STEPEHEN REBELLO: You looked swell at the Oscars.
SIGOURNEY WEAVER: Thank you. The mircacle of hair and makeup, you know. A friend of mine was sitting next to two women who said about me, "She's had work done, but it's very good work." I've done my work at the gym, thanks.
Q: People in their 20s think you're godhead because you play Ripley. Just ask any of them around the Movieline offices.
A: Really? I was thinking Winona would bring in that crowd. That's nice to know. Oh no, more pressure!
Q: The last time we talked, I had the feeling that you were still a bit baffled, maybe even a touch embarassed about having become famous playing an action hero.
A: You mean it seemed I might be thinking, "It's science fiction. I'm above that." Well, I'm very lucky to be still doing it. Having these successful movies enables me to do things like The Ice Storm.
Q: There are so many ways we could talk about Ripley, one of the strongest characters in the last 20 years. How would you characterize her from the first movie to the new one?
A: In the first, she was the new recruit, very idealistic, very much by-the-book. Second one? Disillusionised, angry, filled with foreboding about reigniting her battle with the aliens, a battle that actually brings her back to life in a way. The third one, she knows she's going to die, feels that inevitability coming closer and closer. In this new one, she's unleashed, totally unpredictable. Even she doesn't know what she's going to do. She's more animal, sniffing the air. This new Alien picture is pretty kinky and I was lucky to have a particularly kinky director [French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet] who was as interested as I was in pushing the sensual side of the story.
Q: Let's talk about how you pushed for that evolution.
A: I don't think it's a dark secret that Alien Resurrection has me cloned against my will. I felt Ripley should come back almost like a vampire. Her skin should be radiantly fresh, an element added to her that makes her sexual and incredibly lustrous. She's almost too good to be true, and you don't know where she's getting it from. I wanted her to look "new and improved" strong, a little bit like a "creature". I didn't want to carry a gun. I mean, once you've died, it's not a big deal to die again. I thought it was important for her not to need all that paraphernalia.
Q: What, in your mind, is Ripley's overall back-story?
A: I've always known she came from a meat-and-potatoes kind of family, where the sexual roles were very clear: strong father, wonderful mother, blah-blah-blah. She's had a daughter, she's married, but she's like these other real-life women who go into combat - she has a sense of duty, she still wants to do this thing. I've always felt her father and brothers had all been space cadets.
Q: You were very lucky on Aliens, a sequel after all, to get a director like James Cameron, weren't you?
A: You need that lucky break. I had just done Halfmoon Street. To get a distributor, the director had taken Paul Theroux's very unconventional character and tried to make her sympathic. That was such a cop-out. I remember saying, "The next director I work with is going to be a real fighter, a real megalomaniac who's gonna force the studio to do what he or she wants." I remember working with Jim Cameron in this little English dubbing studio. We were supposed to go daily from nine a.m. to four p.m. Every night, we'd still be going at midnight. Here we were, two fighters, megalomaniacs working in the same room. We got along great. You need to be crazy to work on a film, theater, to be an artist of any kind.
Q: Moviegoers barely know Alien3 - and yet Ripley committed suicide in that one.
A: I'm still disappointed that the American public didn't embrace that film. It's often not even mentioned when people talk about the series. David Fincher is an amazing director who never got to do his script. The reasons that movie didn't work weren't David's doing it all. I had total confidence in him right away, so his success with Seven doesn't surprise me at all. Months before Copycat [the 1995 film in which Weaver starred] was supposed to come out, I went to [executives at] Warner Bros. and said, "You cannot bring out this movie opposite Seven. I know David is going to make an amazing movie." They went,"Brad Pitt in a moustache? Ugh." I ran into them again at Cannes and said: "I told you!"
Q: When Alien3 was released, you sounded almost relieved that your character was going to die.
A: I felt a little guilty doing this new one because I had really wanted Ripley to die. One of the reasons I wanted her to die, though, was that I had heard they were going to do Alien vs. Predator. That was so hideous, I thought, "They're crazy to develop this great thing over the years and now they're just going to shit all over it." It's different now at Fox. I had other ideas about Ripley's death, though.
Q: Which were?
A: Ultimately, I think we take death for granted as our way out. Things get too hard, we can split and be gone. But in this future, you can split and someone can bring you back, wheter or not that's what you want. I thought, "Wow, that's an amazing thing to grapple with. That's what she's got inside of her.
Q: Why, aside from the fabulous payday, did you want to make Alien Resurrection?
A: I was seduced by the script, which is really good, the best Ripley I've ever gotten to play. Then I met Winona and just liked her so much right away. I think she's an amazing actress and person, terribly funny.
Q: You mean it wasn't the fabulous costumes?
