Sigourney Weaver: The Heat is On

Q: Aren't you involved with Fox in a legal wrangle over profits from Aliens?

A: I think it's still pending. The salaries we get are so absurd, but all of us who did Aliens were ripped off. I ended up paying about 70 percent in taxes, which was a shock, because that movie was a killer to do. You get these absurd financial printouts, and I just got mine saying Aliens is still in the red. But now it's like $12,000 in the red and they'll run out of things to charge us for. So, maybe it will resolve itself. All I could think when I was naked doing Alien3 was: "Thank God I'm not going to get screwed again," not, "Wow, look what I've achieved."

Q: You won a producer's credit on this movie, too?

A: Yes, I'm a co-producer.

Q: Weren't you also unhappy because Fox pressured James Cameron to cut from Aliens footage you liked about Ripley, her family, and Newt, the little girl she "adopted"?

A: That three minutes of material changed everything. That is another reason why I wouldn't want to do another one of these pictures. If you bust your gut trying to play a character and then they take away your raison d'etre, it's such a slap in the face.

Q: Lots of the new movie is set on a kind of prison planetoid, and you shaved your head for it.

A: I'll follow a director pretty much anywhere. I said, very seriously, to David Fincher in the middle of this big meeting at Fox--before he even had the job of directing the movie--"So, how do you see the character of Ripley, anyway?" He said: "Well, how do you feel about baldl" At that second I fell in love with him. Everything is pared down in this picture. Now [the studio] has some worry because it's so dark and atmospheric, that it's, like, 30 bald actors and me talking.

Q: Didn't Fox exert an iron fist throughout the shooting?

A: Politically, it's very difficult to make sure that everyone is supporting the same film, let alone the right film. It felt like we had to fight for everything. Maybe that's normal, especially when it's such a big budget picture. And this is a sequel, a known quantity. But when you're giving this amazing young talent like David or Jim Cameron or Ridley Scott a chance to go for it, you've got to let them go for it. The [audience] is going to expect guns, action nonstop and David has done something very stylish, cynical, yet innocent at the same time. Maybe some people will say it's too slow or existential. And that's got people at Fox a little nervous. David says, "We all sat around deciding to make this amazing tea cup and it's not for us now to say, 'Why isn't it a beer mug?'"

Q: Didn't this movie get shot, like, a couple of times?

A: We weren't allowed to finish the film, originally, because [the studio] felt we'd done enough. It's an expensive picture, about $40 million. Because the movie is getting such a good response, the boss is putting a little more money in it. We did a week of reshoots in November-- little things--and they're doing a couple of days of more alien stuff that we've been fighting for. It's stuff that was always in the script, but cost too much money. Bit by bit, we're getting everything we wanted.

Q: To quote a Stephen Sondheim lyric, you sound "sorry/grateful" to have it behind you.

A: I feel very, very good that it's the last one. I mean, the last one for me. I had lunch with a Fox executive last week who said, "What if Fox someday wants to do Alien 4?" I said: "So do it." Ripley could become a burden to whatever writer or director was working on the movie. But because I've had to say goodbye to her, I've really embraced Ripley. From the beginning of the film and throughout most of it, there's a big awareness that you're with a very different person than the one you knew before. Something major has happened to her: she's gotten older.

Q: You actually sound sad.

A: This will probably look weird in print, but I love Ripley and think of her as sort of separate from me. At this point, she's one of my closest friends. I know it sounds crazy, but I came to realize that the only way she could finally get any peace was if I, the actor, was willing to go deep into the material and allow her a release. I had to be braver than I wanted to be in order to let her go. And it sounds completely cuckoo, but that was very, very hard.

Q: You have a production deal at Fox. Are you nervous about the film's doing well, for career reasons?

A: Somewhat, because if it doesn't do well, they'll blame it on my being a woman and I'll play right into their hands. I want it to do reasonably well. But if these films make lots of money, I never get the credit; it's the director and the technology.

Q: Does wetting your feet on this movie make you look any differently at producing your own movies?

A: I want to produce--I mean, I am doing it. But having recently done 1492, in which I was just an actor, it was a luxury not to have them say to me, "We don't have a penny more if we don't finish in Seville. What are we going to do?" It was their problem.

Q: That movie reunited you with Ridley Scott, who directed you in Alien, and Gerard Depardieu, with whom you made One Woman or Two. Let's start with Depardieu.

A: The best actor in the world. You look in his eyes and everything disappears except for what is going on in there.

Q: Have you ever fantasized about aiming Ripley's flamethrower at the movie you two made together in France, One Woman or Two?

