Watch the trailer for The
Girl in the Park
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a student and the video player represented
the cutting edge of a beery night in, there was no finer spectacle for a
chap and his mates than that of Sigourney Weaver. Specifically, Sigourney
Weaver cavorting around a spaceship, zapping aliens. . . in her pants. “Girl
with gun,” the actress says. Actually, it was a flame-thrower. She laughs:
“Ah, the good old days.” Yes, long before Sarah Connor, Xena, Lara Croft and
the rest of the sinewy sisterhood came the fragrant Ellen Ripley, warrant
officer of the Nostromo and star of Alien. She was the first female
big-screen action hero. “I can’t take too much credit. It was the
producers,” she deflects. “They cynically said, ‘Nobody will ever think the
girl will be the only survivor, let's do that.’ ” Let history record the
milestone.
Weaver has always been a class act. And not only because of her Ivy League,
East Coast mien. Part of it is down to her willingness to send herself up.
In this year’s Pixar animation Wall-E, about a robot in the 29th century,
there she was as the voice of the ship’s computer. In 1999, in a wonderful
act of self-parody, she starred in the comedy Galaxy Quest, as the bored
cast member of a Star Trek-esque TV drama. “They didn’t want to hire me
because I had done science fiction,” she says. “I said, ‘Guys, the one
person in the world who would know how to make fun of science fiction is
me.’ ”
This does overlook the fact that Weaver’s career has been overwhelmingly
earthbound. Twenty years ago, she was just about the biggest female star on
our planet, thanks to Ghostbusters (I and II) and, in 1989, her scar
nominations for both Mike Nichols’s zeitgeisty Working Girl and Michael
Apted’s Gorillas in the Mist, the biopic of the anthropologist Dian Fossey.
“Crazy business,” she shrugs.
Meeting Weaver is a delight. Chic, intelligent and a good raconteuse, she
chooses for our rendezvous a chichi patisserie on Manhattan’s Upper East
Side. The table has been booked in her given name, Susan, rather than the
giveaway handle she granted herself precociously at 14, cribbed from a minor
character in The Great Gatsby. “It was an act of desperation, because I
didn’t like being called Susie,” she explains. “Now I’m ‘Siggy’, so it
doesn’t matter.”
When I arrive, she is already ensconced in a corner seat, wearing a pair of
black-framed glasses and leafing through a script. Aged 59, she is a
handsome woman; statuesque, even sitting down. She is wearing a
leopard-print dress and a pair of big hoop earrings, one of which keeps
dive-bombing the soup of the day.
She is here to talk about The Girl in the Park, an interesting independent
drama co-starring Kate Bosworth and directed by David Auburn, the
Pulitzer-winning playwright of Proof. In what seems to be becoming something
of a sadly topical subgenre, it tells the story of a mother (Weaver) whose
three-year-old daughter is abducted from a local park: “Every parent’s
nightmare.” The film then fast-forwards 16 years as Weaver, a shadow of her
former vivacious self, and estranged from her family, begins an unlikely
friendship with a drifter of a young woman (Bosworth), raising questions as
to whether this might be the missing child. “You think you know the
territory, but it turns out not to be about that at all,” Weaver says. “It’s
definitely about the mysterious way the human heart heals itself.” Both
actresses and the film have been put forward for Bafta nominations.
While Weaver has enjoyed more stage work in recent times, The Girl in the Park
seems to characterise one of two strands in her current career: either
starring in a small independent film (2006’s Snow Cake is another example)
or doing a walk-on in a bigger project, as in Vantage Point, Be Kind Rewind
or Baby Mama, a trio of recent movies that seem a far cry from her last
purple patch in the mid-1990s, with films such as A Map of the World, Death
and theMaiden and The Ice Storm, which featured her garlanded turn as a
1970s swinger.
She has, however, just returned from several months in New Zealand, filming
the $300m epic Avatar, jumping back into sci-fi for James Cameron, who
directed her in Alien’s even more kickass sequel, Aliens (1986), and helped
her to her first Academy Award shout. Not many people work with the
notoriously demanding Cameron more than once, I say. Productions such as
Titanic and The Abyss were brimming with accounts of tantamount
slave-driving. “Well, Jim underwater, that would be tough,” Weaver concedes.
But his infamous focus has been necessary, she insists.
Indeed, buzz is already building about this space venture, 20 years in the
making and likely to be the most expensive film ever. Set in parallel
universes where humans have virtual proxies, it has been shot in a
pioneering form of 3-D. “Once Avatar hits the world, it’s going to change
film-making as we know it,” she states, matter of factly. “You’re not
watching a film any more, you are in that world.”
