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Beauties and the Beast

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''Ah-lyen! Ah-lyen!'' the director yells. The translator steps in: ''It's supposed to be the first time you are seeing the alien!''

''Wait a minute,'' says Perlman. ''You mean we're supposed to pretend we haven't seen any of the other Alien movies?''

Unless you've spent 20 years under a meteorite, you probably know something about those other Alien movies.

Scott's original Alien was one of the most acclaimed films in science-fiction history. The magic was in its simplicity: A crew of a spaceship investigates a transmission from a desolate planet. A fierce life-form there hugs John Hurt's face, sneaks into their craft, and kills off every member of the crew except one — a steely, high-haired heroine named Ripley. In many ways, it was a classic horror movie, and a bit of a horror for its untried star. Weaver's most prominent movie role previously was as Woody Allen's movie date in Annie Hall.

''I attacked the role like an Off Off Broadway play,'' Weaver says, ''because that's really all I'd done before. I used to look directly at the camera, and Ridley, who could be so intimidating, would say, 'You can't do that!' and I'd say, 'But it's so big!'''

Whereas Alien was quiet and spare, Aliens was a rip-roaring intergalactic romp, a full-fledged action movie with pumped-up GIs engaging in high-tech combat. ''It made the first Alien look like a cucumber sandwich,'' Weaver says.

It's not really nice to say what Alien3 looked like. The production was a nightmare from the start. ''We didn't have a finished script, Fox was already having budget issues, and the studio was unsupportive,'' says Fincher, who went on to direct Seven and The Game. ''It wasn't a time I look back on fondly.''

Weaver, who shaved her head for Alien3, agrees the studio bailed on Fincher after another director, Vincent Ward, left shortly after taking the gig: ''As soon as Fox hired David, they lost confidence in him and tried to undermine him. They started off telling him they wanted Hobbit in Space. Midway through, they're saying they want an 'E' Ticket ride of a movie. It was a mess.''

''To say I lost confidence in David isn't really accurate,'' says Roger Birnbaum (now chairman/CEO at Caravan Pictures), who hired Fincher while head of production at Fox. ''The production itself was chaotic. If David had a finished script prior to shooting and had producers around him who could manage problems [that] he ended up dealing with himself, he could have made a really great movie. Unfortunately, those things didn't happen.''

The biggest trouble came at the end: Fincher, trying to spice up the finale, reportedly added six seconds to his nearly finished film (at a cost of $500,000) to soup up Ripley's death scene. ''We were all pretty p---ed off,'' says Ryder, speaking for a generation of Alien watchers (she was 9 when she first saw Alienand grew up with a poster of Ripley over her bed). ''The idea of Ripley dying wasn't received well, especially in my home. For fans, it was a big disappointment. I was like, Goddamn it.''

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