Alien: Covenant is nearly here, and director Ridley Scott is characteristically chatting up a storm. The prolific filmmaker is simultaneously releasing Alien: Covenant and prepping his next film, the crime drama All the Money in the World, to start shooting, but he’s also giving an update on his plans with the Alien franchise.

Scott returned to the sci-fi realm with Prometheus in 2012, but after that moved on to films like The Counselor and Exodus: Gods and Kings. Filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, meanwhile, started developing his own sequel to the Alien franchise, which then spurred Scott to move more quickly on the long-promised Prometheus sequel which became Alien: Covenant. During the development of Covenant, Scott revealed that he planned on making as many as four additional Alien movies. Now, in an interview with Yahoo! UK, the director is changing his tune:

“I don’t know. [I’ll make] maybe two more [films], or maybe one more, I don’t know.”

“I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer at this point, especially given that the 79-year-old Scott plans on moving directly into the thriller The Cartel after All the Money in the World, and somehow also plans on rolling cameras on the Alien: Covenant sequel within the next 14 months, which has John Logan (Skyfall) on scripting duties:

“I’ll probably be filming it within a year,” Scott says about the follow up to Covenant. “It’ll be out within a year and nine months. It’s weird when you’re writing, doing, planning, thinking about franchises, it’s amazing how it opens up and starts to evolve.”

Scott also did a bit of reflecting in the Yahoo interview, admitting he was taken aback when audiences weren’t too thrilled with his take on Prometheus:

“It went straight up there, and we discovered from it that [the fans] were really frustrated. They wanted to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: ‘Wow, OK, I’m wrong’… The fans, in a funny kind of way – they’re not the final word – but they are the reflection of your doubts about something, and then you realize ‘I was wrong’ or ‘I was right’. I think that’s where it comes in. I think you’re not sensible if you don’t actually take [the fans’ reaction] into account.”

As someone who liked Prometheus more than most I can attest the xenomorph was the least interesting thing about it, so it’s a bit of a bummer to hear that Scott thinks that was one of the film’s major issues (and not, you know, incredibly dumb characters). I suppose we’ll see when Alien: Covenant hits theaters, and about which our own Haleigh Foutch had mixed feelings in her review.