Ellen Ripley lies in dreamless hypersleep. Her pristine, hi-tech environment as silent as the grave. Then from somewhere deep in the gloom, the sonorous buzzing of an alarm. A bleating, nagging urgency that slowly drags the bleary-eyed Ripley from her slumber, then awkwardly, half-awake and half-dressed she stumbles to the source of the distress signal. Her phone. "Hi, Sigourney", reverberates the executive trill all the way from home base Los Angeles, "have I got an offer for you." "Huh?", returns Sigourney Weaver, blinking against the sharp light of her luxury New York apartment. "Is that you Peter?" "Yup, sure is", tantalises Peter Chernin, honcho of 20th Century Fox, "and guess what. I've got this script. This great script. And, well, you remember that Ripley is dead? Well..."
"Well, I laughed", laughs Sigourney Weaver recalling the moment - give or take a bit of artistic license - Fox first approached her with the idea of sci-fi's hardest femme returning for a fourth Alien movie. A, frankly, ludicrous prospect, given her recent swan song - a swan dive into a molten furnace while experiencing a familiar chestbursting sensation in mid-air at the close of Alien3, which, one would assume, put paid just such a suggestion.
"He said, 'You are going to be very surprised when we send you the script.' 'Gee', I said, 'I hope so.' I was pretty sceptical and then they didn't send me the script for six months. So I thought, 'Well, that idea didn't work out' and I didn't really give it any thought. Then when they actually showed me the script I was bowled over. Then it was pretty easy."
Easy? To bring Ripley back from the dead. Well, yes. If you really can get two identical ewes called Dolly, and dinosaur restoration on two movie occasions, then a resurrected Ripley in the far-flung future is hardly a greap leap of the imagination. Exept, this isn't exactly Ripley. This is Clone 8, reborn from samples of the original's blood, that and some foreign DNA. Alien DNA. No, this isn't the same Ripley at all...
1. The Rebirth
It was young Joss Whedon, a real bright-spark scriptwriter who had earned a tidy rep doing tidy-up jobs on Speed, Waterworld and Toy Story, who came up with the idea. Fox, the mother studio, were dumbfounded that one of their favourite franchises had done the impossible and squandered A Sure Thing, scuppering Alien3 amid a miasma of internal squabbling, misconception and a befuddled attempt to "do something different". So they turned to the young scribe for a sequel without its lead. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the studio, someone was dallying with the franchise melding exercise of Alien Vs. Predator. Whedon, though, got it. He knew exactly what to do. Bring back Ripley.
"The thing is, they bring me back but it goes wrong", teases Weaver on the delicious moral implosion Whedon's excellent script presented her with. "Everyone thinks that if things get really bad, in the back of their mind, there is this idea that they can check-out permanently. But the fact is now they can bring you back, clone you or what-have-you. That sort of final liberty no longer exists and I was very curious to play someone who is brought back against her will."
Weaver knew the series had hit a dead end. Literally and figuratevely. She could only foresee endless episodes of Ripley awakening to big bug jeopardy in godforsaken grungy dungeon scenarios. The formula was tired. "That's one of the reasons I died," she opines. "And if they were going to make a dumb Alien Vs. Predator then I didn't want to be any part of it. So, I just set it free. Let other people discover what it is about."
But she hadn't counted on Whedon's script. Set 200 years after Alien3, on the vast spacecraft Auriga headed in the specific direction of planet Earth, a cloning experiment comes to fruition. Ripley, Clone 8, is born again. Only she's not too concerned with human life, she's distinctly agile and her blood, well, sizzles. And she keeps having these flashbacks about being warrant officer Ripley in some past-life. Then arrives a band of nefarious space pirates. Cut to the chase: the sinister scientists were after the Alien DNA all along, the spiky ones are set loose, the gang of brigands enlists the undecided Ripley 8 to their cause (to stay alive) and the gloop really, really hits the fan. Tsssss....
"It was a very juicy set-up from the beginning", sneaks the sheepish Weaver, unwilling to read too close to the revelatory edge. "I think most people know I'm cloned and mistakes do happen. And then this bunch of brigands arrive with this unthinkable cargo. The situation is so incredibly juicy, I think it's the best one we've had. It's so sinister at the beginning of the film, it'll make your hair stand on end."
