Want. Not a concept I’m familiar with. That being said—
Lawrence of Arabia leapt to mind when I cast Michael Fassbender because I realized that Michael Fassbender, with blond hair is not the same, but not dissimilar to, and if you were ever gonna redo Lawrence you’d probably certainly want Michael Fassbender to be Lawrence.
And I thought, you get a person, a being onboard the ship who is of serious intelligence, probably an IQ of 225 or 300 he’d wanna definitely entertain himself, and by entertaining himself he would naturally educate himself, by watching everything that’s onboard. So he’s been through the entire library of a million movies. The thing that stuck to mind was Lawrence of Arabia which he plays again and again mainly because he loves the anecdotal thinking of Lawrence himself so we go on out and the line is him saying: “The point is not minding it hurts” when Lawrence burns his finger. Which in a funny kind of way has a kind of loose, metaphorical connection to a person who has no soul, has no feelings and in fact is David. So that’s why maybe he gravitated towards Lawrence because Lawrence, in a funny kind of way while he was a very passionate character also had a degree of a soulless quality to him which made him kind of even more powerful. So I thought it was a good connection.
—Ridley Scott, Prometheus Director Commentary
“Ridley had sort of said that there was this character who was, um, obsessed with sort of Lawrence of Arabia, and I thought that was kind of an interesting area to explore in terms of sort of the femininity of the character I thought could be kinda interesting and to sort of have this androgynous feel to it and then we spoke also about like other influences like early David Bowie. And then the walk I sort of took from Greg Louganis. I remember seeing him in the eighties with my parents we were watching the Olympics. I just thought ‘wow that’s such an unusual walk’, it was such a neutral sort of position when he used to walk to the edge of the board. So I kinda took that, I don’t know, it just sorta popped into my head.”
—Michael Fassbender, Prometheus Screen Test
