Sigourney Weaver: The Hollywood Interview

Actress Sigourney Weaver.


SIGOURNEY WEAVER:
PORTRAIT OF A HEARTBREAKER
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the April 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

Revered as the leading American actress who combines indomitable strength with old world elegance, Sigourney Weaver comes by both naturally. Born Susan Alexandra Weaver October 8, 1949 in New York City, the daughter of legendary NBC TV President Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, and English actress Elizabeth Inglis. During his tenure at the network, Pat Weaver is credited with, among other things, inventing the desk-and-couch talk show format that still dominates the airwaves today, as well as creating both the "Tonight" and "Today" shows. Her uncle, the late "Doodles" Weaver, was a popular comic character actor whose face was familiar to both film and TV viewers through the late 1970's.

Re-christening herself "Sigourney" after a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Weaver attended Stanford university as an undergraduate, majoring in English, moving on from there to Yale Drama School, where Meryl Streep was a fellow student. After working for several years in well-received Off-Broadway productions, Weaver made her film debut in Woody Allen's classic Annie Hall (1977, she's Woody's date outside the movie theater towards the end). It was in Ridley Scott's groundbreaking Alien (1979) that Weaver became a bona fide star, playing Lt. Ellen Ripley: part sex symbol, part Earth mother, and part double-barreled action hero, the first film heroine of the post-feminist era. Weaver reprised the role in three sequels: James Cameron's blockbuster Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), and Alien Resurrection (1996).

Weaver followed Alien with an impressive filmography of diverse work: as Mel Gibson's lover in strife-torn Indonesia in Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), the object of Bill Murray (and a nasty entity)'s affections in Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters II (1989). Two completely divergent roles in 1988 brought her Oscar nominations (and Golden Globe wins) as Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively: as doomed naturalist Dian Fossey in Michael Apted's Gorillas in the Mist and the cutthroat corporate exec whom secretary Melanie Griffith tries to emulate in Mike Nichols' Working Girl. She did a charming turn as a disillusioned First Lady who finds love again with Kevin Kline's Dave (1992), and gave a chilling portrayal of vengeance stretched to its limits in Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden (1994). Copycat (1995) had her visiting similarly intense territory as an agoraphobic psychiatrist caught in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a serial killer, while Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) showcased her patrician qualities to their utmost in a chilling turn as a bored upper middle class housewife in 1973 Connecticut. In Map of the World (1999) she gave a powerful performance as an educated woman out of place in her rural community, while Galaxy Quest (1999) gave her opportunity to flex her comedic muscles again as a former sci-fi TV show sexpot who is forced to fight off real-life alien monsters!

Weaver's latest firmly establishes the actress as a gifted comedienne. Heartbreakers tells the blackly comedic tale of Maxine "Max" Conners (Weaver), who along with nubile daughter Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt), have made their living conning some of the country's wealthiest men out of their fortunes. When their latest con against sleazy chop-shop king Ray Liotta doesn't quite go as planned, the women decide to hit Palm Beach, the Mecca of the rich, and make one last big score before retiring for good, setting their eyes on repugnant, ailing tobacco kingpin Gene Hackman as their mark. When Page falls for a good-hearted local tavern owner (Jason Lee) who might, or might not, be harboring a major bankroll of his own, things get complicated. Heartbreakers is a funny, down-and-dirty comedy that will leave you with a smile on your face long after the end credits have rolled, and Weaver is a delight to watch, working her magic alongside fellow acting heavyweights Hackman, Liotta and (in a wonderful cameo) Anne Bancroft. Sigourney Weaver sat down with Venice recently over lunch, looking every bit the elegant lady in a tailored red suit.

Tell us about what drew you to Heartbreakers.
Sigourney Weaver: I think I've been looking for a comedy for a long time, and to find a comedy that has two powerful, sexy, funny devious women...I just thought it was wonderful, and (director) David Mirkin just kept encouraging both of us to be as ruthless and confident as we could! (laughs) I was also drawn to the mother-daughter aspect of the story. Underneath all the sort of Dirty Rotten Scoundrel elements of the story, I thought there was something very real going on between the mother and daughter. This is going to sound terrible, but I can understand conning your daughter to get her to stay home a little longer! (laughs) I know, because I have a daughter. Even thought she's only 10, I can understand not wanting to let her go.

