Weaver, Sigourney

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    Christopher Durang, Playwright Who Mixed High Art and Low Humor, Dies at 75

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    In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown.Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and a master satirist, died on Tuesday night at his home in Pipersville, Pa., in Bucks County. He was 75.His agent, Patrick Herold, said the cause was complications of aphasia. In 2016, Mr. Durang was found to have a rare form of dementia, logopenic primary progressive aphasia. The diagnosis was made public in 2022.An acid, impish writer, Mr. Durang never met a classic (“The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Snow White”) that he couldn’t skewer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown. Regarding subject and theme, he pogoed from sex to metaphysics to serial killers to psychology, and he had a way of collapsing high art and jokes that aimed much lower.“He’s so scaldingly funny,” the actress Sigourney Weaver, a friend and collaborator since she met Mr. Durang at the Yale School of Drama, said in an interview. “You laugh with horror at what’s going on and your sheer inability to do anything about it.”But even in his most uproarious work — like his early play, the sex and psychoanalysis farce “Beyond Therapy,” or his late hit “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a delirious homage to Chekhov — there was often a strong undertow of melancholy.Mark Alhadeff and Cynthia Darlow in a 2014 production of Mr. Durang’s “Beyond Therapy” at the Actors Company Theater in New York.Marielle SolanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart’ Review: The Right Kind of Melodrama

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      Sigourney Weaver stars in an Australian family thriller full of stormy emotions and strangely beautiful terrain.The title of the new Amazon offering “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart,” with its echo of V.C. Andrews’s Gothic novels of family calamity, is a case of truth in advertising. The seven-episode Australian mini-series, which is based on the novel by Holly Ringland and premiered Thursday on Prime Video, is an unapologetic melodrama — a family saga in which lies and secrets proliferate beyond all reason, putting parents and children, friends and bystanders, through unnaturally intense storms of emotion.That it’s also entertaining, moving and vividly atmospheric is a pleasant surprise in a time when melodrama tends toward the banal (some variety of soap opera) or the scolding (some variety of humorless social critique). “Lost Flowers” is a reminder that when it is handled with skill, sophistication and a measure of restraint, melodrama can be as satisfying as any other style of storytelling.The story involves a complicated web of relationships centering on Thornhill, a flower farm that doubles as a refuge for troubled women, who are called “flowers.” Some of the women, though not all of them, are escaping abusive men. The farm is run by a forbidding matriarch, June (Sigourney Weaver), with the help of her Indigenous lover, Twig (Leah Purcell), and their adopted daughter, Candy (Frankie Adams).June is one pole of a story in which the keeping of shameful family secrets is the foundation of tragedy. The other pole is Alice, who is a child when we first see her (played by Alyla Browne) and knows nothing about June, her grandmother. Savage events unite them early on so that they can spend the rest of the series being drawn together and, as Alice works her way through June’s lies, torn apart again.Most of the first half of “Lost Flowers” is tied to the point of view of this young Alice, and the director and cinematographer, Glendyn Ivin and Sam Chiplin, give these episodes the seductive texture of an ominous, doom-tinged fairy tale. Using the strangely beautiful landscape of the New South Wales coast, they create an ambience that reflects Alice’s childlike, wavering apprehension of the unreasoning violence that regularly bursts into her life.They are helped immensely by Browne, who gives a terrific performance even though Alice spends several episodes mostly mute while recovering from trauma. Sadness, rebelliousness and a puckish sense of humor are there in her eyes. Though she shares the screen with Weaver and with the Australian star Asher Keddie, who plays a sympathetic but self-righteous local librarian, Browne draws you right to her.Alycia Debnam-Carey plays an older version of Alice, who after a 10-year leap forward in the story appears to be repeating harmful family patterns.Amazon StudiosMidway through, the series jumps ahead more than a decade, and Alice, now a young woman played by Alycia Debnam-Carey, finds herself in another magical setting — this time a national park where a volcanic crater provides a haven for wildflowers.The change of scenery is symbolic — away from the protection of the farm, Alice is free both to find herself and to start repeating harmful family patterns when it comes to men. And the writing, led by the series’s showrunner, Sarah Lambert, dries out a little