A: You've actually seen it? Luckily, you're the only one in the world who has. Daniel Vigne [the director] has had a lot of bad luck since, but I always felt slightly alarmed because he wanted these very broad takes, almost like kabuki, with which I was never comfortable. You have to trust your director, so I thought, "If I'm pulling back when everyone else is doing that, it won't work." Even for the French, apparently, it was too much. It was still a dream job. I made very good friends on that production and, in fact, the costume designer is my daughter's godmother. Gerard was so sympathetic to my efforts to work in French and now, here he is, working so wonderfully in English. He is Columbus, and Ridley is getting such a kick out of working with him.

Q: Let's talk about you and Ridley Scott. Did your decision not to do Thelma & Louise have anything to do with the less than complimentary stuff you said about him after Alien?

A: When he asked me if I was interested in Thelma & Louise, I had already committed to Alien3. I always liked working with Ridley, even the first time, but he operated the camera on that picture and I so wanted him to spend more time with us. What he did, which I can now really appreciate although it was confusing at the time, was create such a world for us actors to live in. Working with him again on 1492 cracked me up because he's so much the same, except now he's really hit his stride, and he's much more diplomatic and will try anything. It's going to be a wonderful picture.

Q: In 1492, you play Queen Isabella; years ago, you resisted playing patrician parts.

A: To play a queen could be very sort of--[Weaver pulls a hoity-toity Greer Garson face]--but I'm not as worried about that anymore. Besides, I played a working queen, not a fig¬urehead, an amazingly powerful politician, fiercely intuitive, intensely religious, who was responsible for starting the Inquisition. Also, there were those costumes, tiaras, rings, and we shot in old cathedrals that Ridley would make look remarkable with chorales singing mass, hundreds of extras, and rose petals falling from the ceiling. My husband one day said, "I'm going to go to the Prado if I get some time," and I said, "Oh, I want to go," and he said, "You don't have to. You're living it." After Alien3, where I ran around in sweatpants and bald, this was like winning the jackpot.

Q: What would you do if you were queen for a day?

A: If I had absolute power, I would call a conference on AIDS, on which I would declare total war from which we wouldn't surrender. There's nowhere near the attention or money that should be going toward finding a cure.

Q: Staying on the subject of power, Ellen Barkin told me that she doesn't want to make Jack Nicholson's $10 million salaries until she sells as many tickets as, say, Jack Nicholson does.

A: With the recession, theoretically, no one is getting that kind of money anymore. But if all the men who get Jack Nicholson-level salaries were as talented and unique as he, I don't think it would bother any of us. One of Nicholson's greatest appeals is his irreverence. Women are never allowed to be irreverent. There's this feeling that somehow we're all interchangeable. I think of it like Lysistrata: What if we organized and said, "How long will the public want to see films without any women?"

Debra Winger lashed out at something I said along these lines, saying, "I just care about the work." As if I don't. The sad part is that all us women are so isolated from each other. The only time we see each other is through the Oscars or something. Look, I don't seriously think that women organizing en masse would ever happen. But it helps when Meryl reminds people in her speeches that when more women had great parts in films, the films were better, more interesting, and there was a bigger audience for them.

Q: Speaking of those days, do you ever envy the opportunities those great vintage-era dames like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur and Claudette Colbert had?

A: I like the idea of being able to do five pictures a year. I would have loved to work again and again with David Lean, Fred Zinnemann, Preston Sturges. I think that's how the best movies were made. But a lot of those "vehicle" pictures weren't much good. Today, the studios still try to bring you things that they want to develop for you. I've had a lot of ups and downs with 20th Century Fox. I've made most of my movies with them, so in an odd way I guess I feel I am in the studio system. Whether that will change now that I'm not going to make another Alien, I don't know. But, I have sort of a philosophical, karmic view of these things. Whatever my feelings are about Fox, whatever they were during the different years, I'm still going to end up doing a lot of work for them.

Q: But aren't you developing at your production company "vehicles" you can star in?

A: Originally, I started that company not to find things for me, but because I knew so many good writers and unknown actors in New York. I just wanted to be a pipeline to New York for the studio. I was sort of naive. Most of the things that we get ahold of or that people send to us have a very good woman's role. Three of the things that we have now in development have very good roles for women, whether or not I play them. But the last thing in the world I would ever want is a vehicle. That just makes my hair stand on end. The idea isn't that someone will construct something around your talents. The idea is that someone sends you something great that would allow you to try something else.

Q: Why hasn't anything happened so far?

A: I sometimes think wistfully about when I was starting, going out on auditions. It was a tough time, but in a way very simple. And now it's like, "Well, I have to do this with this script and that with that script, I have to get that script to Tokyo." I don't want to be on the phone all the time, I just want to have my script, sit down and get to work, you know? I just wish I had a Siamese twin or something. It's hard to do everything at once, but we will, under pressure, we will.

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