Once Whedon's script was doing the agent circuit, things really began to click. Winona Ryder signed up fast, purportedly a huge fan of the movies, also starting a flurry of Weaver replacement rumours. Then Weaver finally committed, excited not only by the script's devious spin but the studio's evident enthusiasm for getting it right ("That was my big problem, I always felt there was a danger of not making it as good as it could be") scuttling the scuttlebutt and setting the project on fast track. The only bug, so to speak, in the ointment was the lack of a director. Big problem. Cue lottery.
"I was so busy working that I didn't really get involved in that. All I know is that the studio was determined to continue the Alien tradition of finding someone who has not done a lot of work necessarily, but was brilliant, young and would bring his or her own startling vision to the series."
Enter Danny Boyle. Brilliant, young, a vision as unique as they come. He liked the script. He met Weaver, But he was nervous. The sheer scale of the movie daunted him and he feared his own brand of filmmaking would be engulfed in the huge budget and studio demands. He exited to A Life Less Ordinary.
Alien Resurrection was postponed and the wheel was spun again. In quick succession a series of bright young things were reputed to have dallied over Whedon's sci-fi horror yarn: Paul Anderson, Anthony Waller, apparently even James Cameron took a gander at the possibility of a return. And then David Cronenberg... "Oh really?" starts Weaver surprised at the name, before striking a diplomatic furrow on the Crash director's chance at the gig. "I don't know if he was offered it. I think someone like David Cronenberg would do a great job, on the other hand the tradition is to go with someone who hasn't made any films (David Fincher), or one film (Ridley Scott), or two films (James Cameron). There was a period when Fox considered a lot of people."
Then early in 1996, rumours leaked out of headquarters that a French director had been signed up. Apparently he could speak no English, but they'd given him an office and the chance of a lifetime. His name? Jean-Pierre Jeunet, one half (with Marc Caro) of the whimsical directing duo that gave the world the exotically nightmarish visions of Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. Which, if you think about it, is about an ideal vision for the Alien movies as there comes. By April the rumour was fact.
"I was so delighted when they ended up with Jean-Pierre", enthuses Weaver, "because his movies, Delicatessen particularly, were so claustrophobic. That style of humour and also he has his great love of actors. And it's that kind of film where you need that, everyone is close together in these cramped spaceships."
The shoot for Alien Resurrection began after a handful of false starts in November, 1996. And it was straight in at the deep end. Literally. Not to give too much away, the fourth instalment features, perhaps, its most terrifying sequence. An Alien battle underwater. The scene was filmed 36 feet down in a submerged kitchen, the demands upon the actors incredible - weeks filming in a tank with no respirators, no face masks and no coming up for air in case of panic - up was the ceiling.
"You had to give a signal", recalls Weaver of Jeunet's gruelling opening salvo, "and wait for a safety diver to jam a respirator in your mouth and take you through the maze of the kitchen to get out, to get some air. You had to have an amazing amount of trust. For Winona and me it was especially tough. I was a wreck. I kept saying to myself Ripley's brave, Ripley's brave. There is no Sigourney in that scene whatsoever."
Yet Weaver cites this as the easiest shoot of the four. She was physically fitter - thanks to a year's worth of karate - she looks trimmer and sexier than ever before with raven trusses teeming over her shoulders (no more baldy thank you very much) and a sneer-smile that'll haunt you for weeks. Gone were the reshoot hellfire catastrophes of Fincher's Alien3, gone the gun-toting demands of Cameron's Aliens, gone the baptism by gore of Scott's 1979 progenitor.
There were still rumous of a Weaver-Jeunet fracas, but Weaver puts that down to one day when she was feeling unwell and the language barrier finally proved too strong to breach ("That was a tough day. I was just feeling under the weather. I didn't do anything big. I just left the set for a minute, twice.").
Whatever the isolated testiness, the overwhelming feeling was one of harmony. A healthy flow of ideas from the veteran Ripley to the Gallic helmsman. "He trusted me completely and wasn't deterred by my ideas about the new Ripley." And what were these new Ripley ideas? "Ha, when you come back from the dead", sidesteps Weaver on the film's inner mysteries, "you don't take very much seriously - especially people trying to stay alive. She certainly isn't concerned with saving people. She has been set free from what I would call human obligations..." Which in anybody's book is a something of a change of tack.
