“Man of Extremes The Return of James Cameron”
Fascinating piece on writer-director James Cameron in the latest New Yorker:
The director James Cameron is six feet two and fair, with paper-white hair and turbid blue-green eyes. He is a screamer — righteous, withering, aggrieved. “Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this motherfucker?” he shouted, an inch from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face, after the actor went AWOL from the set of “True Lies,” a James Bond spoof that Cameron was shooting in Washington, D.C. (Schwarzenegger had been giving the other actors a tour of the Capitol.) Cameron has mastered every job on set, and has even been known to grab a brush out of a makeup artist’s hand. “I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt,” he says. “It saves so much time.” His evaluations of others’ abilities are colorful riddles. “Hiring you is like firing two good men,” he says, or “Watching him light is like watching two monkeys fuck a football.” A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly; they call the dark side of his personality Mij — Jim backward.
The pressures on Cameron are extreme, never mind that he has brought them on himself. His movies are among the most expensive ever made. “Terminator 2” was the first film to cost a hundred million dollars, “Titanic” the first to exceed two hundred million. But victory is sweeter after a close brush with defeat. “Terminator 2” earned five hundred and nineteen million around the world, and “Titanic,” which came out in 1997, still holds the record for global box-office: $1.8 billion.
Cameron is fifty-five. It has been twelve years since he has made a feature film; “Avatar,” his new movie, comes out on December 18th and will have cost more than two hundred and thirty million dollars by the time it’s done. He started working on it full time four years ago, from a script he wrote in 1994. “Avatar” will be the first big-budget action blockbuster in 3-D; Cameron shot it using camera systems that he developed himself. He is a pioneer of special effects: the undulating water column of “The Abyss” and the liquid-silver man of “Terminator 2” helped to inspire the digital revolution that has transformed moviemaking in the past two decades. The digital elements of “Avatar,” he claims, are so believable that, even when they exist alongside human actors, the audience will lose track of what is real and what is not. “This film integrates my life’s achievements,” he told me. “It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Another time, he said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”
Given the current state of Hollywood, obsessed with remakes, sequels, and pre-branded brands, it’s important for movies like Avatar to succeed. You can say whatever you want about Cameron, but the movie is if anything original.
The New Yorker article goes into a lot of detail about Cameron’s personality, but I thought this aspect was most interesting: His fascination with strong female leads in his movies:
Hollywood metonymy for female characters is “handbags,” also known as “girlfriend parts” — in other words, incidental sidekicks. Gale Anne Hurd, Cameron’s second wife, and the producer of his first three films, says that Cameron always found women more interesting than men as protagonists. “He felt that they were underutilized in sci-fi, action, and fantasy,” she said. “And that just about everything you could explore in a male action hero could be explored better with a woman.”
In 1981, Cameron had the idea that became his first autonomous movie. It came to him, as he tells it, in the post-Freudian form of divine intercession: a dream. He was in Rome, trying to see a cut of “Piranha 2,” a bikinis-and-blood exploitation flick that he had been hired to direct. (He had been fired by the Italian executive producer, and wanted to get his name taken off the film.) He was sick and broke, and staying in a tiny pensione. One night, he said, he dreamed of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Then he sketched the figure cut in half and crawling after a woman. He said, “I thought, That was cool. I’ve never seen that in a movie before.”
Cameron came home and recruited Wisher and Frakes to help him with a storyline centered on the chrome skeleton he had begun to think of as the terminator. He analyzed the common traits of the ten most successful movies of all time: an average person in extraordinary jeopardy was a major trope. His story posited a future when much of Earth has been destroyed in a catastrophic nuclear war; out of the rubble, a race of machines rises up and tries to eliminate the few remaining human beings. To win the war for good, the machines send a cyborg terminator back in time, to 1984 Los Angeles, to kill the woman, Sarah Connor, a waitress at a burger joint who will later give birth to the leader of the human resistance.
As a young writer, Cameron borrowed a trick from Walter Hill, who, working on the outer-space horror movie “Alien,” took a character (a young ensign named Ripley) that was originally male and, with minimal revision, made the character female. (Sigourney Weaver played the role, Ellen Ripley.) As Cameron described the technique, “You write dialogue for a guy and then change the name.” After “The Terminator,” Cameron was hired to write and direct the sequel to “Alien.” His movie, “Aliens,” intensified Ripley’s machismo, and gave her an important new motivation: to save a little girl whose parents have been killed by aliens. Weaver says that she was shocked when she showed up for work, not having read the script’s stage directions carefully. “I had been working for gun control since college,” she said. “I get to the set and, I’m telling you, I had never seen so many guns, all designed by Jim. And then there was my weapon, this super-weapon — a machine-gun-bazooka-flame-thrower all in one.” Her performance was nominated for an Academy Award, a rare recognition for the star of a sci-fi action film.
In the pièce de résistance, Weaver, who also has a large role in “Avatar,” dons a metal-plated hydraulic suit and confronts the Alien Queen, a bony black monster with dripping translucent fangs, like a T. Rex skeleton exhibit come to life, whose goo-encrusted ovipositor is a Satanic vision of the procreative principle. As an instance of feminist iconography it perhaps leaves something to be desired. “Get away from her, you bitch!” Weaver spits when the Queen goes for the little girl, invoking an archetype that is more catfight than warrior goddess, before she engages her in hand-to-hand combat and takes the old girl down.
Of all the movies coming out through the end of the year, Avatar is the one that my college students seem most excited about — and frankly me, too.
It debuts on December 18th. Here is a trailer:
For more information, go here to the movie’s official website.