RWG: I never thought about it. It just sort of keeps happening by accident, to be truthful with ya. I worked for a year on Star Trek. I had been hired by Gene Roddenberry to produce what was going to be a series - a TV series because they couldn’t find a story they liked for the feature. I came up with the nut of a story, and I worked with a young writer and sort of developed the story and fleshed it out, and that became the feature. So I was a year building the Enterprise and cast Persis Khambatta, the bald-headed girl, but then I left after a year because it was a new director and all the credits were going to be changed, and I went off and did my own movie, which was not sci-fi. It was a wonderful little character piece called Inside Moves that Richard Donner directed with John Savage and David Morse - again an independent movie like this.

The X Files was an accident. Sheila and I had decided to get the kids out of L.A. and bought a house up in Washington state, and I sent a letter out to all the studios, saying, “We’re moving there - if there’s anything in the Northwest, in Seattle or Vancouver...” And I get a call from Fox, saying, “We just picked up this new show. We’re doing 12 episodes in Vancouver. At least get you moved there.” I said, “Great, what is it?” “The X Files.” “Send it over - let me take a look.” [Laughs] I mean, I loved it - especially The X Files because I love spooky stuff and scary stuff, but I love comedy, too. I did a wonderful family comedy television show called Life Goes On. Sunday nights. The boy in the family had Down syndrome, and Chris Burke really did have Down syndrome, so it was wonderfully heartwarming and a great experience. I really like everything I do. I’m not very picky. I just like making television shows and movies.

SFBG: But Alien Trespass was a real labor of love, right? It’s certainly not what anyone would expect to come out now.

RWG: Who knew? Blame it all on my [co-producing/co-writing] partner, Jim Swift - it was really his idea. As a young kid he used to go the movie theater in Inglewood and see a double bill every Saturday, and he loved these sci-fi movies. As it happened Jim and I became friends in the last few years, five or six years ago, up in Northwest Washington, and I was in the same theater because he and I went to the same school. We didn’t even know each other in Los Angeles! We would go to Inglewood and see these same double bills - he was probably sitting in the next row. I loved it, too.

He said the only problem with the ‘50s sci-fi movies is that they didn’t make enough of them, so he was really wanting to make another one, and he came up with this story idea, which I thought was just wonderful, and he wanted to make it the way I would have wanted to make it - which I did make. Very true to the form, not a parody, not a spoof. Because it’s ‘50s and out-of-date, it’s funny and charming. It is definitely a unique film - there’s no question about that. No one else has ever done it, I think. No one else is that stupid. Or crazy. [Laughs]

But there were so many crazy people who were right on board. Eric McCormack [of Will and Grace] read the script, and it was 10 minutes before we got the phone call. “Eric loves this and wants to do it.” He totally got it, and it was that way with the whole cast and crew and everybody. It was just a ball.

Diner dogs: R.W. Goodwin, left, with the cast.

SFBG: What was your budget, and how long was the shoot?

RWG: It’s a small budget. We’re not 100 percent sure where we are right yet because we’re still waiting for this tax credit we’re supposed to get. But I think it’s between $3 and $3.5 million. It was 15 days to shoot, plus two days of second unit where we did all the desert stuff with all the cars and photos of them. So it was tough, but not overly tough because I had great training on The X Files where we would make little movies in eight days. I learned very quickly that you have to have a very strong vision and you have to be able to communicate that vision to the people who are working with you. And most importantly you have to find the most talented people you can to do the work. That’s what we did, and so this came off just like clockwork.

SFBG: Did you do much research on the original sci-fi B movies? They were shot on a similar schedule.

RWG: Twelve days mostly. They were the same. Russell Johnson is a good friend of mine - Russell is most famous for being the handsome professor on Gilligan’s Island, but before that he was in a lot of these B sci-fi movies in the ‘50s. He was in It Came from Outer Space. He did a bunch of them and he told me that’s how they’d do it. They’d go out to the desert and shoot for a day or two at the most - the big wide shots, either with the cast or photo double - and then they’d go back to Universal, and there would be a desert set on one stage, and they’d shoot all the close-ups for the wide stuff. Nothing ever matched, which I thought was wonderful.

And so we just followed that pattern and shot our movie that way. We did tons of research. Of course we had seen almost all these movies as kids, but you know as kids you have emotional memories, not technical. So we immersed ourselves in the ‘50s. The three films that are the most indicative of what we are aiming for are War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and It Came from Outer Space. The acting was very good - it was stylized because it was the ‘50s, but they were great actors doing a very good job, very earnest about playing a part. The color and gorgeous look of War of the Worlds was what we emulated for our movie. Then once we established that we were doing a quality high-grade ‘50s B movie - because I didn’t want the actors copying bad acting - then we went back and I really mined all the wonderful little things from of the less successful ‘50s films. There were moments when the technology didn’t quite work - they had no choice and they just had to move on, that kind of thing. So there are a whole bunch of things in Alien Trespass that don’t quite connect.

