This page collects quotes from the movie's creators that offer hints at what's going on in Prometheus. For expanded theories about what the movie is all about, also check the sections on Creation Gone Wrong in the Theories section, as well as References on related material, like Lawrence of Arabia or Paradise Lost .

Ridley Scott: "[The] sequence at the beginning of the film that is fundamentally creation. It's a donation, in the sense that the weight and the construction of the DNA of those aliens is way beyond what we can possibly imagine." Source: The Playlist

Ridley Scott: "The guy at the beginning is simply donating himself, no stranger than the Aztecs or Incas would choose some poor bugger, at the beginning saying 'right, you're it, in the year you get all the girls you want, all the food you want, blah blah, and at the end of the year we're going to take your heart, take it out, squeeze it, and w're going to get jolly good crops and good weather next year.' It's no more than that, he's into a form of donation, except his DNA is so powerful, each molecule is like a timebomb. So, we only set our standards by what we know here, which makes us essentially naive. We don't, we can't conceive of galloping DNA: I release that on the desk, and in a second I've got a cotton wool ball going black. We can't conceive that because it's not in your frame of experience. So you've got to take your brain, put it on the side, and when you enter the movie just let yourself breathe." Source: Slashgear

Ridley Scott: "You're either going to believe in the fact that we're by entirely genetic luck, so from day one where you have atomic storms -- inconceivable storms that will go on in this nucleus, in which the dirt bowl will find some reason to start growth on everything -- was that created? That may have been accidental, because I think there are many of those out there. But then the idea that, is there a higher force in the universe, comes the question: is it God, or are there superior beings out there? You stand and look at the stars at night in the galaxy out there, it's entirely ridiculous to believe that we are it. You mean this is it? We're sitting in this room, I’ve got this fucking cappuccino, and up there there’s no-one else? I don’t think so!" Source: Slashgear

"Big things have small beginnings." -- David, citing Lawrence of Arabia

Is it Earth?

Ridley Scott: "No, it doesn't have to be. That could be anywhere. That could be a planet anywhere. All he's doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history -- which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas -- he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etc., etc." Source: The Playlist

Martin Hill (WETA Visual Effects Supervisor), about the sequence: "Because we had such a short amount of time to tell the story of the DNA getting infected, breaking apart, and then re-forming and recombining to show Earth DNA, we had to make the designs of the different DNA quite graphical, quite illustrative of what they were." Source: MTV

About Weyland

Ridley Scott: "There's a scene in the script that we decided not to shoot, where we see the inside of that dream, and basically David takes a jetski out with a beautiful woman in a bikini, to a yacht, and on the yacht is Weyland. Played by Guy, without old-age make-up: this is his dream. And they have a scene together, and in that scene David says 'the engineers are dead, they’re all gone, mission failure' and Weyland says 'go back and try harder.' And we rewrote it so that we were going to play Weyland’s identify closed, give the audience a sense that [David] was talking to someone on the ship but not view them." Source: Slashgear

What Does the Black Substance Do?

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Damon Lindelof: "I think that one of the things that I love about Ridley’s movies, and have loved long before I worked with him -- and it's very surreal to be on the inside of; thirty-some odd years after Blade Runner we're all still talking about whether or not Deckard is a robot. So there's a speculative part of it, so the question becomes 'what does the black goo do?' That is the question that you're supposed to be asking coming out of this movie. The movie demonstrates what it does in certain circumstances. So, here's what it does if it gets on worms; here's what it does if it gets on your face; here's what it does if someone just puts a little bit of it in your drink. So, now we see that that lots of this is headed to Earth. Now, you used the word 'weapon,' you're extrapolating that based on the theory [Prometheus captain] Janek has, because it looks like a payload to him: all these ships are loaded with this stuff, and they're headed for Earth. The intent has to be to wipe us out, or is it to evolve us, or is it for something else?"

Damon Lindelof: These are all hopefully questions and points of debate – frustrating for some -- but ultimately the kind of science-fiction... why the two movies that Ridley did decades ago are still being discussed, is this idea that when you walk out of the theater that you have to go into a community and start to discuss 'well, wait a minute, this is what I think happened,' and you're hopefully mirroring the conversation that the characters are having in the movie, and more importantly this is why Shaw says what she says at the end of the movie. Which is, 'I’m not going back to Earth and calling it a day, I need to know a little bit more about what's happening here.'" Source: Slashgear

Why does David Infect Holloway?

Damon Lindelof: "I'd say that the short answer is: That's his programming. In the scene preceding him doing that, he is talking to Weyland (although we don't know it at the time) and he's telling Weyland that this is a bust. That they haven't found anything on this mission other than the stuff in the vials. And Weyland presumably says to him, "Well, what's in the vials?" And David would say, "I'm not entirely sure, we'll have to run some experiments." And Weyland would say, "What would happen if you put it in inside a person?" And David would say, "I don't know, I'll go find out." He doesn't know that he's poisoning Holloway, he asks Holloway, "What would you be willing to do to get the answers to your questions?" Holloway says, "Anything and everything." And that basically overrides whatever ethical programming David is mandated by, [allowing him] to spike his drink." Source: io9.com

Is Vickers an Android, like David?

