The director Sigourney Weaver crowned as the second coming of Ridley Scott and James Cameron
There’s a lot of noise right now about the young writer and director Curry Barker and his horror movie Obsession, with the filmmaker now being handed the reins to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot and being ranked as one of the next great directors.
In this, someone who definitely knows all about seminal horror movies is Sigourney Weaver, and she has her own thoughts on the legendary auteurs of the future.
After all, it was Weaver who took the lead in not just one of the finest horror movies ever, but one of the finest sci-fi movies too, with Ridley Scott’s mind-blowingly good 1979 film Alien, something that made eating breakfast in space a particularly dicey proposition due to the prospect of some creature exploding out of your stomach and running out of the room.
Alien was, and still is, genuinely terrifying, and Scott wanted to focus on the horror aspect of it rather than the science fiction; in fact, he pitched it back in the day as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of sci-fi. It was the film that rightly put him on the map as a director, making ten times its budget at the box office and within 18 months, he’d also made Blade Runner, which is a hell of a one-two.
As for Weaver, she strapped in for the long-awaited sequel, Aliens in 1986, a rare follow-up movie that’s just as good as the original, where James Cameron, already a Hollywood big-shot thanks to the Arnold Schwarzenegger cyborg hit, The Terminator, basically matched Scott in everything he did the first time round, including the box office performance, raking in over $100million in gate receipts. Then, by the time The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day arrived in 1991, he was one of the most in-demand directors in the industry.
Later in her career, Weaver had the opportunity to work with a director she felt was getting to the point where he was on a creative par with the legends of Cameron and Scott, Juan Antonio Bayona. The Spanish-born filmmaker cast her in 2016’s weepy fantasy A Monster Calls, co-starring Liam Neeson, and had made his name with the gothic horror The Orphanage in 2007 before directing the true-life tsunami disaster film The Impossible five years later, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Naomi Watts.
Weaver told Fandango about her desire to work with Bayona, saying, “I had seen The Orphanage and The Impossible, and one of the reasons why I wanted to work on A Monster Calls was because Bayona was directing it. I think he’s already up there… Ridley was a visionary from the time I worked with him, and so was Jim Cameron. I don’t think it’s one of those things that comes with age; I think it comes with perspective and with passion. And I think Bayona has all that.”
A story about a boy struggling with his mother’s terminal diagnosis who is visited by a giant magical tree, A Monster Calls was a critical, if not a commercial success on release, with Weaver playing the boy’s grandma. Bayona had much more luck when he was hired for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with Chris Pratt two years later, which was the fourth most expensive film ever made but brought in a staggering $1.3billion at the box office.
His most critically acclaimed film is 2023’s fantastic Society of the Snow, the Netflix-produced real-life story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains in 1972, leading to the survivors enduring avalanches and cannibalism, which brought him a nomination for an Academy Award for ‘Best International Feature Film’.
