Sigourney Weaver: Ripley's Game

Sigourney Weaver gives a lot of heat talking about The Ice Storm.

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Pausing just the right number of beats for the glittery crowd to absorb how subtly sensational she looked wrapped in a crimson, backless Cerruti gown, Sigourney Weaver set off her personal fireworks last March as a presenter at the Academy Awards. With a manner balanced aptly between wry and properly patrician, she radiated uptown smarts, breeding, sexiness and supreme comfort in her own skin.

In other words, she came on much the way she always has in her best on-screen moments.

Ever since Weaver turned heads with her passionate, ineffably elegant performance opposite Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, she's been one of Hollywood's few actresses of substance and style. Over the years, she's proved gorgeously hilarious in Ghostbusters, statuesquely witchy in Working Girl (for which she nailed an Oscar nomination) and bracingly uncompromising in Gorillas in the Mist _(another Oscar nomination), to name a few of her triumphs. But for sheer cinematic impact, nothing can rival the character Weaver created back in 1979 in the gritty, terrifying sci-fi film _Alien.

Hardworking, no-nonsense, smarter-than-the-guys Ripley had all the makings of a classic film character, and with the release of the extraordinary sequel Aliens in 1986, she achieved icon status (and Weaver got her first Oscar nomination). Now, with the third Alien sequel, Alien Resurrection, poised for holiday release, Ripley stands as gallant and heroic as any celluloid hero who ever kicked butt--and considerably brainier than most.

Weaver comes honestly by her looks, her bearing and her style. To the manor born, she's the daughter of Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, a TV pioneer who became president of NBC, and elegant British actress Elizabeth Inglis, whom Alfred Hitchcock cast in The 39 Steps. She maxed the gifts of her gene pool by studying drama at Yale, then taking on adventuresome stage work at every opportunity to balance out the success she achieved in Hollywood films. Her role as the surreally faithless Connecticut wife in director Ang Lee's Cannes-applauded film The Ice Storm is, in its style, intelligence and dark humor, a perfect culmination of Weaver's years of mixing stage, screen and celebrity. With The Ice Storm and Alien Resurrection hitting screens this season in separate but equally compelling statements of purposeful style, how could we not have Weaver on the cover of Movieline's special Hollywood Style issue?

STEPHEN REBELLO: You looked swell at the Oscars.

SIGOURNEY WEAVER: Thank you. The miracle 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 a 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 embarrassed 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 still be 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? Disillusioned, 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 dear: 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 Half Moon Street. To get a distributor, the director had taken Paul Theroux's very unconventional character and tried to make her sympathetic. 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 in 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 at all. I had total confidence in him right away, so his success with Se7en 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 Se7en. I know David and he's 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!"

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