along with the landscape. These episodes feel more like something we’ve seen before, though a bit of the earlier enchantment lingers in a plot strand involving Twig’s long road trip in search of Alice.What carries you through, finally — as you might expect — is Weaver. “Lost Flowers” doesn’t play to her traditional strengths — the taciturn, bottled-up June doesn’t provide much of a canvas for Weaver’s regal-yet-feral intelligence or her deadly sense of humor. She can get more out of sheer presence and stubborn charisma, however, than most performers do from busily acting, and in the later episodes she takes over, carrying off some wonderful moments as June slows down and opens up. Weaver’s work in series has been sparse and unpredictable; getting to spend seven episodes with her is the icing on the melodrama. More

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      Sigourney Weaver Has Us All Fooled: She’s Really Quite Silly

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      In her life onscreen, Sigourney Weaver has faced down ghosts, aliens and serial killers, romanced the likes of Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson and studied the clannish movements of gorillas in the mist and of suburban swingers in Connecticut. But before you knew her for any of those feats, an outrageous stage performance bestowed a lesson that has spanned the length of her five-decade career.“It was so good for me,” Weaver said, “to play a girl with a hedgehog in her vagina for a few months.”The year was 1976, and the production was “Titanic,” an Off Broadway play by Weaver’s frequent stage collaborator Christopher Durang (not her frequent film collaborator, James Cameron, who would make his own, very different “Titanic” two decades later). Durang’s sex farce asked her to play roles that ran the gamut from a black widow with deep décolletage to a pigtailed girl hiding a hedgehog in her vagina. The New York Times, in an amused review, described Weaver as “a cover girl beauty with a dry wit” and the play’s principal attraction.But what’s all that praise worth when weighed against one withering comment? One night, after an Actors Studio teacher came to see “Titanic,” Weaver asked for his take on her performance.“Well,” he sniffed, “I didn’t really feel that you had a hedgehog in your vagina.”This season Weaver will be seen in four very different roles, including a teenager in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and an abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesUndone by the criticism, Weaver spent the next day overthinking things. Every waking minute was devoted to imagining the hedgehog and mapping out the little creature’s wants and desires; by the time she was onstage that night, throwing her leg onto a table to feed the hedgehog some lettuce, she could swear she felt a real animal moving to claim its prize.And how was all that hard work received? “There was not a laugh in the house,” she said. “It was absolute stone-cold horror.”Well, the performance earned one laugh, at least — a rueful, belated one from Weaver herself, as we sat by the beach at the Venice Film Festival in August. “I think the Actors Studio and comedy may not go together,” she told me, chuckling.Acting can sometimes be a battle between intellect and instinct, and by either measure, the 73-year-old Weaver is formidable. Co-stars talk about the way she marks up her scripts, scribbling down the motivations behind every line, action or lifted prop; onscreen, she projects that intelligence in a calm, cool way and can handily outthink any scene partner. But Weaver’s natural instincts have proved important, too, ever since her first starring role as the resourceful Ellen Ripley in the 1979 sci-fi classic “Alien.”“She’s reduced to instinct and survival, and goes from this person who knows the rules to someone who’s just flying by the seat of her pants,” Weaver said. “So I got a very good drenching in that right away.”The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Sigourney Weaver: Hollywood has never quite known what to do with the actress, who has four films out this season, including the “Avatar” sequel. She spoke to us about her unusually fluid career.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.Some things about Weaver are immutable, like her height (she stands nearly six feet tall) and honeyed voice, but she is credible in comedy, drama and action tentpoles and has put together an unusually fluid career that’s on full display this season. In September, you might have caught her in the indie comedy “The Good House,” in which she played Hildy, a witty, oft-soused real estate agent; the next month, New York Film Festival audiences met Weaver’s Norma, a wealthy woman having an affair with Joel Edgerton in the fraught, Paul Schrader-directed drama “Master Gardener.”Weaver can currently be seen as Virginia, an abortion-rights activist in the period drama “Call Jane” (out this weekend) and in December, she reunites with Cameron in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” despite the fact that her character died in the first film. Since the “Avatar” movies are shot mainly via motion capture, Cameron crafted a whole new role for Weaver, and it’s a corker: She plays Kiri, a 14-year-old, blue-skinned alien.It’s a role that reminded Weaver of her own adolescence and the winding path she has carved since. Born Susan Weaver to a television-executive father and actress mother in Manhattan, she picked the name Sigourney out of “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager, an act of willful reinvention in a life that would be full of such choices. “But I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” she told me in Venice. “I’m pure instinct, and I’ve learned to trust those instincts.