James Cameron: From Titanic to Avatar

The last time most people will remember seeing Cameron was on the night of March 23, 1998. It’s hard to forget the director on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in LA, exultant, pumping a golden Oscar statuette into the air and shouting: “I’m the king of the world!” As everyone knew, that was the most famous line in Titanic, exclaimed by Leonardo DiCaprio’s character as he leaned into the wind on the prow of the doomed vessel. Cameron’s incantation of the line was a giant “eff off”, in front of a television audience approaching a billion, to all the naysayers, especially those sitting right in front of him. He could afford to gloat. Titanic had just won 11 Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, matching the record set by Ben-Hur in 1960.

It was an astonishing triumph, all the sweeter for Cameron because in the weeks before Titanic’s release, just three months earlier, almost everyone had predicted that the film — costing more than $200m, $100m over budget and the most expensive ever made — was as fatally doomed as the huge ship whose story it told. Even Cameron thought he was headed for disaster. “We laboured the last six months on Titanic in the absolute knowledge that the studio would lose $100m,” he recalls. “It was a certainty.”

As Titanic neared release, particular venom was spat at Cameron for what was seen as his hubris and monumental extravagance. The film critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote that “Cameron’s overweening pride has come close to capsizing this project”, which he said was “a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances”.

Hackneyed Titanic may have been in some ways, but Cameron, for all his faults, seemed once again to have his electric finger on the pulse of some hitherto unprobed cultural zeitgeist. He had reinvigorated science-fiction film-making in the 1980s and early 1990s, pushing technological and creative boundaries with his Terminator series and his Aliens sequel. Titanic, however, was something else altogether, and, particularly in its appeal to women, almost unfathomable in its emotional power. It went on to become the highest-­grossing film in movie history, eventually making more than $1.8 billion. (It also, almost incidentally, made both DiCaprio and Kate Winslet big international stars.)

The making of Titanic cemented Cameron’s formidable reputation as “the scariest man in Hollywood”. He became known as an uncompromising, hard-charging perfectionist and 300- decibel screamer, a modern-day Captain Bligh with a megaphone and walkie-talkie, swooping down into people’s faces on a 162ft crane. “God damn it!” he would yell at some poor crew member. “That’s exactly what I didn’t want!” Winslet, who chipped a bone in her elbow making Titanic and was worried that she’d drown in the 17m-gallon water tank the ship was to be sunk in, admitted: “There were times when I was genuinely frightened of him. Jim has a temper like you wouldn’t believe.”

During the shoot, a disgruntled crew member put the hallucinogen PCP into the soup that Cameron and others ate one night, sending more than 50 people to hospital. Cameron managed to vomit before the drug took a full hold. Even so, one actor who saw him said: “I was just shocked at the way he looked. One eye was completely red, like the Terminator eye. A pupil, no iris, beet red. The other eye looked like he’d been sniffing glue since he was four.”

Bill Paxton, who has acted in a number of Cameron’s films, including Titanic, and is a friend of the director, admitted: “There were a lot of disgruntled people on the set. Jim is not one of those guys who has the time to win hearts and minds.” Crews even had a nickname for Cameron’s evil alter ego: “Mij” (Jim spelt backwards). “Film-making is war,” the director countered in his defence. “A great battle between business and aesthetics.” Since then, the mythic “Jim Cameron” has featured as a recurring character in the Hollywood-set television series Entourage, played gamely by the real Jim Cameron.

Yet today, in person, Mij is nowhere to be seen. Cameron is surprisingly affable, even congenial, smart and engaging. The Canadian-born director is a little over 6ft tall, dressed as always in his deliberately utilitarian working man’s uniform: blue jeans and a dark-blue denim shirt over a grey T-shirt. He looks only a tad older than he did that night 12 years ago (he’s now 55), and perhaps a few pounds heavier round the middle.

He says the main reason for the break was not the film’s success, but the fact that “it opened my eyes to underwater exploration. The inception of that film was the opportunity to dive to the wreck of the Titanic. I fell in love with deep-ocean exploration and decided to do that for a while”. Cameron has made a number of documentary films about his deep-sea adventures, including Expedition: Bismarck and Ghosts of the Abyss, which took him back to the Titanic. “At a certain point, I always assumed I’d come back to feature film-making — to replenish the treasury, if for no other reason.” Treasury is the word: he’s thought to have made more than $100m from Titanic.

After Titanic, Cameron also got married, for the fifth time, to the actress Suzy Amis, who had a small part in the film. Having seen his earlier marriages — including to the Terminator actress Linda Hamilton and the director Kathryn Bigelow — disintegrate, in part because of his admittedly blinkered focus on film-making, this time, he says, he felt he “needed to be there” for his new wife and their young children. Cameron now has five children: three with Amis, one with Hamilton, and a stepson from Amis’s first marriage.

