Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

The year is 1954. Dwight D Eisenhower is in the white house, Roger Banister runs the first sub four minute mile, The DNA ‘double helix’ structure is discovered and in the small town of  Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada James Francis Cameron is born. At the age of 17 James moved to the United States and later graduated from California State University with a degree in physics, something that would later prove to be more than worthwhile. Throughout his higher education years, James had aspirations of becoming a screen writer and would spend hours upon hours in the USC library reading pretty much anything he could lay his hands on that related to the technical practice of film making and, in particular, special effects. After graduating he took a job as a truck driver to pay his way while he followed this dream.

It was around this time that he wrote and filmed his first picture; a ten minute science fiction short entitled Xenogenesis. While this picture never really saw the light of day it awoke something within Cameron. In order to learn how to use the camera that he and his friends had rented to shoot the film, he dismantled it and spend the first day of the shoot putting it back together and getting it to work once again. Indeed, the whole project was nothing scarcely more than an experiment. After reading Syd Field’s book Screenplay Cameron had found his true calling and became fascinated with the concept of combining science with art on screen.

Following this revelation James didn’t hang around and wait for things to happen. In the style that defined his career to come, Cameron took the bull by the horns and dove head first into the movie industry. Just three short years after Xenogenesis and a few smaller on-set technical jobs, Cameron landed his first directorial job on the B movie Piranha Part II. The project was doomed from the beginning with Cameron only being hired as director due to the original director leaving the project. Combined with the fact that the film was sorely underfunded and the staff were mainly Italian and unable to speak English, Cameron became quite ill due to stress. It was then, during a restless night’s sleep that Cameron had a dream that forever changed his career. He dreamed of an invincible robot hit man sent from the future to kill him. This one dream would become The Terminator.

Made for a mere $6.5 million with cutting corners such as using mono sound, The Terminator proved to be a major box office hit grossing over $78 million worldwide. The movie also saw Cameron work for the first time with a number of actors he would use again and again in his projects such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lance Henriksen, Michael Biehn and Bill Paxton. It was also the first time he had worked with special effects genius Stan Winston. Arguably however, Cameron’s new found obsession with his blooming career took it’s toll on his personal life as in 1984, the year of The Terminator’s release he and his wife of 6 years, Sharon Williams, were divorced. This, however seemed to only further push Cameron to immerse himself into his career.

During the early 80′s Cameron wrote two other screenplays in addition to The Terminator. The first of these was Rambo – First Blood Part II which was taken over by Sylvester Stallone who altered the script and the final version differed greatly from Cameron’s initial version. The other screenplay he wrote during this time would later become his biggest project thus far, a sequel to Ridley Scott‘s ground-breaking sci-fi horror, Alien.

It was perhaps on this project that Cameron earned the nickname Iron Jim. You see, James Cameron is famous among directors and actors alike for being an extreme taskmaster who absolutely will not accept compromise from any member of the cast or crew. On Aliens this required crew to work 14-16 hour days, 7 days a week with few or no breaks. This did not go down well with the mainly English crew who were used to standard 40 hour weeks with plenty of tea breaks. This cultural split came to a head around half way through shooting when Cameron demanded that a large number of crew were fired from the project and replaced with his choice of vetted crew or else he would walk off the set and take his screenplay with him. Having invested far too much money already to throw it all away, 20th Century Fox and Pinewood Studios reached an agreement with Cameron and the film was completed. Needless to say, the film was an epic success, grossing over $131 million worldwide. After that, Cameron had earned a virtual carte blance to make any movie he wanted and the studios would fight for the right to fund it.

After writing and directing the modestly received underwater sci-fi picture; The Abyss in 1989 (the same year he was divorced from his second wife, Gale Anna Hurd and subsequently married Kathryn Bigalow) Cameron green lit the much talked about sequel to The Terminator amidst a shit-storm of legal and logistical red tape. Terminator 2: Judgement Day was released in 1991 and immediately smashed box office records and earned Cameron the greatest critical acclaim of his career so far as well as winning four Oscars, a feat unheard of in the genre up to this point. Much of the film’s success can be attributed to Stan Winston making a return to the Terminator franchise and working on the Terminator and cutting edge T-1000 effects that were some of the first of their kind. The film grossed around half a billion dollars and further bolstered Cameron’s status as Hollywood’s hottest director.

The massive success of Terminator 2 was followed up with True Lies in 1994 which despite still being regarded as a blockbuster was a relatively small picture when compared to Aliens and T2 and it’s modest profit and lukewarm critical reception is testament to this. This would be the last time Cameron would work with Arnold Schwarzenegger as he actively put as much distance between himself and Terminator 3 as possible.

Then, the great departure. Having pretty much conquered the sci-fi and action genres Cameron focused on his next project, a tale of the fateful maiden voyage of the Titanic. Amidst ridicule over it’s massive expense, a record breaking $200 million, Titanic saw it’s release in December of 1997. Oddly, for this type of holiday season blockbuster, Titanic’s second week gross was actually higher than the first week by 23%, testament to the appeal of the mammoth 3 hour epic. The movie went on to break many records for box office takings including total gross of over $1.8 billion. It also tied the record of most Oscar nominations by a single film at 14 and went on to win 11 of those. To this day, Titanic remains the highest grossing movie of all time and, on paper, Cameron’s most successful.

With the exception of various documentaries as well as work on the TV show Dark Angel, that more or less brings us to the present day. James Cameron has been away from real movie making since Titanic and only announced in 2005 that he was working on another project, one that at the time had the working title of Project 880. This project was later revealed to be Avatar, a film that Cameron has been writing for over a decade, patiently waiting for the technology to catch up to his vision. You see, Cameron hasn’t just been lounging around eating Doritos in his underwear the last 12 years. He has been a leading developer of a new era in digital stereoscopic 3D camera equipment capable of capturing an unprecedented level of detail and realism in 3D cinema. The technology that he has developed is already expected to change the face of modern cinema forever. The outcome of Avatar will either confirm these expectations or potentially destroy them. It’s a big risk, not only for the $230 million spent just making the movie but on the countless millions spent on developing the technology. If anyone can pull it off, however it is Cameron.

Throughout his career James Cameron’s no compromise approach to film making has given us some of the finest and most spectacular movies ever made. No other director, living or dead has displayed anything close to the level of obsession and attention to detail when it comes to the art of making a movie. Some would speculate that it is the kind of obsession that borders on mental illness, or at the very least that it is the reason Cameron is now on his fifth marriage. Indeed, his longest marriages seem to coincide with times in his life when he isn’t making movies. However you view his approach to film making, though, you cannot deny that he is the rarest breed; a film maker who is creative enough to write an Oscar winning screenplay while at the same time being technically brilliant enough to faultlessly see it through production and onto the big screen. With multiple projects currently in the works we can only hope that we will soon see the triumphant return to the most creative director in modern cinema.