A: I do have a very nice costume, my best by far. It's very tight brown leather, lots of straps - just beautifully cut, very practical. This movie marks a real departure in may ways, but the director didn't want a departure costume-wise. He wanted the grungy look of the other movies. We couldn't go as far as we wanted with the costumes, but my costume is exactly what I wanted.
Q:You've considered to be one of the least diva-like of actors, but I heard you had a bad argument with your director. Care to elaborate?
A: One day that I can remember, I was coming down with something. I was very frustrated because sometimes the language thing got to be difficult. I had thought of a scene one way and - obviously, with each Alien picture, I have stronger and stronger ideas about what's important, about what the audience wants, because I'm the one they tell when they meet me.
Anyway, there was something Jean-Pierre didn't want to focus on and I just had a sense of the rythm the picture needed in order for the ending to work Jean-Pierre didn't agree. That was a tough day. I was just feeling under the weather. I didn't do anything big. I left the set for a minute, twice. That was my form of a nervous breakdown. When I came home I got really sick.
Q: You had director approval, didn't you?
A: Yeah, I did. And I should have.
Q: How did it go when you met Trainspotting director Danny Boyle, who was originally offered the movie?
A: He didn't really talk about the script as much as what it was like to do a giant Alien picture. He had some concerns, which I guess didn't put to rest. He said, "I like to work with my actors and not have 200 people standing around." I said, "Look, between you and the actors, it's exactly the same as making a small film. It's as intimate as you want to make it. The only difference is, if you say, "I don't like that door handle color, paint it blue", you will have 200 people standing around waiting while they paint it blue. I'm surprised he made the decision he did, because the script is so marvelous.
Q: I recently ran across a photo of you and Mel Gibson, looking ravishing at Cannes 14 years ago when The Year of Living Dangerously competed. In that shot and that movie, you two have a chemistry that makes me have to ask: did you have a crush on him?
A: Yes, I loved Mel. I didn't have a crush on him so much as he sort of restored my faith. Here was a guy who was so good-looking but didn't care about that, loved his wife, carried her around because she was pregnant, made sure she took vitamines. He was just, like, a regular guy. [But] if he hadn't be married, who knows? I think one of the reasons I married my husband [theator director Jim Simpson] was he reminded me of Mel.
Q: You competed at Cannes again this year with The Ice Storm. How did the experience compare?
A: You know, you said "ravishing" a second ago. What I remember about that time was not that I was particularly ravishing at all, but that Mel was so beautiful that when we walked down the Croisette, I felt like an observer watching the world down discover Mel. He's such a sweet person, I couldn't have been happier for him. We loved working together and I just felt happy that I knew him. He was so "Mel". Back then, I didn't feel very secure. When I returned this year for The Ice Storm, I felt like part of the community.
Q: Didn't Peter Weir tell you right after you started The Year of Living Dangerously he was shocked at how little you knew about acting?
A: Yes. He was actually kind of cranky. When I was at Cannes the first time I also remember feeling relief that every frame I shot for the movie was in the movie. At the cating session, Peter had told me that my role was one of the things he might even get rid of entirely. I remember doing this now kind-of famous scene where I walk through the pouring rain to Mel's office. We were shooting this scene in Manila and we could do only one take. They turned firehoses on me and I was, like, bodysurfing. Meanwhile, the extras - villagers, really - weren't cooperanting because they were very unhappy with our being there. After he yelled "Cut", Peter came up to me and said, "Whatever you were doing was completely wrong. We'll reshoot this in sunshine." But shortly after, we got death threats and got thrown out of the Philippines. Luckily, the continuity girl had quietly printed the take we had all thought was a disaster. When it came up the screen in dailies, there was something so amazing about it that Peter stood up and said, "That's the movie." That meant so much to me because it had really thrown me, when someone I respect as much as Peter asid, "That sucked." I wasn't very secure then, anyway. I'd had such an awful time shooting Eyewitness, and I'd been fired by Nicol Williamson from "the Scottish play" [Macbeth].
Q: It's bewildering that people didn't try to pair you and Mel again right away. If it had been the old studio days...
A: ... We'd have been doing mysteries, romances, musicals, I know. We could have danced down to Rio together. [Laughing] I loved working with Mel. He had no qualms about my height. He was just cool. The Year of Living Dangerously is one of the four good ones I've made. Even though Mel and I have the same agents, you still have to kind of engineer it. I'm only a few years older than Mel, but Hollywood thinks more along the lines of, "Let's put Harrison Ford together with Anne Heche."
Q: Or Julia Ormond.
A: It's the actors who want to do that. It's male vanity. It's some sort of male fantasy that no matter how old they get, they want to be with a very young woman. I don't think I was under consideration for 6 Days 7 Nights, the movie Anne Heche is going to do with Harrison, although I'm sure a few years younger than he is. I never understand why these movies don't even mention the age difference, making it something you can play off.
Q: You sometimes miss out on projects for which I think you'd be a natural.