Charlize Theron: "We played around with a lot of stuff, I'll just say that. We threw a lot of stuff out there very loosely. There was definitely something that happened once David and I kind of stood next to each other, where I started feeling like his posture was overtaking my posture. There's the good age-old question like, 'Is the chicken before the egg?' Like, is it him or is it me or is it part of my DNA in him? We did talk about that a lot, that it was nice to have something ambiguous about the origins of both of us, maybe, like why do we look so much alike? Why am I walking so much like him? Is it that I am an android or is it that I gave him human qualities, that I gave him my DNA?" Source: Official Featurette

About the Theme of Birth

Ridley Scott: "[...] I think dropping that stuff in earlier, [Shaw] saying 'I can’t conceive,' was absolutely the right, perfect thing to do. Which then, after that -- because they then relate to each other, consummate, and the following day by God she's pregnant -- once she's pregnant, I have to see it, I have to see what that is. And because it's extreme, galloping DNA, whatever that is that's creating this monstrous thing growing inside of her – he says 'you look three months pregnant;' in 25 minutes she now looks eight months pregnant – that's inconceivable for us, because we don't understand it. But I think probably way up there somewhere, it's entirely feasible. You've got to show it, you've gotta do it." Source: Slashgear

"The trick, Mr. Potter, is not minding it hurts." -- David, citing Lawrence of Arabia

Who are the Engineers?

Ridley Scott: "Who pushed Earth along? Have we been previsited by gods or aliens? The fact that they'd be at least a billion years ahead of us in technology is daunting, and one might use the word God or gods or engineers of life in space." Source: New York Times

Ridley Scott: "In a funny kind of way, if you look at the Engineers, they’re tall and elegant. They are dark angels. If you look at 'Paradise Lost,' the guys who have the best time in the story are the dark angels, not God. So boil it all down, and humanity was the offspring of some dark/rogue angels? That would seem to be the gist of it, and we guess that's where a Prometheus 2 would go if/when that should ever happen. Now Prometheus is ready to go off in its own direction on its own entirely different tangent that is not going to be reliant on the things we’ve seen a thousand times before." Source: The Playlist

Did the Engineers Want us to Visit Them?

Damon Lindelof: "I will say that there's something fascinating about humanity where we perceive it as an invitation. You look at a cave wall, there's somebody pointing at some distant planets, and one interpretation is 'This is where we come from' another is 'We want you to come here.' Where are we drawing that from? I think another thing that's interesting about the system that they visit is that the moon they land on in Prometheus is LV 223. And we know LV 426 is where the action takes place in Alien, so are they even in the right place? And how close are they to the place that these aliens on cave walls were directing them. Were they just extrapolating 'this is the system that has the sun with the sustainable life.' So there's a lot of guesswork. There's a small line in the movie where David and Holloway are talking about David's deconstruction of the language based on Holloway's thesis, and he says 'If your thesis is correct' and Holloway says 'if it's correct?' and David says 'that’s why they call it a thesis Doctor.' And the reason we threw that in there is that we're dealing with a highly hypothetical area in terms of who these beings are, what, if any, invitation they issued, and who is responsible for making those cave paintings. And did something happen in between when those cave paintings were made -- tens of thousands of years ago -- and our arrival now, in 2093, 2,000 years after these things have perished? Did something happen in the intermediate period that we should be thinking about?" Source: IGN

Why do the Engineers Want to Destroy the Humans?

Ridley Scott: "God doesn't hate us. But God could be disappointed in us — like children." Source: New York Times

Damon Lindelof: "I think that we had a very defined idea of why the Engineers put those paintings on cave walls, and why it is that they loaded ships full of death, as Shaw puts it at the end of the movie. So those answers are not definitively presented in Prometheus, though if you look through all the materials, I think that the evidence is all there to form a very informed opinion as to what happened, but I'm not going to tell you what my opinion is, as frustrating as it might be." Source: IGN

Bible Notation LV-223 (Leviticus 22:3): "For the generations to come, if any of your descendants is ceremonially unclean and yet comes near the sacred offerings that the Israelites consecrate to the Lord, that person must be cut off from my presence. I am the Lord.”

Damon Lindelof: "But I do feel like, embedded in this movie are the fundamental ideas behind why it is the Engineers would want to wipe us out. The movie asks the question, were we created by these beings? And it answers that question very definitively. But in the wake of that answer there's a new question, which is, they created us but now they want to destroy us, why did they change their minds? That's the question that Shaw is asking at the end of this movie, the one that she wants answered. I do think that there are a lot of hints in this movie; that we give you quite an educated guess as to why. But obviously not to the detriment of what Shaw might find when she goes to talk to these things herself." Source: io9.com

Ridley Scott: "If you look at it as an 'our children are misbehaving down there' scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, 'Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.' Guess what? They crucified him." Source: The Playlist

Ridley Scott, about the audio/video message transmitted by the humans: "Did you get what the message was about? [It was a message to the engineers.] That would be a constant, from takeoff you'd be constantly replaying that, hoping that somebody's gonna say 'don’t come any further, I'm gonna to blow you out of the sky.' In there, there would be every conceivable form of mathematics equation, and anyone who is superior is going to look at that for three seconds and say 'we've got chimpanzees on the way.' So, it's an assessment of who's coming, basically, it makes sense." Source: Slashgear

Damon Lindelof: "The gods want to limit their creations; they might want to dethrone God." Source: New York Times

"This man is here because he does not want to die. He believes you can give him more life." -- translation of what David says (about Peter Weyland) to the Engineer.

