Sigourney Weaver suspects that director James Cameron’s epic science fiction adventure, Avatar, will change Hollywood forever because of the stunning new 3-D technology that Cameron has perfected. “It was quite an adventure,” the actress tells CanWest News Service. “We were in New Zealand for a lot of it, where I’d never worked. We were working at Peter Jackson’s studio with his crew. It was a demanding shoot but it was very exhilarating because we were all doing something we’d never done before. We’d run off and watch these 3-D dailies… and they were so beautiful! I don’t know why people haven’t used 3-D for a legitimate picture before – it’s always been something like Flash Gordon. But these scenes were really about something, played beautifully by our young actors, and to see them in a 3-D context was a revelation to me. It’s such a natural step forward for our business. I think kids soon will be saying: `I don’t want to see that movie – it’s flat.”‘ Sigourney Weaver, whose friendship with Cameron dates back to Aliens some 20 years ago, felt as though she was embarking on her own adventure when she signed up for his inter-planetary epic and was plunged into a world of digital animation, motion-capture technology, up-to-the-minute virtual reality techniques, spectacular live action sequences – all of it employing a 3-D process which took her breath away. “I’m so fond of Jim personally. He loves actors. He’s a good director. He has no ego about his writing. He works in primary colours and it’s always based on really strong themes, so it’s a real challenge to deliver characters of the size he wants in a subtle way. But I had a great time working with him. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years, and we picked up as if we’d never been apart – like an old married couple.” While filming Avatar, in which she plays an inter-planetary botanist named Dr. Grace Augustine, Sigourney loved to watch James Cameron work. “He’d invented these cameras. He operated them on almost every shot – and they’re huge. And he had so much to do with the design and the whole concept of this different world. He invented so many of the creatures – I just can’t believe what he’s capable of. It’s going to be really awesome.” To a degree, she ended up feeling that the character she was playing in Avatar was a facsimile of the driven director himself. “He’d called me up and we had a long talk about what he’d not been doing and what he had been doing. And then he said he really wanted me to see this character he had. He’d thought about making it into a man but decided in the end he wanted it to be a woman – he wanted it to be me. I’ve teased him that I’m playing Jim Cameron in the movie with his kind of brilliant scientific approach: driven, idealistic, perfectionist – but with a great heart underneath.” Sigourney Weaver’s voice can be heard in two animated films this year: Wall•E as well as The Tale of Despereaux which she will be narrating.