The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  “The Crowded Room” was not part of the new deal but was still in the works with a modest budget. But days after Cameron’s gargantuan pact with the studio was announced, Arcara sued him. She alleged that she had been cut out of the preproduction process on “The Crowded Room” and refused to finalize the deal until she was given an increase in her fee, from $250,000 to $1.5 million. The director had become a victim of his own success. Arcara told Daily Variety that Cameron “is a much more powerful director and has a lot more clout now. … He’s not the same person he was when I brought him the project.”2 Cameron was discovering the downside to being the biggest gorilla in the forest—a lot of little critters want to climb on your back. He dealt with Arcara’s demands with his usual pragmatism. “I don’t negotiate with terrorists or extortionists, so I told her to take a flying fuck and collapsed the project,” Cameron says. “The Crowded Room” was dead, and with it any prospect of Cameron’s departing from the big-budget event movies Hollywood expected from him. The director felt an obligation to make his first movie for Fox under the historic deal a highly commercial one. Arcara would later take “The Crowded Room” to other studios, where various director-actor combinations were floated, including David Fincher and Brad Pitt, Steven Soderbergh and Sean Penn, Danny DeVito and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Joel Schumacher and Colin Farrell, but the movie never got made.

  Strange Days

  The eighteen months after the release of T2 was the busiest writing period for Cameron since his Aliens and Rambo marathon—in addition to “The Crowded Room,” he was at work on a treatment for a Spider-Man movie and a futuristic film noir story that had been gestating in his brain since 1985 called Strange Days. Strange Days takes place on the last days of 1999, when Los Angeles is a smoking, rubble-strewn mess and there’s a new kind of high-tech contraband on the streets called superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs. SQUIDs are a kind of virtual-reality headgear that taps into the brain and records every sensation a person experiences. People wear them to feel the thrills and terrors of others, from criminals to lovers. It’s Cops on crack. Cops was the only reality show on the air when Cameron wrote Strange Days, but he clearly foresaw the camera culture that was coming. In the story, a grubby ex-cop named Lenny Nero traffics in the high-tech contraband and gets his hands on a disc of the police beating a rap star to death.

  Cameron had sufficient motivation to stop putting off writing Strange Days—wait another seven years and it would actually be the eve of the millennium. But the director finally started tackling the story at the behest of Kathryn Bigelow. “I’d always liked it,” Bigelow says. “It was a dark, edgy, gritty take on mediated reality and the perils of life lived on-screen.” Cameron and Bigelow had divorced immediately after T2, and at some point he had stopped trying to hide his relationship with Linda Hamilton from her and the rest of the world. Despite Cameron’s affair, he and Bigelow remained friends and would for years. It’s a testament either to Cameron’s decency in divorce proceedings or to his perceived power in Hollywood—or perhaps to a combination of the two—that his ex-wives stay on good terms with him. In the spring of 2009, seventeen years after they split, Cameron eagerly left the Avatar set on a Friday night to take in a screening of Bigelow’s highly praised Iraq war thriller, The Hurt Locker, with his current wife, Suzy Amis.

  Cameron’s 1992 description of L.A.’s near future in Strange Days isn’t a wild Blade Runner vision with flying cars and perfect blond cyborgs. It’s grimly predictive—the future will be like today, he tells us, only worse. He’s a better macro futurist than a micro one. His idea of 1999 fashion—an “Auschwitz meets Metropolis look” for women and kilts and bicycle shorts for men—didn’t pan out, thankfully. But Strange Days is an amazingly accurate portrait of Los Angeles circa 2009, even more so than the year Cameron intended, 1999. Here’s how he described the city:

  The economy is worse. The jobless rate is up. New housing is down. All the indicators are creeping steadily into the red. … California, the Shake ‘n Bake state, is still mailing out IOUs and waiting for the Big One to make Barstow into beachfront property. The freeways are a nightmare of gridlock, with smaller cars parked closer and closer together. Gas is over three bucks a gallon. … There are security cameras in malls, cameras in office buildings, cameras in banks, cameras in schools, cameras in convenience stores. … Reality shows and amateur video dominate TV programming. It is the age of scopophilia, voyeurism, and vicarious living. … We like to watch.3

