The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  But the film was still falling behind, causing serious problems for Horner, who was supposed to have seven weeks to compose the score at Abbey Road Studios. Horner was another Roger Corman grad who had met Cameron when they were both working on Battle Beyond the Stars. Born in Los Angeles and educated at the Royal College of Music in London, Horner speaks with an indefinable Anglo accent. As a traveler in both artistic cultures, he had anticipated the clash between Cameron’s hyperactive American working style and Lovejoy’s more measured English pace. But he’d had no idea how bad it would get. By the time Lovejoy had locked reels for Horner to compose to, it was less than two weeks before the film’s scheduled scoring session with the London Symphony Orchestra. The session couldn’t be canceled without forfeiting the entire fee. “I have to write a score, but I don’t have the film,” says Horner. “It was horrible. It was just too hard. I think Jim and Gale thought I was just being an asshole and I didn’t get it. I completely got it. I knew it wasn’t going to satisfy everything they wanted.” When the second-to-last day of the scoring session arrived, Horner still hadn’t composed the last action cue of the movie. He wrote the final piece of the score overnight, and the orchestra recorded it on the last day of the session. Additional music was added after Horner left to score another film. “I didn’t really know how to work with an orchestral composer, and I don’t think James knew how to work with directors,” Cameron says. “He had a lot to learn, and I had a lot to learn.” As disappointing as their process was on Aliens, Horner and Cameron both admired each other’s creativity and drive and would end up finding a better way to collaborate later in their careers, on Titanic and Avatar.

  Once Cameron had a finished film, he had some difficult decisions to make. His movie was way too long, nearly two hours and forty-five minutes. Cameron couldn’t figure out where to cut—a minute here or there wouldn’t get the film down to the running time he needed to satisfy Fox. Hurd made what seemed like a wild suggestion—dropping all of reel three, the portion of the film where Ripley’s daughter is revealed and the LV-426 colony is shown before the aliens attack. “I thought she was nuts at first,” says Cameron. “It would remove the only images of the derelict ship, which was the only tether to the first picture.” Cameron thought about it for a day and decided that Hurd was right. The reel was a clean cut. By excising reel three and two other scenes, they could slash almost half an hour and reach a length of two hours and seventeen minutes, still long by the standards of the day but defensible to studio bigwigs. It was a tough call, and one that home video made reversible in 1992, when Cameron restored reel three in its entirety in a 154-minute special edition.

  The Aftermath

  In 1986, Twentieth Century Fox desperately needed a hit. A year earlier, Rupert Murdoch had bought the studio, and Barry Diller, made chairman by its previous owner in 1984, had yet to prove he could make and release movies that worked there. When it came time to show Aliens to the studio brass, Cameron proudly toted his film cans into the screening room. “Here it is,” he told the executives. “It’s done.” Tom Sherak, who was handling marketing for Fox at the time, remembers someone suggesting the film might be too long. “No, it’s not too long,” Cameron said, awfully sure of himself for a guy handing over his first studio movie. Halfway through the screening, Sherak knew Fox had something special on its hands. When it was released on July 18, 1986, Aliens did something unusual for a sequel at that time—it built on the audience of the original. Thanks in part to a demographic Cameron reliably entices to the box office, young women, Aliens earned more than $130 million worldwide. “Aliens helped save the studio,” says Sherak. “I don’t even think Cameron knew what the impact was on us. It’s one of those rare times when one movie can change almost everything.” The movie changed everything for Weaver, too. Although she was crestfallen that Cameron edited out Ripley’s motherhood, Weaver’s performance in Aliens made her the first actor to be nominated for an Oscar for a sci-fi film, a genre historically ignored by the Academy.

  Aliens remains the highest-grossing film in the franchise. The movies that followed it opened strong but never managed to hold on to their audiences after the first weekend or to win over the die-hard fans of Scott’s film as Cameron had. To hear Cameron talk about the last two movies in the quadrilogy is to hear the voice of the fourteen-year-old fanboy in him more than the director. Alien3 was the first feature film by David Fincher, who got the job based on his stylish music videos and went on to make Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “Fincher pissed me off by killing off Newt, Hicks, and Bishop, essentially trashing the entire ending of Aliens in the first few minutes of Alien3,” Cameron says. “His photography is always so good, so I’ve come to see it as an interesting failure, at least an admirable film.” The director of the fourth movie, Alien: Resurrection, was a curious choice—Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the Frenchman behind the black comedy Delicatessen. Jeunet would later make A Very Long Engagement, a war romance that Cameron admired a lot more than his farcical take on the Alien story. “Some of the imagery is fun, but the film is ridiculous,” Cameron says. “However, I have to say I did shed a tear for Ripley finally returning to Earth, at the end of a four-film cycle and hundreds of years, including death and rebirth each time (either symbolically or actually), thus ending her epic struggle. Of course it was just for the idea of that, not the execution. I wish the film had been better.”

