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Due to constant studio interference, director Matthijs van Heijningen had such a negative experience with the film that he claimed to have lost his passion for filmmaking, and retired for nearly a decade. One of the issues was that he had to battle with five or six different studio executives in charge of the project, which made it difficult to make any creative decisions. At one point, production was shut down for a week because Universal wanted the film to be in 3D, and the release was eventually pushed back six months for studio-mandated re-shoots. Although van Heijningen has since made the acclaimed war movie The Forgotten Battle (2020) for Netflix and has also been working on films in Norway, he has since vowed never to work with an American studio again.
The creature effects were filmed primarily with cable-operated animatronic robots on director Matthijs van Heijningen's insistence, since it would improve the performances of the cast if they saw what they had to react to. Computer-generated (CG) images were planned to be added as elements to the animatronics (such as tentacles) if they couldn't be done convincingly. However, due to audience responses from initial test screenings (some reportedly commented that the movie looked too much like an 1980s horror movie), the studio ordered the replacement of most animatronic scenes by full CG models. Creature effects supervisor Alec Gillis would later say that seeing the finished movie gave the special effect team a "post-partum depression.”
According to director Matthijs van Heijningen and screenwriter Eric Heisserer, a different beginning and ending had been originally scripted and partially filmed, which would have shed more light on the Thing's backstory. The prologue would have shown how the alien pilot purposely crashed the ship on Earth, and then committed suicide. Later, an alien in the process of becoming a Thing would exit the ship in order to kill itself by freezing. After the opening, Kate and Sander arrive at the site and enter the unearthed ship, where they find the interior littered with dead aliens, either dismembered, burnt or in a state of transformation. In the central area, they see the last alien pilot hanging, with its throat slit, implying that the alien race piloting the ship was collecting other alien specimens. One such specimen was a Thing, which had broken out of its confinement pod, leading to a massacre among the aliens and other specimens, foreshadowing what would happen at the Norwegian base. This ship's interior scene was later scrapped and moved to the end, however, after early screenings, the studio didn't think the Pilot-Thing was scary enough, and the climax was becoming too complicated, with Kate trying to stop the Sander-Thing as well as discovering the Thing's backstory at the same time. So the backstory was omitted, a new computer-generated Sander-Thing was inserted at the last minute, and a Tetris-like animation was added to the scene where Kate enters the central area to hide the dead alien pilot.
It is mentioned in the DVD commentary that the remains that Kate Lloyd is examining at the beginning of the movie is one of the dog thing props from John Carpenter's The Thing (1982).
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