Sigourney Weaver won’t rule out returning to her seminal Alien character Ripley in light of 50 new pages of a script she’s seen from producer Walter Hill.
“Walter Hill is a very good friend of mine, and he wrote 50 pages where Ripley would be now, and they are quite extraordinary. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I have had a meeting with Fox, Disney, or whoever it is now,” she told the crowd at New York Comic Con Friday. “I said I have never felt the need. I was always like, let her rest, let her recover. But what Walter has written seems so true to me as very much about the society that would incarcerate someone who has tried to help mankind.”
Added the star: “She’s a problem to them, so she’s sort of tucked away. Anyway, I think it’s a very strong first 50 pages, and I’m thinking about working with Walter to see what the rest of the story would be.”
Weaver appeared on the Main Stage, where co-star Veronica Cartwright made a surprise appearance as Weaver mostly shared her memories and reflections on filming the genre-busting 1979 classic directed by Ridley Scott, as well as other entries in the franchise. For the actress, who has carved out her own corner in sci-fi with the help of Alien, joining the cast was about the strength of the story and not necessarily because of her genre-appreciation.
“I’m an English major, so I just read for the story. If it’s a good story, I don’t care what genre it’s in. I never really thought about genres. I just thought of good stories,” she said. “Now genres are a much more well-defined thing, but I’m glad I didn’t really think about it. I’m glad I followed this story.”
She continued: “I thought it was a very concise script, 10 Little Indians, knocking them off one by one. If you don’t know what the Alien design is, it’s very hard to understand what this monster is running around, dripping acid. So I didn’t have any idea of the rather beautiful, exotic creature that the alien was ’til I met Ridley at the audition, and he brought out these incredible pictures from [H.R.] Giger and from Carlo Rambaldi. I realized I’d never seen anything like that in a movie ever. That and Ridley cinched the deal.”
In terms of her casting, which has been heralded for decades as a defining performance and ground-breaking representation of a female lead in the genre, Weaver noted that despite her character being at the center of the narrative, she questions whether she was actually considered number one on the call sheet. And that comes from the fact that there had been so little representation of women like Ripley.
“I think there was probably some dismay in the cast that this complete unknown who’d never really made a movie before was going to be the survivor. And the reason I was the survivor was our writers, Walter Hill and David Geyler, thought no one will ever imagine that the survivor will be a woman,” Weaver said to crowd cheers. “That’s thanks to Walter and David.”
When asked about how her own journey off-screen may have mirrored Ripley’s journey on-screen, Weaver pointed to a conversation with co-star Ian Holm. “I remember that I made friends very quickly with Ian Holm,” she said. “We had that scene right away and… I said to Ian later, ‘Do you think that Ripley feels what she’s doing is right all the time?’ And he said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ And I said, ‘Wow, I really don’t think she knows that at all. It’s a complete improvisation. She’s flying by the seat of her pants.’ Which, in fact, as an actor I was, because no one ever said the lines. It was just a free-for-all all. And for me, being from the theater, I was so I was terrified. That was easy to play.”
That improvisation made its way into the film’s killer final sequence, as how the alien was set to die had yet to be determined. But with the arrival of Fox studio executives, the answer had to come quickly. “He wasn’t really sure how to end it and how to kill it. They hadn’t really worked on how to make that come across visually. But he suddenly, I think, got the word you’ve got to finish today and tomorrow, so they figured out water and did a test. It worked.”
“I asked Ridley not to tell me where, if there was something in my little escape vessel. I didn’t want to know anything about it. So I had the luxury of not knowing, which is a great thing for an actor,” she continued. “I feel very lucky that my first film was that. I think it helped the movie that we never rehearsed, we shot on film, and that gives a free-for-all feeling that I think was very good for the film.”
