SANAA LATHAN: Definitely. She’s a strong woman but I would say that’s probably the only similarity.
LANCE HENRIKSEN: That’s true.
SANAA LATHAN: I mean, as different as me and Sigourney [Weaver] look is as different as these two characters are. It really is this character that Paul has created. She’s her own woman. She’s smart; she discovers things about herself and rises to the occasion in very scary situations. She’s pretty fierce.
LANCE HENRIKSEN: There’s nothing more fierce than the female, like the momma lion. Believe me, my wife is a good example (laughing).
SANAA LATHAN: He knows firsthand.
LANCE HENRIKSEN: But it’s got that rich quality.
Did you have to learn a lot of technical jargon to play a scientist?
SANAA LATHAN: I’m not a scientist. I’m actually an environmentalist who is very familiar with Antarctica. I’m kind of like the safety guide. It’s the other people who are the scientists and the archaeologists.
LANCE HENRIKSEN: We brought together the best. The best that we could find.
SANAA LATHAN: My character is learning as I go along. I’m just there to make sure everybody is safe.
Did you have to do a lot of acting against things that weren’t there?
SANAA LATHAN: (Laughing) Yes.
Did you ever feel kind of silly or did you really get into it?
SANAA LATHAN: Well, you know it’s funny because my mother, when I got the part, we were all really excited and she said, “This will probably be a really hard movie for you physically but easy acting-wise.” And I found that that was completely wrong. It was probably one of the hardest films acting-wise that I had to do because it’s such a high state of emotion and then on top of it you’re – you know, the monster isn’t there – and you’re having to create that for yourself.
Was there a funny prop, like a sock on a stick, in place of the creature?
LANCE HENRIKSEN: No. No, they did better than that (laughing). You know the other thing about this movie is that most of it was physical but parts that just brought that action and the extra mile [were] miniscule by comparison to a lot of stuff being made today. All of our stuff was actually there but then to go that extra [mile], that’s when she’s talking about there’s nothing there [to act opposite].
When you were in “Aliens,” there weren’t any CGI effects, were there?
LANCE HENRIKSEN: There was none of that. None.
How was that a much different experience from this?
LANCE HENRIKSEN: The technology was extraordinary because [James] Cameron and those guys – you know, Stan Winston at the time – they had an Alien Queen with like four guys in it. Two in the top and then they were operating stuff. But we had problems to overcome. Like with CG, you can rip somebody in half. Today it’s nothing. But in those days, I had to actually act backwards. We did a whole scene backwards because the Queen couldn’t actually grab anything. Old stuff like that. But it was, again, it was a little bit like doing a low budget film in a sense that you had to use your cleverness as opposed to saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll get that on the green screen.” I don’t really like giving up that much power to the green screen. You know what I mean? I really want to be part of it. I mean, Dennis Quaid had to do a whole movie where he’s talking to a dragon that wasn’t there. A tennis ball on a stick – that’s what you’re talking about. I can’t even imagine that.
I hope they painted eyes on it at least.
LANCE HENRIKSEN: Yeah. Like the crew gets funny and they draw a little smile on it. You go, “Yeah, thanks.”
How does this incarnation of your character compare with the previous films?
LANCE HENRIKSEN: The only similarity is that Bishop, because he wasn’t human, thought anything alive was the most beautiful thing to see. And in this one, I’m playing a guy who’s dying so the same thing exists. When you’re dying I would imagine that seeing life for the last time or soon, you’d think that all living things are so beautiful. And I think that that was part of the dignity of the character. That’s what I respond to, more human things.
How did the finished footage from “Alien vs Predator” you've seen so far compare to your experience of making the film?
LANCE HENRIKSEN: It’s beautiful.
SANAA LATHAN: It is beautiful and it’s so big.
LANCE HENRIKSEN: It’s such a big movie.
SANAA LATHAN: Even though the sets were the most amazing sets I’ve ever experienced to work on, they were massive and so detailed.
LANCE HENRIKSEN: Unbelievable. The sets were a city block and the screen’s going to have to be as big as this wall to be seen.
SANAA LATHAN: It definitely matches that and even surpasses that in terms of the bigness. It was beautifully shot. I think it falls in the “Alien” tradition.