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Weaver as a 14-year-old Na’vi girl in the “Avatar” sequel. Early on “I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began.”20th Century StudiosDoes this feel like an unusually prolific phase of your career?I’ve just been doing one film a year, but they’re all coming up at the same time as if I threw some magic beans out the window and suddenly there were all these great plants. But I’m happy about it because I’ve always secretly had this dream of being an actress in a repertory theater. Once that didn’t happen, I thought, “Doesn’t matter, I can do it myself. I’ll play the maid one day and the queen another, and I’ll keep jumping around, hopscotching from one genre and one kind of role to another.” So it’s a lovely expression of my earliest dream.When you pick a role, is it informed by the last role you played?It’s never about the role for me, ever. It’s about the script, I don’t even care who the director is. I was an English major, I can’t help it: I know about structure — beginning, middle, end — and I know the story has to be about more than the people in it. If it doesn’t pass those tests, I don’t care how good you are, it’s not for me. The next thing is the director and their vision, and to work with someone who’s passionate. Not with someone who says, “Well, let’s get this over with.”You’ve had those experiences?Only a little. And that’s why I decided I would stay in New York, after going out to L.A. in the ’70s and waiting to be seen by casting people. I felt that in New York, we talked much more about the nobility of our profession, how important it was and also how much fun it was. And being around actors at that time in L.A., there was a real feeling that it wasn’t a noble profession, that you were there to get famous or something. I found it all too confusing, so I went back.Tell me about playing Virginia, the abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Virginia seemed to pop right out of me. I could have been Virginia in another life, I just felt her rangy style in my body. But it was very hard to get the movie financed. We tried to shoot it in other states, and no state wanted us, and Connecticut finally gave us a place to shoot.Were those states rejecting the film because it was about abortion?Maybe they didn’t like the script either, but it certainly was the subject matter. They didn’t want to be tarred with that.A prelude of events to come.Such a prelude, and I didn’t see it coming. I just thought, “Well, it was probably a conservative mayor, or whatever.” I didn’t see the big picture.Opposite Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane.” Weaver said it was hard to find a state to film in, in large part because the subject was abortion. Officials “didn’t want to be tarred with that.”Wilson WebbDo you remember your political awakening as a young woman?Freshman year, I arrived at Sarah Lawrence, and a bunch of girls were burning their bras — I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It was quite an exciting place, and I happened to be at college during a very political time. Almost every spring there would be protests, sit-ins. Every time I talked about politics, my father [Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the creator of the “Today” and “Tonight” shows] would say, “Are you on drugs?” And I’d say, “No, not yet. Give me time.”Did you grow up in a conservative family?Well, my parents seemed quite conservative. I worked for a Republican congressman on Capitol Hill for a summer, but I never voted for a Republican. I think as an artist, we tell these stories about self-expression, about the people’s welfare and how vulnerable they are, and I don’t know how you could be a Republican and tell the stories that actors tell. I’m sure I’m wrong, I’m sure there are lots of Republicans that could, but you have to be able to play anyone, which forces you to have compassion for people with other positions and reinforces your conviction that people need freedom.What were you like at 14, the age you play in “Avatar: The Way of Water”?It was a period of my life when my parents were traveling a lot, and I felt a little like a lost soul. I was this tall when I was 12, and I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began. I remember so well being that age, and to be given an opportunity to revisit that in a safe way is a great gift, isn’t it?The role is motion-capture. Do you recognize yourself in Kiri, or does the character seem like someone else?I’ve only seen a couple of scenes, but all I hope is that it’s truthful. When I would do my warm-up, I was able to drop 60 years and feel the 14-year-old bubbling up, and then I just let her go.Does she fall in love?I don’t know if I can answer that question. I know that she just wants to be with Spider, a human boy, all the time. Even though she’s seven feet tall and he’s a human, they just complement each other. He actually puts blue on himself to pass, but I don’t think she notices much else besides the fun of being with him and being in the forest. They’re just free urchins at the beginning, and they have a kind of golden life there, even though they’re at war and in hiding.