The Big Picture - James Cameron: An Oral History

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Alan Siegel interviews some of James Cameron's creative collaborators to find out the secrets of the blockbuster director's success. You can read the written version of this feature at TheRinger.com. Host: Alan Siegel Edited by Andrew Gruttadaro Produced by Steve Ahlman and Vikram Patel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. When Sigourney Weaver first heard there would be a sequel to Alien, she didn't want to star in it. That is, until she read the screenplay. Here's how she remembers it.

Every single page was my character, Ripley. Expanded and with all kinds of different levels of drama in it. Everything about the script was so good and powerful. Weaver wasn't familiar with the young filmmaker who wrote the script, but she could tell that his follow-up to Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror classic was more than just a money grab. It was a war movie in space. To the actress, the idea of Ellen Ripley fighting aliens

alongside a unit of colonial Marines sounded great. She says that there was only one problem. First of all, I didn't know there'd be machine guns in it, and I'd worked for gun control for a number of years, and I said, you know, I'm sorry, the gun thing, that's not going to work for me. Another director might have scoffed at Weaver, or even thrown a tantrum to studio execs behind her back.

But not James Cameron. He responded by taking her to a shooting range. After letting off a few bursts of ammunition, she began to see the world through Cameron's eyes. That experience gives you so much adrenaline. It's a little bit transforming even though I still have very powerful reservations about guns I had to embrace the fact that I was with an army unit and they were going to be using these guns and at some point I would have to do that

too but he you know Jim really wants his actors to feel comfortable, to feel committed. So he always had me try everything first. You know, sometimes I say, no, I don't really want to do that. And he'd go, oh, come on. Aliens is a typical Cameron blockbuster, exciting, moving, futuristic, propelled by a heroine, and full of things that audiences had never seen before. And oh yeah, it was a smash hit at the box office that won two Oscars and earned seven nominations, including Weaver's first. This is the James Cameron way. He's reinvented the popcorn flick every single time he's made one, from the Terminator to Titanic to Avatar.

Each of his movies is more ambitious, more expensive, and more imaginative than the last. He's repeatedly outdone himself and the rest of Hollywood. But while Cameron's genius is unique, he hasn't made magic alone. And if the last 40 years of moviemaking has convinced anyone of anything, it's that collaborating with Cameron is a singular experience. Today, those creative collaborators will give you a guided tour of the director's career. I'm Alan Siegel, and this is The Ring of Oral History of James Cameron. It's true that when you work with Jim Cameron and everybody,

it's both scary, but it's also exhilarating. You have to bring it. You have to bring your top game. Part one. Technically, Cameron made his directorial debut in 1982 with Piranha 2 The Spawning, but he actually got fired from that Jaws ripoff a week into filming. Not that it was a great loss to him. It was a piece of garbage, he told Entertainment Weekly in 2014. The first movie that was truly his was based on a fever dream that he had about a metal endoskeleton emerging from flames. The Terminator, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton,

jump-started Cameron's career. It was the first time the world saw the skills the Ontario, Canada native sharpened while working for legendary producer Roger Corman in the 70s. I was making a science fiction film. I think it was called Battle Beyond the Stars. And the shooting went very well. We were in post-production. Everything was going along well, except our special effects department was falling behind schedule. And so I sent my ace assistant, Gail Hurd, down to the studio to watch the special effects for a day and then tell me why they were falling behind schedule. Gail Ann Hurd, who went on to become Cameron's producing partner,

and later on, his second wife, remembers it well. So I went down there. I walked in. There was a tall, blonde gentleman. And he came right up to me. And he said, so are you here for the tour of the model shop? And I said, yes. Assuming he was the head of the model shop. And not only did he show me around, but he explained the backstory for each of the ships what it

represented for the culture of that alien species it was far beyond oh isn't this cool we just decided to you know do something that looks cool. It all came from character. And then I left, went back to report to Roger. And I said, yeah, I met with Jim Cameron and the head of the model shop. And he said, no, he's not. Which was a big surprise to me. And I think I probably said, well, he should be. And I talked with him for a little while.