Weaver was well placed to go into drama. Her father, Pat, was the head of NBC
television during the 1950s “golden age”. Her actress mum, Elizabeth Inglis,
an Essex girl(Colchester), appeared in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. “She was in
The Letter, too, with Bette Davis, which is a wonderful movie. She’s good in
it. Just a small part. Awfully pretty.” Dare we point out that Uncle
“Doodles” was also a comedian? “You’ve done your research,” she says.
Far from being blinded by the showbiz lights — “It’s a racket, as my father
used to say, a wonderful racket” — she wanted to be a journalist, conscious
that her height (knocking on 6ft) was not to her advantage as a thespian.
Has it been an obstacle? “It wasn’t a problem for me,” she muses. “I think
it saved me from working with conventional people.” In The Year of Living
Dangerously, did they really have to stand Mel Gibson on a box? She laughs.
“He was pretty cool about it.” At Yale, Weaver was a drama classmate of her
pal Meryl Streep. I put it to her that Streep’s boss-from-hell turn in The
Devil Wears Prada was just a rip-off of her own in Working Girl. Sadly, no
catfight can be sparked. In fact, a soliloquy ensues. “I admire Meryl so
much personally and professionally. She’s done so many good movies, but now
suddenly she’s in this trifecta: Mamma Mia! ... er..."No, me
neither. “Anyway, two others.”
Weaver was more interested in radical theatre than in film. She even did the
unthinkable, spurning a part in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, which would have
been her screen debut. “I was so committed to this new play,” she remembers.
“I played a multiple schizophrenic who kept a hedgehog in her vagina.”
Quite.
Allen did grant her a consolatory blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment as “Alvy’s
date outside theatre”, but Weaver soon accepted an invitation to shoot a
space thriller at Pinewood Studios, in Britain, with an up-and-coming
director named Ridley Scott. It seemed as much a character study — “Ten
Little Indians”, as she puts it — as an overt shock-horror thriller. And the
rest is entertainment legend.
Look back at Alien, 30 years old next year, and it’s not only remarkable for
the fact that crew members clamber out of their suspended animation pods and
start smoking like there’s no tomorrow — “It’s so boring in space, what else
are you going to do?” — or the fact that Weaver’s pre-Lycra half-mast
underwear (which, gallantly, they only strip her down to at the end) seems
to be reacting to its own gravitational pull. It’s that Weaver is so
comfortably feminine compared with how the role would be cast today.
“Ripley was really an ordinary person put into an extraordinary set of
circumstances,” she says. “Whereas now, if you’re a female action star,
you’re not a real person, you’re supercharged. Actually, the reason I got
the job is that the producer [Alan Ladd Jr) got all the secretaries in the
building to come and watch my screen test. He said, ‘Do you like her?’ And
they said, ‘Yes.’ They got me the part.”
In space, the slogan went, no one can hear you scream, though they are
probably still registering the groans of disappointment as Aliens was
followed by Alien³ (Ripley dies), Alien: Resurrection (Ripley returns as a
clone) and the recent Alien vs Predator films (no Ripley at all), which
tells you everything about courting today’s key male teen demographic. It
was different in the 1970s. “The goal wasn’t to make money, it was to leave
something. To make a great movie was, in itself, everything.”
But we are going down Ripley Road again. Siggy must be off. “Thank you. I ate
like a horse,” she says (she did). Since her only child, a daughter, left
home for university, she’s been coping with empty-nest syndrome, spending a
lot of time with the drama students at the off-Broadway Flea Theater, run by
her husband, the director Jim Simpson. She goes to purchase her “kids” a big
pumpkin cake from the counter. Tonight they’re doing Cato, by Joseph
Addison, reportedly George Washington’s favourite play, and she kindly
invites me along. Sadly, I have to fly home.
“You’re nice not to ask all those horrible questions about parts for women and
all that stuff,” Weaver says. “For me, if you can hang in there, your parts
really get more and more interesting as you get older.” There are other
things in the offing: a voice in the animated feature The Tale of
Despereaux; a television movie, Prayers for Bobby, about a gay-rights
campaigner. Avatar, however, will blow everything away, she says: “I’m all
for doing a play in a barn in leotards, but when you see what Jim’s been
able to do and how beautiful the 3-D is, it’s very powerful. A lot of people
won’t want to leave the movie theatre.”
As to what happens in it, other than that she plays a futuristic botanist, a
three-line whip has been laid down. “It’ll be worth the wait,” is all she
will offer. To tell me would necessitate killing me. Torching me with a
flame-thrower, maybe? Perhaps in those saggy old pants.
The Girl in the Park is out now
