Sigourney Weaver names the best directors she ever worked with: “I don’t think anyone else can do what he does”
Having been an actor for almost 50 years and a star for over 40 of them, Sigourney Weaver has spent the majority of her career rubbing shoulders with the industry’s highest-profile auteurs.
She made her feature debut in Woody Allen’s ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ winner Annie Hall, and two years later, she headlined Ridley Scott’s Alien and became an instant icon of sci-fi and horror. Since then, she’s never looked back, adding more and more names to her collection.
Weaver has reunited with Scott on 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Exodus: Gods and Kings, saddled up with James Cameron for her Academy Award-nominated turn in Aliens before circling back around with a plum gig in his Avatar franchise, and that’s barely even touching the tip of the iceberg.
The statuesque favourite netted another nod for Michael Apted’s Gorillas in the Mist, would have happily dedicated the rest of her career to The Ice Storm‘s Ang Lee, co-starred with Mel Gibson in Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously, hopped on the David Fincher train at the first stop on Alien 3, without forgetting M Night Shyamalan, Paul Schrader, Noah Baumbach, or Michel Gondry.
However, it’s none of the above who made the cut when Weaver was caught reminiscing on her favourite directorial collaborations, with Mike Nichols earning a plum spot for reasons that weren’t entirely down to Working Girl getting her on the Oscars shortlist for the third and so far final time.
“He’s the best,” she informed Alex Simon. “He’s so much fun, so astute. You’re granted admission to a very special world when you work with Mike.” Beyond bringing out the best in his actors, Weaver celebrated Nichols’ artistry and insight as both a writer and a director, referring to how he’s “so smart and really understanding of the structure of a script,” which allows him “to give you one direction that liberates you for the whole piece.”
Weaver’s second candidate is an eminently more controversial one, with the star overlooking everything else that’s ever happened away from the set to call Roman Polanksi “probably the greatest director I’ve ever worked with” before explaining her reasons why such a figure was deserving of double-barrelled adulation.
“I don’t think anyone else can do what he does,” she offered. “Especially with that kind of claustrophobic, chilling, perplexing story.” The two worked together only once on 1994’s mystery Death of a Maiden, which flopped at the box office. Weaver is excellent in the film, though, but because it died a slow and painful death in cinemas, it’s tended to be consigned to the ‘overlooked and underrated’ section of her performative back catalogue.
She’s worked with a laundry list of top talents, but Weaver will die on the hill that nobody’s come close to matching Nichols or Polanski.