Later in the panel, Weaver addressed the ways the film ultimately prepared her to be a screen actor — and with Cartwright, discussed Hollywood’s initial treatment of Ridley’s Alien film. Speaking to the experience as a performer, Weaver recalled how the experience taught her not to look into the camera. “All these basic things I had to learn very quickly. But I’m so amazed and thrilled that it’s such a loved movie, and I think so much credit should be given to Ridley Scott — truckers in space, you know. It’s not elegant sci-fi. It’s the real deal.”
“I loved the sets coming from the theater,” Weaver later added. “I thought, ‘Wow, so nice of them to build these really, real sets for us.’ And then, of course, we’d be in these sets and the consoles, we were never allowed to touch those buttons. We always had to touch fake buttons over here, and so the whole thing was, to me, very funny.”
Speaking to its opening, Cartwright recalled the film not getting its own standalone premiere. “They didn’t give a premiere. There was no premiere. I went down to the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and saw it by myself. And people, when the chest burster happened, were getting up out of their seats and leaving the theater. Nobody had seen anything like it. It was really super impressive,” she recalled. “We were just a B movie. Showed them.”
In terms of her first impressions of the sequel, which was helmed by another legendary director, James Cameron, Weaver said she was in France when she got the script and was shocked by how “Ripley’s on every page” of a story she wasn’t aware of. “I also thought it was one of the most extraordinary scripts I’d ever read. And when I finally got back to the States, I did meet Jim in Los Angeles for the first time, and he said, ‘Well, do you have any notes?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me? This is perfect,’” she recalled.
When asked about possible tensions with the sequel’s crew and Cameron, Weaver recalled that it was about how much “they loved Ridley, and they wanted Ridley to be directing this second film,” not to mention “they didn’t know who Jim Cameron was. I didn’t really know who he was. I just thought he wrote a great script,” she explained to the crowd.
“I think Terminator had come out, but I didn’t get to see it, and he and Jim kept setting up screenings for the crew after at the end of the day, and they never went. So they did have an attitude, and it did take a while, actually. I remember, because I loved Jim right away, it was very easy for me to go, ‘Listen, yeah, I love Ridley, too, but this guy wrote this, and he has this film Terminator, and he knows what he’s doing. He’s a natural.’ He impressed them gradually, and by the end, of course, they were devoted to him.”
The sequel would earn Weaver a best actress Oscar nomination, something she was surprised by. “It was very unheard of and still kind of would be, but I knew that Jim had created the structure of a character and the story so that it was very meaningful to people. So I was delighted to be in a genre picture that… regardless of the genre, it was embraced by the Academy,” she said.
Weaver heaped similar praise on Alien 3’s director David Fincher, stating that she “had total confidence in David,” while noting that “it’s so utterly different from the first two, and I felt that Fox was very smart to keep choosing very gifted directors who wanted to do something completely different with the Alien story.”
While discussing the film, she addressed the script and what Fincher was able to do with it given the limited time he had ahead of filming. “It was a script that had originally been written by Vincent Ward, and was all these monks in space in a kind of medieval garden. My character, I guess, crash landed, and then I was in a coma for about half the movie, so I wasn’t as crazy about that script,” she explained, to audience laughs. “I feel like David would have loved a chance to work on the script before we had to start shooting. We did delay, but not enough for him to feel he’d solved a lot of the problems.”
She continued: “I think we have the most amazing group of actors, amazing crew, so it’s meaningful to me, and I don’t really compare them.”
Weaver also weighed in on the modern chapters of the franchise from Romulus to Alien: Earth, noting that she “loved” Earth and “liked” Romulus as well. “I guess for me, especially, and I met Sydney [Chandler] yesterday, and some of the cast, I see myself [in them]. Even though the movie had no profile, it still is a big responsibility, and so my heart goes out to them,” she said. “Now that the movies are so beloved, I think probably there may even be more pressure, but I’m thrilled to still be working at my age. I feel I have an opportunity as an older actor to bond with the younger actors.”
In terms of what she’d tell those younger performers in the franchise, Weavers said, “I guess the message I would always like to send out is, don’t worry so much. It’s going to be fine. Just hit your mark. Say the lines, go for it. Don’t think about it when you go home.”
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