Interview: James Cameron
Conversation with the filmmaker who produced and co-wrote the screenplay for the movie Alita: Battle Angel.
A Little White Lies conversation with James Cameron whose writing-directing credits include The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies, Titanic, and Avatar. He co-wrote and produced the upcoming movie Alita: Battle Angel.
LWLies: Alita: Battle Angel is powered by some extraordinary computer generated visuals. By what metric are you judging the success of these visuals?
Cameron: Robert and my producing partner John Landau were mostly responsible for the finished work on the visual effects in Alita. I’d cast my eye over things every week. I’d do a quick run-through of all the shots that were in progress. I’d give notes where I felt it was necessary. But it was really up to them.
What kind of notes were you giving?
For example, the Motorball stuff was struggling, because it was the most pure CG sequence in the film. Everything else was more set-based — there was no set for Motorball, other than the bleachers and the crowd. Everything on the track was 100 per cent computer generated. I thought it was not quite at the reality levels of the rest of the film. I suggested a few small changes that I thought would punch it up. They were embraced and executed, and I think it helped. Now I think the sequence is spectacular. I didn’t give any notes or movement or dynamics or editing or anything like that. Robert is masterful at all that. But some of the CG stuff he’s done in the past — and he’ll readily admit this — had a whimsical, slightly cartoony quality to it, like in the Spy Kids movies.
Robert and I had a friendship of 25 years that preceded our work on this. We just agreed to be really respectful of each other’s territory. We each brought to it what we knew best. And Robert’s a shooter — he’s a floor guy. He loves to be out there with the camera and the crew. I never went to the set at all, that was his turf. Behind the scenes, we collaborated on the writing. I wrote the script and he cut it down. If he wanted to tweak some scenes, I’d throw some pages at him here or there. He’d rework them and send them back. We rewrote the ending a couple of times.
Are we heading towards a future where computers will decide the shots for filmmakers?
I think you’ve got plenty of AI experts around who would say, yeah, sure. They’d take every movie every made, throw it into a massive database, feed all that into an AI, deep learning neural networks will analyse why they work, and you’ll have an AI create a movie — and it’ll suck. Because the AI is not embodied, it’s not having the human experience. It’ll be like a filmmaker who only knows other movies as opposed to being human.
People ask me all the time, ‘What would your advice be to a young filmmaker?’ It used to be, pick up a camera and start making a movie. Now my advice is, live a bit of life, then pick up a camera and make a film about what you know and what you’ve experienced. Don’t go from being a superfan in high school to film school, and come out knowing nothing about life except what you’ve seen in movies. Because you don’t know shit. You’ve got nothing new to say.
I stand by that now. That’s the journey I took. I left home when I was 18, I worked as a machinist, I worked as a school bus driver, a school bus mechanic, precision tool guy, truck driver, all kinds of stuff. Worked on auto body — what do you call it over here? I was a panel beater! Got married, had a house with a picket fence, and then I started making films when I was in my mid-twenties. I don’t think I missed anything. It’s not that I was late coming out the gate. I mean, Spielberg, he was 19 when he started, but he’s the exceptional case.
Here is a trailer for Alita: Battle Angel:
For the rest of the Little White Lies interview, go here.
Twitter: @LWLies, @JimCameron.
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