After three years off the screen, Sigourney Weaver is back in a big way: she commanded a $5.5 million salary to reprise Ripley in Alien 3, then reunited with her Alien director Ridley Scott to portray Queen Isabella in his epic 1492 Here she chats about everything from which co-stars kiss the best to why she wanted to play Catwoman.
__________________________________
I rap on the door of Sigourney Weaver's suite of rooms high atop a hotel just a whistle away from Central Park, wondering which particular Sigourney will greet me. Weaver, one of our most paradoxical stars, boasts a truly varied career--and a personal profile to match. There's pop Sigourney, whom moviegoers know as the vampy woman possessed in two Ghostbusters movies and as the flame-throwing, heroic Rambolina of the Alien movies, the second installment of which won her an Oscar nomination and the third of which has just fireballed into theaters.
Then there's classy Sigourney, rival of Meryl and Glenn, who has copped a Tony nomination for her stage work and stars in the most intelligent of commercial films, like Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously and Michael Apted's Gorillas in the Mist (which won her another Oscar nomination). In-between, there's Sigourney the restless sophisticate, scoring yet another Oscar nod for a whiz-bang comic turn in Mike Nichols's Working Girl.
The offscreen Weaver scans just as contradictorily. Her father is the estimable Pat Weaver, who ran NBC for five years. Her mother, Elizabeth Inglis, acted for Hitchcock and Wyler before retiring to raise Sigourney (nee Susan, but self-renamed after a character mentioned in The Great Gatsby). Raised in New York society, Sigourney went to all the right schools, including Stanford and Yale, and came out as a debutante twice.
None of this seems the likeliest background for the young hellion Weaver became in off-Broadway efforts that teamed her up with playwright pal Christopher Durang and demonstrated her real gifts for comedy. In one play, the two hurled vegetables at the audience while singing "Welfare Mothers on Parade"; in another, she played a lesbian who secretes a warthog in her vagina. All of which got her notices but, better yet, got her noticed. And soon she was toning it down for TV roles in PBS's "The Best of Families," and "Somerset." Then came movies, awards, great expectations and a career that--one can't help feeling--ought to have taken this major actress further than the Ghostbusters and Alien successes.
So, I'm standing outside her door wondering which Sigourney will greet me: The one who throws famous parties renowned for their jugglers, scavenger hunts and rub-off tattoos? Or the one who often strikes journalists as serious and dutiful? Or the sly parodist who once stalked a Vanity Fair reporter in Norma Desmond-ish old-time movie queen drag, six cigarettes in her fingers, sighing, "I'm ready for my interview"?
Weaver is, as it turns out, a little of all these. At once shy, friendly and utterly self-assured, she greets me and then asks, "Shall we order in everything on the room service menu?" Married for eight years to theater director Jim Simpson, with whom she has a two-year-old daughter, Charlotte, Weaver is every inch a happy Upper West Side Manhattan mother and movie star.
STEPHEN REBELLO: So, what do you make of this magazine whose cover you're going to be splashed across?
SIGOURNEY WEAVER: [laughing] I get the entertainment magazines a little confused, I'm sorry. But I'd say: "Movieline: not as nasty as Spy, much more dishy and fun than Premiere." How'd I do?
Q: Close enough. I have a notion that lots of us secretly walk around with some sort of theme music rattling around in our brains. What's yours?
A: That's a very nice theory, really quite romantic. It's probably true that we all have a kind of rhythm and spirit that we try and bring into a room. With that in mind, I would say that secretly I'm a mambo kind of girl. I have this New York side, but actually the fun side is more Latin. I'm more about the beat than what the words are saying, you know?
Q: Why have we seen so much less of the mambo girl in your movies than the confident, patrician, somewhat off-putting New York girl?
A: I've always chosen to do films for selfish, interior reasons rather than, "Oh, this would be good for me to do." I either thought, "I'll have a very good time working on this," or, "I want to get to know the people involved." I've found if your agent says, "This would be a good thing for you to do," it's inevitably a disaster.
