Sigourney Weaver Reveals Why Avatar and Alien Still Rule Sci-Fi

Sigourney Weaver took a break from battling xenomorphs and blue aliens to talk about, well, battling xenomorphs and blue aliens. At the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, she reflected on Alien and Avatar — the two giant sandboxes that shaped her career — and why both ended up reshaping movies in their own ways.

Alien: Ripley was never meant to be a statement... until she was

Weaver says nobody making Alien in 1979 thought they were launching a movement. The team just assumed audiences would never clock the young woman as the last one standing — which, at the time, was a genuine surprise.

"They thought that the audience would never suspect that the young woman was going to be the hero, essentially the survivor."

Looking back, she calls Ripley ahead of her time and is still a little stunned by how much the character stuck to the culture. Her read on why: Ripley signals that you can count on yourself, you do not need a guy to swoop in, and yes, in her view, women hold the whole thing together. Not exactly a radical take now, but in 1979 that twist hit like a facehugger.

Avatar: Two decades in, it feels like family

Jump to Pandora. Weaver says the Avatar crew has basically become a family after roughly twenty years of working together. The first film landed in 2009, returned with a sequel in 2022, and there are more entries on the way in the Sam Worthington-led saga.

Her praise for James Cameron is exactly what you would expect and also kind of fascinating: she credits him with building the performance-capture toolkit specifically to free actors up to be anything — teenagers, aliens, you name it. She hopes more directors pick it up because, in her words, the process delivers a much purer experience for both the cast and the person calling the shots. Cameron inventing new toys so everyone can play harder is the most Cameron thing imaginable.

• Where she said it: Red Sea International Film Festival, Saudi Arabia
• Alien snapshot: 1979 release; Ripley was not pitched as a feminist banner, but the impact made it one
• Why Ripley still matters (per Weaver): self-reliance, no need for a savior, women keep the world intact
• Avatar snapshot: launched in 2009; sequel hit in 2022; additional films are in the pipeline with the same core team
• On Cameron: his tech was designed to let actors be whatever they could be, and she says it makes filmmaking feel more adventurous and cleaner for directors and casts

Bottom line: Weaver sees two franchises that bent expectations in totally different ways — one by quietly handing the flamethrower to a woman when nobody saw it coming, and one by reinventing the tools so actors and filmmakers could chase bigger, stranger, more ambitious stories.