Say you're Ridley Scott, a director known as a visual stylist. You've got a new project with 20th Century Fox, which marks your long awaited return to the hybrid horror/science fiction franchise you began 33 years ago with ALIEN (1979). It's huge. Essentially, you need someone to design the universe. To whom do you turn?

You turn to Arthur Max. Max, the Production Designer of PROMETHEUS, which opens June 8, previously collaborated with Scott on G.I. JANE (1997), GLADIATOR (2000), BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001), KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (2005), AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007), BODY OF LIES (2008) and ROBIN HOOD (2010). Before that, he worked on commercials for Coke, Jeep, Levi's, Pepsi and Nike, teaming with both Scott and David Fincher, for whom he later designed SE7EN (1995) and PANIC ROOM (2007).

We sat down with Max at Hollywood's classic eatery Musso & Frank and, between the steak and spumoni, the former NYU student, who worked on the lighting crew at Woodstock and lit rock concerts at Bill Graham's Fillmore East and later for the bands Pink Floyd and Genesis, among others, spoke about his career and one of the summer's most anticipated movies.

"On the one hand, I come from the streets of New York," said Max of his signature style, "all the broken glass and barbed wire, the visceral, tactile texture of the street, over which I've overlaid a classical education in art and architecture, so there's a kind of a combo-meal there, that seems to appeal to these two directors."

"David Fincher and Ridley Scott have a certain shorthand language of motifs, of lighting, of shape, of foreground objects as silhouettes," said Max. "If you look at all the movies I've done with those two directors, you will see there's a certain commonality to those elements. The genre is almost irrelevant."

Max speaks with a distinct British accent, the result of years spent in England, studying for his Masters in Architecture at the Royal College of Art before designing housing projects for the City of London. Architecture may have provided the foundation for his film work, but it wasn't Max's true calling. "I found it too slow and boring. And I was in a dilemma because I had this theater background, lighting background and architectural background, but I was a misfit. I didn't fit anywhere," he said. Happily, the self-described "frustrated sculptor" made friends with some film editors and camera people. "I visited one of them on set and I saw what was going on and I thought, this is for me. And I've never looked back."

PROMETHEUS, which stars Noomi Rapace (Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO trilogy), Charlize Theron (SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) and Patrick Wilson (LITTLE CHILDREN), took shape with pre-production designs in Los Angeles. "We were in a single large room with lots of light, which is what I asked for," Max recalled, "and eventually we completely boarded over the whole room with pin-up board and artwork and then we got to the window wall. And so it became like a tomb. And Ridley would pop by regularly."

After much consideration, Max and the concept artists working with him hit upon the proper style for the alien universe. "You could see the DNA in what we did from Giger," said Max, referring to H. R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist whose books, "Necronomicon I and II," first inspired Scott with their images of bio-mechanical monsters. "We sort of stripped out the bio- and emphasized the mechanical," Max explained. "But we kept some of the basic shape language...so you could recognize it. It was cleaned up and mechanized to a much greater degree for reasons that you realize in the movie eventually."

As for designing the film's title spacecraft, "we kind of logic-ed our way into it," said Max, "in the sense of, 'What is it for?' We decided it was not unlike the 'Nostromo,' in the original movie, which was just a tug hauling ore from planetoid to refinery...and very kind of neglected and derelict." Prometheus "would be a flagship of the fleet and it would have every advanced technology available, multiple cargo pods for various missions of exploration that could be loaded and unloaded. Everything in PROMETHEUS was basically a sculpture. The creatures, the ship, the interiors of their world was all sculptural and organic."

The plot of PROMETHEUS has elements of a prequel, but its twists are a closely guarded secret and Max wasn't about to spoil the fun. Suffice it to say, the story involves archeological scientists who venture into galaxies to uncover the beginnings of the original ALIEN story.

"We wanted them to have all the benefits of advanced technology," Max revealed. "We're set something like 90 years in the future from now, a generation earlier than the original movie, a lifetime prior."

Beyond the challenge of establishing a plausible prior manifestation of Giger's vision, Max and his team were mindful of the ALIEN franchise's fan base. "We wanted to lead the audience to where they're expecting to go," he said. "We wanted to fulfill their expectations somewhat. So it was a bit of a struggle."

Max's greatest ally in this struggle was Scott, whom he laughingly described as "a total asset." He appreciated the director's clarity. "He communicates graphically with his sketches and his doodles and his storyboards, particularly. He does beautiful storyboards because they're basically shooting boards, so you know what's in his mind and how he's going to shoot a sequence."

Max also credits British designers Stuart Craig, with whom he apprenticed, and John Box (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, DR. ZHIVAGO) as major influences.

According to Joseph Garrity (WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, BEST IN SHOW), Senior Filmmaker-in-Residence at the AFI Conservatory and head of its Production Design department, Max's relationship with Scott is a model for the Fellows in his program.

"You become friends with each other, and you have these intense relationships with each other, whether it's a small film or a gigantic film," Garrity explained. "This time of 'prep' is so important for the designers and the director, to really understand what the story's about - Who are these people? What's their back-story? - so we can go back and decorate their space. It's all about collaboration."

Max and his team were given two to three weeks to make a studio presentation of PROMETHEUS. "Basically, it was like speed-drawing and illustration and concepts of reference material, like a shotgun blast of ideas that Ridley came to see several days before and had his input," said Max. "We tore things down and re-arranged certain things. The studio came and were either kind of bored or awe-struck, I still don't know."

Max is more certain about Scott's reaction and credits the director's experiences as a designer with the BBC for his understanding. "He understood what we were about more fully than most directors and, also, he liked what we did. He was interested in our department. Ridley is a teacher. I think he probably is, in himself, an institution. He's an institute! You talk about the American Film Institute - there is the Ridley Scott Institute of filmmaking which I'm privileged to say I've been associated with for 27 years - since 1985 when I did my first Coca-Cola commercial with him back in London, and I've been learning about filmmaking with him ever since."

Scott figures prominently in one of Max's happiest film experiences, when the director came to Malta and saw the finished and dressed sets of GLADIATOR for the first time. "He was like a kid in a candy store," Max recalled. "I've never seen him like that before or since, where he was running around, literally, like a kid with a new toy, from one angle to the other, saying to his cameraman, 'Come and look at this, come and look at this! Look at this angle here! Look at this, look at that!,' running around the place because it was a very big back lot set. That was very, very gratifying."

Like GLADIATOR, PROMETHEUS features some very large sets. "I'm talking about very, very, very, very, very large sets - Ridley Scott's idea of big," said Max. "That involves maquettes (scale models) up to full size and then the logistics of molding giant molds. A lot of those sculptures were made from multiple piece molds in various workshops and assembled on the set, so to some degree I never saw (them) until they were put together. And there was no changing it because it was months and months of work involved. And the schedule was such that you had a matter of days to put them up in some cases, so if it didn't work you were screwed. But it worked. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, none of them did. PROMETHEUS is a galactic, gigantic, very big scale movie."

The Production Designer paused for a moment of satisfaction. "I think I might have gotten 'there' on this one."