And I said, Jim, this is something I've never done. I'm giving you a raise during the time you're working here and you're going to be the new head of special effects. In addition, there's always a little second unit shooting of that so that they can take care of some shots that your main crew doesn't do. So I said, Jim, I'd like to have you shoot some shots for me. And he showed me the footage. And I thought, this is better than the director of the picture. So I moved a lot of shooting over to the second unit and Jim directed all of the second unit. And every time he was a better director than the director on the film. When Cameron was casting The Terminator, Austrian bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger

wanted to play the good guy. The director, thankfully, had other ideas. Their partnership was cemented over a lunch that nearly turned disastrous. But Heard says that Schwarzenegger saved the day. So essentially our financing hinged on getting Arnold Schwarzenegger to say yes to star in the day. So essentially our financing hinged on getting Arnold Schwarzenegger to say yes to star in the film. And Jim and I took him to lunch at a very swanky restaurant on Sunset Boulevard

called Scandia. And we went in and we knew that it was probably going to be expensive. And before we sat down, it turned out that Jim didn't have any credit cards. I didn't bring my purse with credit cards. I had some cash. The bill came and we realized we couldn't afford it. We just sat there and assumed we would wait it out and Arnold would leave. And then we'd figure out what to do with the management of the restaurant. But he didn't leave. And finally, the manager came over and said, I'm sorry, we're closing now.

What I remember is Arnold saying, you can't afford the tab, right? And Jim and I both looked at each other and thought, well, there goes the movie over want of the ability to pay for lunch. What star would work for, you know, two people who can't even pick up a lunch tab? Here's Schwarzenegger and Heard. And Arnold said, you know what? didn't have any money, if it was funny, if you were in a fancy restaurant with a dome or something like that. And Arnold said, you know what, that happened to me once at Mr. Chow's in New York.

Oh, I had to go for lunch. That was such a bonding experience because we were relating to each other as humans, as people having experienced the same thing. And rather than cratering the entire project, I think it was the best possible way to kick things off. We were all going to share this adventure together on equal terms. Cameron cast Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese,

the soldier sent back through time to protect the movie's heroine, Sarah Connor. I'd be lying if I told you I read the script to Terminator and thought, oh my God, this is an incredible script. This is just going to be wonderful. It's going to be epic. Until I spent time with Jim himself and saw the passion that he had for it, you don't have to be around him very long to realize that he's very special. I think when he sits down and he really thinks about things, you know, that he develops a vision, I can relate to that because I think this is the very thing that I was always good at in my career,

that the visualized and the becoming of this universe, the visualized becoming of what we saw, the visualized becoming governor. Being in Stan Winston's special effects house in Washington, and Jim creating the Terminator in front of my eyes, as far as the practical effects went. Roger Corman wasn't surprised by Cameron's technical wizardry. Needless to say, the special effects were extremely good because that's where he started.

Orion Pictures president Mike Medavoy vividly remembers Schwarzenegger's first appearance on screen. When he arrives and he's naked looking around you know you gotta go there to that question about hey what's next.

You're close. Give them to me. Now. Fuck you asshole. Bean put it best. You know he did things while we were shooting that, you know, you just don't see other people do. We did a scene in Terminator where the car is screeching backwards, Arnold's on fire, Andy's smashing his hands in the window of the car and grabbing Linda by her shirt.

And it's all done in one take. That's hard enough as it is. You can control it if the car is stationary. It's dangerous if the car is moving. So Jim said, we're going to put a faux brick wall on the equipment truck, the grip truck, and drive that past. And that's how we solved that problem. And I defy anyone to look at that shot, given that it's 1984 technology, and think it was anything but a moving car.

And that's the type of thing that he did that you just went, wow, I certainly never looked out of doing anything like that. Part two. The Terminator was a surprise hit in 1984. But Cameron landed the gig writing Aliens on the strength of the script of The Terminator before it even came out. Here's Gayle Ann Hur directed, who's only directed Piranha 2, The Spawning, is going to be in the director's chair for the sequel to Alien. Jeanette Goldstein's first movie role was in Aliens. She went on to appear in two more Cameron films, Terminator 2 and Titanic.

