James Cameron Is Ready to Move Beyond ‘Avatar’: “I’ve Got Other Stories to Tell”
The outspoken Oscar-winner gets candid about the make-or-break fate of ‘Fire and Ash,’ his future projects (including a secret Terminator script), the threat of AI, and all the things that still get him riled up.
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Article: Maybe it's the time on The Abyss when he ran out of oxygen, a safety diver grabbed him and shoved a broken regulator full of water into his mouth, and the director punched him to escape? Or when a disgruntled caterer on Titanic spiked the production's chowder with a pound of PCP and — in the resulting mass psychosis that followed — a crewmember reportedly stabbed Cameron in the face with a pen? Or maybe it's some little-known factoid, like how Cameron secretly wrote his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 action classic Point Break? (The script is credited to W. Peter Iliff.) "I wrote Point Break," Cameron says. "I flat out got stiffed by the Writers Guild on that. It was bullshit."
Article: My favorite (like several of these, chronicled in Rebecca Keegan's excellent Cameron biography The Futurist) is one you've likely never heard.
On The Abyss, a rat used to demonstrate the film's oxygenated water technology drowned during filming. Faced with the prospect of a dead rat — and losing the production's "No Animals Were Harmed" certification — Cameron performed CPR on the rodent. The rat sprang back to life, and Cameron adopted "Beanie" as his pet.
Some other tidbits:
Article: Cameron won't reveal his next project — and he might even be unsure himself — but will give intriguing hints.
In addition to co-directing Billie Eilish's upcoming 3D concert documentary, Hit Me Hard and Soft, Cameron has another globe-trotting documentary adventure in the works, the details of which are under wraps.
His next narrative film probably won't be Ghosts of Hiroshima, which has generated considerable press after Cameron acquired the rights to Charles Pellegrino's book chronicling the true story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who in 1945 survived the nuclear blasts at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cameron promised Yamaguchi on his deathbed in 2010 that he'd make the film.
"The postapocalypse is not going to be the fun that it is in science fiction," he says. "It's not going to have mutants and monsters and all sorts of cool stuff. It's hell."
Cameron says "a lot of people" in the industry have stepped forward wanting to help make Ghosts, but there's no script yet. I point out that even if Cameron employs an army of Japanese talent to ensure the film is authentic — which is his plan — he'll likely still get some backlash for being a white filmmaker telling that story.
"Fuck 'em, I don't care," Cameron says. "I'm going to tell this story — because why? Because nobody else is doing it. If you want to haul off and make the film, I'll hand you the book. But nobody's putting their hand up to do this. It'll probably be the least-attended movie I ever make. It's not a pretty sight what a nuclear bomb does to human beings."
Cameron first portrayed the apocalypse in his 1984 debut, The Terminator, a franchise he's quietly working on revisiting. "Once the dust clears on Avatar in a couple of months, I'm going to really plunge into that," he says. "There are a lot of narrative problems to solve. The biggest is how do I stay enough ahead of what's really happening to make it science fiction?"
Asked whether he's cracked the premise, Cameron replies, "I'm working on it," but his sly smile suggests that he has. The result will be the first Terminator film Cameron has been involved in that won't star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"I can safely say he won't be [in it]," Cameron says. "It's time for a new generation of characters. I insisted Arnold had to be involved in [2019's] Terminator: Dark Fate, and it was a great finish to him playing the T-800. There needs to be a broader interpretation of Terminator and the idea of a time war and super intelligence. I want to do new stuff that people aren't imagining."
When I mention Noah Hawley's AI-themed reinvention of the Alien franchise with Alien: Earth, Cameron praises the FX drama as "great; a lot of fun," but notes it leaned on the first two Alien films, and that doing fan-friendly callbacks is "what I'm not going to do" with Terminator. "I'm not criticizing it, but I was there for Aliens, what, 41 years ago? Something like that wouldn't be of interest to me."
"The things that scare you the most are exactly the things you should be doing," Cameron declares. "Nobody should be operating artistically from a comfort zone."