  If he were making Aliens in 2010, Cameron says he would use computer graphics to create the queen. The director is an advocate for all-CG creatures now, which saddens some in the old-school special-effects world who look to his alien queen as the pinnacle of the art form. But Cameron concedes it would probably be best to mix prosthetics and CG to maintain the textural reality of glistening, dripping alien slime. “Prosthetics is a dying art,” he says, “but an Alien film would be the exception.”

  With the release of Aliens in 1986, Cameron closed act one of his career. He had delivered a hit, a studio film, on time and close to budget. Aliens cost Twentieth Century Fox $17.5 million to produce, nearly $2 million more than it had planned to spend but an overage that would seem downright quaint by the time Cameron and Fox got to Titanic. He had shown he could hold his own with Ridley Scott’s classic material and with a truculent crew. He had helped a struggling studio stay afloat and earned the underappreciated sci-fi genre some respect with Aliens’ seven Oscar nominations. For his efforts, Cameron got to enter that rarefied Hollywood club, directors with final cut. The first thing he would do with his new power was turn to a story he’d wanted to tell since he was sixteen. It was the movie that would drag him to his depths physically and emotionally, into The Abyss.

  5.

  STARING INTO THE ABYSS

  A Human with Gills

  As a boy in Chippawa, Cameron lived about a mile and a half upstream from Niagara Falls, the roar of the water crashing over the limestone cliffs a constant soundtrack in his ears. Water and its mysteries would be an abiding source of fascination and creative stimulation for Cameron throughout his life—one that would inspire him to make his most grueling and personal movie, The Abyss. The Abyss began as a short story Cameron wrote at age sixteen, when he was devouring Jacques Cousteau’s underwater TV documentaries. Because he earned top grades in science, Cameron was invited to attend a series of weekly lectures just over the U.S. border at a university in Buffalo, New York. One lecture was delivered by a diver who showed film of an experiment in which he had breathed liquid oxygen while lying on an operating table. Among the researchers’ goals was to send humans deeper into the oceans; with liquid rather than air oxygenating the lungs, a diver’s body could more easily accommodate changes in the pressure of the surrounding water. The research hadn’t gotten very far—the test had been terminated when the diver wasn’t getting the right mix of gases. But the experiment stunned Cameron, whose mind reeled with the possibilities. This diver was like a human with gills—imagine the places he could go. The next day, Cameron starte
d scribbling a short story about an underwater science lab perched on the edge of the Cayman Trough, the deepest point in the Caribbean. In the sixteen-year-old’s story, scientists testing experimental fluid-breathing gear made dives down the wall, going deeper and deeper and, one after another, failing to return. The last of the dive team had to decide whether to follow the others and see what had happened to them or to abort the experiment. He dived and experienced a kind of rapture, ending up in a depth-induced psychosis. “It was a simple story, more of a psychological metaphor than a thriller,” Cameron says. Nevertheless, this was pretty heady stuff for a teenager—a statement on the attitude of exploration and the lure of the unknown.

  Since Cameron’s first diving adventures as an adolescent in Chippawa Creek, he has logged more than 2,500 hours underwater, including 550 hours in diving helmets and 500 in deep submersibles. The drive to go ever deeper, which sent the divers in his short story into the Cayman Trough never to return, is one Cameron understands at his core. While making Avatar in 2009, he was also at work on an engineering project, designing and building a one-man sphere to dive to the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the world’s oceans. The last manned vessel to reach the 36,000-foot depths of the Mariana Trench was a U.S. Navy boat called the Trieste in 1960. One of the Trieste’s Plexiglas windows cracked under the pressure, and the two men inside spent just twenty minutes on the ocean floor before turning back. That no one has bothered to try again in fifty years doesn’t deter Cameron—it makes the journey irresistible to him. He plans to dive into the abyssal depths, alone in his submersible, in late 2010.