On Prometheus and Religion

Damon Lindelof: "Hey, a bunch of humans seeking out their creator. David knows exactly who created him, and he is not impressed by his creator."

Ridley Scott: "I do despair. That's a heavy word, but picking up a newspaper every day, how can you not despair at what's happening in the world, and how we're represented as human beings? The disappointments and corruption are dismaying at every level. And the biggest source of evil is of course religion. [...] Everyone is tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshipping the same god. [...] I'm really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith. I don't care who you are, it's what we all think about. It's in the back of all our minds." Source: Esquire

Damon Lindelof: "I'm most definitively pro-science, but I think that the movie advances the idea that, can the two live along side each other? Is it possible to be a scientist and maintain some fungible faith in the unknown? And are you rewarded for having blind faith? I do think that the movie is making the meta-commentary in saying well Shaw is the true believer on board, and she's the one who survives. So what are we trying to say by telling that story?" Source: io9.com

The Connection to Alien(s)

Damon Lindelof: "Essentially what I proposed to them was that the movie didn't need to lean as heavily on the Alien tropes that we were all familiar with. Eggs, face-huggers, chest bursters, acid blood, xenomorphs. I said that stuff can be a part of this movie, but I don't think it needs to be what the movie's about. There are some other really cool ideas in here that you can flesh out and grow." Source: IGN

Ridley Scott, about the ship shown in Alien: "I always thought it was a carrier. It's a vehicle that doesn't look like it crashed. It looks like it may have [been a] forced landing, but it landed. And why did it land and why was the pilot damaged? Because his cargo... something had gotten loose, in the cargo; had evolved, and had actually taken him out." [Source: Hero Complex]

Ridley Scott: "For all intents and purposes this is very loosely a prequel, very, and then you say 'But how did that ship evolve in the first Alien?' Then I would say 'Actually he's one of the group that had gone off and his cargo had gotten out of control,' because he was heading somewhere else and it got out of control and actually he had died in the process and that would be the story there. That ship happened to be a brother to the ship that you see that comes out of the ground at the end. They are roughly of the same period give or take a couple hundred years, right? Other than that, there's no real link except it explains, I think, who may have had these capabilities, which are dreadful weapons way beyond anything we could possibly conceive, bacteriological drums of shit that you can drop on a planet..." Source: Collider

Jon Spaihts (writer of the original script -- before Lindelof -- about the xenomorph in the movie): "[Ridley] was always pushing for some way in which that Alien biology could have evolved. We tried different paths in that way. We imagined that there might be eight different variations on the xenomorphs - eight different kinds of Alien eggs you might stumble across, eight kinds of slightly different xenomorph creatures that could hatch from them. And maybe even a rapid process of evolution, still ongoing, in these Alien laboratories where these xenomorphs were developed. So Ridley and I were looking for ways to make the xenomorphs new." Source: Empire Online

Is the Ending the End of the Story?

Ridley Scott: "Well, from the very beginning, I was working from a premise that lent itself to a sequel. I really don’t want to meet God in the first one. I want to leave it open to [Noomi Rapace’s character] saying, 'I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I want to go where they came from." Source: The Playlist

Ridley Scott: "Because [the Engineers] are such aggressive fuckers, I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see actually is not so nice, and is certainly not God. I'd love to explore where [Dr. Shaw] goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous." [Source: THR]

Jon Spaihts: "My vision of the trilogy would have involved the arrival of the Yutani Company and a couple of other major plays around the Engineers themselves: the revelation of an additional grand Engineer design, and the possibility of seeking an Engineer homeworld. That shot of the ship flying at the end offers a lot of creative ways to play with this. But it feels like it brackets you into the search for the Engineer homeworld and home civilisation. That's an interesting challenge."

Damon Lindelof: "I think that Prometheus wanted to have two children. One child grows up to be Alien (the movie), the other child grows up to become this other mysterious force where we're heading off in a different direction and contemplating why it is our creators wanted to destroy us. This is a fundamentally interesting question looked at on a theological level, but also on a sci-fi level as well. In constructing those questions, Ridley wanted to know what the answers were as well, and we talked about those at great length, and then he determined what it was he wanted to put in the movie." Source: IGN

Ridley Scott: "Prometheus 2 will start getting shot in February [2016] and I’ve already begun now so I know what the script is. Then there will be another one after that and then maybe we’ll back into Alien 1, as to why? Who would make such a dreadful thing?" Source: IGN

Have you seen another official quote from the movie's creators that can fill in more blanks (or cause more confusion)? Hit the EDIT link up top and add it!