  Cameron wrote his ideas for Strange Days in an eighty-page novellalike document that he called a scriptment. It’s a term the director had coined as a joke back on The Terminator to describe the long, detailed story outlines he writes, a kind of hybrid of script and treatment that contains some dialogue and long chunks of narrative description. Most treatments are under twenty-five pages, but Cameron’s scriptments run much longer—the one he wrote for Avatar is about one hundred pages. As a writer, Cameron’s strengths are his savvy use of structure and his uncanny ability to paint vivid pictures that even Hollywood’s most notoriously unimaginative species, the studio executive, can see in his head. But dialogue is Cameron’s weak spot, and he knows it. His blood-and-thunder lines—“Come with me if you want to live,” “Get away from her, you bitch,” “I’ll be back”—are memorable and oft quoted, but everyday banter stumps him. On Strange Days, Cameron made an extra effort to capture realism in his characters’ speech. “I’m proud of that piece of writing more than the others for the sound of the dialogue,” Cameron says. “I was trying to channel Elmore Leonard. Didn’t quite succeed, but it is still my best dialogue.”

  Bigelow would direct Strange Days, the first time since Rambo that someone else had made one of Cameron’s scripts and the only time he has ever trusted another filmmaker with one of his original ideas. When Cameron’s other projects prevented him from turning his novella into a shooting script himself, Age of Innocence screenwriter and frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks took over the writing. “I think he felt in good hands with Jay,” says Bigelow. “Jim pretty much let the project go at that point from a creative standpoint.” Cameron relinquished the writing but played a crucial role as a producer, mediating between Bigelow and the studio. “He kept us well insulated from studio turf battles and executive politics,” Bigelow says. The resulting movie is unsettling and indeed a bit strange. Upon its release, some critics praised Bigelow’s daring direction. She relied on handheld and point-of-view camera work to suggest the experience of wearing SQUIDs—a technique she applied more skillfully fourteen years later on The Hurt Locker—and made an unlikely casting choice for the sleazy ex-cop Lenny, Ralph Fiennes, engaging in a bit of genre slumming between Schindler’s List and The English Patient. Audiences didn’t connect with the movie’s bleak future vision: on a $42 million production budget, Strange Days grossed less than $8 million.

  What if James Bond Had to Answer to His Wife?

  Back before Schwarzenegger had a state to run and Cameron had five kids, they often got together to ride their motorcycles through the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, Schwarzenegger in front, leader-of-the-pack style. “Jim doesn’t have to be the lead guy,” explains Tom Arnold, their mutual friend and sometime biking companion. “Arnold does. Everyone is in Arnold’s wake.” The subtle variations in machismo expressed by the director and his leading man are best illustrated by their choices of driveway art—Cameron buys new Corvettes, while Schwarzenegger prizes his Austrian army tank. One guy likes speed, the other strength, but they’re both playing at super-herodom in their own ways. On their Sunday rides, Cameron and Schwarzenegger would often stop at the Rock Store, a mom-and-pop shack on a twisty stretch of Mulholland Highway that has been a gear-head mecca since Steve McQueen rumbled through in the sixties. “When we get together, we have great conversations about things you wouldn’t expect—education, the environment, relationships with women,” Schwarzenegger says. Occasionally, they met without their hogs, sharing brea
kfast at Schatzi, Schwarzenegger’s now-closed Santa Monica restaurant, known in the 1990s for its excellent Wiener schnitzel and the German-language lessons piped into the restrooms. It was at Schatzi one morning in early 1993, with the action hero bent over his usual vat of oatmeal, that Schwarzenegger announced to Cameron what their next movie would be. It was just the two of them. They hadn’t met Tom Arnold yet, but would very shortly.

  Both men had reason to be hungry for a sure thing that morning. Schwarzenegger was fresh off filming Last Action Hero, an action-comedy that was plagued by bad buzz and would go on to become the summer of 1993’s biggest flop. Cameron had signed his massive deal with Twentieth Century Fox the previous spring and had yet to put a movie into production. Joe Roth, the filmmaker-friendly chairman who had approved Cameron’s deal, had moved on to Disney, and now the man running Fox was a relative unknown named Peter Chernin, an executive whose background was mostly in TV. Cameron wanted to come out swinging with his first film under the deal, to cement his relationship with the studio as well as with Lightstorm’s new foreign partners.

