Sigourney Weaver recently told The New York Times that she once stood up to James Cameron during their first movie together, 1986’s “Aliens.” The science-fiction action movie marked Weaver’s return as Ellen Ripley after the success of Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” Cameron was new to the franchise and was butting heads on set with a young female actor who was struggling with some of the props.
“I sort of trundled up to him and I said, ‘You know, when you yell at an actor, you yell at all of us, so understand that what she was doing actually was very hard. Maybe shoot something else while she gets used to doing this stuff the way you want it,’” Weaver remembered.
Cameron took her advice, she added. Weaver said: “He’s a good guy. I really do think Jim has mellowed.”
The actor also remembered getting dinner with Cameron after the two wrapped production on “Aliens” and “he hadn’t been like that directing. He was wildly funny, witty. I can understand why that guy couldn’t come out during ‘Aliens,’ because that was a tough shoot, especially for him. Let’s put it this way: I’m glad I wasn’t shooting ‘The Abyss’ with him.”
Weaver is referring to Cameron’s 1989 thriller starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Michael Biehn. The film’s production was fraught, to say the least, with the cast and crew’s health and safety constantly in jeopardy. As recounted by SyFy: “Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had a physical and emotional breakdown on set, and Harris admitted he broke into a fit of sobbing while driving home one day because of the stress. At one point, a lightning storm ripped a hole in the black tarp covering the tank, and since repairing it took too much time and production was already running over, they started shooting at night. Too much exposure to chlorine burned divers’ skin and turned their hair white.”
“We were guinea pigs, in a way,” Harris once told Entertainment Weekly. “Jim wasn’t quite sure how this was all gonna go down… [in the drowning scene I was] screaming at her to come back and wake up, and I was slapping her across the face and I see that they’ve run out of film in the camera — there’s a light on the camera — and nobody had said anything. And Mary Elizabeth stood up and said, ‘We are not animals!” and walked off the set. They were going to let me just keep slapping her around!”
Whatever Cameron was like on past sets did not deter Weaver from reuniting with him on the “Avatar” franchise. She’s starred in all three “Avatar” movies so far. Her co-star Stephen Lang told The Times that “a part of Jim that has leavened and lightened much over the years,” adding: “I think he embarked upon a course of self-improvement, and I don’t say that this is actually necessarily a conscious thing that he did; I just think that he’s kind of geared that way.”
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“Marinating, maybe, is a good term, right?” Cameron himself told the publication. “It’s not like I was a screamer all day long. But every once in a while. Everybody’s entitled to a bad day. If you’re not doing the job, then get out of my way.”
Cameron’s latest, “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” is now playing in theaters nationwide.
From Variety US