Almost as soon as Jon Favreau left the WonderCon stage after premiering nine minutes of great-looking footage from Cowboys & Aliens, he came backstage to talk to the press.  Before going any further, if you missed Matt's write up of the presentation and a recap of the footage, I'd start here.Since I only had a few minutes to talk to Favreau, I decided to ask him how he choose what footage to show and how they designed the look of the aliens, which he revealed at the very end of the footage.  As Matt said of the alien, "He was a bulky sumbitch with big spiky teeth.  He kind of reminded me of the troll from Fellowship of the Ring but more muscular and rough-hewn.  Think of an angry gray gorilla with sharp teeth and no fur and you’re kind of getting there."Hit the jump to watch, and we've also transcribed what he said about designing the look of the aliens.cowboys_and_aliens_international_teaser_movie_poster_01Talks about designing the aliens:

"The look of the aliens—clearly there have been a lot of alien movies—our ace-in-the-hole is that we're working with Stan Winston's guys, Legacy, and of course, Steven Spielberg. A lot of effort went into designing the alien in our film and to make it different than stuff you had seen before, but also evoke a type of alien. There's been the Close Encounters, Signs alien, the Predator-type alien, the Alien-type alien, so there's a lot of different branches to the alien family tree. We wanted to go for something that was verging more on horror and scary and big and overwhelming to further support the visceral effect the appearance these things have had on the landscape of the old West. If you think about movies like Predator or Alien. They wouldn't show you anything. They would show you the effects of the alien, they tease the alien, and the alien would reveal itself over time by removing cloaking devices or armor until finally you saw what it was. And I think in the age of CG, that fan-dance has gone away. But we were fans of the old, suspense-style alien movies so to just give a tease to this crowd was fun for this crowd. I also think it was something special for this crowd because it's not something we're going to be putting in the materials."

Here's the full interview:

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