The Impossible Reality of James Cameron
FORTY YEARS ago, the kind of kid Jim Cameron was, the jocks in high school just wouldn’t leave him alone. This was in Chippawa, Ontario, not far from the roar of Niagara Falls. He was a science geek who once fashioned a diving bell out of a mayo jar and sent a mouse down to the bottom of a local creek. He’d take the bus to museums in Toronto and spend his time sketching Etruscan helmets and dinosaur bones. He was lanky, and clumsy, and a terrible athlete, probably the worst wrestler in the entire school — “useless,” a classmate recalls. So the jocks had it in for him. They’d wait for him at the top of stairs, bop the books out from under his arms, send them scattering. Or else they’ll punch him in the gut, pow, just because. He didn’t stick up for himself. He stood and took it. He was precisely the kind of shy suburban kid who grows up to take his revenge bloodily, with guns and knives.
Only he didn’t go in that direction, not exactly. Instead, he became a major motion-picture director and earned a reputation as “the scariest man in Hollywood.” In 1989, during the making of The Abyss, he ran his production in such a way that star Ed Harris burst into tears. On one shoot, crew members wore T-shirts that said YOU EITHER DO IT MY WAY OR YOU DO ANOTHER FUCKING MOVIE. And so it’s been, ever since his first big movie, The Terminator, in 1984, led him to make some of the most expensive (and most profitable) movies of all time, including Aliens, Terminator 2 and, of course, Titanic.
The last time most people saw him was 11 years ago, on a bright 11-Oscar night for Titanic, when he ascended the stage to accept his Best Director award and, quoting his own movie, bellowed, “I’m the king of the world, whooooo!” He took a lot of heat for that remark, as it smacked of overweening hubris, and since then he’s laid pretty low. Right at this moment, however, he’s sitting in front of a giant monitor in a darkened room on the Fox Studios lot in L.A., laboring over CG effects for Avatar, his first feature since Titanic. The pressure is on. The film has a budget of $230 million, and if it fails at the box office it’ll be a fiasco not only for Cameron and Fox but also for the entire movie industry. It’s the first suitable-for-adults movie to be shot in 3-D. The effects are gee-whiz stunning; when a character goes off a cliff, you can almost feel the air resistance in your eyeballs. True, you still have to wear 3-D glasses, and so far only 2,500 of the nation’s theaters are digitally rigged. Even so, Hollywood is counting on the movie to usher in a Golden Age of Cecil B. DeMille proportions. All that is resting on Cameron’s shoulders.
Now, on the monitor, a helicopter gun-ship known as the dragon swings into view and begins blasting its cannons. Cameron replays the clip a few times, then circles an area of fire and smoke with a laser pointer and says to his CG crew, “What’s nice is the differential rise rate through the convection. The haze looks great. It’s also got the right amount of simming, hitting the leaves with the wind effect. But don’t forget to grad it off, have a radial drop away from the dragon. Then we have to have another grad where it’s active here, less active there, otherwise we’re opening up a can of whoop-ass on ourselves about how we interacted fire with the rotor wash.”
Everyone seems to know what he’s talking about, nodding and taking notes. But even if you don’t, it’s interesting to listen to him, both for the technical poetry of his words and for their delivery — not angry, not full of frustration, none of what he has been so known for. Could it be that he’s changed and somehow moderated the distance between candy-ass kid and dukes-up adult?
“He’s a fucking pussycat — don’t believe that other stuff,” says Avatar animation director Richie Baneham. But then he says, “You do have to ease people into his work flow, because his work flow is to react, like, ‘This is not what we fuckin’ talked about! What the fuck is this!’ Jim has a very strong sense of vision.”
“I still have my bad days, which anybody does,” Cameron himself says during a break in the action. “Before this movie, though, I felt very adversarial with my crew. But now, when I do have a bad moment, I’ll take that person aside and apologize, or do it publicly in front of the group.” He stops for a moment, cheeks pinking, looking a little put upon. I Ie doesn’t really like having to defend his actions. “Look,” he continues. “Avatar is a big-budget picture. But it’s not some crazy runaway thing that’s out of control like Titanic was. We’re right on trajectory. So, that’s not a story. And me, I’ve learned an awful lot in the past decade. So, me being a wack job is, I don’t think, a new story anymore. So, what is the new story?”
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