David Britten Prior is a DVD producer, screenwriter, actor, and filmmaker who has won several awards; but if you saw him in Alien Resurrection, you probably didn't recognize him as the great-grandson of The Great Lover. Dripping with slime, he played the not so pretty Alien. When asked which part of the film he appeared in, he said, "primarily in the sequence toward the beginning (about half an hour or more into the film) in which three Aliens were trapped in a cage overseen by the scientist played by Brad Dourif. My longest bit of screen time occurred when Dourif kissed the glass with the Alien on the other side, then zapped it with CO2--that was all me. The baby Alien was a mechanical creation (nobody inside) and the swimming Aliens were created entirely in the computer. We tried to put actors, wearing Alien suits in the water, but they sank rather quickly and ignobly, so that idea was abandoned."
David is interested in every aspect of film production. He wrote and directed Cain Rose Up (1999), a crime thriller; did the rewrite of Immortal Kiss, a vampire screenplay; and wrote, produced, and directed a short called Forever After. He produced the DVD version of Ravenous, one of his favorite films, for Twentieth Century Fox. He said, "Ravenous is a funny, scary, intelligent adventure yarn and one of the most courageously strange and mature films to come from a major studio since the 1970s." An in-depth interview with David about Ravenous is available at Digital Bits, the DVD information Web site.
"The DVD is the greatest media for home video," David told The John Gilbert Appreciation Society. "The possibilities for interesting programming it offers are fun and unique. A DVD offers numerous alternate audio tracks apart from the normal film sounddtrack, so you can watch the movie while listening to the filmmakers talk abut the process of making it."
David's name is becoming a major DVD selling point. In addition to the Ravenous DVD, he has produced DVD versions of Pearl Harbor, Fight Club, Titus, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The July/August 2000 issue of Widescreen Review magazine (#40) featured an interview with David about Fight Club. His latest project was