At about eight o’clock one recent morning, sitting at the end of a long
conference table in his offices on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles,
James Cameron laughs when I ask why it’s taken him so long to get back in
the saddle.
We are meeting early because Cameron is racing to finish Avatar, his first
feature film since Titanic. It is a typically gargantuan Cameron
extravaganza, a ridiculously ambitious, $230m, 3-D sci-fi adventure epic,
four years in the making. It will be released on thousands of screens across
the world on December 18, exactly 12 years less one day after Titanic, his
last movie, came out. Cameron says he knows that a lot of people in
Hollywood think he was just “too chicken shit” to make another film after
Titanic: “It’s a natural conclusion, but it’s incorrect.”
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.
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