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Sigourney Weaver and James Cameron are reflecting on their creative partnership
The two first worked together on the 1986 sci-fi classic Aliens, the sequel to the 1979 film Alien
Cameron sent Weaver a script to the film while she was shooting another project — and she was blown away
Sigourney WeaverandJames Cameronare reflecting on their lengthy creative partnership — which began with the 1986 sci-fi classicAliens, the sequel to the 1979 filmAlien.
Speaking to IndieWire, 76-year-old Weaver recounted how, 40 years ago, she was shooting the French comedyOne Woman or Twowhen she received a package from the director.
"A script was sent to me:Aliensby James Cameron," Weaver told the outlet, adding that the script "was magnificent. The greatest script I had ever read. I was just blown away by the humor and the humanity and the action."
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The two arranged to meet — an interaction for which Cameron, 71, was nervous, considering the film would be his first big studio movie.
"We met in Santa Barbara, and I drove up there with some trepidation," Cameron told IndieWire. "She was just this wonderful person, and I was so relieved that she saw some value in the script and where I was proposing to take the character."
There was one hiccup, however: the script called for Weaver's character (protagonist Ripley) to use a machine gun — and the actress was staunchly anti-gun.
So the director took Weaver behind the studio to try shooting a gun. "I'll never forget her blasting away with this thing," he told IndieWire. "And then there was this kind of sly look over to me, like 'This is fun.'" Cameron took many gun scenes out of his later projects, out of concern for fetishizing weapons.
In addition toAliens, Weaver and Cameron worked together onAvatar(2009), in which she played Dr. Grace Augustine and later Kiri (Grace's avatar daughter) inAvatar: The Way of Water(2022). Weaver also appears in Cameron's newAvatar: Fire and Ash.
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Weaver was ultimately nominated for an Oscar for her role inAliens,which she said in an October appearance on theHappy Sad Confusedpodcast was a surprise due to the film being sci-fi.
"I think I was surprised because it was very unheard of — and still kind of would be," she said. "But I knew that Jim had created the structure of character and the story so that it was meaningful to people, and so I was delighted to be in a genre picture that didn't skip over all of that. And just for the story and everything else, regardless of the genre, it was embraced by the Academy."
In a New York Comic Con panel on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025, Weaver said she had a meeting with Disney, which owns the rights to theAlienhorror franchise, about potentially reprising her role as the series' main hero in a future sequel.
"You know, Walter Hill is a very good friend of mine and he wrote 50 pages of where Ripley would be now and they are quite extraordinary," Weaver said during a panel on theAlienfranchise.
She added: "So I don't know if it's going to happen, but I have had a meeting with Fox, Disney or whoever it is now. I have never felt the need [to reprise the role.] I was always like 'let her rest, let her recover.' But what Walter has written is, first of all, seems so true to me. It's very much about the society that would incarcerate someone who has tried to help mankind, but she's a problem to them so she's sort of tucked away."
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