The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  The climactic third-act confrontation between Ripley and the alien queen makes use of one of Cameron’s signature designs—the power loader, a piece of full-body construction equipment Ripley wears during her hand-to-claw battle with the alien mother. The power loader was inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s military sci-fi novel Starship Troopers, in which infantry troops don an exoskeletal suit in combat. Heinlein’s vision of future warfare has proved especially prophetic and was a major inspiration to Cameron in the making of Aliens—Bill Paxton’s character’s reference to a “bug hunt” is a nod to the book’s influence. For his exoskeletal suit, Cameron needed something that Ripley might have been trained to use, so he came up with a construction version. To create the appearance that Ripley was manipulating her giant metal outfit, Cameron had Weaver stand on the feet of a burly stuntman hidden behind her. A combination of cables and the stuntman’s strength moved Weaver and the suit together. Cameron also has a variant of the power loader in his 1978 film Xenogenesis, and he has a military model of it—called an AMP suit—in Avatar. “I like the idea of giving a character great power to fight a big, fierce enemy in mano-a-mano combat,” he says.

  Robotic suits like the power loader that lend humans extraordinary strength are no longer just the stuff of fantasy. In 2000, the Pentagon launched a seventy-five-million-dollar program called “Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation,” and the army has already built working prototypes that provide soldiers ten times their natural brawn. In 2004, a Japanese robotics company produced a power loader–like model that nurses could use to lift their patients. The Japanese roboticists are obviously Cameron fans—that company is called Cyberdyne, the same name as the firm that builds the robots in the Terminator films.

  Boot Camp

  Cameron’s casting on this film reflects one of his dominant traits—loyalty. Michael Biehn, the future warrior from The Terminator, plays Hicks, the Colonial Marines’ squad leader. Lance Henriksen, whom Cameron had met on Piranha II, was cast as Bishop, the movie’s heroic android. And Bill Paxton, who had hammered sets beside Cameron at New World Pictures, is a hyped-up marine named Hudson. Cameron’s allegiance to his friends on this film is particularly remarkable given that the production was obligated to audition and hire a certain number of UK-based actors. He did take a few, including Jenette Goldstein, a freckle-faced bodybuilder who darkened her hair and complexion to play the squad’s tough Latina, Vasquez. And for Newt, Hurd found Cameron a nine-year-old army brat named Carrie Henn, one of the only children who showed up for the audition without any acting experience. That turned out to be an asset, as all the other kids had been trained to smile after delivering every line—helpful for a soda commercial, but not for playing a victim of extraterrestrial post-traumatic stress.

  Months before casting began, when Cameron had just been hired to write and direct the film, Paxton ran into his old friend at the Los Angeles airport. “I was just kidding him, and I said, ‘Hey, I hope you write me a good part in it,’” Paxton says. Since his Corman days, Paxton had been getting more acting work. He was fresh off a well-received performance as the obnoxious big brother in Weird Science when he got a call in the summer of 1985 to audition for Cameron. “Jim put me through my paces,” Paxton recalls. “He handed me a long cardboard tube to pretend like that was the plasma pulse rifle I was holding. I left thinking I wasn’t gonna get the part. I thought I was too over the top.” But Paxton’s energy was just what Cameron wanted. Hudson would become the film’s comic relief, a break from the constant tension of the combat scenes.

  Cameron decided that some kind of military training was necessary for his Colonial Marines to lend authenticity to their speech and movement and to bond the cast as a group. All the actors playing marines had to participate in a two-week boot camp, humping backpacks in the rain, learning how to use weapons, and enduring the yells of a drill sergeant. Actor Al Matthews, who had earned two Purple Hearts as a marine in Vietnam before Cameron cast him as Sergeant Apone, conducted the drills. “I enjoy actors in general, and forming such a tight-knit group before we started shooting gave us all a sense of being on a team, doing something fun and important,” Cameron says.