“If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesNorma, the character you play in “Master Gardener,” is at the other end of the spectrum. She makes every situation so fraught — even the way she wields a wine glass is like it’s a loaded gun.She’s certainly one of my favorites. Norma is a really complex character — I saw her referred to as icy, but I think she’s a cauldron.She can operate at a remove, but it’s not an icy remove.I’m so glad you see that because I think there’s a tendency to dismiss older women and, if they’re wealthy, to refer to them as icy. It’s one of the best parts I’ve ever had, but I’ve always avoided that kind of character.She’s a fun character to watch, because she’ll so often say or do something that’s wildly inappropriate.It’s one of the best roles I’ve ever had because she is so complex and was never meant to be one thing. There used to be so much emphasis on playing a woman sympathetically, and they only do it to women — nobody worries about the man being sympathetic. Also, I must say, it’s great to play competent women who still have sex lives. It’s something that didn’t used to happen that much in the old days, so I feel very optimistic for me and my peers that as long as they make good stories, older women are going to be a part of it, because they are very powerful in our real lives.When do you feel most powerful in your own life?Gosh, I’m not sure I know how to answer that. Powerful. Well, the Supreme Court decision made me feel very un-powerful, and I think that’s what a lot of women are feeling.In the 1980s, as you were coming into your own as a movie star, did you feel powerful?Whenever I used to go to Hollywood and have to deal with these different studio heads, I was never comfortable. I always felt incredible sexism there, and a kind of resentment that they had to listen to me because I did have this power and I was smart enough to put several sentences together. I used to think, “Oh, it would be fun to direct, but I don’t want to have to deal with those people.”I remember I was trying to raise money for our theater [she was a founder of the Flea Theater in New York], and I asked a studio I have a good connection with if they would make a charitable donation. And they said, “You know what we’ll do? We’re going to give you a bonus, and you can sign that over to your theater.” I said, “It’s not really the same thing. I can make my own charitable contribution.” I was so astonished by their lack of interest, and you’d think after several movies together that there’d be some kind of mutual respect.“I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” Weaver said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn a 1994 interview, you said, “I always felt a little bit illegitimate. Whenever they talked about serious actresses, I always felt that I had one foot in the land of Arnold Schwarzenegger, one foot in the land of Ivan Reitman and maybe a toe in the land of Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.”If you’re a woman, they want to know, are you a babe? Are you a comedian? Are you this or are you that? They didn’t know what to do with me. It was always off-the-track directors who would wake up in the middle of the night and go, “Oh, Sigourney Weaver, she could do this.” And then these things would come to me out of nowhere.After “Alien,” I was sent all these serious-person scripts and most of what I’d done was comedy onstage. I thought, “God, when am I going to get back to that?” That has been frustrating because a good comedy is hard to find, and so are love stories — I love them, but they couldn’t really imagine me in a love story. If I came in the room, all the producers would sit down, and if there was a leading man, he’d usually sit down, too, because they wanted someone different, someone much smaller.Did you feel pigeonholed because of your height?If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that. I think because of my career, I’ve kind of fooled people into thinking that I’m a serious person. There are some things I feel quite serious about, but in general, I’m on the silly side. I think that’s why I love working with Jim Cameron — if it’s an adventure, let me at it. But this is something any actor has to deal with. Anytime a movie registers, you get 10 more offers like that — after “Ice Storm” [1997] I got so many mean, cold ladies. I think the only recourse is just find things to surprise yourself, and you’ll surprise your audience.What’s a good example of that?They