A: Here's my theory: producers are short. I'm not the average producer's sexual fantasy. I am tall. When I come into a room wearing platforms, they go, "She's not my type of woman", because what they're looking for is the petite blonde who looks up to them. With me, directors either sit up in the middle of the night and go, "Sigourney Weaver!" or they don't. It hasn't been a problem with leading men, although I remember on Scarface coming in to meet [5'7" tall] Al Pacino, and he didn't get up to shake my hand. The only leading man I ever worked with who was psychotic about my height was Chevy Chase, and he's 6'4". It's ended up I've played lots of women who are very isolated. Those are interesting parts, but they're not as easy for me as a love story. My West Coast agent says, "Sigoureny, nobody knows how sweet you are."
Q: The Ice Storm isn't going to do that PR for you. How would you say that film worked out?
A: What I loved about it was that I play the bad girl, a character [director] Ang [Lee] loved and whom he never judged. The movie's set in 1973, in WASP-y rich New Canaan, Connecticut, with people who smoke pot and have sex, but Ang, who is from Taiwan, seemed to find a part of himself in each of these people. He could see these characters in midlife, panicking about not being able to squeeze out all of life's juices. If seemed moralistic. The world press I met at Cannes had the same reaction: this is mankind, not just New Canaan.
Q: Your character in the movie is pretty depressed.
A: When I told Ang, "I didn't mean to play her so sad", he said, "You didn't. She just is so sad." It was like playing someone whose head is separated from her body. The only time she can be in her body is the brief moments when she's having sex.
Q: I think you should get nuts on-screen, and soon, with Jim Carrey.
A: Will you tell him that, please? I'm such a sucker for that kind of talent. At the Oscars, he was wearing a Richard Tyler shirt the same color as my gown. I went over and totally fawned over him, telling his wife, "I'm sorry, but he's got to be with me the rest of the night because we match." I told him that he was my daughter's and my favorite actor and it's true. We watch all of his films. I would love to work with him. Given the choice, I run to see Jim Carrey's movies as opposed to sitting through a four-hour Hamlet.
Q: Still, you do have something of a rep for turning down things. Such as Body Heat and 9 ½ Weeks years ago, and Marvin's Room and the Barbara Hershley role in The Portrait of a Lady more recently.
A: Funny, because I was talking with [ agent] Sam [Cohn] earlier about the post-Alien years when I turned down everything I think I was so afraid of making a mistake. Or, because I was an English major, no script seemed good.
Q: But you must have had specific reasons for turning down specific jobs.
A: I didn't really have confidence in Adrian Lyne [for 9 ½ Weeks]. I feel like I've never unleashed my real sexuality on the screen, maybe because of my own reticence or my lack of trust in what I thought might happen or the lack of the right story.
I turned down Body Heat because I was going out at the time with a very conservative guy from the South and he was put off by the script, which was much more risqué than the movie. With The Portrait of a Lady I was one of the people Jane Campion considered when Susan Sharadon dropped out. But a 17-week shoot playing a supporting character? I said to her, "You have a child, too. Can't you make this a little shorter?"
They sent me Marvin's Room with [Meryl Streep's] part in mind when one of the producers was going to direct it. It was one of those things where I could tell they didn't have their money together and I didn't want to get involved. The movie is flawned, but I thought Diane Keaton was amazing. And Leonardo [DiCaprio] is wonderful. Actually, I'd love to play an older woman opposite Johnny Depp. I think he's extraordinary. I loved Donnie Brasco. And those lips!
Q: Are you going to direct a film?
A: Now that my daughter is older, I feel I have more options. My husband is the most supportive man in the world, always encouraging me, "Get out there and work. Direct, do the things you want to do. The time is right now." It has also taken me many years to rid myself of the horrible training at Yale, which was all intellectual.
Q: You're going to direct an Alien movie at some point, aren't you? I can feel it.
A: [Laughing] I am in a better position to know what's needed and hopefully, someday, I will direct. I want to direct the one where they go back to the original planet. But I have to direct a couple of other things first. The prospect would be really too scary, otherwise.
Q: Still, you know Ripley so well.
A: I am used to her company, even though I'm so unlike her. I don't know where she comes from, yet she's like an old friend. How many actors have been able to do the same role over and over for so many years? It's like getting to do James Bond every few years.
Q: Given your icon status as Ripley, how do fans respond to you?
A: After seeing me feel like a hunted raccoon, I'm pretty sure my daughter will never do anything that will make her famous. What I usually get is people's incredible exhilaration when they see me on the street, especially kids. In New York, I always wonder, "If I'm about to be mugged, do I mention Ripley?" And if I did mention her, would the muggler's response be, "Uh-unh, we couldn't mug Ripley"?
Q: Have you ever made any star's life difficult, in public, that is?
