Sigourney talks Avatar, Cameron and why sex in Alien would have been crazy

23 November 2009

John Howell

In Avatar, Sigourney Weaver plays botanist Grace Augustine, a scientist studying the jungle moon Pandora, home to a species of 11-foot-tall blue humanoid creatures called Na'vi. Like Sam Worthington who plays Jake Sully in the lead role, she appears in human form and as a 3-D animated Na'vi. Their avatars are human-Na'vi hybrids into which Grace and Jake's consciousnesses are projected. Pandora's atmosphere is toxic to humans and the alien wildlife deadly. Unlike other animated renditions of real people, the actors' facial characteristics and movements appear disturbingly accurate. If they didn't have an ever so slight cartoonish feel, the result would have been 3D digital perfection.

In an upcoming edition of More magazine, Sigourney reveals that she and cast-mate Stephen Lang "were nervous as two kittens" during a screening of the finished film. About a third of the way in Stephen Lang turned to her and said, "People are going to piss themselves when they see this movie." She was equally enthusiastic about the visuals. Avatar she claimed is "just one amazing scene after the other".

She had a great deal of input into how her character was written, and it's a sharp departure from her Ellen Ripley character in the Alien films:

"I loved Grace because she reminded me of teachers I had in high school in New England; they had devoted their lives to giving girls a good education," she said

"Sigourney came up with the idea [that Grace should be] a fair-complected woman with freckles—pale skin, red hair, " director James Cameron explained to More. "A kind of Irish look, maybe. It seemed very fresh for her; she hadn’t done that. I wanted a certain kind of warts-and-all quality, meaning that Grace didn’t really care that much about her human body. But at the same time I wanted Sigourney’s inner luminosity to come through. I think we hit exactly the right balance on that."

Grace takes on a mentor and mother figure role to Jake Sully's paraplegic soldier character.

"The audience knows from the work Sigourney has done before in science fiction that she’s not going to play it campy, she’s not going to be over the top," said Cameron. "She doesn’t accept the limitations of the genre, in a sense. She just plays it straight, like a person. Plus she’s very bright, very articulate. She’s good at taking concepts that can be a little cerebral and making them quite visceral. She took to it right away—she saw the possibilities."

"My avatar body can do anything," said Weaver. "It was so cool. I remember reading the script and going, 'How is Jim ever going to do this?' It didn't seem physically possible. . . All this technology doesn’t really worry me. It’s just going to give us more fun stuff to do. You’re never going to be able to replace the actor, because we’re the people who make the special effects work. Without Sam and Zoe [Saldana], they play the main love story—if they weren’t so good you wouldn’t care about being in that rainforest. To see their relationship flower in that world, that’s why you want to go there. It’s not because the colours are pretty."

She describes Cameron's directorial style:

"Shooting on the floor with Jim had a kind of guerrilla feeling. He was operating on every shot—he'd invented these cameras and by god he was going to use them. He was unstoppable; it was fantastic. I think the filmmaker [in him] had been pent up for so long over those 12 years [since Titanic] that once he started shooting . . . you know, he’s probably still shooting a few things that we don’t know about."

James Cameron said that he and Sigourney had mellowed since Aliens:

"At that point we both were young, we had a lot to prove. We had a great working relationship on that movie but it was definitely adversarial in the sense that she would challenge me with ideas, and I would incorporate them—or I’d have to give her a damn good reason why not. On this one, we were both more confident and it felt like a much easier give and take, an easier partnership. She’s very demanding on herself. As a director, you have to keep pace with that —she’s not going to settle for second best."

Discussing her past and present roles Sigourney revealed that she "didn't have to be a superwoman in a tiny outfit doing bizarre things".

"To me," she said "what was sexy about Ripley was that she was who she was."

Apparently in her original screen test for Ridley Scott's classic science fiction horror Alien, she had to act out a scene where she and the ship's captain had sex. She told Scott at the time: "That is so ridiculous. Who's going to have sex with that thing running around?"

Having just watched the original Alien movie again, I'd have to agree: adding such a scene would have appeared way too tacky. It's good that Ridley Scott resisted.

You can read the entire interview in the upcoming Dec/Jan issue of More magazine. Thanks to Mariela Azcuy from More for pointing us to the material.

Avatar's international release date is 18 December.

Update!
Read our review of Avatar here.

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