The first time I met him was, yeah, for Aliens. And it's when I was asked, I'd met Gail and heard a couple of times, she was in the initial interviews. And so I was, I went down to Pinewood Studios and I wasn't sure who he was. I mean, I was figuring I was meeting the director, but then he was also crawling around on the floor with a camera and improvising with me. Stephen Lang recalls auditioning for Aliens. My very first meeting with Jim was an audition for Aliens many, many years ago. He really reminded me of it.

I knew that I had done the audition. And, you know, I kind of put it in the past because I didn't get the part. What I found out years later was I came pretty close to getting the part, but I didn't get the part. What I found out years later was I came pretty close to getting the part, but I didn't get it. And he always remembered my audition, which is very Cameron-like. That's like total Jim. He chapter and versed me my audition years later. Here's Sigourney Weaver and Heard. I'd been sent this script for Aliens when I was working in France with Gerard Depardieu. And, you know, because we didn't know each other, he was very concerned that I tell him how I felt about it.

Well, we didn't have sequel mania like we do now. And the perception was that sequels would make maybe 60%, maybe more of the box office revenue that the first film did. So there was a lot of pressure on the budget for the film. absolute self-confidence that she said, no, I think you're paying me a million dollars for this or whatever her fee was. That's when the sexism of the studio and the Times reared its ugly head. And the administration came to Jim and said, write a new script without her. And he wouldn't do it. I think we had a brief phone conversation from France where I said, you know, wow, what a script. We agreed to meet in California when I came back. And he talks about this, but he decided that if I was going to wear high heels, I would try to dominate the relationship. But I think because I probably showed up in sneakers, he thought, okay, it's going to be all right. The seminal element of the script in the film is, I mean, the Joseph

Campbell, unreluctant hero, in this case, heroine, but her connection with Newt. And the fact, sadly, the scene that we had to trim because of the running length, when she promises her own daughter that she'll be back for her birthday, and she isn't. That was really the moment that created the drive that Ripley's character has toward not betraying another child,, her surrogate daughter, Newt. Unlike other action movies, testosterone didn't fuel aliens. Michael Biehn says that's by design. I don't think that there's any chance that it's just happened. Oh, it just turns out that he's had these small women characters.

I think that that's been part of his design. You know, something that he's wanted to bring to the forefront with every single film he's ever made. You know them in your life. I mean, that's the crazy thing. I mean, it's like, you know, my aunts, my grandma, you just don't see them up there on the screen. And I don't, I never understood why not.

In the climactic scene of Aliens Ripley takes on the xenomorph queen and an animatronic power loader. You know when I think about that the power loader and the queen it had to have that kind of huge set in order to for you to be able to appreciate both those characters as it were and so he's done a lot of this work as a vision um but i think what was fascinating was i was practicing my work in the power loader right this big dude named john who was sort of behind me, hidden, who would help me lift the machine because the machine was quite real. We also had guys who were, you know, who were hidden in the queen, making the arms move. So there was so much preparation that went into it, so much thought, nothing was really left to chance. And then I was allowed to just sort of bring the acting to it,

the passion to it, the desire to survive. And that was sort of like the match that lit the whole thing up. Get away from her, you bitch! Part three. Working with James Cameron is a collaborative but extremely intense experience. Like a good coach, he tailors his approach to each individual actor, regardless of their star power.

When the star of True Lies needed a sidekick, Cameron didn't look for an A-lister. He went with the guy who he thought had the best chemistry with Schwarzenegger, Tom Arnold. He had to go to Fox Studios, who was financing the most expensive movie ever made, and give them the great news. And so he went in there and he said, hey, good news, we found the third guy after Jamie Lee and Arnold, and we can start filming True Lies. And they're like, that is fantastic news, Jim. Who is it? He said, it's Tom Arnold. And they're

like, that's horrible news, Jim Cameron. And he said, why? And and they're like that's horrible news Jim Cameron that's horrible and he said why and he said well don't you read the tabloids I don't think he's done much he's crazy you read and Jim Cameron to his credit this is the best thing he's ever done for me said no I don't read the tabloids but I wrote this and he is the guy and they're like well we're sorry Jim but we cannot approve Tom Arnold for this movie. And Jim said, oh, no, no, I'm sorry, because I wanted to make the movie here at Fox. Now I'm going to go down the street to Paramount. They're like, okay, we'll give him a chance. So every day on the set, the Fox execs were coming down. I was hugging them and saying, thanks for loving me, basically.