How was it working with Gene Hackman, who I understand is a real hero of yours.
I was worried, because I thought 'How can I play someone who's so repulsed by him?' because I think he's fabulous! Then he came in wearing this horrible make-up, oozing smoke. (laughs) You'd never believe it, but Gene's never smoked! He's been a total non-smoker his whole life. But he was able to do all those things that smokers do, having the cigarette just hang there, not getting the smoke in his eyes. It just got all over me! This is definitely a non-smoking movie.

Is it true that comedy is the hardest thing for an actor to do?
I don't think it's the hardest thing for me to do. I think I feel more at home in it sometimes than drama, probably because my father did a lot of early television drama, so there was a great priority in our family on being funny, and telling jokes, stuff like that. It's just harder to find a good film comedy and a director who understands how to shoot and cut it. Getting all those elements to work is what's hard, and when Heartbreakers came along, I knew how special it was...also working with Jennifer was wonderful. I felt that we really could have been mother and daughter. We had about three weeks of rehearsal, so we really got to know each other pretty well. She was also really sweet with my daughter.

I could see a little bit of your Working Girl character in Max.
Well, I actually felt a little sympathy for Max. I think in her heart, she knew what she was doing was wrong, but still felt that the end was justified. Luckily, she's redeemable. My husband saw the film again last night and said "You know it's really hard for us to like her in the beginning." But, if you get caught in these situations, I think a mother will do anything to protect her daughter...If you think about it, what they do is a combination of acting and psychology. I never realized how much psychology was involved in conning. You really have to be able to disarm people, and get them to trust you. It's fascinating, really.

Your scenes with Ray Liotta looked like you guys were having a lot of fun.
I think Ray really steals the movie. He's so out there! Because he has such a big heart in reality, he plays the comedy really well. He's also a real gentleman. There are many times in the movie when Jennifer and I had to be in intimate situations with Ray, and he was always so considerate. That can make a big difference.

Show business runs in your family. Are you an only child?
No. I have an older brother who lives in Salt Lake City. He has four kids.

What was it like growing up around television's "golden period"?
I think most children in those days were sort of sheltered from what their parents did. We did have people drop by the house sometimes. I had chicken pox once and Art Linkletter came by. We have a movie of it, actually. (laughs) As far as I was concerned, everyone's father ran a network. My father clearly loved what he did. He had come from radio, then started running TV stations, and would always come home laughing. I knew that it was not a fair business early on, because dad had some real ups and downs. He started the first cable company in '63 and was put out of business illegally. I knew that it was a rough business, but a great business. So when I came into the business, my expectations were really low. I never thought that success or fame would make me happy. Fame looks much better in the movies than it does in real life.

Were you always drawn to acting?
No. I was very shy as a kid. I'm always amazed when I hear people say things like "I've always wanted to be an actor since the age of eight," because I would have never had the confidence to say that. It looked impossible to me. I was hesitant to follow in my parents' footsteps, but it was in my blood. Being an actor is all about communication, sort of the same thing as being a journalist in many ways. You sort of go into the middle of a situation, suck it in, then come back and tell us what it's like.

What was Yale Drama School like?
Well, I made some good friends there, but didn't get a lot of encouragement from the faculty, more like a lot of discouragement. So it was not a very happy time for me. I learned a lot about how to survive. I think the world will tell you soon enough that you're not cut out for a career. You don't need to pay people to tell you that you're no good.

Tell us about your transition from "Susan" to "Sigourney."
That's when I was 13. I was about (6 feet) tall when I was 13. I was called "Susie" or "Sue." I felt too tall to have a short name like that and I saw this name in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." I thought 'That looks good. I'll use that until I figure out what to do with my name.' I had the middle name Alexandra, which I thought was pretty, but too long. It's so funny, I found an old letter from my father. He always used to write me, because I changed my name, and begin the letter "Dear 'Dra," "Love Drad." And he wrote me that way for years.

