We thought being King of the World meant never having to say you were sorry, but guess what? Even James Cameron had to say it at least once. Who knew? But back in his pre-Avatar, pre-Titanic, pre-Terminator 2 days, the director wrote H. R. Giger a letter "by way of an apology."
Giger, the Academy Award-winning artist responsible for making the 1979 film Alien so ... well ... alien, expressed "disappointment" at not being called in to work on the sequel, and so Cameron replied in a 1987 letter dug up and posted today at Letters of Note. We thought you'd get a kick out of it.
The main reason, other than Giger's scheduling, that Cameron claimed for not inviting the artist along? He feared that his own vision would be "overwhelmed." As Cameron wrote:
I found that creating a sequel can be an uneasy exercise in balancing creative impulses, the desire to create a whole new canvas, with the need to pay proper hommage to the original. Mr. Giger's visual stamp was so powerful and pervasive in "ALIEN" (a major contributor to its success, I believe) that I felt the risk of being overwhelmed by him and his world, if we had brought him into a production where in a sense, he had more reason to be there than I did.
For more fun letters, visit Letters of Note.