Stephen Lang didn't get a role in Aliens, but later on, Cameron cast him as Avatar's big bad, Colonel Miles Quarich. I used to always make this joke, and I made it many times, that the two jobs, on-set jobs that Jim Cameron respects the most are acting and catering. Those are the two jobs that he knows he can't do better than everybody else. That's how Sigourney Weaver saw it, too. He's so good at every job except acting. Here's Danny Nucci, who plays Jack Dawson's best friend in Titanic. I've seen him take the makeup palette and really do something with the blood and the scar.

And like literally everything stops and Jim does it because that's the way he wanted. That's the vision that he had. Here's Jeanette Goldstein again. You know, it's just somebody demanding the best of you. I remember that very first day that I worked on the first Avatar back in 2007. I was lifting weights and I remember that they had some weight on there. And I said to the prop man, I said, you got to put more weight on there. That doesn't look like it's enough to me.

So do you want more weight on there? And I said, yeah, put more. I said, no, but no, no, put more weight on. And then I remember and I did. If you look at it, there's some good stacks on there. You know what I mean? And it looks like it's probably around, you know, 280 or 300 pounds or something like that,

when in fact it's probably around 140 is what it was in the end. But I remember Jim saying, you know, you're going to have to lift that all day. And I was like, I'm good. It's cool. You know, don't worry. He was like, okay. Here's Michael Biehn. We do a tape and Jim says, Michael, that's exactly what I don't want.

I said, okay, Jim. This was back when I was doing the trouble here. I said, everybody here knows that you can do their job better than they can. Everybody knows that. I know that. But I know another thing, and that is you can't play Kyle Reese. Give me a line reading and let's move on.

And he did, and I did, and that was that. Part of Jim's real genius is how adept he is at dealing with actors in the way that they need to be dealt with. We thrash our stuff out, we wrangle a lot, we spar a lot, which is not all that unusual when you consider the fact that he and I have been kickboxing and quarter staff fighting together for a number of years as well. So it's just sort of carrying that into it. And when we are working, the crew tends to pay attention.

I mean, I'm not saying they don't pay attention at other times, but they kind of prick up their ears to see what's going to happen. This is our experience. I believe that we both derive energy off of that. I've seen all these rugged characters, all these, you know, marine fighters from the future on the sky side. If there's anybody that I have ever met, including all the SEALs I've worked with, all the special forces guys I've worked with, if there's anybody I would want in a box home with me,

it would be Jim Cameron. If the world was ending, I want to be with Jim Cameron. Wherever he is, I trust that he will figure it out. Jim Cameron, you know, he's a raw bone, six foot three fucking Canadian dude, man. He's ready to go. And part of the reason it's a success is because he is that

guy. Like if he tells Arnold, I want you to go down this escalator, up this escalator, jump over, do that. And Arnold looks at it and goes, boy, I don't know if I could do it. He goes, okay, I'll do it. And so always, whatever it is, he'll get, he'll take the cab, or I'll get, dangle out of the helicopter. He'll do, there is nothing that he won't do. And it inspires you. Here's Jeanette Goldstein again, remembering shooting a scene in Titanic. The one thing that I really remember

about the scene with the kids, especially the little boy, in the scene where we're caught down behind the gate. And so you've got this little boy, this actor, he'd never, he'd done like a McDonald's commercial. That's all he had done. The little girl had been on a couple of TV shows, so she was a pro.

But he, he was tiny, you know, what was he, what, four years old or something? And you're there with all these extras and the crush and everything, you know, he was a little worried and scared. And we did the master. We did one take of it. And then Jim goes, all right, cut.