Q: You had great career momentum going after Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl, both of which earned you Oscar nominations. Then, after Ghostbusters II, you had a baby and seemed to vanish.
A: That was a personal choice. I was getting into my late thirties and wanted to have a family, so I had to make choices about my priorities. Also, one of the funny things that happened after Gorillas was that I was sent a lot of wonderful parts that were all, like, women climbing Annapurna or women who do that dog sleigh race. I was a little afraid of playing too many heroic people--I didn't want to turn into Charlton Heston.
Q: So if you were to, right now, come across the "Sigourney Weaver" entry in an encyclopedia of movie stars, how do you think it would read?
A: I'm hopeful I'd have much better things to do, but it would probably say, "Best known for her blood and guts portrayal in the Alien series," and, hopefully, "did some interesting work in other films." With this new Alien movie coming out, I'm conscious of the fact that the character Ripley is very much in people's minds. But when those [Alien] movies aren't happening for me anymore, my greatest hope would be that someone might write: "Good all-around actress who did a lot of different kinds of films and had a great time doing it." Undoubtedly, though, there would be a big picture of me in a torn undershirt or something.
Q: How does someone who was once described as "the latter-day Katharine Hepburn" wind up our Terminatrix?
A: It is odd being thought of as the female Harrison Ford. We have that same kind of rocking back and forth between action pictures. It used to frustrate me more because I was a terrible snob when I first started in the business. I certainly didn't want to be caught dead in a science fiction picture. But, I mean, no one meant to do sequels to Alien or anything. If you're lucky enough to find material that can nurture several stories, that's great, but it's an accident.
Q: Not to knock a steady gig, but might you have a different career profile minus Ripley?
A: I'm lucky enough to be sent a lot of really good pictures, and part of those come from being very well known as Ripley. In a way, I consider it an amazing privilege to have played this character--happily, with so many years between each sequel--because there are so few women characters around who are just the bare bones person: no hair, no makeup, no frills. The opportunity to get rid of everything and just be there, to play someone who's just at survival, was really great for my work and has always been a test of what I've learned, of my confidence and technique. Alien3 is so completely different from the second one and even the first one that, hopefully, the audience will leave with a very different viewpoint about me. And, I think, carrying the strongest feeling.
Q: Yet one hears that you weren't exactly in a rush to do another Alien.
A: Well, it was their idea. When Aliens came out, the producers said to me--and this was before the Back to the Future sequels were shot back to back--"Wouldn't it be interesting to do a third one without Ripley, about their returning to the original planet and screwing up? Then, back to back, to shoot the fourth movie, in which Ripley comes back and saves the day or something?" They put together quite a wonderful script without my character, but [Fox chairman] Joe Roth said, "We can't do an Alien picture without Ripley." Then we started work on putting my character into another screenplay that didn't work out.
Q: Didn't you refuse to sign on until very late in the game? Surely, not all of it had to do with script problems.
A: A lot of it did. At the start of each of them, all I've ever said is, "Please give me something interesting to do because I know more now," and, "I don't want to do what I did before." There was a wonderful Vincent Ward script in which Ripley was unconscious for half the picture; it had a great, unusual male lead. Then Larry Ferguson did a draft and made the mistake lots of writers do of making Ripley sound like this uptight camp counselor who swears every other sentence. Then we asked Walter Hill and David Giler to come and be writers on it. As soon as they did, their interests as producers were compromised so we essentially lost them as producers, which is painful for all of us. But they gave me a wonderful part.
Q: Didn't your requirements for what the movie should and shouldn't be also slow things down?
A: I didn't want to be in a movie with guns. By this time, of course, everyone is expecting me to come out swinging cannons over my shoulder or something. Also, I didn't want to rehash the material and I wanted it to be the last one. So there were, I guess, a lot of things that I was asking for.
Q: Like close to a $6 million salary?
A: [nodding] I keep thinking if I were negotiating now, they would never have given me what I asked for. And I wouldn't have done the picture.
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.
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.