A: I saw Tom Cruise downtown and I couldn't believe I would have such a reaction, but I just screamed, "Oooooh, it's Tom Cruise!" because I was so thrilled to see him come out of nowhere into this deli. I thought I would die. I now understand why people have a reaction to seeing someone they recognize. I went to John Travolta's birthday party, thinking, "Hmm, not a bad dancer. Dancing must be his hobby or something, because he moves really well." Then I realized, "Oh my God, I'm dancing with Saturday Night Fever!" I'd completely blocked out his early career. I hurriedly say: "Oh, I have to go!" because I know there was going to be some disaster - like, I was going to fall on my ass.
Q: You mentioned earlier the specter of Alien vs. Predator. Let's imagine other horrifying sequel possibilities involving Ripley and other cultural icons. In a fair fight, would you bet your money on Ripley or Godzilla?
A: Oh, I'd embrance him. I'd want to be carried away with him. I'd want to be his Godzuki.
Q: Ripley or Barbarella?
A: I'd win. I'm smarter. But we'd probably only pass each other by in some corridor in space.
Q: Ripley vs. James Bond.
A: Oh, I think she'd want to put on a nice sleek dress and go gambling with him. Poor Ripley, she's never had a romance, really. She's busy, busy all the time.
Q: Ripley and Rush Limbaugh.
A: I'd make sure he'd get killed. Or terrified.
Q: Ripley vs. Kathie Lee Gifford.
A: I think it would be like, "Hi, bye. You're on the wrong ship."
Q: Let's talk about money. You were reportedly paid something like $ 4 million plus back-end participation to so Snow White: A Tale of Terror and $ 11 million to do Alien Resurrection. When a figure gets reported, does that mean that you actually get that money? Or can it mean you will get that money if the movie makes over a certain amount? Are there steps? Contingencies?
A: If it's published, it means you're getting that money up front. On Show White, one of the reasons Interscope published my salary was to show that the film was happening, that it was a done deal. But I was a little surprised to pick up Variety and see it. I sort of thought that it was a private thing. The studios always say they don't want actor's salaries published because then it's harder to deal with all the other actors. On The Ice Storm I hardly took any money because I wans't there to make money off a small picture.
Q: Did you have that kind of experience on Snow White? What I mean is, what's it like being paid so many millions and then the movie goes direct to cable in America?
A: What?
Q: You didn't know that it was going to debut on Showtime?
A: I didn't even know that. They were afraid to tell me, probably. Listen, Showtime is fine. At least it'll be seen. I think the movie has some of my best work. It was a weird movie, but it was treated like a little orphan. It makes me sad when you work that hard on a movie, then the original producers don't know what to do with it, so they pass the buck. I think there are flaws in it, but why not at least bring it out in theaters in America? Oh well, on Snow White at least it was so nice to have long hair and pretty clothing for a change.
Q: What did you make on the first Alien?
A: Do you know, when I finished the movie, I thought I'd made so much money? I thought I could live on my $ 33,000 forever. I actually went to the Dakota and asked about the costs of buying a unit there. They showed me something on the ground floor - a studio. I never wanted to live there. I thought it was a good investment. You know, I think I'll get an electric boat. It's good for the environment and it's a folly. I need a folly.
Q: Still, you've gotten some great paychecks recently. Did you blow the money on anything terrifically frivolous?
A: Actually, I've been thinking about buying that electric boat, but I haven't done it yet. It's the only big thing I've really considered. I've also been thinking about what charities to donate to, because it feels like I should get rid of some of it. But getting [the Alien Resurrection] salary was a small, important victory for me.
Q: How happy are you these days with career stuff?
A: I'm usually satisfied with my career. What I find difficult is modern life. I have too many things going and my constant plight is, Where do I put my energy? Into acting? Into things I'm producing that are actually going to be shot? Working with writers? My family? It would be easier if I could just concentrate on the acting, but I'm too schizy. I still have a small child and I don't want to miss time with her.
Q: The movie you're interested in doing next is something funny and local. Something you've been developping for some time, right?
A: It's Dear Rosie, based on a British short that was nominated a few years ago for an Academy Award. It's just a wonderful quirkly kind of comedy, in which I'll play a serious novelist who attains sudden success when she is coerced into writing a trendy diet book. I'm relieved to finally play someone ridiculous. In fact, she's the closest to myself than I'll probably ever play.
Q: What's your career plan for the next few years?
A: Whenever I've done that, nothing happens. It's almost like a curse. I'am of an age now where I've lost friends, contemporaries, to various diseases. Who needs a three-year, a five-year plan? I'd love to be relaxed enough to live on some peaceful island somewhere, take my electric boat and go crazy. But my engine's running and I can't turn it down. As you get older, you sort of get feverish about spending your time productively, when you'd probably be better off going to that island. So, my solution is: "Don't even make a list. Do everything right now."
