropologist, someone ESP… and a hitman. But the filmmakers have fun with essential biological drives as comedy, and, as with classic horror characters like Dracula and Frankenstein, there's an attempt to show Sil's point of view. Why shouldn't she have the right to exist as well? She only wants to be loved.
Donaldson is originally from Australia, though but for a Wild Bill Hickok goatee and a pronounced antipodean accent, he could be a ringer for Bill Clinton. How you make a smart movie that teeters on the edge of schlock, as in the opening scene that has Kingsley, fresh in everyone's mind from Schindler's List, playing a scientist who watches what seems to be the gassing of a teenage girl.
"That was the appeal of doing the movie. I love the humor of the script, the scariness of the script, the sexiness of the script," Donaldson tells me. "I love the genre. I love the Alien-esque part of the movie." Did you worry about unfavorable comparisons to Alien (1979)?
"Listen, the last thing I felt was that it was derivative of Alien in any way. I thought the first Alien was the scariest movie I had ever seen and very entertaining, but it was a long time ago. I only remember it was a great experience as a filmgoer. It's not like I went back and said 'Let's pick up that scene or that scene.' It was a great film in the same genre. We could have avoided it by not hiring Giger in the first place, but his enthusiasm and his ideas and obsessions just made the film that much better."
There's an amusing parallel drawn between the creature's voracious need to mate and the courtship between biologist Helgenberger and hitman Madsen. In that small way, Species is an epic genre piece that gives Donaldson his best chance to examine relationships since Smash Palace in 1981. Were there any concerns about portraying a beautiful woman as a sexually voracious intergalactic lizard? "More than any other part of American society, filmmakers are concerned with how women and different races and villains are portrayed. They're issues that get discussed whenever you put a movie together. So this time the villain is a female. Maybe that's a sign of the times. Think of it not as hostility toward women, but as giving them equal time!"
But what about the parallels between the characters? "The movie, in my mind, is about procreation. The creature's sole purpose is to procreate and continue the species, and that's what's driving the characters in the film as well. I do like the fact there was a relationship in the team paralleling what she was up to."
A momentous pause.
"I never saw this movie as a meaningful movie as such. I saw the movie as, I hope, a smart, populist entertainment. I was hoping it was a movie in which, whether you wanted a fright, or wanted to intellectualize it a bit, it was there. If you wanted to see something that had a sense of humor, and didn't take itself too seriously... I mean, I take it seriously, because I made it and everything in it is a conscious decision. But what I was setting out to do was make a good escapist summer entertainment. You'd feel you got your seven bucks worth."
Species was released July 7, 1995.