James Cameron conceived a radical approach to puppeteering her, which would involve hanging the creature from an overhead crane and stationing two stunt men inside the mid-section to operate the puppet’s four arms. Other key functions would be controlled through external rods, wires and hydraulics.
“When Jim first came to me with this idea of putting two guys inside a giant alien queen suit,” Winston admitted, “I thought, ‘This man is out of his mind.’ Nothing like that had been done before. But in the next moment, I realized that if he had imagined it, we could probably do it.”
For a Stan Winston Studio proof-of-concept test, stunt performers puppeteered ski-pole arm extensions from inside a crane-suspended ‘garbage bag queen’ in the studio parking lot, a simple foam mockup covered in black trash bags. "Just to see if this concept worked,” Winston said, “and it did.