  “I like doing things I know others can’t,” Cameron says. That’s part of what attracts him to shooting movies in water, an arduous, almost masochistic endeavor that he does better than any other Hollywood director by a factor of about a zillion. “Nobody likes shooting in water,” Cameron says. “It’s physically taxing, frustrating, and dangerous. But when you have a small team of people as crazy as you are, that are good at it, there is deep satisfaction in both the process of doing it and the resulting footage.” To Cameron, journeying deep into the ocean is as close as he can get to rocketing into outer space. To go where almost no man has gone before and fail to bring a camera? Well, that would be like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong planting the flag on the moon and never stopping to take the picture. When Cameron explores the deep ocean, he feels a responsibility to bring it back for the rest of us, just as Cousteau did for him. “I love the experience of being underwater,” he says. “As a filmmaker I want to share that.”

  Truckers, Aliens, and God

  Triumphant after the July 1986 release of Aliens, Cameron and Hurd departed for a well-deserved honeymoon in the south of France, their first having been cut short by the film’s preproduction schedule. When the couple arrived to find the region swamped by European tourists, they quickly changed their travel plans and flew to the Cayman Islands instead, where they chartered a boat called the Cayman Aggressor and spent their days scuba diving, exploring, and enjoying some of the first low-pressure moments in their marriage, all just miles from the site of Cameron’s high-school short story. When they returned to L.A., Cameron decided that rather than scramble to set up deals capitalizing on his growing heat in Hollywood, he would take time to contemplate his next move. While her husband brainstormed story ideas, Hurd signed on to produce her first non-Cameron movie since her Roger Corman days, a sci-fi thriller starring James Caan and Mandy Patinkin called Alien Nation. After working elbow to elbow under stressful conditions for the last three years, Cameron and Hurd were taking a break from each other professionally. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  In December, urged by Hurd to tackle a project he’d long dreamed about, Cameron began working on a treatment for The Abyss. The scope of the movie would be much grander than his high-school idea, involving loose nukes, submarine chases, wise aliens, and Cameron’s most sophisticated love story. Although his original piece had followed a group of researchers working underwater, Cameron felt scientists weren’t commercial enough protagonists for the big budget he would need to realize this wildly ambitious underwater action film. So he turned to another archetype he knew well and felt he could sell to a studio—blue-collar heroes. He knew he could create a compelling story around some of the real-life characters who had labored beside him in his twenties—he just needed an excuse to get them underwater. Around this time, Cameron hired Van Ling, a recent USC film school grad who became such an indispensable assistant that the director began calling him his “extra RAM”—it was Ling who first showed Cameron how to use a Mac, so he could ditch his yellow legal pads and typewriter and write The Abyss on a computer. Cameron and Ling researched possible underwater gigs for the movie’s heroes—harnessing thermal-vent energy, mining undersea manganese nodules. They were all too technical, Cameron thought, but undersea oil drilling, a technology that is possible but isn’t practiced in the real world due to its prohibitive cost, would be easy for an audience to understand. So Cameron decided to set The Abyss on a civilian underwater oil-drilling rig called Deepcore. And he conceived of Deepcore’s crew, led by the foreman or “head tool pusher” Bud Brigman, as the kind of no-nonsense good ol’ boys and gals who could just as easily be driving an eighteen-wheeler across the desert as piloting a submersible across the deep ocean. In an early scene that establishes the Deepcore family, the actors sing along to Linda Ronstadt’s trucking anthem, “Willing,” as they twist knobs and pilot subs. It’s just another workday under the sea. That is, until the Deepcore crew is drafted into taking aboard a group of Navy SEALs to rescue a sunken U.S. submarine carrying Trident missiles. And in case that isn’t enough drama, a hurricane is blowing in, and so is Lindsey Brigman, Deepcore’s designer and boss and Bud’s soon-to-be-ex-wife.

  Just as in Cameron’s high-school short story, Deepcore is perched on the edge of the abyssal Cayman Trough. That’s the literal meaning of the movie’s title. But Cameron was interested in exploring the multiple interpretations of the word “abyss.” He was taken with the idea of a psychological abyss—a pit of madness, of fear, of the unknown. His script started with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” The quote was omitted from the theatrical release of the film because it had been used in another movie that opened just before The Abyss, but it got to the heart of what drew Cameron to this story, the idea that his characters would go to the deepest, darkest part of the ocean to confront a monster, and find out the monster was them.

