Sigourney Weaver: The Heat is On

Q: How does one cope with being the first person to have been nominated for two Oscars in one year...

A: ...who didn't win (laughing). See, I'm going to go down in history. If people sort of avoid you if you lose the Oscar, they avoid you twice as much if you lose twice. There should be some sort of anteroom for the losers to go and commiserate with each other, instead of everyone putting such a bright face on it. The first thing you feel when you don't win is huge relief you don't have to go up there and make a fool of yourself with whatever speech you've been thinking up. I was disappointed mainly because my parents were there and my father's in his eighties and my mother is almost is her eighties, and I dragged them all the way out there. They were very disappointed for me and so was my husband. And you sort of feel like you've let them down a little bit. I mean, I can survive, but they were so disappointed for me that I felt badly.

Q: You sound less driven to be a movie star than you once did.

A: Since I started in the business, one of my biggest goals was to be the Margaret Rutherford of America. Now that I'm in this middle period of my career, it sounds irresistible. Making 1492--I mean, there I was for two very intense weeks in this great part that I didn't have to go to the ends of the earth for and work my guts out for six months--made me think: "Wow, character parts." To be able to work with wonderful people and not have to say goodbye to your family for months on end is, at this time in my life, better for me regardless of what standing it gives me in this business. There are more important things, you know.

Q: Like spending time with your husband and child?

A: I would actually like to have another baby before I get back into the loop. I'm sort of continuing to avoid the loop for awhile, and I probably will pay for it. But I'll pay for it in a worse way if I become a workaholic at this point in my life. "Luke" is a very good temperature to be, so then you can heat up and then die back down again. Do I want to be "Joan Crawford," or what we think of as "Joan Crawford"? Do you realize the energy that you would have to have to go into that? Constant. Maybe the public feels we should worry about this stuff more, that we should go out in public always looking like movie stars. Let me tell you, they're invariably disappointed when they run into me on the street and I'm schlepping my daughter around or going to the grocery store.

Q: Some people thought you were perverse to follow a star turn in Gorillas in the Mist with supporting roles in Working Girl and Ghostbusters II.

A: I was lucky, because supporting roles are fabulous and actually more difficult. If you're playing the lead and you get a little off in one scene, you get another scene to pull it back in. As a supporting actor, you've got to make every scene count. If I were offered Gorillas in the Mist tomorrow, I wouldn't do it. I don't like being away from my family now and I wouldn't take my daughter where there are no hospital facilities. Everyone has to decide what's right for them and I couldn't say goodbye to her for four months. Some people say, "She's so little she won't even notice." But I would. She was in 1492, wearing the most remarkable golden dress with a beautiful bonnet. She did four takes and was better every time. My husband thought this idea of mine was terrible. He was a child actor, an Equity member at age eight. As a show business person, the last thing you want to do is have a child go onto a set. A rotten racket, you know?

Q: Marriage seems to agree with you.

A: If I had known how much fun it was, I would have married earlier, but then I probably would have married the wrong person, so what are you going to do? I just saw my parents recently and realized that, until you have children, you only perceive yourself, in the scheme of things, as a child. When you become a parent, there's a kind of really healthy shift. I'm very glad that Charlotte has a few years in which to know my parents. Last week, I gave her her first swimming lessons in the pool. And my father was playing the sea monster and he'd come up really close to her and make one of his faces and she'd say, "Be gone!"

Q: Years ago you said you one day hoped to do a really raw, sexy movie, then changed your mind because you knew you would have to one day justify it to your kids. How will you ever justify Half Moon Street?

A: (laughing) I'll say that it was supposed to be a much better film than it is, and that they edited it badly. I guess because I am now a mother, I'm not as worried about all that. I mean, my husband's working on a Mac Wellman play now called Seven Blow Jobs, which is about the NEA and Jesse Helms, and The New York Times refuses to print the title in the ad. Sometimes I wish I weren't a movie star at all. I don't want my daughter to grow up with a movie star for a mother. It's really tacky, but what am I going to do?

Q: But you didn't have a baby back when you turned down Body Heat.

