Interview: Sigourney Weaver, actress

Published on Sunday 20 December 2009 11:44

"It's Ripley. I definitely think it's Ripley." Sigourney Weaver, Oscar-nominated actress, statuesque beauty, graduate of Stanford and Yale, the gate-keeper if you're a Ghostbusters fan, lays the blame for her reputation for seriousness squarely at the feet of Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley. The shaven-headed warrior, sci-fi icon and heroine of the Alien movies, Ripley is an indelible part of Weaver's career. So much so that, in some ways, sometimes, Weaver is landed with he

"It's sort of ridiculous," she says, before adding that James Cameron, who directed Weaver in the second of the Alien films and who she's just worked with in his massively hyped sci-fi epic, Avatar, will corroborate her story. "Jim will tell you what a silly person I am." She laughs.

It may well be true. Weaver laughs and smiles easily; the fine lines on her face crinkle when she does. But silly doesn't seem to quite fit. She is modest, reserved even. There's an air of old-fashioned, East Coast formality. (I'm thinking American East Coast, rather than Scottish although she does have ancestry here that she hopes a longed-for hiking holiday will reveal. "Watch out for the midges, right?") Weaver's voice is smooth and measured; movies are "pictures" and often she refers to herself as an "audience member" as well as an actor. It's polite, elegant. There's nothing gauche, nothing Hollywood.

It's the same with her appearance. At 60, Weaver looks more natural than plenty of Hollywood stars half her age. You only realise how remarkable that is when you actually see her. The bone structure remains but her face is naturally, attractively lined. She's not too thin, not too primped. Her make-up is subtle and so is her wardrobe: a charcoal grey blouse and cream slacks, a patent belt cinching her waist. Neatly folded into a plush armchair, her towering mauve suede heels tucked neatly together, she looks every inch the movie star. But it's in a low-key, sophisticated way.

"It took me a while to let my hair down in the business because I was kind of a shy person," she says, returning to the question of reputation. "I was from New York and never really felt at ease in Hollywood. You know, I don't really now either but I don't care, it's not important that I do. Filmmakers find me or I find them." Everything Weaver says is delivered with simple straightforwardness. She's a woman who seems comfortable in her own skin, clear about "the industry" and also her place in it. But it wasn't always like that.

Weaver grew up in New York. Her father, Sylvester "Pat" L Weaver, was a renowned TV producer and the chairman of NBC TV in the 1950s. Her mother, Elizabeth Inglis, was an English actress who'd worked on the stage as well as making a few films (including The Letter with Bette Davis) before giving up her career to raise their two children, Trajan and Susan. Weaver was 14 when she replaced her pedestrian Susan with the more exotic Sigourney, a name lifted from The Great Gatsby. The name, more suited, she thought, to a girl who was nearly six feet by the time she was 13, was needed because she always knew that she wanted to act. What's interesting, though, is that encouragement was difficult to come by. Her mother told her Hollywood would "eat her alive". Even at Yale, none of her teachers raved about her as they did about her classmate, Meryl Streep. According to Weaver, the lack of support has shaped her career.

"What I really wanted was to be in a repertory company. My mother had been part of Liverpool Rep. Since they were not very encouraging about that I think I felt I had to create my own repertory career. That's why I love playing small parts and big parts and doing comedies and dramas. That has been my only strategy and really it's been a selfish one. I never think of the business and how I'm doing, I just think about what would be interesting."

When Weaver took the part of Ripley she was 30 and hardly known. It was she says modestly, a "fortuitous debut". And despite the fact that she had no interest in science fiction, she has become inextricably linked to the genre. Without Weaver, there couldn't have been a Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator, no Lara Croft for Angelina Jolie to play, no Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss) in The Matrix.

It's not hyperbole to say that the Alien films were revolutionary – radically altering the way that women could be cast in action movies. Ripley, and of course Weaver, was brave but brittle and ever so cool. She knocked out pithy one-liners with ease, she even threw a basketball backwards over her head and scored. Winona Ryder, who starred with Weaver in Alien: Resurrection, the fourth in the series, said: "Sigourney is the one person who has shown us you can do it all." There have been dippy comedies: Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters (1984), the bitchy, slapstick performance as Katherine Parker in Mike Nichols' Working Girl (1988), for which she was nominated for an Oscar in 1989. There have been dramas: in that same year, Weaver was nominated for a second Oscar for her role as scientist Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist. Skip forward and there was Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) in which she was a desperate and compelling presence as the bored, adulterous wife. And Snow Cake (2006), in which she played an autistic woman.

"My basic approach has always been the same – it's about the script. And it is about more than just the people in it," she says. "I never go 'I don't know about this script but boy I'd love to play that part'. I can't even think that way. If it's a good project that I'd want to go to the theatre to see then I want to be a part of it even if I'm playing a doormat."

In Avatar, Weaver plays Dr Grace Augustine, a scientist and mentor to the main character, Jake Sully. Augustine is his guide to the world of Pandora, a kind of CGI-created tropical paradise, home to a race called the Na'vi, where she's lived for 20 years. She enters the world by being transformed into her avatar, a 10 feet tall creature with blue skin, ears and a tail. In the human world, Augustine is a wise-cracking, chain-smoking researcher, the kind of character that, in sci-fi terms at least, it's difficult to imagine anyone other than Weaver playing.