You know, we're going again. And the little boy goes, did I not do it right? And then everybody started laughing. And Jim goes, quiet, please, quiet. And he made everybody, it was very cute, and he, everybody stopped, you know, all of those people, and he just sort of went and talked to little, he said, oh, he said, have you ever done a, said, okay, well, let me, you know what a master, okay, and he spent like a minute there explaining to the little boy how it works, we're going to do

this, and then you're going to do it again, you think you can do it like three times and then we're going to move the camera and then is that okay if we then do it over here and then you're going to do it it was so so sweet he said so is that okay you think you can do it and he's like yeah and then he started again and it was really amazing and everyone was just like wow you know this huge stressful moment he was able to sort of you know get this performance out of this little boy and kind of calm his fears in 100 meters turn right actually no turn left there's some awesome new breakfast wraps at mcdonald's really yeah there's the sausage bacon and egg a crispy seasoned chicken one a spicy and egg worth the detour. They sound amazing.

Bet they taste amazing too. Wish I had a mouth. Take your morning into a delicious new direction with McDonald's new breakfast wraps. Add a small premium roast coffee for a dollar plus tax at participating McDonald's restaurants. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. Part four. Outdoing yourself is hard. That's why shooting a Cameron film is a challenge. The stars of the abyss were pushed to their mental and physical limits during grueling underwater scenes. On the set of Titanic, some presumably aggrieved person spiked the chowder with PCP. Cameron's uncompromising drive might bristle,

but it's helped him break both new ground and box office records. Here's Gaylan Hurd. The technology, at least ILM's technology, did not exist at the time we embarked in pre-production for The Abyss to create the CGI pseudopod or water snake. It didn't exist. No one in the world could have created that. And we had to go into Fox and tell them we could pull it off. And Dennis Murin, our visual effects supervisor, took I don't know how many months off to become a coder, actually learn how to create a 3D CGI effect. That was the film when Jim took on so many things that didn't exist before

that were essential to making the film. And I think those are the lessons. The first is there was no place to film it. So he and the underwater cinematographer Al Giddings went to try to find a location and they found the uncompleted nuclear power plant in Gaffney, South Carolina and decided it could be made into a filming tank.

I mean, imagine that. Here's John Landau, Cameron's producing partner. Number one, I think what he has is the skill as a writer to write stories without regard to what's possible technologically, you know, but to then say, okay, this is the story I want to tell because I think it's going to move people. Now, how can I be the impetus for that technology? And he has both sides of that brain that are working where he understands the technology side and how to push people. He doesn't always necessarily have the answer himself, where he understands the technology side and how to push people.

He doesn't always necessarily have the answer himself, but he can say, I think you could figure this out. And he throws out a germ of an idea that they then run with. And he did that going back to the abyss. You know, it's really interesting. He wrote in the pseudopod scene where Mary Elizabeth comes out and talks. And he wrote that into that movie because he already had envisioned Terminator 2. But he knew if he didn't crack it, he would never be able to do Terminator 2.

Here's Sigourney Weaver. So I love the abyss. You know, first of all, combined his fascination with the deep, you know, all of his skills and diving and everything with this incredible love story, kind of scary story. I think that movie will always be ahead of its time because it was so daring. And here's Michael Biehn. You know, I don't know when they used CGI first, but it was the first time that I was aware of CGI. We also, for budgetary purposes, had to shoot a six-day week. We called it, you know, life's abyss and then you dive. In the third act of that movie, when Ed Harris is bringing back Mary Elizabeth Bust Antonio back to life, you know, wake up, she's slapping her.

And it's emotionally draining. It's an emotional high, not only for the characters in the movie, but also for the audience. Goddamn, you bitch! You never backed away from anything in your life! Now fight! Fight! Fight!

Right now! Do it! Fight! Fight! Fight! Right now! Do it! Fight, goddammit! It's like an out-of-body experience in a way to participate and watch a Cameron movie. Crossing

Cameron on set isn't a wise choice. Just ask Tom Arnold. We're on the street on Constitution Avenue, which is a big, busy street in Washington Just ask Tom Arnold. And we're ready to shoot this scene. And the light over here goes out. And so Arnold's like, that'll take 20 minutes. I'm going to take you guys on a tour of the fucking monuments. Nobody has ever been happier to be an American than Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's so fucking proud of this. So we're driving.

