With upcoming sci-fi epic Avatar set to end twelve years of cinema exile for James Cameron, Trevor Hogg profiles the career of the influential Hollywood filmmaker in the second of a three part feature… read part one here.
Determined to avoid the fiasco he encountered with Piranha II: The Spawning, James Cameron set about making sure it did not occur again. “Because of my strong background in special effects, my natural inclination was to lean toward science fiction. But realistically, I know the most money I could probably raise to make a picture would be $3 or $4 million. I knew I would have to write a contemporary story in a contemporary location.” Keeping the budget in mind, Cameron began writing the screenplay with his good friend William Wisher Jr. (Judge Dredd), and first-time producer Gale Anne Hurd (Hulk), a former executive assistant to Roger Corman.
“I hit on the idea of the future being determined by something that’s happening now; someone who’s unaware of the results of their actions finds out they have to answer for those actions – in the future,” explained Cameron about the origins of his breakout film, The Terminator. “So what’s the most extreme example of that I can think of? If the world has been devastated by nuclear war, if global events are predicated on one person, who is the least likely person you can imagine? A nineteen-year-old waitress who works at Bob’s Big Boy.” The story idea proved to be marketable. “I had many, many people trying to buy that script, but I wouldn’t sell the script to them unless I went with it as the director. Of course that was a turn-off for almost everybody, but we did find one low-budget producer who was willing to make the film. That was John Daly at Hemdale, and that’s how I got my real start.”
Released in 1984, The Terminator stars Linda Hamilton (Dante’s Peak) as Sarah Connor, a young woman destined to give birth to the saviour of the human race; with the arrival of a time-traveling cyborg assassin she finds herself fleeing for her life. “Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger [Conan the Barbarian] as our Terminator…shouldn’t have worked,” stated Cameron on the actor’s career defining role. “The guy is suppose to be an infiltration unit, and there’s no way you wouldn’t spot a Terminator in a crowd instantly if they all looked like Arnold. It made no sense whatsoever. But the beauty of movies is that they don’t have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.”
Cameron does not find the appeal of his trademark movie franchise odd at all. “The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that’s why people key into them. They’re about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has not compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they’ve become machines in human form.”
In response to Linda Hamilton’s infamous remark that she believed her director to be on the side of the global-conquering machines, James Cameron replied, “It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give something that they can act with. You can’t tell them a lot of abstract information about their character… They need something tangible.” The notorious perfectionist went on to add, “What is misunderstood about my particular filmmaking process, is that I get people to go that extra mile that they’ve never done before.”
Made on a budget of $6.5 million, the picture grossed $78 million in worldwide box office receipts. David Kehr of the Chicago Reader wrote, “As a souvenir of a kind of B-grade action cinema that has all but vanished, The Terminator should find a small place in the heart of every movie addict.” The film critic’s prediction became true as the line, “I’ll be back.” has become part of the cinematic lexicon and in 2008 the movie was selected for preservation by the National Film Register.
While developing The Terminator, James Cameron wrote the screenplay Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) which was radically rewritten by the star of the picture, Sylvester Stallone. Moving his attention towards another project, the director decided to follow in the footsteps of British filmmaker Ridley Scott (Kingdom of Heaven) by producing a sequel to Alien (1979).
By choosing a story that centred around another strong female character, Cameron was perceived as continuing what he started in The Terminator. “What I found so interesting is that a lot of people made the mistake of thinking I was presenting Sarah Connor as a role model for women. Nothing could be farther than the truth. I wanted people to invest in her emotionally, to feel sorry for her, because she had been through such hell. And there were a lot of people, who made a straight-line extrapolation from [Lt. Ellen] Ripley to Sarah.” The filmmaker went on to say, “They’re very different characters. Ripley’s been through a trauma, but she had certain innate characteristics of leadership and wisdom under fire; she’s a true hero. Sarah’s not really a hero. She’s an ordinary person who’s been put under extreme pressure, and that makes her warped and twisted, but at the same time strengthened, in a sad kind of way.”
Aliens (1986) has Sigourney Weaver (Gorillas in the Mist) reprising her role as Ripley, but rather than battle the hostile creatures within the confines of a deep space vessel, she finds herself trapped on their home planet. “I get to the set and, I’m telling you, I had never seen so many guns, all designed by Jim,” recalled Weaver. “And then there was my weapon, this super-weapon – a machine-gun-bazooka-flame-thrower all in one.” The confrontations were not restricted to the big screen as hostilities erupted between James Cameron and his production crew. “You need a team and you need the respect and the trust of that team,” reflected the moviemaker. “That was a lesson that took me a while to figure out, because at first I just wanted to do it all myself.” Cameron also had problems with the acting talent; he replaced one of his lead actors, James Remar (The Cotton Club) with a familiar face, Michael Biehn (Tombstone) from The Terminator. “I have since come to learn that…There has to be some chaos, some looseness, so the actors are given opportunities to give you their best.”
