It has been said before, but Sigourney Weaver is extremely tall (1.8 metres). And both times I met her - in France, coincidentally, once in Cannes and once in Paris - she was wearing the type of spindly high-heeled shoes which made her look, somehow, like a mast battling against the wind.
A karate green belt with an impossibly low percentage of body fat on her lean frame (when it came time to do underwater scenes in Aliens: Resurrection, she floated), Weaver is all angles and bones and beauty. She looks positively Amazonian in the fourth instalment of Alien and despite the visual orgy the movie provides, all I could think while watching it was: she is amazing. Weaver is 48 now and exudes the kind of cool intelligence that does not need to be sharp to prove its existence.
She is nervous doing interviews, she says, but on both occasions is kind and fun and not at all precious. I came away both admiring and liking her, which is surprising given she is darned scary in Aliens 4, towering over all her co-stars with a butch sneer Bruce Willis could only aspire to. Like every other Alien fan, I sneered (weakly in comparison) at the news that Weaver - whose character Ripley committed suicide in Aliens 3 - had pocketed US$11 million (about HK$85 million) to return from the grave. What next, an Alien shower sequence? But at 48, Weaver knows what she is doing. And Jean-Pierre Jeunet (with co-director Marc Caro-helmed Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children ) ain't no cretin either, as they might say in his native France. Obviously, if you pay Weaver US$11 million, she will go the distance - even if that means an orgy scene with a nest of slimy 'mothers'.
You get Jeunet to sign on the dotted line and he will bring his director of photography Darius Khondji (Seven ) into the bargain, lighting slime to end all slime on Weaver, her co-star Winona Ryder, and a brand new Alien baby who spurts goo from every orifice. Aliens: Resurrection is grotesquely obscene and in it, 20th Century Fox has rescued a faltering franchise: it seemed as if director David Fincher had killed it all off in Aliens 3, but, no, Weaver is back. And maybe she is not better than ever, but she certainly edges close to the Ridley Scott-directed original (made in 1979).
'I laughed, yes, when they came and told me they had a new script,' says Weaver, who is not at all apologetic for her Ripley volte-face. 'Then when they showed me it, I was bowled over. It was an easy decision to make.' Well, easy-ish.
Ryder - almost laughably a physical opposite to Weaver, a tiny, elfin-like actress - committed to her part as the mysterious Coll in the misguided belief that Weaver was already on board.
'There isn't a chance I would have done it without her,' says Ryder. 'I've been an Alien fan all my life - the original was one of the first movies I ever saw and certainly the only one with a female presence - and I couldn't wait to join up.