And he's like, look at the fucking Lincoln Memorial there. You know what? On and on. I'm looking at Bill, actually. Anyway, we come back around the block. And in the middle of the block is James Cameron, like, standing there as Arnold pulls the car up.

And, bam! He hits the hood of the car. And he comes around, because it didn't take 20 minutes to change that light. It took two. And he's like, hey, motherfucker, you do that shit again and Pulverova's gonna finish the movie. Or whatever. So then I get back, he gets out, I get back in the again, and Pulverova's going to finish the movie, or whatever.

So then I get back, he gets out, I get back in the car, and I'm sitting next to Arnold, and I'm like, are you going to take that shit from that asshole? And he's like, I have to, I fucked up, which is such a good lesson. Here's Stephen Lang. He's got a very dry, a very sharp, very ironic sense of humor, and he can level it at me, you know, pretty good. And he doesn't mind at all if I level it right back at him, you know? Stan Winston told me that once a movie goes over time or over budget, Jim has a different personality. They call it Midge, M-I-G.

When I first met him on Aliens, he was still trying to, you know, make a name for himself. And so it wasn't really till we were on the kind of world tour with Aliens that I was sitting with him at dinner. I went, you're funny? Where was this guy all those months?

I've heard Jim Yuske phrase to people working on his movies often, don't help. Don't help. Which I've always thought was kind of a fun way of saying, you're kind of fucking this up. Let me do it myself.

Here's Jeanette Goldstein. Someone has your back and they trust you even though you're scared to death or whatever. When meeting him, he really wanted to know everything I thought about Vasquez and who she was and what, and he was like, you know, I trust you, what you're going to try. You know, if I don't like something, I will tell you. He, it seems to me that he casts for the story. Whatever the story is, he's going to max it out.

He's going to make it the most powerful, the most suspenseful, the most terrifying. And that's just so natural to him to push the envelope so that it's not just the ship hitting the iceberg. It's so many levels of experience. Here's John Landau. Jim walked into a big meeting we were having. It was like a marketing meeting in the executive room and everybody was there. And Jim comes in, he walks right around, sort of nods to everybody, comes right around to me and he goes, so I understand we're going to get to be pretty good friends or bitter enemies. And I looked up to

him and I said, pretty good friends, I hope. You know, and then, you know, again, on True Lies, I was the studio exec, he was the director, but it was out of that dynamic and that relationship that we started talking about doing Titanic together. If you look at the number of characters in Titanic, the way they're developed, it's an extraordinary number of characters. Some of them only have one scene. Some of them have 20 seconds, but you know all you need to know. Avatar aside, I would pick Titanic as my favorite. And that's not because I think Aliens is amazing and really all his films are wonderful. terminator is terrific but titanic is such a

massive the love story just gets me goldstein and danny nucci remember seeing the set of titanic for the first time i got there down to rosarito and you know you see the ship in the distance you know that was something we were all convinced that this was an unbelievable undertaking. That the scope of what we were doing was just unprecedented. And we were all, to a certain degree, in awe of it. And then you go into the sound stages. I remember the producer took me and said, oh, you want to see the sound stages? And the ballroom.

And it was incredible. And then I always remember the wardrobe with the wigs and the beaded dresses and incredible, incredible. And then getting down onto the Titanic, I mean, the interior, there was a gang, you know, the gang play. You had down and I had to, like, hold my kids, the actor's hands to get in there. You know, you just kind of were on the ship. It was stunning. But we're shooting this really sort of complex scene. And I'm in the middle of the boat and I'm supposed to be swimming. And he's got like eight cameras.

And it was one of those awkward moments where I think it was the first time that Jim and I, it was just me and then Jim from where I was. And it was just the two of us in this boat in the middle of Rosarito Beach and the tank on the set. And I don't think I'd ever been alone in a room with Jim ever before. So it was just the two of us. So it was just this awkward moment, right? And I'm like, now at this point, I've been yelled at 15 times. You know, it's no longer personal

it's not about me but nonetheless i've been yelled at 50 times by this point so i'm a little trepidatious so i sit there and and i think oh it's the first thing i'm gonna say to jimmy uh hey uh jim jim um this is kind of kind of cool, all this stuff, all these cameras. Because you can see them. There was a lot going on, cameras moving and on gimbals. It was just crazy. He's like, this is just annoying. He goes, all I can see is what can go wrong. I go, well, what's your favorite part?

