Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Ridley Scott reminisced about how Stanley Kubrick called him up after watching the iconic “Alien” chest-bursting scene, desperately wanting to know how Scott managed to pull it off without the use of special effects:
“I remember Stanley Kubrick called me up saying, ‘How’d you do that?’ He said, ‘I’ve run it through slowly, I can’t see the cut,’” said Scott. “And I just said that much. He said, ‘OK, I got it. I got it, it worked.’”
The “how” was actually rather simple, with a special table and the actor only exposing part of his body as the rest was composed of a false torso that had the chest-bursting alien popping out.
There is no better compliment than getting the Kubrick seal of approval, the legendary director was well-known to be an obsessive-compulsive filmmaker in and out of the set, shooting an unending amount of takes per scene and meticulously deconstructing every single detail of a given frame.