SEPTEMBER 2019 HOME CINEMA CHOICEIN 1998 CANADIAN fi lmmaker James Cameron
took to the stage at the Academy Awards to declare
'I’m king of the world!' after picking up the Best
Director accolade for Titanic, one of the 11 Oscars his
epic romantic disaster movie grabbed on the night.
Skip forward to 2009 and that title seemed more
fi tting than ever. A decade had passed since Titanic
sank the opposition (and stayed in US cinemas for
over nine months), but Cameron hadn't been resting
on his laurels; instead, he'd been working on
a project designed to revolutionise moviemaking
through a new take on a gimmick almost as old as
cinema itself – 3D.
It may not have been the fi rst 'modern' 3D
blockbuster (the likes of Beowulf, Chicken Little
and Up all predate it) but when Avatar arrived in
December 2019 it put the format centre-stage. Shot
using a proprietary Fusion 3D twin digital camera
system developed by Cameron and award-winning
director of photography Vince Pace, in conjunction
with other technological innovations (including a
virtual camera setup allowing a fi lmmaker to see
digital characters in real-time when shooting
motion-capture), it was conceived from the ground
up in 3D. As such, Cameron was adamant Avatar's
native stereoscopic photography would draw viewers
into the fantasy world he'd created, rather than
resorting to gimmicky poke-you-in-the-eye trickery.
Couple Cameron’s devotion to shooting in 3D
with production costs in the region of $230m (plus
another $150m for promotion) and it’s clear there
was a lot riding on Avatar’s success. Such success
duly followed; this technological tour de force was
a perfect ‘lightning in a bottle’ moment for 3D
fi lmmaking, one whose record-breaking box offi ce
numbers convinced studios, cinema chains and
electronics manufacturers alike that 3D was the
future. Hollywood’s self-styled ‘king of the world’
had gone and done it again.
Master of VFX
Considering his impact on cinema, James Cameron is
not exactly a prolifi c fi lmmaker. Across a career that
now spans four decades, he's only directed eight fi lms
(although he has been shooting two Avatar sequels
back-to-back since 2017 – more on that later).
And he didn't start out as a director, beginning his
career instead in special eff ects when he joined the
model shop on Roger Corman’s sci-fi fl ick Battle
Beyond the Stars in the late 1970s. Impressing the
B-movie supremo with his design for the hero’s
spaceship (‘It’s Roger Corman. He does girls-in-
bamboo-cages movies. So I designed a kind of
Amazon warrior spaceship – basically a spaceship
with t*ts,’ he told Corman biographer Chris
Nashawaty), Cameron rose through the ranks
and earned a promotion to art director.
A stint producing VFX for John Carpenter’s Escape
from New York followed, and Cameron then returned
to Corman’s New World Pictures as production
designer on 1981's Galaxy of Terror. With the fi lm's
shoot lagging behind schedule, he convinced
Corman to let him take on second unit directing
duties – a move that eventually led to Cameron
helming his fi rst feature fi lm...
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For Avatar, Cameron employed the
Fusion 3D camera system, co-developed
with director of photography Vince PaceThe story is the stuff of legend. Attempting
to get a shot of maggots wriggling on a severed
arm, only to fi nd them not bothering to move,
Cameron devised his own method, running a small
electric current through the prosthetic to spark
the worms into motion. As Cameron would later
tell Chris Nashawaty: 'I say "Action" and all of
these worms start squirming around, and I say
"Cut" and they stop. They [producers Jeff
Schechtman and Ovidio Assonitis] can’t fi gure it out.
And what I hear later is they go off and talk and say:
"If he’s that good with worms, I wonder what he can
do with actors." And that’s how I got to direct
Piranha II: The Spawning.'
This 1982 sequel was off ered to Cameron after
the departure of original director Miller Drake.
Maybe he should have smelled something fi shy
about the project right away, but who can blame him
for grabbing an opportunity to direct a movie – even if
it was a cheap American-Dutch-Italian co-production
about fl ying piranha chowing down on holidaymakers
in the Caribbean. As it happened, Cameron lasted
only a little longer than Drake; Ovidio Assonitis
reportedly grew tired of Cameron’s perfectionist
nature (spending hours looking for the perfect cloud
cover to match previous setups doesn’t go down well
on a low-budget exploitation fl ick, apparently) and
took on the director role himself.
It wasn't the end of Cameron's Piranha II
involvement. Although locked out of the edit suite,Titanic was the world's highest grossing
fi lm – until Avatar...