SFBG: Are you talking about the bullet hole disappearing?

RWG: Well, the bullet hole disappears, but he’s an alien! Or when he’s walking alongside the truck he’s obviously on a treadmill, and when he stops, the background keeps moving for a little while. That kind of thing - just fun stuff like that. People who’ve seen the movie several times say they find something they didn’t see last time because it’s just loaded with funny little ‘50s stuff.

SFBG: I must say the alien monsters made me laugh every time I saw them - though if I was a child, they’d be scary, too.

RWG: Scary in a PG way, as they say. Again this is what they had in the ‘50s. They had to make them out of rubber, and they could only do so much. The initial conceptual stuff was done in the writing, but then when you actually get into the process, you have all hands on deck, the production designer. I like to bring the cinematographer in. And then we have the creature designer and maker Joel, who did drawings and models, and eventually we had this great, big 7- foot-tall phallic symbol with an eye in the middle of it!

SFBG: The look of the film is really beautiful - it almost throbs with saturated color.

RWG: War of the Worlds was our model for that - the rich, luscious color.

SFBG: The notes pointed out that the color wasn’t entirely accurate to the era.

RWG: I think the reason people say that is because most people have seen these films after they’d been running for years and years and they get banged up. But if you saw War of the Worlds in the theater when it opened, it would have been the same experience - luscious color. You know, color has been around since 1912 when the first color movie was made. But it was really brought into its own with Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. That spectacular studio color look - that’s what we were going for, and I think it really achieved it, and it does reflect on those old movies. A lot of people who weren’t actually there in the ‘50s, younger people, think everything in the ‘50s was black and white, which it wasn’t. The reason people in their 30s and 40s think that is because they saw it on TV when the TV was black and white - the fact is as many films were made in color as they were in black and white in those days.

SFBG: How did you get that color?

RWG: What you do is you hire one of the best cinematographers in the world! His name is David Moxness - we call him Moxie - and he’s brilliant. He can do movies and he can do TV. He can work fast, and he’s great. What we did which is what I always do: have boards made up, where we would take photographs or images and mount them on the boards and say, “This is the general color palette we’re looking for,” and we have more boards with costumes and set deck and everything else, and we made sure everyone on the team was coming from the same place.

SFBG: Any challenges creating that look?

RWG: Well, you’re always challenged when you have a short schedule and not a lot of money. The reason the studios in the ‘50s were able to make them so quickly and inexpensively was in those days they had standing back lots on all the studios and they had sets, standing sets on different stages, and frequently they’d write to whatever was existing. In our case, since it was a ‘50s piece, nothing existed. So we had to create all that.

The diner was built. There’s a little studio in North Vancouver where we shot it, and it has a little back lot New York-y street, which is really very clearly a back lot. For years people tried to get me to film there for real, and I said, “Are you kidding - it’s a back lot!” [Laughs] So the minute we were doing this, I said, “Get that studio!”

SFBG: What’s next - more sci-fi perhaps?

RWG: I’m not one to like to repeat myself. After The X Files everyone was trying to get me to do X Files TV shows, and I kind of avoided that. What I definitely do have is a pilot for a half-hour comedy, which is more of a cable thing. I just shot the pilot, and I’m just finishing it up now. It’s called The Cody Rivers Show with a couple of wonderful comedians I know up in Washington. Shorthand, it’s like Monty Python meets the 21st century.

SFBG: Do you see a particular relevance in doing a tribute to ‘50s B’s now?

RWG: Truthfully T was attracted to it because, like I say, looking at those ‘50s movies now, there was such a wonderful funniness about them but also more than that, there was an innocence then that we don’t have now. In the filmmaking, maybe not in the real world. There was an innocence. There was an optimism. It was a gentler time. When we started [making the movie] we were still in pretty good [economic] shape. but I kind of felt like, wouldn’t it be great to go back to a time that was simpler and life was better. At least it felt like it was better.

Then as it progressed and we made it, it just turns out to me that it’s a perfect film for this time - because people need to get away. They need some relief in their life. And here they can go and spend a couple hours in a wonderful decade and get scared and laugh and cry a little bit. It’s just a great experience - just make you feel good for a change.

Alien Trespass opens in Bay Area theaters April 3.