Trivia / Species

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Michael Madsen signed on immediately at the chance to play a heroic role for a change.
• Contractual Obligation Project: Natasha Henstridge's cameo in Species III.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Michael Madsen once claimed that Species was one of the six movies out of the 150+ he made until then that he was actually proud of. The sequel, on the other hand...
• Dark Horse Casting:
  • The filmmakers opted to go with reasonably known character actors as opposed to stars - in the hopes of putting more money into the special effects. Ben Kingsley coming on board however did a lot to "legitimise" the production. Michael Madsen as The Hero likewise was extremely odd, considering his best known roles were as psychopaths.
  • When casting Sil, they kept running into problems; they tested loads of potential actresses, but couldn't find one with both the beauty and acting experience they needed. When they expanded the casting to include models, Natasha Henstridge was favored. While she was trying to transition from modelling to acting, she had no film experience, and plenty of higher-ups didn't want to give the most important role in the film to someone so new.
• Deleted Scene: Tons of them, as the original cut of the movie was two hours and seven minutes long. A particularly notable one is Press and Laura discussing Sil's nature before kissing... which was supposed to be the ending, before the producers decided that closing on that Sequel Hook rat scene was more than enough.
  • Another notable one would be the team using a computer simulation to see how fast it would take for the effects of Sil mating and then that progeny also mating. As they watch in horror, dots of red flash across the world, then turn into a wave until, within a decade, the human race is extinct.
• Doing It for the Art: MGM didn't want to shoot the nightmare train sequence, hoping to keep costs down. H. R. Giger financed the sequence himself, with $100,000 of his own money. Subverted in that he expected studio reimbursement, and in the end the model he built was used for only a few seconds and he was only reimbursed half what he paid to have it made. He later admitted that when he gets an artistic idea going, he sometimes had trouble making good business decisions.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: Dennis Feldman had the idea for Species in 1987, as he worked on another film about an alien invasion, Real Men.
• Fake American: British actor Ben Kingsley as American scientist Xavier Fitch.
• Follow the Leader: While not a full-on Alien rip-off, Giger himself complained that there were too many similarities, starting with his involvement in designing the creature. There's something of a paradox here: as Good Bad Flicks notes, Roger Donaldson was not a "genre" director, and someone more versed in sci-fi horror might have taken Giger's input more seriously. . . but Donaldson saw Giger's artbook and, like Ridley Scott, immediately knew this was the man he wanted to design his monster, so without Donaldson Giger might never have been attached to the project. But once Giger was involved, the studio seemed interested in banking on Giger's name and connection to Alien more than they were interested in his ideas.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Michael Madsen and Marg Helgenberger were allowed to improvise their sex scene.
• Hostility on the Set: Ben Kingsley was very protective of his chair, insisting that no-one touch or sit in it. Michael Madsen pranked him by hiding his chair, putting garbage on it and even hanging it from a crane. Kingsley was furious at this, so much that he refused to sit near Madsen during the press tour. They eventually made amends.
• Inspiration for the Work: Having read an article by Arthur C. Clarke about the insurmountable odds against an extraterrestrial craft ever locating and visiting Earth, given that stellar distances are great, and faster-than-light travel is unlikely, Dennis Feldman started to think that it was "unsophisticated for any alien culture to come here in what [he]'d describe as a big tin can." Thus in turn he considered that the possibility of extraterrestrial contact was through information. Then he detailed that a message would contain instructions from across the void to build something that would talk to men. Instead of a mechanical device, Feldman imagined wetware. The visitor would adapt to Earth's environment through DNA belonging to Earth's organisms. Mankind has sent to space transmissions "giving out directions" such as the Arecibo message, which Feldman considered unwary, as they relay information to potential predators from outer space. He pointed out that "in nature, one species would not want a predator to know where it hides."
• Old Shame: Michelle Williams, who played the young Sil, doesn't remember fondly the film due to the amount of bullying she got after it was released.
• Playing Against Type: Michael Madsen, normally a villain, plays The Hero, with one particular scene establishing him as a Kindhearted Cat Lover.
• Star-Making Role: The first movie made model Natasha Henstridge into a sex symbol in the 90s.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The treatment for the film was called The Message and was more of a police procedural, with the alien being created by a "bathtub geneticist" who had just had his project aborted by the government, and a biologist who had worked on the project getting along with a police officer to search for the creature.
  • An earlier draft of the script had the young Sil killing a friendly taxi driver. In order to keep the character appearing sympathetic - and to make the murder of the conductor more shocking - it was changed to a tramp attacking her and getting killed in self defence.
  • Giger had envisioned more stages of Sil's transformation, but the film only employed the last one. Giger also envisioned Sil glowing with red-orange heat, getting brighter and hotter as she got angrier or felt more threatened. The studio claimed such a thing would be impossible, and when Giger had test designs made to show it could be done, they still refused.
  • Giger designed Sil to be translucent, and a detailed animatronic was made showing assorted internal details. However, because of how the animatronic was lit and shot, and the fact that the woman-in-suit and CGI versions of Sil could not be translucent, this detail is easily missed.
  • The nightmare sequence where Sil imagines herself mating with a male alien was about twenty minutes long originally and far more graphic. Giger criticized the few seconds shown in the final cut, feeling it was too short and poorly edited.
  • Giger also disliked the ending the scripwriters had created, feeling it was too similar to both Alien³ and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. He eventually convinced them to finish Sil by headshot and not with fire. Giger felt that flamethrowers were both too similar to Alien and, that with his intention of Sil to actually emit heat as a defense, fire would be completely ineffective.
  • An early idea for this ending was an intense showdown in a movie theatre where Alien would be shown in the background. In this ending military and police forces have to be called in, culminating in Laura blowing Sil's head off with a rocket launcher. The baby would crawl out of the corpse but then die in an explosion.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger was briefly interested in the script, but it was clear that the budget wouldn't allow him.
  • Pierce Brosnan was offered a part in this movie, but declined due to scheduling conflicts with GoldenEye.

---