  Weaver was kept out of the training so that she would be the outsider, just as Ripley is in the film. She and Cameron would slip away to the sets after the workmen left for the day and rehearse. One of the issues the director and his leading lady had to overcome was their differing ideologies on guns. When Cameron wants to blow off some steam, he drives into the desert and shoots, usually aiming at soda cans and watermelons, targets he considers “especially visual, ballistically speaking.” Cameron doesn’t collect guns, but he does know how to use them. He trained with a champion shooter for two years and at his peak could shoot a “double tap”—two rounds hitting the target in under fifteen hundredths of a second. “I believe in gun control for everyone but me,” he says. So for Cameron, all the futuristic weaponry in Aliens was good fun. But for Weaver, who had donated money to antigun causes, the notion of spending two-thirds of a movie with her hand on some kind of trigger was upsetting. To accustom Weaver to weapons, Cameron took her out behind the stage and gave her a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Weaver fired off a fifty-round magazine from the hip. “I knew from her grin that she was at least temporarily converted,” Cameron says. “Another liberal bites the dust.”

  The Tea-Trolley Mutiny

  Production on Aliens took place at Pinewood Studios, the historic soundstages about twenty miles outside London where Fahrenheit 451, The Shining, and the James Bond movies were filmed. In some respects, England in the fall and winter was the perfect place to shoot this movie—the cold, windswept weather matched the bleak atmosphere on LV-426. But the location posed some unique challenges for Cameron. In England in the 1980s, studios came with a crew attached, unlike the current “four-wall” studio system, in which a soundstage is simply an empty space and producers hire their own crews. Many of the employees at Pinewood were lifers, locals who viewed their film jobs as they might factory work—a paycheck and nothing more. The Pinewood crew was an abrupt change from the young, eager, nonunion film crews Cameron and Hurd had labored with at New World Pictures and on The Terminator. “Gale and I were shocked to be working with people who simply couldn’t care less about the film they were working on,” says Cameron. “The Pinewood crew were lazy, insolent, and arrogant. There were a few bright lights amongst the younger art-department people, but for the most part, we despised them and they despised us.”

  By the standards of an American film crew at the time, twelve hours was an average day. In England, twelve hours was a very long day. Cameron was accustomed to pushing his crews through fourteen-hour marathons. “Jim was like a tornado hitting Pinewood Studios,” says Paxton. “The crew guys, they were used to their breaks at ten and two. They’d go to the pub on the lot at lunch. They’re ready to knock off by five.” One ritual that was particularly hard for the Americans to understand was a twice-daily set-clearing fury that accompanied the union-mandated arrival of a woman pushing a tea trolley. “I was shocked when at a particular time of the morning everybody would be gone,” Winston recalled. “Hello? Where is everybody?”7 In the middle of filming a scene, the giant stage doors would swing open, letting the special-effects smoke spill out, so the crew could rush the tea lady, with her urn of hot water and plate of cheese rolls.

  No one in England had seen The Terminator yet, so as far as the Pinewood crew was concerned, Cameron was a young, upstart Yank with no credits and no business directing the follow-up to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece. Of course, he was actually a young, upstart Canadian, but no one ever seems to remember that. When Cameron did try to hold Terminator screenings for the crew, they didn’t bother to attend. “There was a lot of resentment and really very little understanding of what Jim was trying to accomplish,” says Hurd. “At the time, there was a sense that you don’t get to the top of your profession through talent, you get there by paying your dues and putting
in your time.” To the Pinewood veterans, Cameron, at thirty-one, was an undeserving kid and Hurd, as a female producer married to the director, was a joke. When Hurd interviewed crew members for various positions, they would inform her that they didn’t take orders from a woman. Forget LV-426; Cameron and Hurd had found a hostile environment right here on Earth.

