James Cameron knows what people in Hollywood are whispering about him behind his back. “He’s too chicken to make a movie after making the highest-grossing film of all time,” he says. Titanic, in case you have forgotten, not only made £1.1 billion, it won 11 Academy Awards, including a best-director Oscar for Cameron. Still, he hasn’t made a feature film since Titanic was released in 1997, and he has spent much of the past year supervising the two-disc Special Edition DVD and four-disc Deluxe Collectors’ Edition DVD of the film.
“It’s an incorrect external perspective on my life,” counters the 51-year-old director, sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel, looking trim and fit and relaxed in a charcoal-grey suit. “It really goes like this: I learnt to scuba-dive when I was 15, and I loved diving before I was a film-maker. I loved wreck-diving. When I had an opportunity to dive the ultimate shipwreck, the Everest of shipwrecks — the Titanic — I took it, and I made a movie as a result of that. And when it turned out to be a huge success, I could then dive all I wanted. I even bought my own submarine. I could now do whatever I wanted. I could enjoy the possibility of exploration throughout the world’s oceans, real exploration, stuff you could only dream of. I got to live my childhood fantasy — which wasn’t to be a movie director. It was to be an explorer, and I got to do that for real.”
In fact, the workaholic Cameron has been as busy as ever, although away from the glare of Hollywood. He has directed two wonderful underwater documentaries — Expedition: Bismarck, about the search for the wreck of the famous German second world war battleship; and Ghosts of the Abyss, the 3-D Imax journey back to the sunken grave of the Titanic. He has produced a number of other deep-ocean documentaries. He has pursued his fascination with space travel — he’s apparently hoping to be on the first Virgin space flight — through his work on the Nasa advisory board. He has produced television series, including Dark Angel, starring Jessica Alba. And through his company, Digital Domain, he has been at the forefront of new digital film technologies, including 3-D developments. He also got married again, to the actress Suzy Amis, his fifth wife, and they have had two children.
Yet as he releases the definitive Titanic DVD box sets, the Canadian-born Cameron is preparing to put that 10-year chapter of his life behind him. He’s finally returning to the Hollywood fray, with what may be an even greater challenge than Titanic. “I’m directing two movies back-to-back and I’ve got two more lined up after that,” he says. “Two movies using the same techniques, the same 3-D digital-camera system, the same virtual production studio. They’re big projects.” The first will come out in the summer of 2007, the second in the summer of 2009. One is called Battle Angel, an epic adaptation of a 12-part Japanese manga series about a 14-year-old amnesiac female cyborg on a quest to discover her identity while battling evil, set in the 26th century. The other, which he refuses to talk about at this stage, may be what is known in Cameron circles as Project 880. He will not be making Terminator 4, and he will not be making True Lies 2, as has been rumoured. The budgets for the two films — which will use the proprietary, high-definition 3-D digital technology he has developed — are likely to be huge. The combined budget could even top half-a-billion dollars, enough to give even the most sanguine studio head years of sleepless nights.
“It’s like the moth and the flame,” says Cameron, once dubbed the “scariest man in Hollywood” for the relentless obsessiveness of his relationship with the studios. “Every time you decide to make a movie, you’re dancing with the devil. It’s just the way we’re wired. We have to do that. There’s no such thing as safe choices. These are big, expensive films that are not safe. But then, neither was Titanic.
“They could probably throw anybody else out of their office who came to them with these projects, but they can’t throw me out because we already did the impossible,” he says. “So they always have this thought, ‘Maybe he knows something we don’t.’ Which is not true — or maybe it is, but it never feels that way. It’s not like there’s a crystal ball.”
As the new DVDs show, Cameron had to make a lot of painful choices to turn Titanic into the huge success it was. He had to cut prominent scenes, scenes that are now included on the DVDs, which show 50 minutes’ worth of never-before-seen footage. This includes a passionate kiss between Jack and Rose; Jack and Rose in their final moments together; and one lavish sequence, which cost more than $1m (£560,000), showing Spicer Lovejoy, played by David Warner, chasing Jack at gunpoint through half-submerged staterooms on the sinking ship.
The other fascinating sequence included on the DVDs is the film’s original nine-minute ending. I won’t reveal how it differs from the theatrical version, but Cameron says that what he has included on the DVD was shot “as the scripted ending of the movie. I wrote it and directed it, and that’s what I thought was going to be the ending”.
However, it was changed, he says, because “There was the moment where the movie really got you, when Jack was dying and Rose gets saved, and there’s the kind of bittersweet melancholy around that, an emotional reaction that you wanted to sustain through to the end when they’re kind of reunited, right before the end credits.” With the original ending, that emotional reaction was lost, Cameron felt. “Films get written twice,” he adds, “ once on script and once in the editing room.”
There’s an enormous amount of other material on the DVDs, including a television special on the production, behind-the-scenes footage, a documentary about a dive to the Titanic, and three amusing Titanic parodies. Although Cameron says these are the final, definitive Titanic DVDs, there is a strong possibility that, at some point in the future, he will release a 3-D version.
“I would have made Titanic in 3-D if I’d had the technology then that we have now,” says Cameron. “Titanic was shot in a style that was about the environment as much as the people: the scenes were always meant to wrap around you to give you a texture of this world, this Edwardian world, the refined architecture.”
Given the unprecedented success of Titanic, it’s easy to forget that the film, which ended up costing about £110m, went tens of millions of dollars over budget and months over schedule, leading to panic at the studios that had financed it: 20th Century Fox and Paramount. I ask Cameron when he first realised he might actually have a hit on his hands.
“We had been dragged across a cheese grater, face down, for two solid years, and we thought we had the biggest money-losing film in history,” Cameron recalls. “Then we had our first preview screening in Minneapolis, and there was a woman sitting behind me — I had no idea who she was: a Minneapolis housewife, maybe — who narrated the entire film. She was like a Pez dispenser: everything just popped out of her mouth. I just kind of leant my chair back so I could hear what she was saying.
“I remember distinctly the moment when Jack and Rose are shaking hands when they are about to part, and Rose is saying, ‘You’re very presumptuous,’ and the woman sitting behind me is saying, ‘Yes, but you’re not letting go of his hand, are you?’ That was the moment when I knew the movie was communicating exactly the way it was meant to.”
I wonder, looking back, what would have happened to Cameron if Titanic had been the disaster so many people had predicted. “I do think about that alternate reality,” he admits, “how devastating that would have been. And it’s going to happen: I’ll make a movie, and it will get savaged. But I also know how capricious it is, so I’m totally sanguine about it.
“If it had been a disaster, though,” he laughs, “I would probably have made 10 movies by now.”
The Titanic Special Edition and Deluxe Collectors’ Edition DVDs are released on November 7