2. The History
In 1979, Ridley Scott was offered a stab at a horror movie. In space. The script by Dan O'Bannon, proffered an alien species whose outlook on life was, frankly, genocidal - using other denizens of the nearby universe as hosts in their life cycle: facehuggers to chestbursters to the glans-headed bogeymen with acid blood and gloop-depositing habits.
Which was all very well for Scott, but he also wanted a female lead. An unknown. The charge of saving humanity was thus handed to the 30-year-old, five feet 11 inch Sigourney Weaver, fresh from a cameo in Annie Hall and a, now, long forgotten Israeli dud Madman. It was the making of two careers and the redefinition of sci-fi in the wake of the high-gloss, fairy-tale milieu of Star Wars. For the role of Ripley in Alien, Weaver was paid $ 30,000 (she thought it was a king's ransom), for Alien Resurrection she received $ 11 million.
"What I loved about Ridley was that he was so 'no bullshit'", says Weaver, asked to contrast the working ways of the three remarkable directors who have come before. "They had Ripley in this - in fact it was the whole crew - in these pale blue suits with pink insignias and when he came in and looked at me he just shrieked: 'You look like Jackie Onassis in space!" As the anecdote goes Scott immediately trundled his actress down to wardrobe and a huge stock of old NASA suits they had imported for sourse. He rummaged and yanked out a dirty brown flight suit. The look is still there in her latest tanned leather gear.
"There was something very direct about Ridley. He was such an incredibly visual director. I will never forget the designs he had Giger make. Ridley's from the North of England - isn't there some idea that people from where he's from are really volatile?" It's probably a trait peculiar to Ridley Scott, but as if to close the argument, Weaver launches herself on another anecdote on the tyrannical deportment of the director from South Fields, Northumberland.
"We were doing this scene and he was taling to all of us: John Hurt and everybody. Suddenly he grabbed me: 'Look, I don't want to give you the motivation to pick up your fucking cup of tea!' I looked at him, and I had been so silent and I burst into tears and ran off. It was the second week and I had never asked for any motivation. I hadn't even picked up a tea cup. Afterwards Ridley hurried to find me and apologised: 'I'm so sorry, I wanted to say that to John but I didn't feel I could. It's alright isn't it?' He felt we were the same. For both of us it was a trial by fire."
The return of Ripley came in 1986. With another young, vital director who had these big ideas about the nuclear family and nuclear weaponry. He was also another reputed dictator with a megaphone. James Cameron. "He had this real uphill battle", recalls Weaver of her second outing. "He was working with an English crew who worshipped Ridley and he was this punk kid from Canada whom they hadn't even seen coming in and acting like a great filmmaker (which he is). Jim kept trying to show them screenings of The Terminator so he could show them what he could do but they never bothered to come. Jim created a much more dramatic story and he pulled out all the stops for the action stuff."
Three. Cubed. Whatever. Came in 1992, after the script shapeshifted from bar-coded monks on a wooden planet to a prison colony made up of bar-coded paedophiles and rapists and a mish-mash of junky ideas and undernourished plot. Ironically for the least seen of the films so far, it is the most talked over. Ruminations flew thick and fast on its disastrous arrival at the hands of the since exonerated (with Seven) David Fincher.
"Fincher, of course, wanted to turn it all inside out", muses Weaver. "I loved that about Fincher. He had such a hard time with the studio. He wanted to make a very 90s film, and it has a lot of it, in a way it is a very innocent optimistic film.
" Although it is hard to swallow the notion of a film where 90 per cent of the cast perish as "optimistic", it is easy to admire Weaver's loyalty to the film, to this day she stands by it. "Domestically it wasn't welcomed - 'No guns? Ripley dies? Forget it', she tutts at her countrymen's limited horizons. "But Asia got it, Europe got it. May people over there seem to prefer it out of the three. I was disappointed that Fox didn't support the picture.
But I like the fact that what Jim Cameron built up, Fincher wanted to destroy. In fact, we all had dinner, Jim, Fincher and I in LA. And Fincher turned to Jim and said, 'You know, I've killed Newt.' Jim's first reaction was, 'How can you kill Newt?' Then I think he understood. Why would we want David Fincher to do a Jim Cameron film?"
