Exclusive Interview: James Cameron

September 20, 2011 World Screen

PREMIUM: James Cameron, who transformed filmmaking with the 3D splendor of Avatar, tells World Screen Newsflash that the next big revolution in 3D is going to be in broadcasting.

A list of the greatest feature film directors of all time would certainly include Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Some gave us timeless classics, others had compelling visions or advanced the movie genre with awe-inspiring special effects, and still others created worldwide blockbusters.

There is one person who belongs on this list who has not only done all of the above, but in the process, has revolutionized filmmaking. Not content to merely direct, he is also a producer, a screenwriter, an artist, a cameraman, a special-effects whiz and a major 3D proponent. And he made the two highest-grossing movies of all time: Titanic and Avatar. He’s James Cameron.
 
From a very young age, Cameron loved writing stories and reading science fiction. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother an artist, and he absorbed the talents and interests of both. At 15, he saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and after being mesmerized by the visuals and special effects, he knew he had to be a filmmaker. So consuming was this desire that in a biology class in high school, instead of following the lesson, he wrote a short story that would later become the movie The Abyss. This passion was confirmed when he saw Star Wars. From that moment there was no turning back.
 
His first big movie was The Terminator, in 1984. While waiting to secure financing for it, Cameron wrote the screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II with Sylvester Stallone, and Aliens, the sequel to the 1979 classic sci-fi movie Alien. The Terminator was produced on a now unthinkably low budget of $6.4 million, but grossed almost $80 million worldwide. It also firmly established Cameron as a screenwriter and director, and launched the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger as well.
 
Cameron then directed Aliens, which won the Oscar for best visual effects and best sound editing, and grossed some $130 million worldwide. Rambo: First Blood Part II, meanwhile, took in more than $300 million worldwide.
 
On The Abyss, Cameron brought into play his passion for the ocean, and the film set new standards for underwater shooting. More important, it brought to life the famous morphing effect that Cameron would later use to create the liquid metal T-1000 in the hugely profitable Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which grossed $500 million and won four Oscar statuettes–for makeup, sound, visual effects and sound-effects editing.
 
While working on other movies, Cameron was preparing to shoot Titanic, his most ambitious project to that point. To retell the tale of the doomed ocean liner, he spent most of his time on the bottom of the Atlantic, exploring the Titanic’s wreckage. At $200 million, the movie was way over budget, but it made more than $1.8 billion worldwide and won 11 Academy Awards—a tie with Ben-Hur—including best picture and best director for Cameron.
 
Avatar, released in 2009, made motion-picture history again. Not only by becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time (at nearly $2.8 billion), but by advancing 3D and CGI effects to new levels. It was Cameron’s baby from the get-go. He wrote, directed, produced and edited it, helped develop the 3D cameras, and designed some of the characters. Some say Avatar has changed filmmaking forever. Intent on furthering the development of 3D technology, Cameron this year set up the Cameron Pace Group in partnership with cinematographer Vince Pace to pioneer tools that will assist in the production of 3D content.
 
WS: Where has your passion for special effects come from?
CAMERON: First of all, it comes from imagination and one’s internal landscape, the dreams and images that occur inside your mind. Then you see movies—in my case, as a kid, the animated films of Ray Harryhausen like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts—and you get inspired that other people are actually taking the kinds of images you are seeing inside your own head and putting them up on a giant screen. Then you get excited about the process of how that is done. For me a pivotal turning point was when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was such a milestone in its time. It jumped over two or three or four levels of cinema visual-effects development and just took us to a whole new place. That inspired me to want to learn very specifically how these things are done. And once your foot is set down a path, after that it’s just a matter of time and the number of iterations before you are a practitioner yourself, which is what I became.
 
WS: Vince Pace, your partner in the Cameron Pace Group, described you as da Vinci, Newton and Rembrandt all rolled into one!
CAMERON: I think Newton’s math was a little better than mine! The reason I had to switch from physics to an English major was because of my C in calculus!
 