didn’t want to see me for “Galaxy Quest” [1999], but I thought, “This is my chance to show my own insecurity when I go out to L.A.,” because no matter who you were, [Hollywood] could make you feel as vulnerable as [her character] Tawny feels. It was one of the reasons I made her such a babe: Babes should have all the friends in the world, but I’m not sure they feel secure about that because they think it’s only skin-deep when it’s not.So now that you have planted these magic beans, and by sheer luck they’ve all bloomed at the same time, what do you do with this garden that you have outside your window?I don’t want to pick it! Probably no one will get as much enjoyment out of these four films as I do. Imagining Norma and Hildy and Virginia and Kiri together, I just feel like I hit the jackpot, man.I would love to see those four characters in a room. Who would get along?I’m not sure what Kiri would think being in a room like that — I’m sure she’d find Norma completely terrifying. I guess it would depend on what kind of wine Hildy brought to the gathering. More

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      James Cameron and the Cast of ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Hold Their Breath

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      The original was the biggest hit ever, but the sequel still took a long time to come together. How will it resonate in a different era of moviegoing?James Cameron knew the question I really wanted to ask about his new sequel, “Avatar: The Way of Water.”“‘What took you so long?’ Let’s not beat around the bush,” the director cracked.It’s a fair query, since after Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi adventure took in nearly $3 billion and became the highest-grossing film of all time, a follow-up that returned us to the beguiling alien world of Pandora was slow to materialize. Hollywood has changed so much in the interim that 20th Century Fox, the studio that financed “Avatar” and Cameron’s megahit “Titanic,” was acquired by Disney right after the sequel finally went into production in 2017.So what did take Cameron so long? On a recent video call with his cast, he confessed to blowing off the movie for a few years while indulging his passion for deep-sea exploration. After constructing a submarine designed to take him to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest-known place on this planet, Cameron accomplished that goal in March 2012, even as his “Avatar” actors fretted.“We kept thinking, ‘I hope he survives to make a new movie,’” Sigourney Weaver said.And even when Cameron convened a writers room to map out a second and third film, “I just wound up with more story than I bargained for,” he said. A tale that was initially conceived to complete a trilogy came to span four more movies, which all required a considerable amount of preproduction: Writing those new movies took four years, and designing their different biomes, cultures and wardrobes took an extra five.But “Avatar: The Way of Water” acknowledges that plenty of time has passed since the first film: In this installment, the soldier-turned-liberator Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his great love, the blue-skinned alien Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), are parents to a brood that includes three Na’vi children, a human boy who becomes part of their coterie and an orphaned, teenage Na’vi played by the 73-year-old Weaver through the magic of motion capture. (This is a different character than the one Weaver played in the first “Avatar,” and one hopes that any potential confusion is mitigated by the casting decision’s irresistible boldness.)Worthington, right, with the director James Cameron on set. “You’ve got to have something that the actors can get their teeth into” Cameron said of the screenplay.20th Century Studios“Avatar: The Way of Water” also adds new co-stars like Cameron’s “Titanic” lead Kate Winslet, and incorporated several deep-sea sequences that required the cast to film underwater while holding their breath for minutes on end. “You always walk away after an ‘Avatar’ journey feeling like you know more than you did before, and that’s exhilarating,” Saldaña said.Do they feel pressure to replicate the stunning success of the first “Avatar”? “You can’t be a slave to the outside forces,” Worthington said. “You’ve just got to go to work and be fearless and as true as you can.” Still, Cameron is a realist: He has already shot the third film and a little bit of the fourth, but he knows that his ability to finish a five-film franchise hinges on the box office performance of “Avatar: The Way of Water,” due in theaters Dec. 16.“If we make some money with two and three,” Cameron said, referring to the sequels, “it’s all mapped out. Scripts are already written, everything’s designed. So just add water.