In the midst of a global promotional tour for her new movie Avatar: Fire and Ash, Sigourney Weaver made a brief detour to Saudi Arabia‘s Red Sea International Film Festival on Wednesday, for a wide-ranging talk about her long and stellar career.
As well receiving a Red Sea Honoree Award for her contributions to cinema, Weaver also took part in Red Sea’s “In Conversation With” talk series, which at the fifth edition of the festival has included the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Idris Elba, Riz Ahmed, Sean Baker, Dakota Johnson, Adrien Brody, Ana de Armas, Darren Aronofsky, Nadine Labaki, Ali Kalthami, Mai Omar, Kirsten Dunst, Leblebla, Nicholas Hoult, Queen Latifah, Jessica Alba, Amir El-Masry, Stanley Tong, Aishwarya Rai Bachan, Kriti Sanon, Alia Bhatt, Kartik Aaryan, Nina Dobrev, Edgar Ramirez and Salman Khan.
The Oscar-nominated actress spoke candidly about her upbringing and how her father, the television executive Pat Weaver who served as president of NBC and also the creator of The Today Show, inspired her into entering the entertainment business from a very early age. “He’d always come home smiling,” Weaver said of her father, adding that although she was too young to fully understand why he was so happy she knew that “whatever he’s doing looks like it’s fun, so I think that did influence me.”
Weaver also spoke in great depth about her love of theater, working in comedies, and her early start Off-Broadway working with the likes of her late friend Christopher Durang, the aburdist comedy playwright famed for his outrageous work. “My favorite role [in one of Durang’s works] was in a play called Titanic, in which I played three roles. I played Lydia, the captain’s daughter, who kept a hedgehog in her vagina and used to feed it at the table. And I did it very blithely (laughs), like it was nothing, and then, eventually, I morph into the sister Helena. [Helena] has now changed into a seagull that malts. You just see the little feathers or whatever… And then I change again into a sort of murderess named Annabella … One of the best parts I’ve ever had (laughs).”
She added, “I loved working with Chris. Unfortunately we’ve lost him now, but he was a wonderful, wonderful writer, and I always loved comedy. I was very surprised to get Alien. [Ripley’s] quite serious, and I thought, what am I doing here? But eventually I found my way back to comedy.”
Moving on to the Alien films, and the iconic character of Ellen Ripley, Weaver said that no one working on Ridley Scott’s 1979 franchise starter Alien expected that the film would be such a box office and pop culture hit, as “we were just trying to make a good small movie.” “The writers had done this cool thing. It was a script with 10 men, I think, and so they decided to make it a coed group in space, like dirty truckers in space. And they thought that the audience would never suspect that the young woman was going to be the hero, essentially the survivor. So they really did it for story reasons, we weren’t doing it as a big feminist step forward, [although] it did somehow turn out to be that [way].”
On Ripley, Weaver said, “I realize now that it was ahead of its time, unfortunately, as all movies were back then. But I did love the character of Ripley. It’s amazing to me how influential the character of Ripley has been. I think it’s because she reminds us all that we can rely on ourselves, and we don’t need a man to fly in and save us or some something like that. Because I do feel that women are the glue that holds the world together, and there it is: I’m just telling the truth.”
Asked by the interviewer as to what point she realized that Ripley had become bigger than just a fictional character in a “small” sci-fi movie, Weaver said that realization hit her on the second film, James Cameron’s Aliens, for which she received an Oscar nomination for best actress, a rarity for a performance in a sci-fi action movie. “I was always so lucky to work with Jim Cameron, it was the first time [we worked together] and I’m still working with him. I realized then [that Ripley had become this phenomenon] because he had really built this amazing movie around the character of Ripley and her story, which I feel we can all identify with. She was cast out by society and put in a position she doesn’t want to be in, and having to save the day. It’s a beautifully written script.”
The actress spoke more about her groundbreaking work with Cameron when the talk turned to the Avatar series. The actress is part of the core cast of the Avatar film, having played Dr. Grace Augustine in the first film and Kiri in Avatar: The Way of Water. Weaver reprises the role of Kiri in Fire and Ash, which is released in theaters on Dec. 19.
Weaver praised Cameron for his groundbreaking work on Avatar, particularly his use of motion capture and how he works with actors. “All credit to Jim. He invented this technology really to let actors be whatever they could be. In other words, I could be [14-year-old Kiri] since he kept saying I was so immature anyway (laughs). He’s created a process where we come into an empty Volume [stage]. We’re in our little [motion capture] suits, we have our little cameras, but you forget about those instantly. And then you work to find the scene. It’s the cheapest part of this whole process so he spends a lot of time, working on what the scene is about, improving it, letting the actors try various things. And we don’t end with working on that scene until we really feel we have it. And then all the technology happens later.”
On working on the long-running Avatar series, Weaver said, “we’re now such a family because we’ve worked together twenty years. These little kids like [Trinity Bliss], who plays Tuk, she was 7 [on The Way of Water], this little tiny creature, and now she’s 15.”
She added that working with Cameron has been “so much fun.” “Jim is actually a very playful person he has a fierce reputation, and he is a perfectionist, but he’s playful. A funny guy.”
When asked about Cameron’s negative stance towards the use of generative artificial intelligence actors, Weaver said, “he’s so full of surprises. You wouldn’t think that this sort of scientist, inventor, who’s such a genius at all this technology would have done it all to be the director of actors. When we’re acting, he’s right there with us. He’s not in the video village 100 ft away.”
She added that Cameron’s technology and the motion capture approach he has used on the Avatar films “has enhanced the adventure of filmmaking.” “I look forward to the time when many more filmmakers [use it]. [His technology] is not AI, it’s actually anti AI. We can share this technology because it gets rid of lighting, it gets rid of costumes, makeup, setups, different angles, waiting for the clouds or waiting for the sun or whatever you’re waiting for, so it’s a much purer experience for the director and the cast. And it’s really cool.”
