Sigourney Weaver recently talked to the United Press about her role in the ‘not soon to be released’, Avatar. Working on the sci-fi epic meant that she would be reunited with director James Cameron, who made Weaver a household name after they worked together on Aliens back in 1986.

“It was great,” Weaver told reporters in New York Monday. “I’m so fond of him personally. He loves actors; he’s such a good director. … I can’t believe it’s been 20 years. We picked up like we’d never been apart, like an old married couple.”

“We had a long talk about what he had not been doing and what he had been doing and how he really wanted me to do this character,” Weaver recalled. “He had thought about making it a man, as well, but had decided, in the end, that he wanted it to be a woman and he wanted it to be me.

“And it’s such a great — like all of his women characters — it was a great woman character and I teased him because, to me, I’m playing James Cameron in the movie … with his kind of brilliant, scientific approach, driven, idealistic, perfectionistic, but with great heart underneath.”

The character of Ripley in the Alien movies is considered to be one of the most kick ass female characters of all time. Cameron knows how to make his female characters more then just a girl who needs to be saved, or the girl who screams constantly. The fact that Cameron could easily have made the role a man, suggests that Dr. Grace Augustine will not need any help if she is confronted by any aliens in Avatar.