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.It’s not easy to follow up making the highest grossing movie ever, but James, you’ve now had to do it twice. What did you learn from the aftermath of “Titanic” that could be applied as you follow up “Avatar”?The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.From the Archives: Cameron “hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder,” our critic wrote after the release of “Avatar” in 2009.JAMES CAMERON You can’t think in those terms. If I brought that into every decision I make, then it’s like, “OK, is the color that’s going to go on the back of this Ilu going to make the difference of $10 million global gross?” I have to remind myself constantly to just have fun and enjoy the day because otherwise you’re competing with yourself.So is this a more fun James Cameron?SAM WORTHINGTON Yeah, absolutely.CAMERON Don’t all speak at once.What was the biggest difference between making the first and second film?ZOE SALDAÑA There were many more challenges. I was younger in the first installment, I didn’t have children. Now I have three children.Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri. She learned to hold her breath underwater. “I come from generations of island people,” and on colonized islands “you are taught to love the ocean as if it’s a goddess, but you fear it.”20th Century StudiosCAMERON And Zoe and Sam now play parents, 15 years later. In the first movie, Sam’s character leaps off his flying creature and essentially changes the course of history as a result of this crazy, almost suicidal leap of faith. And Zoe’s character leaps off a limb and assumes there’s going to be some nice big leaves down there that can cushion her fall. But when you’re a parent, you don’t think that way. So for me, as a parent of five kids, I’m saying, “What happens when those characters mature and realize that they have a responsibility outside their own survival?”Did having children change the way you take risks in your own life?CAMERON Yes, I was pretty wild in my misspent youth, and there are a lot of risks that I wouldn’t take now. I see some of that wildness in my own kids, and there are stories that are embargoed until they’ve turned a certain age. But it definitely colors your whole perspective to have children.I also want to do the thing that other people aren’t doing. When I look at these big, spectacular films — I’m looking at you, Marvel and DC — it doesn’t matter how old the characters are, they all act like they’re in college. They have relationships, but they really don’t. They never hang up their spurs because of their kids. The things that really ground us and give us power, love, and a purpose? Those characters don’t experience it, and I think that’s not the way to make movies.WORTHINGTON Jim wrote this family in a great way where not only are the stakes life and death, but the conflicts are quite domestic. You’re still having these arguments with kids that you have every day, like, “Pick up your clothes, eat your food,” even though the world is at war. To be honest, I’ve used a lot of what I learned from reacting to teenage boys in the movie and put it back into my real life, because I’ve got three boys — it’s a zoo at my house — and someone’s got to be the Great Santini and keep them in line.James, even before you had kids, a lot of your action films explored that parental dynamic. I’m thinking of Sarah Connor and her son, John, in “Terminator 2,” or Ripley and Newt in “Aliens.”CAMERON I think it’s a question of what interests one as a writer and director. The one thing I’ve learned is that you’ve got to have something that the actors can get their teeth into, something that they can draw on from their life experience. I knew as I was writing it that Sam and Zoe were new parents and that this stuff would resonate for them, but if you’re speaking to a young audience, let them feel validated that kids on another planet, 200 years from now, are going through the same crap they’re going through right now.Sigourney, how did you react when you learned you’d be playing a moody, motion-captured 14-year-old?SIGOURNEY WEAVER I remember when Jim finally made the decision, he said, “You can do this because you’re so immature. Nobody knows this but me, but I know that you’re just 14 at heart.” And I think Jim is about 16, so he’s not off by much! But it was incredibly exciting to set loose your inner 14-year-old and to refine it, because being 14 is not all fun. I think we all remember how excruciating it can sometimes be and how unjust things seem in the moment. If you’re playing someone as sensitive as a 14-year-old girl who’s been uprooted, that’s a whole world of adventure you get to have as this character.Sigourney Weaver plays the teenage Kiri, left, in the new film as her character Dr. Grace Augustine, right, died in the original.20th Century StudiosZoe, what was it like to play the mother figure to Sigourney Weaver?SALDAÑA Oh my God, there were moments I would go, “There’s that teenager that just hates me.” I was a daughter before I became a mother, and I do remember those moments with my mom when I felt completely confused and misunderstood.Movies like “Aquaman” and the upcoming live-action version of “The Little Mermaid” take place underwater but don’t actually submerge the actors. “Avatar: The Way of Water” does, and the actors had to learn how to hold their breath for several minutes to shoot some of its undersea sequences. What’s gained