James Cameron interview
His film Avatar is coming out soon - The New Yorker has a nice
interview/biography:
Man of Extremes
The Return of James Cameron
by Dana Goodyear
The director James Cameron is six feet two and fair, with paper-white hair and turbid blue-green eyes. He is a screamer�righteous, withering, aggrieved. �Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this motherfucker?� he shouted, an inch from Arnold Schwarzenegger�s face, after the actor went AWOL from the set of �True Lies,� a James Bond spoof that Cameron was shooting in Washington, D.C. (Schwarzenegger had been giving the other actors a tour of the Capitol.) Cameron has mastered every job on set, and has even been known to grab a brush out of a makeup artist�s hand. �I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt,� he says. �It saves so much time.� His evaluations of others� abilities are colorful riddles. �Hiring you is like firing two good men,� he says, or �Watching him light is like watching two monkeys fuck a football.� A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly; they call the dark side of his personality Mij�Jim backward.
The pressures on Cameron are extreme, never mind that he has brought them on himself. His movies are among the most expensive ever made. �Terminator 2� was the first film to cost a hundred million dollars, �Titanic� the first to exceed two hundred million. But victory is sweeter after a close brush with defeat. �Terminator 2� earned five hundred and nineteen million around the world, and �Titanic,� which came out in 1997, still holds the record for global box-office: $1.8 billion.
Cameron is fifty-five. It has been twelve years since he has made a feature film; �Avatar,� his new movie, comes out on December 18th and will have cost more than two hundred and thirty million dollars by the time it�s done. He started working on it full time four years ago, from a script he wrote in 1994. �Avatar� will be the first big-budget action blockbuster in 3-D; Cameron shot it using camera systems that he developed himself. He is a pioneer of special effects: the undulating water column of �The Abyss� and the liquid-silver man of �Terminator 2� helped to inspire the digital revolution that has transformed moviemaking in the past two decades. The digital elements of �Avatar,� he claims, are so believable that, even when they exist alongside human actors, the audience will lose track of what is real and what is not. �This film integrates my life�s achievements,� he told me. �It�s the most complicated stuff anyone�s ever done.� Another time, he said, �If you set your goals ridiculously high and it�s a failure, you will fail above everyone else�s success.�
A long and wonderful read.
Looking forward to this movie -- The Abyss is one of my favorites.
Posted by DaveH at October 20, 2009 2:43 PM