WS: Is every movie genre suitable to 3D or are some more so than others?
CAMERON: Conventional wisdom in the last few years has been that the big expensive animated films, the big expensive science-fiction and fantasy live-action films are the natural subjects for 3D. I would submit that there is another way of looking at this. The $100-million to $200-million films are going be spectacular with or without 3D. You take the 3D out of it, they’re still great movies. Where I think 3D has so much to offer is when you are doing just a straight drama—two people sitting in a room talking, or sitting in a car, or wherever the drama takes place—because the 3D really electrifies that experience. It makes us feel like we are physically present watching it happen. The most interesting thing to watch in 3D are people in all their infinite colors. I think [the industry is] going to wake up over the next couple of years and see that 3D is really for things that people historically have not thought 3D was for. Take Avatar, for example. I have a dramatic scene with Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang. They are sitting in a darkened commissary on the base. It’s a single camera shoot, two actors in a room, and it’s very powerful because of the 3D. I was struck making that film not by how much the spectacular scenes were lifted by the 3D, but how much the “mundane” scenes were transformed. Like I said, this will be the next revolution in cinema 3D. I think the next revolution in 3D overall is going to be the wide-scale adoption for broadcast.
 
WS: How do you envision that happening?
CAMERON: Most of the big movies are already either being shot in 3D or being converted to 3D, and I’m not a big fan of conversion. But the next big revolution is going to be in broadcasting, because there we have a relatively tiny amount of market penetration right now. Only a few, ESPN, BSkyB and so on, are actively producing and broadcasting in 3D. As that opens up, then all of these TV sets that are currently available and work very, very well, will actually have some content to play on them. If you take all the 3D movies that have been created to date you will probably run through them in two or three days, assuming they were all available on 3D Blu-ray right now, and they’re not.
 
WS: Is it correct to say that a lot of movies have been post-converted poorly and that has turned off some viewers to the whole 3D experience?
CAMERON: I think that’s fair to say, and conversion certainly can be done well. We’re certainly making every effort to do it as well as it can possibly be done on our conversion for the 3D re-release of Titanic next year. But that is a process that is taking us $18 million and a year to do. The movies that are made for summer release, the big summer blockbusters, they might have a month and a half to convert them and they certainly don’t spend that kind of money to do it. So to me it’s a limited technique, but when it’s done right, it can be effective. The problem is, depth costs money; the more depth you put into a shot, the more money it costs to do the conversion, because there is more digital paintwork that needs to be done. Most people don’t spend the money to do it right.
 
WS: How do you feel about viewers watching epic movies like Titanic and Avatar on a small portable screen?
CAMERON: It’s a different experience. There are films that I personally won’t watch on a small screen: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lawrence of Arabia, Close Encounters. But with Avatar we packed the frame with a lot of action; and compositions were not specifically designed for a wide screen versus a small screen. Look, let’s face it, in a movie theater you are more surrounded, you are more submersed [in the movie]; you are going to be more emotionally impacted by it, but that’s true of any movie, whether it’s 2D or 3D or whether it’s Avatar or any other film. That’s just the nature of entertainment in our world today. Some people choose the immediacy of watching on a tablet versus the special experience of watching a movie in the theater. I think Avatar, since its release, did a lot to lure people back to an appreciation of the cinematic experience. Having watched the film on smaller screens, meaning either a 40-inch home TV or even right down to a laptop, I don’t feel that the story is negatively impacted at all.
 
WS: I imagine 3D lends itself beautifully to documentaries.
CAMERON: Yes, the first documentary I made, Ghosts of the Abyss, in 2001, was shot in 3D. And we set ourselves some major challenges on that film of shooting 12,000 feet under water with 3D cameras and specially built housing and so on. The first 3D film I made was actually a documentary, so I think 3D and documentaries go together very, very well because of, again, that sense of being there. You feel like you are bearing witness to something that is really happening right in front of your eyes. Because that is something that 3D does, it triggers a part of the brain to think that you are actually watching reality. You know intellectually that it’s a film, but part of your brain says, “Wait a minute, if I’m seeing depth here this must be something real, this isn’t a movie.” That little conversation is happening way back in your reptilian hindbrain the whole time that you are watching something and it just feels more real to you—so it has more impact. If you are making a documentary and you are trying to make a point or teach people something, [if it’s shot in 3D] it will have more impact and people will remember it longer. I actually think there is a huge market for educational media in 3D that goes straight into the classroom. Neuroscientists and other scientists who are researching the effects of 3D on memory retention and cognitive skills have found that kids actually learn better when they are watching in 3D.
 