  Every day, the tension between director and producer and their crew escalated. At the heart of the conflict was the film’s first assistant director, Derek Cracknell, well respected among the crew because he had been Stanley Kubrick’s AD. Cracknell took to calling Cameron “guv’nor” and “Grizzly Adams” for his bushy beard. These were not terms of affection. Cracknell felt he was better qualified than Cameron to direct the film. “Jim would ask him to set up a shot one way, and Derek would say, ‘Oh, no no no, I know what you want,’” says Hurd. “Then he’d do it wrong and the whole set would have to be broken down.” Cracknell was seriously undermining Cameron and Hurd’s tenuous authority. The director of photography, Dick Bush, also wasn’t working out. And Cameron and Hurd were falling behind on their ambitious seventy-five-day shoot. In film parlance, they weren’t “making their days,” so they decided to make some changes. They replaced Bush with Adrian Biddle, a DP from Scott’s commercial production company who had shot Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” ad. And they gave Cracknell his notice, causing the festering hostility of the Aliens set to erupt into a full-blown mutiny.

  At Cracknell’s urging, in the middle of the shooting day, the Pinewood crew downed their tools and stopped work in protest. Cameron and Hurd were in a delicate situation. At the time, England was busy with film shoots and there wasn’t another crew they could bring in immediately. They called Twentieth Century Fox and tried to decide what to do. Cameron wanted to move the entire production out of England, but Hurd tried to talk him out of it. “It was, to this day, the most difficult moment of my entire career,” says Hurd. Instead of attempting to replace their crew, the young filmmakers gathered everyone together on the set for a summit. Cameron addressed the group with characteristic frankness. “Look, this is a really important movie to me,” he said, as Hurd and Paxton remember it. “This is my first studio movie. We have an almost impossible shooting schedule, and I need everyone’s help. I can’t do this on my own. But I also can’t have a situation where it seems like the crew is working to prove that the endeavor is gonna be a failure. If you have a problem with that, you’ve gotta step forward ‘cause we’ve gotta replace you.” The meeting lasted for hours, as crew members aired their grievances about the long hours. At the end of the day, the AD staff agreed to be more supportive of Cameron, and he to be more sensitive to teatime. But no real warm feeling ever developed between the director and his British crew. When he finally wrapped at Pinewood, Cameron stood up again to address them. “This has been a long and difficult shoot, fraught by many problems,” he said. “But the one thing that kept me going, through it all, was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out the gate of Pinewood and never come back, and that you sorry bastards would still be here.” He never did return.

  Five More Cases of Lube, Please

  The tricky task of translating Cameron’s designs into practical sets and locations in England fell to British production designer Peter Lamont, who had created the sets for several of the Bond films and Fiddler on the Roof. Among Lamont’s first great finds was a decommissioned coal-generating plant in Acton, an industrial neighborhood in West London. The Acton plant was the perfect place to house the alien queen’s giant, gooey nest. “What Jim really liked about it was all the walkways and stairways were grille, so when you looked down you could see from top to bottom,” says Lamont. “There was so much old equipment. It was all rusty and horrible. They said, ‘You can do anything you want with it.’” The only problem with this abandoned industrial dream set was that it was covered in asbestos. So before Lamont and his team could start construction, a firm had to clear the plant of contaminants, and readings of the air quality had to be taken multiple times a day during production. To dress the set with alien slime, Winston’s crew arrived with their magic formula. The English must have thought the Americans were having an awfully good time there, because every week, several cases of K-Y jelly were shipped to the set. The lubricant was not for recreational use, however—it was an important ingredient in extraterrestrial spit, giving the aliens’ drool that special glisten.

