Twenty three years after their seminal science fiction masterpiece “Aliens”, Sigourney Weaver has been back working with director James Cameron on his latest epic, the much hyped “Avatar”, although the connection actually almost cost her the role, as she told The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington.
Cameron didn’t want people to see a link between the movies when there was none, a concern Weaver herself shared even after she won the part. “I didn’t want anyone to be thinking about Ripley in this new world,” she admits. “So I decided on the red hair. It seemed right for Grace, who is such a natural beauty, but doesn’t bother with herself. So she has unkempt red hair, an expression of her energy.”
Despite the concerns, Weaver notes that working with Cameron – a “wild man”, as she calls him – was almost like coming home again. “We are like an old married couple,” she says. “I am a perfectionist, and I love working with Jim because I know he is going to stay longer on set than I will. He operated on every shot, holding the camera sometimes upside down, hanging by a leg.” Weaver also insists that she is very proud of the movie, which opens in UK cinemas on the seventeenth of December. “It will pick you up and shake you like a little rag doll,” she declares. “I’m not too much of an emotional creature, but I was weeping by the end…. I think for a certain generation it will change what they want to happen in the cinema.”
