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Sigourney Weaver terrified James Cameron when they first met, because he'd been thinking about her for months
The Aliens director wanted to do justice to both Ripley and Sigourney Weaver, which put a lot of pressure on him during the writing process
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When you talk about iconic castings, Sigourney Weaver’s role as Ripley in the Alien franchise remains hard to beat. The first sequel to Ridley Scott's iconic original installment, 1986's Aliens, brought her back and transformed Ripley into a fully-fledged action hero, demonstrating the versatility and broad range of the character for the first time. However, director James Cameron was feeling the pressure even before he met the star for the first time. He’s recently revealed to the world (and Sigourney Weaver herself) just how much he’d been obsessing over Ripley while writing Aliens.
When the studio opted not to bring back Ridley Scott to direct the sequel to Alien, they instead tapped James Cameron, who had just proven he could nail the sci-fi action genre a few years earlier with The Terminator, to write and direct Aliens. During an interview to mark the 40th anniversary of the box office hit, James Cameron admitted to being intimidated by Sigourney Weaver when they first met, since he’d spent months writing the script specifically with her in mind.
“I was petrified of you,” Cameron told Weaver. “I had been writing for months with your picture up on the wall right in front of my little writing station. I was desperately trying to channel what you and Ridley had created for Ripley, and extrapolate forward with my own post-traumatic-stress-syndrome motif.”
“I loved that,” Weaver assured him. “I thought that was the perfect beginning for her.”
“Yeah, but when we first met I was terrified of what you were going to say about it. And it turns out, funnily enough, that you hadn’t even read all the machine-gun and flamethrower parts of the script!”
Thankfully, Cameron got over his initial fear of his star and directed one of the best sci-fi sequels of all time where the real villain is late-stage capitalism instead of the unstoppable alien monsters.
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