from doing it for real?CAMERON Oh, I don’t know, maybe that it looks good? Come on! You want it to look like the people are underwater, so they need to be underwater. It’s not some gigantic leap — if you were making a western, you’d be out learning how to ride a horse. I knew Sam was a surfer, but Sig and Zoe and the others weren’t particularly ocean-oriented folks. So I was very specific about what would be required, and we got the world’s best breath-hold specialists to talk them through it.SALDAÑA The first step is you fake it till you make it: You tell your boss, “Yeah, absolutely, I’m so excited,” and then it’s complete horror, like, “What am I going to do?” At best, you’re going to walk away with a brand-new aptitude, but I was scared. I come from generations of island people, and the one thing people don’t know about island life is that if you’re from islands that have been colonized, a great percentage of people don’t know how to swim. Through folklore, you are taught to love the ocean as if it’s a goddess, but you fear it.When it came to holding your breath, what were your personal bests?SALDAÑA I’m very competitive, but we had an Oscar-winning actress in our cast that did seven minutes.Was that Kate Winslet?WEAVER Jesus, yeah, seven minutes.Did you have any idea she was capable of that?CAMERON No, and she didn’t either! But Kate’s a demon for prep, so she latched onto the free diving as something that she could build her character around. Kate’s character is someone who grew up underwater as an ocean-adapted Na’vi — they’re so physically different from the forest Na’vi, that we’d almost classify them as a subspecies. So she had to be utterly calm underwater, and it turned out that she was a natural.SALDAÑA I got almost up to five minutes. That’s a big accomplishment, you guys.CAMERON Five minutes is huge. Sig did six and a half.WEAVER To the surprise of the teacher! He said to get rid of your mammalian instinct to go, “Oh my God, my face is in the water.” So you spend several minutes just putting your body back into that element and letting those land-person feelings dissolve.SALDAÑA I was just in Europe, swimming in the Mediterranean with my husband and our children, and I passed it down to my boys — they were swimming underwater. I could do that because I surrendered to something, but it wasn’t wonderful from the beginning, I have to say.CAMERON Now it all comes pouring out.WORTHINGTON The trauma!Since the first film came out, environmental issues have become even more urgent. How does “Avatar: The Way of Water” speak to that?WORTHINGTON In the first movie, Jake Sully says, “Open your eyes. Sooner or later, you have to wake up.” That’s what he does in the movie — he wakes up to the world and this other culture — and I think that “Avatar: The Way of Water” is about protecting all of that.Neytiri and Jake Sully in the sequel. Now that they are parents, Cameron said, “what happens when those characters mature and realize that they have a responsibility outside their own survival?”20th Century StudiosCAMERON In the first film, you wind up with a sense of moral outrage about the destruction of a single tree. We have something very similar that takes place in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” and from what we’ve seen from test audiences, people feel that same sense of moral outrage. Does that translate in some tiny way when people come out of the theater into the way they think about the world, about nature, about our responsibility to the environment? Maybe, I don’t know.WEAVER You opened our eyes in the first one, but the second one, because it deals with the oceans and we’re having a crisis with the oceans, I feel it’s so much more transformative. If our goal is to become part of the World Surf League campaign and protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030, I truly feel that this film is going to advance that goal. And it’s enhanced by the fact that the 3-D will absolutely put you on Pandora, in the water.CAMERON Jacques Cousteau said, “You won’t protect what you don’t love.” He knew that the way to get people to love the ocean is to show it to them with all its beauty and complexity and grandeur. We’re losing the whales, we’re losing the dolphins, we’re losing the sharks. We’re losing the coral reefs due to atmospheric [carbon dioxide] dissolving in the ocean. People will look back a hundred years from now and say, “We had all those things, and we squandered them.” So that’s in [the movie], but in a very organic way as part of the storytelling. The warning is between the lines.The first “Avatar” was a major breakthrough when it came to 3-D. What do you make of what happened to the format in the years after that?CAMERON I think the studios blew it. Just to save 20 percent of the authoring cost of the 3-D, they went with 3-D post-conversion, which takes it out of the hands of the filmmaker on the set and puts it into some postproduction process that yielded a poor result. I do think that the new “Avatar” film will rekindle an interest in natively authored 3-D, which is what I personally believe is the right way to do it. I say either do 3-D or don’t do 3-D, but don’t try to slap it on afterward to get the up-charge on the ticket.SALDAÑA And look, do you want to make a lot of money, or do you want to make something you’re truly proud of that stands the test of time?CAMERON Do I have to choose?SALDAÑA It’s unfortunate, but people chose the moneymaking machine, the post-conversion. And not every director is like Jim, with the level of commitment you put into it. That’s the difference between a project that is just a blockbuster hit and something that is truly special, and I wish more directors would understand that. If they just did a little course at the [Directors Guild of America] …CAMERON I’ll teach it! More