The other reason for his 12-year hiatus was that he was determined his next feature would be in 3-D. Until recently, few cinemas had been converted to 3-D, but by the time Avatar opens next month, there should be about 2,500 3-D locations in the United States and some 3,200 outside it; the UK has about 400 screens. Cameron had originally intended his next feature to be Battle Angel, based on a Japanese manga cartoon, but when he ran into script problems, he dusted off a script he’d written in 1994: Avatar.

While most mega-budget Hollywood movies are, like Batman and Spider-Man, based on comic books, or, like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, adapted from bestselling novels, Avatar explores a world entirely of Cameron’s creation — a much greater financial gamble, because it’s not a world anyone is yet familiar with. Avatar is set some indeterminate time in the future on Pandora, a moon of a planet in another solar system. Pandora has some of the characteristics of Earth, but on a much grander and more exotic scale: incredibly lush rainforests teem with unusual, beautiful and sometimes terrifying and dangerous life forms. It is home to the Na’vi, a humanoid race, apparently primitive, but highly attuned to their environment. They are about 10ft tall and have blue skin.

Humans, who have turned Earth into a wasteland, are trying to colonise Pandora, bringing them into conflict with the Na’vi. They are mining a mineral that is a superconductor for energy, worth $20m an ounce on Earth. It’s that valuable because humans can’t breathe on Pandora. So the mining corporation has created Avatars, hybrid creatures that are a mix of human and Na’vi DNA.

The main character is Jake Sully, played by the Australian Sam Worthington, a paraplegic ex-Marine who is recruited to become an Avatar partly because this will enable him to experience walking again. Reborn on Pandora in his Avatar form, Jake is sent on a mission to infiltrate the Na’vi, but falls in love with Neytiri, a Na’vi princess, played by Zoe Saldana, and learns to respect the Na’vi way. The film’s climax is an epic battle between the Na’vi, now led by Jake, and the Avatars of the corporation. Some have suggested that the film is going to be Dances with Wolves in Space. It does seem to sound a lavish warning about the dangers of man’s attempts to colonise other men, species and the environment.

I wonder whether, particularly after the traumatic budget problems on Titanic, the studio executives were worried about Cameron making a film on the cutting edge of digital technology. “Oh, yes, absolutely,” he says. “Any sane person would be. We had taken them very slowly by the hand through what we were doing, but many of the answers we were giving them were things we had found out 10 minutes earlier. My God, they were pulling the reins as much as they could. But ultimately what brought them back was the possibility of doing something really unprecedented.”

It’s not hard to see a melange of disparate influences in Avatar: the adventure novels of H Rider Haggard, which thrilled Cameron in his youth; the sci-fi comics and Ray Harryhausen movies that he enjoyed in his teens; traces of his apprenticeship with the low-budget maestro Roger Corman; even the visual memories of barely explored ocean beds and coral reefs he has brought back from his diving adventures. I ask Cameron what he’s hoping audiences coming away from Avatar will feel. “Like they’ve had an experience outside their day-to-day life, outside this world, maybe outside their body,” he says. “It will have been a visual journey, a physical journey — in the sense you feel like you’ve actually climbed that mountain — and an emotional journey.

“I like to blow an audience away. I like to f*** with their heads. I like to show ’em stuff they’ve probably seen in a dream but they’ve never seen in a movie.”

No contemporary director, particularly of such big-budget films, has as much of himself invested in his films as Cameron. And none is as immersed in every aspect of the film-making process — from writing, directing and producing to acting as his own cameraman, editing, even putting make-up on his actors when he feels like it.

“Yes, I am a perfectionist,” he says. “I might as well wear it, but I think all directors are, honestly. Some may just phone it in, but I’ve never met them. The directors I know would happily bleed arterial blood before they’d compromise their movie.” I have a feeling he’s talking about himself.

What about Jim Cameron, the mythic screamer? “You know, there was a period of time when I probably earned the reputation, a period of time when it served me to have it, whether it was true or not, and a period of time, more recently, when it was better just to put that behind us. And maybe I just matured a bit.”

Which seems to be true. There were apparently no sightings of Mij on the Avatar set. Cameron says he began to change, even mellow, when he started making his expedition films. “Before that, the movie was everything,” he says. “I subjugated myself before the film, and everybody else was expected to do the same damn thing. But when we went out on the expeditions, the film wasn’t the most important thing, it was a means to an end. It was the way we financed the expedition. And that creates a big shift in the way you think, the way you think about your team, what you are there to do and how you are responsible for each.

“When I came back to feature production, fortunately I wound up not making a big spectacle film like Titanic that had thousands of extras and hundreds of crew. Even though the end result is epic, the process on Avatar was a small team working in an enclosed bubble. We worked at our little virtual production studio for four years. But, hey, I can still have my bad days, like anybody.” Well, not quite like anybody.

I ask him about the future, particularly given the financial and structural uncertainties Hollywood is facing today. Cameron believes that, as a storyteller, he will always have a job. “Budgets may plunge, but I have already told the studio executives, ‘I don’t care if the highest-budgeted film of the year costs just $2m — as long as I’m the one making that motherf***er, I’m happy.’”

Avatar opens on December 18