  Schwarzenegger’s brother-in-law Bobby Shriver had shown him a French movie called La Totale!, a farce about a secret agent whose family thinks he’s just a boring civil servant. La Totale! doesn’t have any big action set pieces, just a couple of short chases. It was the potential of the character—a man who is a hero at work but flummoxed by domestic life—that appealed to Schwarzenegger. He brought a copy of La Totale! for Cameron to watch, which the director did that night, immediately becoming intrigued. “I saw the film as an anti–James Bond, a reality check on the uber–male fantasy,” Cameron says. “You might be able to travel the globe and kill all the bad guys in clever ways and save the world from time to time, but as a man you still had to answer to a woman when you came home. Bond himself is a pathetic eternal bachelor who will never know the truth of what it is to be a man, to be a husband and father, which is why that fantasy works, especially for married men. Because Bond has nobody to answer to.” The joke of this movie would be “What if James Bond had to come home and answer to his wife?” At the time, Cameron was in a relationship with Linda Hamilton, unmarried and expecting his first child, and Schwarzenegger was married to Maria Shriver and a father of two. “Arnold and I both were drawing on our experiences as husbands—the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Cameron says. He saw the movie as a broad action comedy on a giant scale—a crowd-pleasing vehicle for Schwarzenegger and for him. Cameron would call his domestic epic True Lies.

  The sci-fi auteur was a little daunted by the prospect of writing comedy. “I had done funny moments in movies that were otherwise as serious as a coronary,” he says. “But I’d never done a film that needed comedy in order to work on a fundamental level.” Schwarzenegger’s representatives were anxious to get his next movie in the works to resuscitate his image. By the time Cameron finished his Strange Days scriptment, he had just weeks to write True Lies before the actor’s camp said he would have to move on to something else. In a time crunch as usual, Cameron enlisted Randall Frakes, whose floor Cameron had slept on while writing The Terminator, to share the writing duties. After Cameron and Frakes finished their draft, the director didn’t think it was funny enough. The situations were inherently humorous, but the script lacked laugh lines and sight gags. Cameron brought in a team of comedy writers to punch up the jokes. Unimpressed, he kept only a few of their lines, including one uttered by Schwarzenegger when he detonates a missile with a terrorist attached: “You’re fired.”

  Cameron’s commitment to realism in his writing can create some strange juxtapositions. In 1993, with the cold war over, Hollywood was on the hunt for new villains to replace the Russians. For True Lies, Cameron picked a Middle Eastern terror cell operating in Florida. When Cameron and Frakes started researching the subject, they grew concerned about real life imitating their fiction. “We realized how easy it would be to smuggle the weapons in, how difficult it would be to detect them,” Frakes recalls. “We discovered how committed and serious religious fanatics and political fanatics were in the Middle East and how anti-American they were. We got nervous. We didn’t want to give anyone any ideas.” On a crash run to deliver the script, they decided the answer was to make True Lies as silly as possible, which they did with its bombastic set pieces. But nestled in the middle of this action comedy is an eerie monologue delivered by Aziz, the head terrorist, to a henchman holding a camcorder:

  You have killed our women and our children, bombed our cities full of fire like cowards, and you dare to call us terrorists. But now the oppressed have been given a mighty sword to strike back at their enemies. Unless the U.S. pulls all military forces out of the Persian Gulf immediately and forever, Crimson Jihad will rain fire on one major U.S. city each week until our demands are met.4

  The script was written eight years before 9/11. Al Qaeda was just a start-up in Sudan, and the idea of a terrorist delivering threats via grainy black-and-white video was still something audiences could laugh at. Today, Aziz’s speech sounds like something heard on CNN. After the 2001 terror attacks, Cameron abandoned the idea of a True Lies sequel. “Somehow, having fun with nuke-toting terrorists just didn’t sit as well as it had,” he says.