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      ‘The Good House’ Review: Expending Emotional Real Estate

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      Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline star in a film that hides a story about alcoholism inside a soft focus romance.As a real estate agent and as the protagonist of the drama “The Good House,” Hildy Good (Sigourney Weaver) is a confident hostess. The film begins with Hildy describing her life in a small seaside town in Massachusetts, first in voice-over and then in a direct address to the camera.In the spirit of blasé town gossip, Hildy freely offers her back story. Her husband left her to begin seeing men, and her protégé began stealing her clients. However, the secret that threatens Hildy’s happiness is one that she keeps from herself. She’s an alcoholic, and despite previous stints in rehab, she has not been able to give up drinking.The film follows Hildy as she tries to rebuild her life and her business through working with her neighbors as clients. She even begins dating her first love, Frank (Kevin Kline). But the omnipresence of alcohol threatens Hildy’s stability. She can’t resist the bottle, and can’t remember what she’s done when she has one in her hands.The directors Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky use the film’s style as a sleight of hand. At first glance, the movie appears to be a soft focus romance. Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline are beloved performers, still sharp after decades of stardom. The views over the New England harbor charm, and the score cheerily plink-plunks along with assists from the classic rock needle drops. The stylistic placidity draws attention to the disturbance of Hildy’s alcoholism, the way her drinking interrupts even the film’s genre. But the trouble with this cinematic Trojan horse is that the superficial blandness dominates the frame. It’s hard to feel the story’s stakes when the images are always indicating no danger ahead.The Good HouseRated R for language, brief nudity and sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Salinger Year’ Review: Ghost Writers

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘My Salinger Year’ Review: Ghost WritersMargaret Qualley stars in this colorless adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s memoir of her experiences as a young writer in New York City.Margaret Qualley in “My Salinger Year.”Credit…Philippe Bosse/IFC FilmsMarch 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETMy Salinger YearDirected by Philippe FalardeauDramaR1h 41mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.As “My Salinger Year” proves, making a successful movie about introspection is more than a little challenging. Muted almost to the point of effacement, this limp adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 memoir, written and directed by Philip Falardeau, only affirms that what might work on the page doesn’t always pop on the screen.Indeed, the story of Joanna (Margaret Qualley), a bookish former grad student finding her feet in New York City in the 1990s, is so drearily uneventful that you begin to wonder why it was ever deemed filmable. A sprouting poet, Joanna takes a job as assistant to a rigidly old-fashioned literary agent (Sigourney Weaver) whose client list favors authors as creaky as the typewriters and Dictaphones that power her office.[embedded content]Assigned to deal with the effusive fan mail of the agency’s most famous client, the reclusive J.D. Salinger, Joanna, vexed by the dusty form letter she’s been instructed to use, is moved to flout the rules and personalize her responses. Imagining the fans speaking directly to her, she spends most days inside her head, narrating her thoughts while the plot trudges forward. In the evenings, she returns to a low-rent apartment in ungentrified Brooklyn where her narcissistic boyfriend (Douglas Booth) works on his novel and disparages her job.Unable to draw a connection between Joanna’s aimless personal life and her epistolary fancies, “My Salinger Year” never convinces us that she can write, or even that she particularly cares to. Wide-eyed and ingenuous, the character is a blank slate.“I wanted to be extraordinary,” she tells us at the beginning of a movie that persuades us of nothing except her extraordinary immaturity.My Salinger YearRated R for sexual references as bland as the movie around them. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More