Neill Blomkamp debuted his ideas for a new Alien film via concept art that very clearly showed Hicks, the hero from Aliens who is killed in the opening shots of Alien 3. And his first comments on video about the project, released yesterday, seemed very clear. “There’s Alien, and Aliens, then this film,” he said. That, along with comments from Sigourney Weaver about giving Ripley’s story a proper ending, all made a clear point: this upcoming film will basically ignore Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection.

But now Blomkamp says his intent is not to undo the third and fourth movies — it’s just that he wants his film to connect to Alien and Aliens.

Here’s the video interview, from AlloCine:

Blomkamp’s quote starts about 45 seconds in, and he says:

My favorites are the first two movies, so I want to make a film that’s connected to Alien and Aliens. That’s my goal. I’m not trying to undo Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection, I just want it to be connected to Alien 1 and 2.

In case you wanted to go back to the previous video interview, the one that set off all this talk about the new film’s place in the sequel lineup, you can’t. That one has been made private.

At this point we’re going to wait and see what happens. This movie is at least a year away. It’s super-early to be talking about stuff like this, though other recent comments from Blomkamp demonstrate that he’s not one for the typical PR-controlled manner of doing things. We’ll let others debate how to manage a connection to the first two films without disregarding the third and fourth movies, and try to predict what’s going on based on the spare information out there now.