  Master of His Domain

  Cameron had been involved in two CG milestones at this point in his career, the pseudopod on The Abyss and the T-1000 on T2, both accomplished at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic in northern California. After making T2, he believed the visual-effects business was at an important crossroads, converting from optical compositing to digital. Historically, special-effects photography had meant layering each element of a shot—a painted background, an actor’s performance, a model—on separate pieces of film and running them through an optical printer. It was a painstaking process and when done incorrectly revealed telltale matte lines and variations in color and film quality where the separate elements met. If you’ve ever seen an actor in an older movie who appears edged in a spooky halo when he’s supposed to be sitting on a sandy beach, he’s probably the victim of a poorly executed composite. But in the 1980s, it became possible to combine the various elements of a shot digitally and therefore seamlessly. One of the reasons ILM was able to deliver the T-1000 shots so precisely was its early use of digital compositing. Cameron wanted to be part of the digital revolution in special effects. “I wanted to make sure that as a filmmaker I was always ahead of the wave, not behind it,” he says. To do so, he felt he would need a lab of his own.

  About the time he was thinking of founding his own special-effects company, Cameron visited Stan Winston’s shop. The director was amazed to see that Winston, a master of old-school effects, had installed about ten workstations with CG modeling software and had artists creating CG creatures for him. Winston had also stood at a milestone in effects evolution, while working on Jurassic Park for Steven Spielberg. Clearly, Winston felt, in the future creatures would be done as much with CG as with prosthetics and animatronics. It even seemed possible that CG would replace those arts at which he was a world leader. “So typical of Stan to attack rather than entrench, by getting out ahead of the pack and incorporating CG into his stock-in-trade,” Cameron says. The director pitched his friend the idea that instead of ten workstations he could have two hundred, staffed by the best animators and artists in the world. Winston bought that pitch and joined Cameron as a cofounder of the effects company Digital Domain.

  There were two other important pieces of the Digital Domain puzzle to be solved—the money and the person to run it. Rae Sanchini first met Cameron when the director boarded Carolco Pictures’ 1990 flight to Cannes. Then an executive at the company, Sanchini was charged with the ostensibly simple task of escorting Cameron after the festival from France to Carolco’s North Carolina studio, which the director was to scout as a possible site for filming T2. When their flight from the Orly airport was delayed, setting off a chain reaction of missed connections, Sanchini and Cameron ended up living out an upscale version
of Planes, Trains & Automobiles. By the end of the trip it had taken five flights—one on the Concorde—and two long cab rides to deliver Cameron to the studio. He confessed to Sanchini an hour into their journey that he had no intention of filming there, having hated his experience shooting in the South on The Abyss. “He was just being nice,” Sanchini says. “He carried my bag from gate to gate to gate. But it was a nonstarter.” The trip wasn’t a complete bust, however. Cameron and Sanchini hit it off. Her father had worked in the space program, and she was a huge sci-fi literature fan, so they had plenty to talk about on their three-hour layovers. Sanchini was also whip smart, had just earned her J.D./M.B.A. at UCLA, and was playing a key role in Carolco’s aggressive growth. When their long journey finally ended, she remembers, “I said, ‘I’ve failed horribly. I’m probably gonna get fired tomorrow.’ And Jim said, ‘Well, I’ll hire you.’” Sanchini wasn’t fired when she got back to L.A., but two years later Cameron did hire her, to help him put the financing together on Digital Domain. She ultimately raised fifteen million dollars from IBM, which took a 50 percent stake in the company and provided much of the hardware to get it started. Digital Domain wasn’t a hard sell—the guys behind T2 and Jurassic Park were as promising a team to back in the nascent digital-effects industry as existed. The person to run Digital Domain day to day would be Scott Ross, who had overseen ILM during T2. Cameron knew Ross as a sharp manager and a hard charger and asked him to join them as a third founder. The company’s first bold move would be to wholly embrace digital compositing and not even bother to open an optical department. It was a risky decision at the time—most of Hollywood was still relying on opticals. But setting up Digital Domain that way gave the company an almost instantaneous advantage over all the established effects houses.