Between Yale and your film debut in Annie Hall you did a lot of theater.
Yeah. I came to New York and all my friends kept hiring me to be in their plays. Christopher Durang, Wendy Wasserstein...it was great. Then about a year later, I was in the background of a Budweiser ad, I always tried to stay in the background, that way I'd still get paid, but nobody would have to see me (laughs), and I got a call for this thing called Alien. I almost didn't go. They gave me the wrong address. I called my agent and said 'Science fiction?! Must I do this?' (laughs) So I went and met with Ridley Scott. I was wearing these over-the-knee hooker boots, and must've looked about eight feet tall. I think because I didn't care at all whether I got it or not, that intrigued him. (laughs)

Let's go back to Woody Allen and Annie Hall. We just see you briefly in long shot at the end.
He actually offered me the second female lead in the movie, the girl he brings to the beach after he and Diane Keaton break up. I was in a Chris Durang play and I didn't want to leave it, because it was such a great part. I was playing this multiple schizophrenic in a play called Titanic. So I turned down that part. Woody gave me one day in this smaller part, and a lot of it got cut out in the end. I had this scene where we were in bed. I was reading the National Review and eating crackers in bed and he's on the phone with Annie Hall in California, and we also did The Sorrow and the Pity scene.

With Alien, did any of you even have in inkling of how influential this film would be?
When I met Ridley that day, and I'd read the script, I didn't really have a picture of what the alien was like. I just thought it was this mass of yellow jelly or something, not really very inspiring. Even though there was a spareness about the script that I really like. Then when I met Ridley he showed me all the conceptual sketches for the alien and the eggs that H.R. Giger did. Originally the eggs were going to have these little, baby faces on the outside. I knew that I'd never seen a film like this before, so I knew it was going to be something very special. For me, I wanted to concentrate on theater and dabble in film. This was not what I expected...They built these sets that were like an entire world unto themselves. In my naiveté I thought they'd built all these sets for us, so we'd get into character more! (laughs) I think the film still holds up very well. It doesn't seem dated at all.

The evolution of the character of Ripley over the course of the four films has been fascinating.
I think to be able to come back to the same character every few years, having learned that much more about filmmaking and acting was such a please. I felt so lucky. By the time we did the last one, the memories that Ripley has are my memories. It did happen that long ago! (laughs) It was a very weird experience, but a very rich one. People now are asking about Alien 5...I've never been big on sequels, but these days there seems to be a whole generation of people who don't see them as sequels, as much as episodes in the same adventure. Certainly I left the character in an interesting place because I never got to find out which side ended up dominating. But if it doesn't happen, that's okay too. The morning after it was (erroneously) announced that Alien 5 was going to be made, I got a call from my agents saying "Is this true?" I said 'If I were getting $22 million to make Alien 5 don't you think I'd call you guys first?' (laughs)

The Year of Living Dangerously is one of the best films of the '80s.
Yes, and it also marked the beginning of my appreciation of filmmaking and for what an actor can do on film, just for the fact that you do work out of sequence and you do never quite know what you're doing, you don't get rehearsal, there is no audience. I hadn't really embraced it philosophically before then that you have to throw yourself off the cliff and just jump into it sometimes. Life is really like that more often than not. You never know what's going to happen next. To bring that feeling to film is something I learned working on that with Peter Weir...Peter had us watch the love scenes between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946) so our love scenes would have that same, sort of old-fashioned quality. The censors back then dictated that you could only kiss for so long, so they were kissing, then talking, kissing, then talking. Peter was very adamant that he didn't want to see any tongues! (laughs)

How was working with Mel Gibson?
He's both gorgeous and a regular guy, which is a great combination. He was always trying to stay out all night, so the next day he would look tired and haggard, and look older. He was 26 and I think the best looking person I'd ever seen. We all said 'Give it up Mel!' (laughs) The Australian crews are very small, so the whole film was a very intense, intimate experience. So by the end of it, Mel, Linda (Hunt) and I all became very close with each other and with the crew. It's my favorite kind of film to work on. The Alien films had that same kind of feeling.

Tell us about working with Mike Nichols on Working Girl.
He's the best. He's so much fun, so astute. You're granted admission to a very special world when you work with Mike. We loved (my character) Catherine Porter, and modeled her after people that we knew. Mike is so smart and really understand the structure of a script. He believes in treating the material roughly, and not being too sentimental, which is why even in something like (the stage production of) Hurlyburly, you got tremendous laughs. He's able to give you one direction that liberates you for the whole piece.