  Under the sea, along with that missile-bearing submarine, the Deep-core and SEAL teams were to discover mysterious, glowing creatures—aliens that Cameron called NTIs, for “nonterrestrial intelligence.” As always, the director’s sci-fi here is heavy on the sci—the rationale for the NTIs living so far below sea level is that the high ambient pressure of the abyssal depths might be similar to the gravity on denser planets. The NTIs are neither hostile and gruesome like the creatures of Aliens, nor cute and cuddly like E.T. They’re ethereal, resembling underwater butterflies, with giant eyes and no mouths. This is just the opposite of H. R. Giger’s alien, which had a giant mouth and no eyes—this time, Cameron wanted to inspire wonder rather than fear. Here’s how he described the NTIs in his Abyss treatment: “An extraterrestrial creature, bioluminescent like the deep-sea fish. It has four arms and two legs, all long and slender, moving with a slow balletic grace. Its body and limbs are translucent, and it resembles a figure made of blown glass. … The head is refined and strangely anthropomorphic, with large eyes that convey a cold, dispassionate wisdom without malice. It is stunningly beautiful.”1 The NTIs are sage, peaceful inhabitants of our universe, carrying a message of warning to Earth. Their closest filmic predecessor may be Klaatu, from Robert Wise’s 1951 sci-fi parable, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu views humans as misbehaving children with a choice to live in harmony or face obliteration. While Klaatu delivers his message verbally, the mouthless NTIs d
o so via a video screen playing a kind of montage of evil’s greatest hits—nuclear bomb footage, Holocaust scenes, Vietnam newsreels. With all that destruction in humanity’s wake, the NTIs are mulling whether we’re worth saving.

  Just as he had in The Terminator, Cameron infused his script with religious metaphors. One of Deepcore’s crew refers to an NTI as “that angel comin’ toward me.” Bud Brigman’s meeting with the NTIs at the bottom of the Cayman Trough is like a meeting with God—he symbolically dies on the edge of the abyss and is taken by the angel of death into heaven. Cameron doesn’t believe in God, he says, “but I believe in religion. We are all wired with the need to feel that there is some greater sense of purpose and order, that it all somehow makes sense, and that some great force is watching over us.” As far as he’s concerned, belief in UFOs and intelligent aliens originates in the same part of the brain as religion. Some of us choose heaven, some of us outer space, but most of us need to feel there’s something out there smarter and more benevolent than we are.

  Wet for Wet

  With The Abyss, Cameron wanted to bring a new level of authenticity to underwater filming, photographing real actors in an underwater soundstage complete with sets, lights, and sound. No one had ever attempted this kind of filmmaking before, which made it even more attractive to the director. After trying something new with the fourteen-foot queen in Aliens and succeeding, he was learning to listen to his instincts, not the prevailing wisdom about how movies should be made. Historically, underwater scenes in movies have been shot on a soundstage using the “dry-for-wet” technique. With smoke and slow-motion photography, the director creates the illusion of submersion. Another method is to rely on stunt divers doubling as the characters for any scenes that are shot in deep water and to film the close-ups of the real actors in the safety of a swimming pool. Few feature films ever manage to capture the wonder of the ocean as Cousteau’s documentaries did. One undersea movie that stands out, however, is The Deep, a 1977 diving thriller starring Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset. Generally written off as a shameless attempt to capitalize on the success of Jaws two summers earlier, The Deep contains a few stunning underwater scenes, all of them shot by Al Giddings, a six-foot-two, 240-pound cinematographer who had started out as a spear fisherman and competitive swimmer in the 1960s. Giddings had photographed a number of award-winning underwater nature documentaries and was beginning to develop a reputation as a latter-day Cousteau when Cameron flew to meet him at his Oakland, California, studio in 1987. The burly cameraman engineered his own equipment and had a can-do spirit that matched his technical competence and athleticism. Like most people who get along with Cameron professionally, he regarded the director’s formidable plans as an exciting challenge. Older than Cameron, he inspired a confidence in the filmmaker, assuring him that he was not crazy, that what he wanted to accomplish could be done. Giddings was soon hired as underwater director of photography on The Abyss.