He goes, it's the acting. He goes, the acting. So what, you want to do a movie with, what's your favorite part? He goes, it's the acting. He goes, the acting. So what, you want to do a movie with like four people in a room? He goes, yes. Yes, this is what he said to me. And so we chatted about that for a while until it was time to go. And then, you know, I was like, okay, off you go in the water. You know, and

we shot the scene. But that was sort of so when I saw Avatar, I was like, of course, of course, of course, this is what he's done. Makes all the sense in the world to me. Part five. Released 25 years ago this month,

Titanic went on to become the highest grossing movie of all time. At the 1998 Oscars, the epic drama won Best Picture. Cameron also took home the award for Best Director. In his acceptance speech,

he borrowed Jack Dawson's signature line, shouting, I'm the king of the world! In 2003, the director literally returned to the Titanic while making the documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. He followed that two years later with another doc, Aliens of the Deep. By then, Cameron was busy creating a whole new world.

Here's Michael Biehn. I had a meeting with him, and I was on the Fox lot at the time. And this was the year that he won the Academy Award, a couple months after he won the Academy Award. I was in his office. I was talking to him, and I said, Jim, you just won the Academy Award, a couple months after he won the Academy Award, I was in his office. I was talking to him, and I said, Jim, you just won the Academy Award. You know, you're a gang hero.

What do you do next? I mean, where do you go from here? My memory is correct. He was sitting at a desk, and he opened his desk drawers. He reached in, and he pulled out two scripts. They weren't treatments, and one was called Avatar, and the other one was called Alita, Adelangel. Oh, wow.

This is, well, which one are you going to do, Jim? And Jim said, Michael, I have to wait for the technology to catch up to my vision of what these movies should look like. Here's John Landau. I first read his first draft

of Avatar before we did Titanic. We knew that the technology did not exist to do it at that time. And gave jim credit for not saying okay let's make this movie the bad way but let's put it to the side and then in 2005 i actually that's when i went to him and i said jim i think we can now be the impetus to finally make this movie and then it was a toss-up between Alita and Avatar in that moment. And we really went a whole year before ultimately committing to Avatar.

Here's Sigourney Weaver. He said he was working on this thing, Avatar, that he'd written a part for a guy, a sort of professor, doctor, creature, and he decided that I should play the part. And what I remember is that he really wanted me to like it. I'm like, you know, why wouldn't I? It sounds fantastic.

So he sends me this script that honestly, I'm a very fast reader. I try not to read scripts too fast. This script, every page was so filled with details about the world of Pandora, details about the action, the character. It took me so long to read each page, let alone put together what he was, how on earth he was going to get any of this to actually work, like dire horses and banshees, ekrons, all these other things. It was like, I thought,

I can't imagine a movie that's this ambitious. He was just hoping I'd say yes. He's so sweet. You know, and I was like, well, how can I say no to something that has never been done before? Here's Jeanette Goldstein and Stephen Lang. I don't know anything about 3D and all of that, but I figured if anybody can do it and make me not feel nauseous while watching the film, he could. But I do remember having heated arguments about we're like a banshee. We call them banshees back then. I'd have to track them and shoot them. And there'd be like three X's on, you know, on the wall or something that would do

it. And he'd say, it's there. And then I just fuck around and say, no, it's not over there. No, it's not. God damn it. I said, it's over there. He had to make these very sophisticated props that weren't even going to be seen in the movie for us to use just in the scenes that we were shooting. Performance capture puts some fairly rigorous and some stringent kind of demands on you. It's very, very important to turn that into an advantage, you know, to turn that into a challenge that is a good challenge rather than an obstacle or an obstacle that you really can take advantage of. You know, it's always going to be difficult. And I think that Jim is very adept at removing the problem for you to the extent that it can be removed. But I would say that what's nice about Jim working with him on the Avatar movies is he's very, very relaxed. These are his babies. He's written such powerful stories that, in a sense, we all relax and realize that we're here to serve the story.