3. The Psychology
Whatever your opinion of the various Alien movies there is no escaping the depths to which they have been "read". A set of sci-fi movies about homicidal bugs in space? I don't think so. No, for every spoonful of slime there is a ladleful of Freudian analysis to go with it. Most of it very silly. Does Weaver subscribe to any of it?
"Such as?" she purrs. Well, you can view the Alien creature with its smooth, domed, elongated skull as rather phallic. "I think Giger would certainly say that", she laughs. "I remember when I first saw the sketches when I got the part for Ripley, that was certainly what I thought: 'This is a giant penis!' But I wouldn't want to vouch for anything it is meant to represent."
No Freudian overtones in a psychotic knob chasing a free-thinking, self-sufficient female down dingy tunnes then? "I certainly think that designwise there has always been a huge sensual and sexual overtone to the sets", she concedes. "But I don't know if it has anything to do with male versus female or any accentuation of that.
I've always thought that the Alien was interested in things other than itself. There was a scene where Ridley and I wanted to do where I was naked inside a closet and the Alien came over and instead of attacking me, it was trying to touch my skin because I was so different from it. Why should you be afraid the Alien is going to eat you? I certainly think that what it is going to do with you is sexual."
There are rumours that Jeunet has upped the ante again on the kinky side - involving a more than passing encounter between Ripley 8 and an Alien. "I think they have cut out some of the kinkier stuff", sniggers Weaver. "Maybe they'll put out a hardcore version. I would say it was sensual." The other great sub-textual brickbat for the Alien saga is that of feminism. The young, determined, dependable female hero saving the day. Mother love kicks arse. Ripley the feminist icon.
"I think they only call her that because she is a woman", retorts the woman in question. "She doesn't depend on other people to come through for her, she takes it on her own shoulders. I think that women are strong, I think that women are very capable mothers and have been through the centuries. Having to protect their homes and children. In the end the fact that it is called feminism is actually a chauvinist thing to say. I dislike the term feminist icon. I just hope she is a good character, an interesting person who happens to be a woman."
4. The Future
Ellen Ripley. It is a testament to the strength of one character that not even death can do her down (although, expect a spate of Hollywood resurrection subplots to helpfully reinvent long gone heroes). It is finally evident, with the shelving of the dreaded Alien Vs. Predator script (apparently Robert Rodriguez will take the Predator franchise on alone), that you can't have an Alien movie without Ripley. A marriage made in hell.
"I think the reseach said that", Weaver concedes quietly and humbly. "I think they thought they could draw people with me. People actually wanted me to be in it, certainly they didn't have to put me in it like they did." Could she envision a third sequel without Ripley? "I think it would be strange", she agrees. "Especially if it was good. Alien Vs. Predator, that would have been fine. God bless you and goodbye. But if it had been a Jean-Pierre Alien movie then... You know, I had already gone and there were interesting films that I wanted to make. I felt satisfied with what I had done. Having done this, I am very glad. But it was weird, eerie at the most, to be playing a character that I played 18 years ago. It is such an amazing opportunity for an actor - to come back with the same character in a different story. It's been a great gig..."
And as Ellen Ripley ahs been reinvented, there's been a little tampering with the nature of the beast. A third - or fourth if you count the Queen - variety of Alien. The mysterious Newborn. "Oh, they do it in a very ingenious way", Weaver says coyly. "The Alien has evolved in one area. This film is much more about the science involved. I wouldn't call it a new variety, but there is an Alien offspring..."
Resurrection marks a lot of departures from the Alien mythos as we know it. Technological advancements offering CGI Aliens ("I don't think they're as good as having real bodies"). This is the first Alien movie not to be shot in the UK - it was shuttered away in top secret in LA sound stages, although half the crew were French ("I love the fact that the film is international"). With Call, Winona Ryder's character, for the first time Ripley has a major female co-star ("She is determined but fragile creature, something we've never had in the Alien series").
And there is Jeunet's cool, black humour. But, more than anything, it has reinvented the series for Sigourney Weaver. She has thoughts of directing a prequel, to go back to the original Alien planet. And Ripley, well this new Ripley, there's all sorts of places she can go. "I have to tell you", asserts Weaver happily, "I really loved playing this version of Ripley. In a way, she is closer to me than before. So, I think there is more to be done. But, you know, I always think that each one is the last one..." Never say die, though.