"The part of Grace – this woman who's a dichotomy between this very driven, frustrated woman in the human world and this free spirit that's lost her heart to the Na'vi people, the combination of all of these factors made me jump at the chance to go on this adventure with Jim." For Cameron, Weaver was an obvious choice but he did have some hesitations – it was Ripley again. He didn't want the Alien connection to overshadow his new project.

"I didn't actually know that until I read it recently." Weaver laughs a small laugh. "That he was afraid that I was too identified with Ripley. We did go out of our way to physically transform Grace – with her red hair and her chain smoking and everything else – but I didn't realise that he was concerned about that because, of course, I've done so much other work besides Ripley." That's not a complaint, it's too gently put, but you can see why it might be a little annoying. "People think of Ripley, but I hope they think of other things as well."

Avatar is Cameron's first film since the blockbuster to end all others, Titanic. That collected 11 Oscars and is the biggest grossing movie of all time, having taken a reported 1.8 billion since its release 12 years ago. Avatar if anything is even more ambitious. Shot in digital 3D, it's one of the most technologically advanced, and hyped, films ever made, with a budget of more than 230 million and a vast array of new kit, some of it designed partly by Cameron, specifically for this film.

"To see him on the set of Avatar was like watching a kid in a candy store," Weaver says. "He invented the cameras, he was using the cameras. He was shooting his characters in the flora and fauna he created with the creatures that he created. He was having a great time, and so were we." The 3D camera used to shoot the film required the actors to work wearing a camera fitted to a kind of helmet, which would pick up their facial expressions, the way they raised their eyebrows or wrinkled their nose. They also had to wear motion capture suits to ensure that their movements would be picked up by computers so that their animated counterparts would move just like them. Each frame of the film took 100 hours of computer time to animate. Cameron has said that he was concerned that Weaver wouldn't enjoy the process of making the film, but it didn't work out that way.

"When we were in our little suits with our ears and tails we could see what we looked like in Jim's magic camera – I don't know what he calls it, I call it the magic camera – so we were free just to be with each other as actors, as characters and Jim's focus was completely on us.

"We all had renderings of our avatars when we were doing the performance capture. For me Grace had such a haunting face and because her human life is so guarded and armoured, the rendering was a real inspiration to me. So I was very surprised when I saw the movie and he hadn't used it, but that Grace looked just like Sigourney only I was 10 feet tall and blue, a much improved version of myself and 30 years younger." As far as Weaver's concerned in terms of projects, it suits her to swing from large to small, serious to comedic.

"As soon as I've done a I want to do z," she says. "So far I've always been able to find the antidote of what I've just done. I've been very fortunate and I certainly know that. But also because I don't have ambitions, I believe in taking what comes. I love being part of an ensemble and just going for it. I have that philosophy about life in general so I think that I'm not waiting for the perfect project to come along. I go in and try to transform it into the best it can be." True to her word, in the next year alone she's got five films to follow Avatar. Three are comedies: Crazy on the Outside which is directed by Tim Allen, Paul, with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and For You with Jamie Lee Curtis and Kristen Bell. I wonder if the catalyst for such a burst of activity was her daughter Charlotte, 20, leaving home for college just over a year ago?

"I think it's been quite consistent, really," she says. "And also I've fallen in love with smaller pictures, which perhaps haven't got as much distribution. But I've really been working hard now for quite a long time. It's just that they're all coming out this year. Suddenly it looks like you've been in five places at once."

When the PR woman arrives at the door, neither Weaver nor I look round. It wouldn't be polite. Weaver is telling me about The Flea, an off-Broadway theatre run by her husband of 25 years, Jim Simpson. "It's a fabulous theatre," she says, leaning over to get me a card. "He has a young group of 45 young actors in these six plays about the economy that were written specifically for The Flea." It's not just loyalty to her husband, either – keeping her hand in that theatre is what keeps her focus away from Hollywood. "I always see my career in the context of the work being done there. That's where I fell in love with being onstage and being an actor, off, off Broadway; your Fringe." She smiles.

Still nothing has been said about the woman at the door, but we agree to continue talking as we walk so that Weaver can be on her way. There's a press conference before all the hoopla of the world premiere. When she stands up, the true impact of Sigourney Weaver unfolds. She's very tall, slightly over 6 feet in her heels. We walk slowly, Weaver in practiced movie star mode, not making eye contact with anyone continuing to talk to me in her quiet, measured voice. She's explaining, in a characteristically serious manner, development plans for The Flea.

"We'll have a 99-seat theatre, an 80-seat theatre and a 35-seat theatre. And we'll have a rehearsal space and offices above ground which will be nice. It's a great tribute to that kind of small theatre as a greenhouse where all new work germinates whether you're an actor or a writer or a director. It's the future."

Avatar is on general release now

This article was first published in The Scotsman on December 19