It's “Hellraiser's” 28th birthday! Happy birthday, “Hellraiser”! You are still a classic. Also, did you know that Clive Barker was this close to directing “Alien 3”? Because I literally just discovered this while “doing research” on the important issue of vintage Clive Barker interviews on YouTube.
Here's the clip, taken from a 1987 interview on the U.K. series “The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross” (the relevant portion comes at around the 3:10 mark):
A little further digging on the 'net unearthed even more information on Barker's near-involvement, including this 1993 interview (via Weyland-Yutani Archives) in which Barker goes into further detail on his flirtation with the sci-fi horror threequel:
“I had several meetings with [producer] David [Giler] in London and L.A. talking about it.” He tells me in the limousine that serves as a soundproof location for our interview. “But I could never get my head around the fact that the Aliens didn't seem terribly interesting to me. They're essentially machines, albeit organic ones. And that, he adds, referring to his penchant for creating extremely articulate (and often sympathetic) monsters, “is so very far from what i do. I just couldn't find my way around this warrior tribe of mute, instinct-led devourers; murderers”…
Clive mentions meeting with Fincher and discussing the problems he had making ALIEN 3, and I ask Clive for his opinion of Fincher's startling, contentious, jury-is-still-out, second sequel. “I have two problems with the picture. The first is that so much emotional commitment is thrown out of the window because Micheal Biehn and Newt are dead from the beginning of the picture. I didn't want that to happen, i wanted continuity, and felt cheated by the fact that i had been asked to begin again. I didn't want to begin again.
“The second thing was that I didn't understand the meta physics of the piece. That is to say, all we have is this colony of bald monk prisoners with some pseudo-religion which we're not given any real insight into. The idea of them having no guns and gadgets was interesting, but that too was never really developed. So i felt we were being teased with possibilities which were never then delivered.
“Actually,” he adds, ” I have a third objection, I don't think you can call a picture 'Alien Cubed' and show me one Alien. Given what we'd seen in the second picture – the mother Alien, caverns full of eggs, whole armies of these creatures – the threat seemed so… minuscule. I wanted the threat to be much more terrible than it was.”
Finally, I ask what else would Clive Barker have wanted from 'Alien 3'? “Put it this way.” he replies, “I'd have loved to have seen what Vincent Ward would have done with it.”
No wonder David Fincher never amounted to anything.