  Lamont seemed to have a knack for procuring good-looking junk. To build the full-sized version of Cameron’s Vietnam-evoking drop ship, he used the undercarriage of an old Vulcan helicopter that was being dismantled. For the armored personnel carrier, Lamont got his hands on a vehicle that British Airways used to tow its 747s. The aircraft tow truck weighed seventy-eight tons—even after Lamont’s crew pulled thirty-eight tons of lead out of it, they had to reinforce the floor at the power station so it wouldn’t fall through. Lamont’s inventiveness would help save a scene that at one point looked financially unfeasible—the moment when Ripley and the marines emerge from their hypersleep chambers inside the Suhco. By the time the chambers were to be built, the production was already running out of money. Hurd and a producer from Fox determined that the hypersleep scene had to go. Since it was a production-design issue, Hurd asked Lamont to deliver the bad news to the director. “I’m not telling him,” Lamont said. “You’re married. You tell him.” Lamont shuffled back to his office and reread the script, trying to determine what to do about the costly chambers. Cameron, normally a kinetic bundle while he’s working, stopped by Lamont’s office and did something unusual—he sat down. “You look worried,” he said to Lamont. “Are you OK?” Instead of telling Cameron he’d have to cut the scene, Lamont proposed an old-fashioned idea for shooting the chambers. He could build just four, he said, and, with mirrors, make the Suhco interior appear vast. It was a simple solution that allowed Cameron to keep his set piece and appease his budget-conscious producers, an idea that might have come from one of Roger Corman’s striving crew kids. In this Pinewood journeyman, Cameron had found a scrappy ally. A decade later, he would call the sixty-five-year-old production designer out of retirement to build him his most audacious set—the Titanic—a job that won Lamont his first and only Oscar.

  Cameron’s vision of the future in Aliens is surprising for how much it looks like plain old 1985 in certain scenes. He wanted some of his sets and costumes to feel familiar to his audience, especially the portions of the film that take place at the space station in Earths atmosphere. “Since we never actually set foot on Earth in Aliens, the station needed to stand in for it,” the director explains. “We needed to go from the familiar and safe to the distant and alien.” When Ripley is whisked from her hypersleep capsule to the space station maintained by her employer, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, she reports to a staid conference room that could just as well be 1980s IBM, except for the Nehru collars on the suits. “I wanted her return to Earth to feel like a return to a corporate bureaucracy we could recognize,” Cameron says. “So the ‘suits’ still wore suits.”

  Weyland-Yutani is Cameron’s version of that durable sci-fi trope, the evil multinational corporation, and Paul Reiser’s character, Carter Burke, is Cameron’s company man. Burke will stop at nothing to retrieve an alien superpredator for his firm’s weapons division. Appropriately, Burke ends up cocooned in alien slime. In a scene that was cut from the film because Cameron didn’t like it visually, Ripley hands Burke a grenade as an act of mercy, so he can blow himself up before becoming host to another chest burster. At this point in his career, Cameron had little experience with corporations. Looking back, he says, “I don’t think Burke is a very realistic character. Most corporate people are spineless and would not go as far out on a limb as Burke does for a proactive reason of greed.” By the time Cameron got to Avatar, his company man would be more nuanced, a character whose evil is banal and is informed by Cameron’s additional years of tangling with big corporations.

  A Cutting Dile
mma

  Cameron hired Ray Lovejoy, Kubrick’s craftsman who had cut 2001: A Space Odyssey, to edit Aliens. Because 2001 was the movie that had inspired Cameron to make movies, he was prepared to be awed by Lovejoy’s gifts. But Cameron’s techniques and Lovejoy’s were of completely different eras. Lovejoy was deliberative in his cuts and in his working pace. Cameron liked staccato editing, especially in his action sequences, where he inserts blank flash frames to accelerate the tempo. Splicing those little white frames into the film was maddening work, however—a negative cutter told Cameron he had more cuts in Aliens’ reel twelve alone than in any complete film he had ever worked on before. “Ray Lovejoy is a terrific editor, but he didn’t know what hit him with Jim,” says James Horner, who, as the film’s composer, had the unfortunate role of being the next man in the postproduction line. Cameron’s post crew faced other delays. The sound mixers weren’t sure how to tackle the scene where the drop ship flies onto LV-426, since the special-effects artists were still working on it. So Cameron ran down in front of the screen the mixers were using, held up a broom, and said, “Follow this,” as he ran in the path of the drop ship. The timing worked perfectly.