WS: Beyond the spectacular effects and the colors, Avatar offers a profound message about our need to respect the environment. Is that an important message for you to impart, that if we don’t start changing our ways we are going to destroy what Mother Nature gave us?
CAMERON: That’s exactly right, and that is aptly put, and that certainly was a very important subtext of the whole movie. We didn’t sell it that way. We didn’t tell people they were going to see an environmental film, but they certainly understood what the film was trying to say. I would say most people pretty resoundingly agreed with it, because the film made a lot of money from repeat viewers. There might have been a few ultra- right-wing pundits that eschewed the film and stayed away from it as a result, but I would say for the most part that message resonated with viewers. That’s a good thing. That gives me some hope. Does that mean there is a sea change out there and that we are more ready to embrace our responsibility to this living planet? I would like to think so.
 
WS: What can you tell us about Avatar 2 and Avatar 3? I read that Sam Worthington (who played the paraplegic former marine Jake Sully) would like to do ten of them with you!
CAMERON: [Laughs] I’ll sign him up for the ten! I’ll sign up myself! Sam and I and Sigourney [Weaver] and everybody really enjoyed the process of making Avatar. We loved the bonding among ourselves as a creative group that came out of the film, and you don’t always get that from a movie. So we are all looking forward to doing another one. My fellow producer Jon Landau and I have chosen to make the second and third films together as one big production. It makes our jobs harder, but at the same time there will be some economies of scale from shooting it that way. I am not going to reveal too much about the story. I have already gone on the record to say that we’re going to see other environments on Pandora, not just the rain forest, but more specifically the ocean: the shores, the intertidal and the deep-ocean environments of Pandora, which, of course, will be as phantasmagorical as the rain forest that we have already seen. But that is pretty much all I want to say about it at this point.
 
WS: Certainly this takes you back to the ocean and the deep sea, which is another passion of yours, isn’t it?
CAMERON: That’s absolutely right. I love making movies, and making movies is the only thing that can get me away from the ocean.
 
WS: Were Jacques Cousteau or David Attenborough also influences on you when you were younger?
CAMERON: All the good documentary filmmakers, but certainly Cousteau had an enormous impact on me. He was singlehandedly responsible for my love affair with the ocean. In the mid-’60s I was living in a small town in rural Canada, 500 miles from the nearest ocean. But I absolutely had to learn to scuba dive and I did. And since then I have done an enormous amount of diving and underwater filming, and you can trace it right back directly to him. Jacques was a pioneer, an explorer, a diver, a filmmaker, he did it all and he set a great example for the rest of us who wanted to say something visually about the ocean.
 
WS: If we want to save our environment, the ocean is where we have to start, it’s our oxygen tank.
CAMERON: A lot of people incorrectly say that the rain forests are the kings of the planet. They are a very important part of the hydrological cycle and they are an important part of the carbon cycle, but really where we get our oxygen is from the ocean. And the phytoplankton are really taking a beating and global warming has the secondary effect of more carbon going into solution in the ocean, which essentially lowers the pH, turns it more acidic. Most of the life forms of the ocean survive off of either plankton or coral that have calcium carbonate as their skeleton. And they can’t form calcium carbonate in an acidic ocean, so within 100 years we could be looking at the death of 90 percent of the life in the oceans. That is a horrific thing to contemplate when you think 100 years is an eye blink in geologic time. But we as upstart hominids have come along and really started seriously mucking about with how the living part of our planet works.
 
WS: You have primarily worked in film. Would you be interested in getting involved in a 3D television production, a mini-series or a TV series?
CAMERON: Absolutely. I think the first people that really break the ice and really start making television in 3D are going to find that the audience is going to be very receptive to it. So yes, that might be a fun project. I vowed after the series Dark Angel was cancelled in 2001 that I was not going to go back to television again, but for 3D I would because that is absolutely the next threshold. Right now it’s sports, music, basically real-time productions, but I think the next threshold is going to be scripted TV, one-hour dramas, maybe even comedy.
 
WS: Some of the studios and pay-TV platforms want to offer viewers a premium VOD window 60 days after the release of a movie in the theaters. You are not a great fan of that plan?
CAMERON: Well, my concern is that it is going to erode what I think of as the sanctity of the movie experience. I am very concerned because the exhibitors are very concerned. They see this as a threat to their business. It’s very foolish of us in the movie business to do anything that might considerably erode our core business. I suppose they’ll try experimentally. They’ll see how much people are interested in it and they’ll see how much it will hurt exhibition. I don’t think any of the studios are dumb enough to really do something that is really going to hurt their core business, which is theatrical exhibition.        

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