As for the closing sequence where the thought-to-be-safe Ripley and the little orphaned girl Newt (Carrie Henn) are suddenly threatened by the Alien Queen, James Cameron remarked, “I like to lead the audience; so when the audience thinks the film is over that’s when they’re thrust into a whole new territory that heightens the emotional experience. If you, as a screenwriter, can create certain ground rules and get the audience into your rhythm, you can get them right out to end of the dock, then give them a big kick in the ass and they’re going to suddenly find themselves in a new place where they never thought the journey was going to take them.”
Movie critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago-Sun Times wrote, “When I walked out of the theatre, there were knots in my stomach from the film’s roller-coaster ride of violence.” The picture was featured on the magazine cover of Time and received seven Academy Award nominations including Best Actress (Sigourney Weaver); it won for Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects.
Dusting off a story which was inspired by a science seminar he had attended on deep sea diving as a high school student, James Cameron selected his next project entitled The Abyss. “It was about a research facility 2000 feet down, perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Cayman Trench. I liked the juxtaposition of a tropical resort island five miles away, people sunning themselves on the beach in Grand Cayman, and just a few miles away is one of the deepest spots on the planet.” The original tale lacked the alien element of the 1989 theatrical version. “It was purely psychological. People were making forays down the wall and not coming back. The remaining scientists thought maybe there was some predator down there or something was wrong with the equipment. They checked everything 50 times. They kept sending people down to rescue the ones who were missing until there was just one guy left. The story ends with the last guy making his descent to find out what the hell happened to the others. That’s the way a scientist would do it: ‘I gotta know; it’s more important than my life to find out what happened.’”
An aquatic adventure caused the director to radically alter his original idea. “Many years later I was in Grand Cayman. There was a little company there that would give you a ride in a research submersible they’d purchased. For $500 you could go down into the Cayman Trough. It was a three-person craft, a pilot and two passengers. You sat right on the floor of this tin can, and it had an observation bubble in the front. We went around a shipwreck that was sitting at about 900 feet, stuck on the wall, just like the sub in The Abyss. After we’d made that dive, I resurrected my story and used it as the nucleus for a far more complex feature-length idea.”
Filmed over eighteen months, all the underwater scenes were shot in two reactor vessels of an unfinished nuclear power plant in South Carolina. “At 55 feet, you’re not quite at two atmospheres. You’re getting into decompression if you work more than an hour or so at that depth. We were diving between five and ten hours a day, depending on the scene.” The cast which included Ed Harris (Pollock), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money), and Michael Biehn, were the last ones to be brought down. “We’d light the scene, we’d set it up, we’d rehearse it with doubles, then we’d ask the actors to join us. We’d shoot for 30-45 minutes, then we’d take the actors back to the surface.”
The aquatic picture about a group of scientists participating in the military rescue of a sunken U.S. nuclear submarine had almost a spiritual significance for Cameron. “You go into the deepest, darkest part of the ocean to confront the monster, and the monster is you. You go down to confront the aliens, and all they do is hold up a mirror and show you how fucked up you are.” Art began to imitate life. In response to brutal onset conditions, the production crew rechristened the movie “The Abuse.”
Fascinated by the various fluid-breathing experiments conducted by Dutch scientist Johannes Kylstra, James Cameron consulted Peter Bennett, the world’s leading hyperbaric physiologist, about constructing the infamous rodent scene. “What you see is a rat breathing a liquid. There are no tricks, no special effects of any kind.” The most innovated visual effect is the alien water tentacle which has the ability to mimic a human face. Renowned special effects company Industrial Light & Magic spent six months developing the software program required to create the creature which appears on the big screen for seventy-five seconds.
Test screened in Dallas, the picture was poorly received. “Dances with Wolves [1990] hadn’t come out yet; no one had put a three-hour film into the marketplace in fifteen years that had been a commercial success,” observed Cameron. “It was a business decision. I wanted to make my key dramatic points and have the film be a hit. I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong with that. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have done something halfway between the version we released and the long version.”
Changes were made such as the elimination of the concluding wave scene (reinserted in the Special Edition version) which brought up the test scores. However, reaction to the movie remained mixed upon its release. Chris Dafoe of The Globe and Mail wrote, “At its best, The Abyss offers a harrowing, thrilling journey through inky waters, and high tension. In the end, however, this torpedo turns out to be a dud – it swerves at the last minute, missing its target and exploding ineffectually in a flash of fantasy and fairy tale shtick.” Despite the attitude of the film critic’s, The Abyss won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects and was nominated for Best Art Direction-Set Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Sound.
“A movie can be more than just telling a story. It can be a piece of art,” realized James Cameron, while watching a film by a legendary American director. “Stanley Kubrick was an influence because I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], and the more I learned about him and his methodology the more I realized what a rigorous intellectual exercise filmmaking was for him, and I was inspired by that. The word perfectionist has a fussy connotation of unnecessary work, of unnecessary complication of the process, but I think that everything he did in his process was necessary.”
Next on the cinematic agenda for the obsessive filmmaker was a sequel which would top its predecessor for critical acclaim and box office appeal.
Read part three here.
For more on James Cameron, visit JamesCameronOnline or James Cameron’s Movies & Creations blog. For more on Avatar, visit the official site.
Read his Terminator treatment, along with a draft of Aliens.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