A: I turned that down because it was actually much racier when I read it. And I was going out at the time with a very conservative boyfriend. From the South. And I didn't think he'd understand. I adored Bill [Hurt] and it's a great picture, but I don't regret turning down that role, because I always thought the character was a cipher. What I regret is that I never got to know Larry Kasdan and didn't get an opportunity, like Kevin [Costner] and Bill [Hurt], to continue working with him.

Q: Didn't you also dabble with doing Fatal Attraction and 9 1/2 Weeks?

A: I always wanted to make a picture about obsession. I talked to Adrian Lyne about doing 9 1/2 Weeks because I thought it was a very interesting story about a woman almost being held hostage from a normal life by these passions in herself. Now, there's a picture that I'm going to do from a play I've optioned, Black Lizard, by Mishima, which is about a woman criminal. It's a great love story and it's about obsession, but it's not sexual. To think I saw the play in Tokyo in 1984 and we're starting the script now. I mean, it takes forever.

Q: Any roles you do regret spurning?

A: You can't control your career. You can only opt to work with the best people and the best material. Often, when I have been very disappointed not to be considered for something, or not to have gotten a role, the next day I'll get some¬thing that doesn't look as good to me. Like The Year of Living Dangerously. I wanted to play something else, screen-tested for it, and didn't get it.

Q: What was it?

A: I'm not going to say. It's such a horrible experience to screen-test. The next day I went to Peter Weir, and I had kind of stayed up all night, and didn't really care. I met this guy and started off on one of the great learning adventures of my life. All I would have learned working with that other director was how to get out of the business fast.

Q: Have you ever campaigned for a role?

A: Campaigning for a role will not get it for you. And it's too humiliating. I think I've tried to remind people of my range with every picture. There have been things that I so wanted to do, and I have flown for meetings on my own money. It's bullshit. I flew to meet Fred Zinnemann for a not very good film, Five Days One Summer, with Sean Connery, and [Zinnemann] said, "Why are you doing this? The studio thinks you're nuts." And I said, "Well, I'm sorry, I just want to work with you." He told me, "Never do it again, because they don't appreciate your gesture. I do." In the end, the writer's girlfriend got the part. Oh, well, I never sleep with the right people.

Q: Any more recent parts you missed out on?

A: I've always wanted to be Catwoman and would have loved to audition to play her in Batman Returns. Here's my Sean Young story: I actually sent Tim Burton a little cartoon cutout Catwoman with my face superimposed and a little bubble saying that I was the offspring of a Burmese cat and a Berlin-in-the-'30s Kit Kat Klub girl, which I thought was very sort of Helmut Newton. Anyway, they enjoyed the cartoon, but they were very interested in Michelle Pfeiffer. But hey, I went to school with Meryl Streep--if I had sat around worrying about her getting all the great opportunities, I'd have given up and headed out the front door.

Q: Your career resume omits a couple of movies you made before Alien, namely Tribute to a Madman and Camp 708. What are they?

A: The same movie. I was in an Israeli film for a few days that was never released, at least in this country. I played a serviceman's wife, but since I've never seen it and it was never released, I don't know that I've ever made it.

Q: In the mid-'80s, didn't you plan to shift your image with a never-made romance called Lone Star, which Robert Altman supposedly would have directed?

A: I was crushed when that happened. [Altman] was replaced by Walter Hill, then Walter dropped out because he felt that the studio wasn't giving him the right deal. I had spent the whole summer down in Texas, studying the women. I was to play a very lazy, sexy, womanly part, a little like Patricia Neal in Hud. Ever since then, I have been very wary until the cameras actually turn. I don't like to get involved with pictures that are at all "iffy." Because it's heartbreaking when they don't happen.

Q: You're 5' 10 1/2". Ever wonder whether your career might have flourished even more if only studio heads were taller?

A: (laughing) Interesting question. I don't really perceive myself as tall, but I do probably tower over these people. I'm sure I'm not what most of them think of as their ideal babe, and that's something that you always fight. But I guess for some directors I am. So I'd rather be their ideal.