And if we serve the story, everything's going to be fine. Because he's done the heavy lifting for us. All we have to do is embody these characters. And the story is going to work for the audience in a tremendously satisfying way. We have an indigenous population called the Nabi. They are very hard to kill. When Avatar was released in 2009, it naturally beat Titanic's all-time box office record. Over the last 13 years, it's continued to float around the top of that list, trading the top spot with behemoths like Avengers Endgame.

Avatar's 2022 re-release actually put it back into first place. During that time, Cameron has produced television and movies. One of those films was Alita Battle Angel, which Robert Rodriguez directed. Cameron also took his love of the ocean to a new level in 2012, becoming the first person to make a solo expedition to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. All the while, the now 68-year-old director was looking to the future. Avatar, The Way of Water, out on December 16th, and its sequels are more than a decade in the making. Here's Cameron's mentor, Roger Corman.

Somebody asked me, who had some interview, what I thought of the Marvel films. And I said, they're brilliantly made, technically, but there's no story. And I said they should do what Jim does. It's not like he's been sitting around doing nothing. He was creating the technology that allowed him to do things that no other human being has ever done. But we didn't want to have the hubris to go, let's go make a sequel now, until we knew how the movie played out. We didn't want to have the hubris to go, let's go make a sequel now, or let's start a sequel, until we knew how the movie played out.

When we saw then the success of the movie, we said, yes, we want to do that, but there were other things in our lives that we wanted to get back to and do. Jim built the submersible and went to the Mariana's Trench. We converted Titanic and re-released it. Those type of things. And it was after that, really in 2012, that we said, okay, now let's focus on the Avatar sequels.

And Jim went out and he created 1,500 pages of story notes. We realized, okay, we're now talking not one sequel, but we're talking multiple sequels. The avatar factor was always there in my life. And I'd get occasionally reports every now and again, there'd be a call from Jim or there'd be a call from Landau saying, okay, we're going to send a script. We're going to send a courier with a script

and he'll sit there while you read it and then give it back to him. And so then finally sometime around 2015 or 16, we actually started getting together and prepare, schooling ourselves and rehearsing and started the underwater training. I look at Avatar and I look at the new one and how ambitious it is underwater and getting all of us actors to be comfortable underwater, to be able to do all these very, you know, challenging things in a confident way, professional way, I wouldn't even know where to start with that expectation. On our end, of course, we know that we're going to be safe because you're going to be taken care of.

He has the best people around him, people he really trusts to make sure that there's safety. And so the rest of it is then you just give it your heart and soul. And I expect that the audience, when we finally get to share Avatar 2 with people, I think we, the actors, are going to be blown away. It's going to be so much more amazing, even than we know. If I said we didn't have expectations and high hopes, then I think I would be probably lying to you because the precedent that was set was pretty extraordinary, I think. And nobody knows that.

Nobody is as aware of that as Jim Cameron. And nobody is as dead set on surpassing or surmounting that as Jim Cameron. That's just who he is. We really are kind of a family, all of us together. And I know at the end on Friday nights, which would usually be about nine o'clock at night because we worked late pretty much. And he would bring out this very good tequila. Whoever wanted to could have a little shot of tequila and the people who were also doing all the technical stuff behind us at the computers. So everyone would have this little party. And of course, I'm terrible with liquor. So he would usually try to make me have some. I cannot drink anything that tastes that much like alcohol.

So always good for a laugh. We were, you know, trying to chug down this thing. I think he always appreciated how hard everybody worked. And we appreciated how much faith he had in us. And it was quite a voyage. He has this amazing life. how much faith he had in us, and it was quite a voyage. He has this amazing life. You know, he's been married five times. I've been married four.

And I talked to him, and a few, couple, three, four years ago, and he said, I said, yeah, I'm not gonna do that again. That's too, that looks, and he said, hey, nobody writes your fucking life story, Tom. You write it. You write the end. This Ringer Oral History was written, reported, and narrated by me, Alan Siegel. It was edited by Andrew Gurdadaro and produced by Steve Allman and Vikram Patel.