“Sorry,” says Noah Hawley dryly as the lights abruptly pop back on. 

The Emmy-winning showrunner has just screened the first 15 minutes of his upcoming FX series Alien: Earth for a group of reporters. It’s fair to say the room was pretty engrossed when the footage abruptly ended.

The new series brings the 46-year-old Alien film saga to television for the first time and expands the franchise with a prequel set two years before the events in the original 1979 film. Alien: Earth tells the story of a space vessel that crash-lands on our planet and sets loose the collected samples of several different alien life forms (and not just familiar ones). A human-synthetic hybrid (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers race to contain the crisis.

For nearly an hour back in March, Hawley took questions from the media about the series, which tackles several big ideas ranging from AI to class struggles to tech company greed. Hawley also talked about the challenge of expanding the horror concept into an ongoing series — including a couple of lessons learned from HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Alien: Earth (trailer below) premieres Aug. 13 on FX.

The show’s origins and biggest challenge: “The biggest challenge is how do you take a monster movie — a two-hour survival story … and turn that into something that can [run] for many years. It’s a character that you can invest in emotionally and a larger structure that pulls the audience through. [I also] tried to figure out what the first two films [Alien and Aliens] made me feel and why. How can I create those feelings in an audience by telling a totally different story?

The way that I thought about it originally was: Imagine that there have been six movies about the White Walkers and then they said, ‘Make a television series out of that.’ And they made Game of Thrones. The monsters are definitely a critical part of it. But what’s the show about? If you go back and watch the pilot of Game of Thrones, it starts with the White Walkers. They exist and linger through the series. You can argue whether taking seven seasons to get to that confrontation was too long, but it’s like what I did with Legion — take the superpowers out of it and what is the show? With [Alien: Earth], it has to be a great dramatic show. Then the monsters become this bonus that you get versus just doing monster action and horror. The first two Alien films have a lot of big ideas about humanity and and artificial intelligence and our primordial past that we can’t seem to escape. So that’s what went into it for me.”

How AI factors into the franchise and the new series: “When I wrote these scripts, there was no ChatGPT. What elevated [the original] Alien above a monster movie was that at a critical moment in the story, there’s a twist where you realize there are two monsters in this movie — and one of them was [an android] created by people, while the other was just us running into [space] scorpions. So there’s this idea of: Does humanity deserve to survive? If so, how are we going to survive? Is AI going to replace us? Can we amend our own bodies to extend our lives? The idea of placing this story at a moment like 1900 where you had Edison and Tesla and Westinghouse were all competing for who was going to control electricity seemed like a really interesting place to be.”

The show’s lead character, the human-hybrid synthetic Wendy, who is a child placed in a grown-up android body: “Alien is, for me, a female franchise. The question ‘Does humanity deserve to survive?’ led me to a place where I thought, ‘Well, who’s more human than a child?’ They don’t know how to pretend they’re not afraid. They’re bad liars. The idea of watching this child grow up having to face all the problems of the adult world and the choices that they make … there’s that moment in Aliens, where, where Sigourney Weaver says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse, at least [the aliens] don’t fuck each other over for a percentage.’ This kid is going to have to discover what human morality is and that horror exists in many forms. In the show, it’s not just body horror or creature horror; it’s also the moral horror of what people do to each other. If Wendy is a human being in a synthetic body, she has a choice to make. Is she going to choose human or other?”

How Alien and Aliens were both about the working class vs. the elite: “One of the things that Alien is to me is a movie about class. You start the first movie with space truckers, and then the second movie is [Marine] grunts. [Paul Reiser’s character] is middle management. There’s this sense that class is a real issue as a 1970s thing that came into it. So I wanted to bring that element into this show as well.”

Whether the show will connect with the events in the first Alien: “We’re telling a parallel story. I’m not looking to connect it to those movies literally, like ‘who’s on the other end of the phone.’ It’s more taking elements of the original films and expanding them for my own purposes. It’s remarkable how little mythology there is to a franchise six movies deep. [All we know] about the way humanity is organized is it’s built around a corporation, so I just expanded that to be more of a corporate power struggle.”

On not drawing from the ideas in Ridley Scott’s prequel movie Prometheus. “Other than the shark in Jaws, this is the most iconic monster in all of film history. I lived for 28 years of my life believing that this creature was a perfect organism that had evolved over millions of years. Then Ridley made Prometheus and engaged with another idea about the origin of these creatures. But that wasn’t part of what these movies were to me so I chose not to engage with part of the story.”

The reason for introducing new creatures: “[A lot of the drama in Alien] is about the life cycle of this creature. Then what James Cameron did [in Aliens] was was illuminate who is laying those eggs. One thing that I could never do with just the Xenomorph is make you feel that level of shock and dread at how does it reproduce and what does it eat? So instead of this ship simply have encountered Xenomorph life on a planet, it was sent out there to try to collect species from different planets. Now the audience has no idea how they reproduce and what they eat, and have the opportunity to feel that same feeling you felt in the original movie.”

Reaching out to Dune director Denis Villeneuve: “I reached out to Denis Villeneuve when I was making this [because] he’s so good at really feeling the bigness of things. He’s great at making something huge that feels so intimate at the same time. So to the degree that he was willing to talk shop with me, we had a couple of conversations about that. Because the television is not a small screen anymore, you may have seen Alien or Dune on [TV], but you can still feel that sense of scale.”

The future of Fargo now that he’s making Alien: Earth: “Well, first the show has to come out, and everyone has to love it. They haven’t decided to make more of it. But [FX chief John Landgraf] has said their preference is a second season of Alien before another season of Fargo. But we have accounted for that contingency. It’s calendared so we would do another [Fargo] after a second season of Alien.”