Gorillas in the Mist was an amazing film and Dian Fossey must've been an amazing character to portray. You spent months in the jungle of Rwanda actually filming with wild gorillas.
Yes, we spent hours and hours with them. What a gift that was. Talk about join SAG and see the world! I knew about Dian, had read her book and was interested in primatology, but to actually travel there and be with the gorillas was one of the greatest gifts I'd ever received...We spent about three months in the mountains and would have to hike for hours a day to find the gorillas, or to even get to where we were shooting...I would say the one quibble I have with the film is that it's hard to tell a story of 18 years in a person's life in two hours. I think things really crystallized for her in the last five years of her life. That's when she really dug her heels in and became quite intractable about saving the gorillas. I think certainly that she was a lonely child, who felt closer to animals than to people. To this day, I think just being in her skin for a while made me understand that there are many people for whom there is no difference between people and animals, that animals are equal citizens of our world. Once you get used to that philosophy, it really changes the way you look at the world.

What did you learn from the primates?
I envied them, the simplicity of their lives. I remember being covered with baby gorillas jumping up and down on me, urinating on me, trying to steal my bag. I had just gotten married a couple years before and I said to my husband afterward, 'I think we need to have children. I just got a taste of it.' I miss it there. I would love to go back in any capacity. It's funny, I'm not a "channeling" kind of person, but I always felt Dian's spirit there, and because of that, was never afraid of the gorillas. You characters oftentimes become friends in a way when you spend a lot of time with them, and that was certainly the case with Dian. She was a good person.

Death and the Maiden was an amazing film. Tell us about working with Polanski.
I think Roman's probably the greatest director I've ever worked with. I don't think anyone else can do what he does, especially with that kind of claustrophobic, chilling, perplexing story. In some ways, although it was the most challenging thing I'd done at the time, it was also the easiest: we got to have one set, we worked chronologically, it was only the three of us in the cast and a tiny crew. That was a real milestone for me. I started to work in a different way and never went back after that...At the first reading, and this is a European tradition, Roman read all the parts while we sat and listened. I remember Ben Kingsley getting sort of restless, but I thought it was fascinating. He understood all these people because he'd been all these people at various times in his life: he'd been the torturer, the rapist, the helpless husband, the hunted one growing up in the ghetto in Poland. I like Roman a lot, but he's also a lot to take. I'd work with him again in a second, though. It's funny, after I wrapped Maiden, I did Copycat, where I played another very disturbed woman. After that was over, I flew home for Christmas Eve and was cooking for about 14 people. I had never wanted so badly to be domestic in my life, because I'd totally fried myself! I just wanted to hold linens and open ovens and do things that were completely real, and stay completely out of my head. That was very intense, doing those two in a row.

The Ice Storm was one of the great movies of the past decade. It really captured that era down to the tiniest detail. Tell us about that and also about working with Ang Lee.
They sent me a lot of magazines from the era so I could get a sense of what (my character) Janey Carver was looking at all the time. I think for Ang, it was kind of an Asian idea where you had children behaving like adults and adults behaving like children. It's unnatural to do that, so nature will have repercussions. It was a very Bhuddist way of looking at the story. We began the shoot with a Bhuddist ceremony where we burned incense and bowed to the four corners and yelled "Big luck!" It was an amazing experience.

Map of the World must've been an intense experience.
Yeah, we shot it in about 30 days and did several scenes every day. It was very challenging because (director) Scott Elliot just sort of let me go, whereas Roman kept me very reigned in. So it was like living through that experience. It was one of the most satisfying professional experiences I've ever had. It's a film that a lot of people are discovering through video. When it was released theatrically I think the theme of losing a child, especially so early on in the film, was difficult for a lot of people to take.

Is there anything you haven't done acting-wise that you'd like to do?
I'd like to do some more theater. I actually spoke to John Cleese last night about doing a restoration comedy, which would be fun. In many ways I'm looking forward to the strike. It might give me some time to develop some good projects. I'm working on something about Gypsy Rose Lee that begins after she stops stripping, her relationship with her son. She was a marvelous woman.

Looking at your filmography, you've been in lots of amazing films over a relatively short number of years.
I really have been lucky. With Heartbreakers, it's the kind of part I've been waiting for all my life. The other day I was thinking 'Wow, you've really managed to accomplish a lot of the goals you've set for yourself as an actor.' So now it's time to sit down and make up some new ones.