Q: Have you ever had the urge to, say, announce your babe-osity at the Oscars? You know: big hair, slinky dress.

A: And look like everybody else? [laughing) I have too much respect for what the Oscars were originally: private, in a small room with a long dinner table. There's so many people who seem to have made fun of it, like Cher--not that there's anything wrong with it. I sort of tend to lose my sense of humor when I'm out in Hollywood, because you always feel you're fighting for your life. Not for your life as an actor, but for the material. When I go to the Oscars, I feel this great obligation to--it's so shallow--but it's like, what designer's dress do you wear? You have to show the best of America's fashion. I guess I must take it seriously, because there's so much shtick and tackiness out there.

Q: Are you still getting a buzz off your work?

A: Much more now, I think. There are a couple of things that I have read recently that, as I hit this sort of middle of my career, I would kill for. Warner Bros, has a comedy that's a great love story. They have sent it to two directors who might think about me for it, but it's a part people would really kill each other for. I'm not going to lie down in front of their cars and I don't intend to kill anyone for it. But there probably will be some other actresses who will, because times are tough. I feel like I'm finally hitting my stride as an actor. And now I'm going to postpone working, probably, because of my family. It's just an interesting situation to be in.

Q: Let's play.

A: (grinning toward the bed in the adjoining room) I thought you'd never ask.

Q: Who's the best kisser you've ever worked with?

A: That would be difficult. I've worked with some pretty good kissers. I would have to say Mel [Gibson]. But I think I kissed him more than I have other people. And also, Peter Weir was very particular about the kissing. He wanted it to be like Notorious, with the old censorship, where you didn't see tongues or anything. We had to practice--not on our own time, you understand--quite a bit. We worked a lot on that, and what with all the changes in that film, it went on and on. It's my favorite film.

Q: Let's get more superficial. Let's play interviewer and starlet, Tiger Beat-style. So, our readers want to know, Sig, what do you wear to bed?

A: You mean perfume? I actually use something from Paris. Canoe. (laughing) No, I use Eau de Charlotte, which I saw in a store when I was particularly missing my daughter. It's black currant, actually. I'm wearing it and you're welcome to sniff.

Q: Tell me about one of the cool parties you're famous for throwing.

A: I don't give very many of them, but I do like giving parties. In fact, I'm going to have a little party tonight for my husband. A leap year party. And we'll have pocket costumes. I don't want anyone to go to the trouble of coming in a costume, so you have to bring in your pocket something that leaps--a frog, a lizard, a suicide. I was going to try and cook a whole Middle Eastern meal, but everyone told me it was really hard so I gave up and I'm ordering Chinese. And then we're going to go on to a belly dancing club.

Q: Will you dance?

A: No, although I took belly dancing in college. It's fun and very good exercise. I don't think we ever got past the basic moves.

Q: Next time you're in L.A., you should check out the belly dancing at a restaurant called Dar Maghreb, where someone once dared me to shake faster than the belly dancer. And I did.

A: Oh, how cool. I wish I had known. I find it so boring in L.A., I would love to go. Plus, I love to eat.

Q: Favorite shade of lipstick? Favorite food?

A: Red. If you're going to bother, why not put something on there. Oh, and when I go to bed, I either wear nothing or pajamas. And, for food, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese or French. I like food.

Q: What's your favorite rock group?

A: My husband and I collect 45s because we like to listen to so many kinds of old music. Weird things like Arabic and Edith Piaf. We're thinking of getting a jukebox to put all of them in because it's so funny how music changes the whole atmosphere of the house. My daughter is going to grow up with this completely eclectic attitude toward music.

Q: You dropped our role-playing.

A: Oh, right. (Miming a bubble-headed teenage sex goddess) Mmmmm. I know I have one favorite rock group. I have so many. I really dig Dire Straits.

Q: Did you know that they're staying at this hotel?

Weaver leaps out of her chair, goes tearing for the front door like a groupie and doesn't come back--I go out of the hotel room and find her, laughing wildly, in the hallway.

_____________

Stephen Rebello interviewed Ellen Barkin for our May issue.

Pages: 1 2 3