Our man Ripley

Lest we forget, it was Ridley Scott who, with his second feature film, Alien (1979), brought us one of the greatest gender-busters in cinematic history, Ripley. In Dan O'Bannon's original screenplay, every character in the film was named, but not gendered. Thus it was up to Scott to pick and choose which characters would be male or female. The result was some of the most subversive casting imaginable, running counter to every gender stereotype possible. Ripley, the strongest, most resilient character, went to Sigourney Weaver. And the character who is impregnated with the alien was played by a man, John Hurt.

Surprisingly, Scott claims his casting of Weaver in the title role held little significance for him at the time. "Once we got into it, I got so used to Sigourney in the part that I never really separated it from her performance, other than her being the survivor. It was kind of a neat idea, to make what could have been a male character into a female one. It was just kind of curious."

Scott does have strong opinions about how Ripley was handled in the subsequent sequels, including Aliens, James Cameron's follow-up, which became one of the most successful action films of all time. "I think what we made was a film that was visceral, in a sense that we showed less, and consequently was more successful in its target, which was terror. In the second one, because they hadn't explored the idea of reinventing the creature, one had already become used to seeing it. You saw it too often, it was too present. I think the same went for the third one as well. They were more action movies than the first one was."

Ripley appeared to die at the end of director David Fincher's Alien 3, but with fans of the series so disappointed--and with further potential box-office profits beckoning--one of the most popular female heroines in film history is being reborn this fall in Alien Resurrection. Apparently, some of Ripley's DNA was saved in a petri dish and now she's been cloned as part of a Company experiment. Weaver returns to the title role with Winona Ryder and Ron Perlman joining the cast. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who co-directed the ultra-strange post-apocalyptic comedy Delicatessen (1991), is taking over the fourth entry.

"I think the next one might actually be interesting," says Scott, "because it has such an unusual director."

-Matthew Hays