Cameron learned a lot from Digital Domain about business and about managing people. Strategy and boardroom politics were an alien world to him, but he got the hang of it, the lingo and the jockeying for power. He watched closely how Winston ran his shop of artists and took notes on his friend’s motivating leadership style. Mostly, he was excited about being a pioneer. Thanks to its early adoption of digital compositing, Digital Domain quickly became the number-two visual-effects house in the world, behind ILM. Where the company was never able to lead, however, was in the main area that interested Cameron and Winston: CG creature and character animation. In the mid-1990s, Cameron would write a movie to give the company something to set its sights on—Avatar. But Digital Domains first picture would be True Lies.
Funny People
When Cameron wrote the character of Schwarzenegger’s wife in True Lies, Helen Tasker, he already had Jamie Lee Curtis in mind. He had met Curtis through Bigelow during the filming of Blue Steel. “Jamie struck me as kooky, wicked smart, sexy, and cool. We got to be friends, the three of us,” he says. Curtis, the daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, had broken out in John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978, playing the kind of capable heroine that inspired some of Cameron’s own female characters. She’d gone on to make some B horror movies before landing a choice comic role opposite Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in Trading Places in 1983. Curtis loved the notion of playing a dowdy wife desperate for a little adventure in her life in True Lies. This was one casting decision that should have been easy. There was only one problem: Schwarzenegger didn’t like the idea. “He didn’t see what I saw,” Cameron says. “And Arnold was, of course, accustomed to getting his way.” Schwarzenegger didn’t like to confront or question Cameron creatively, so he gave word via his agent at the time, Lou Pitt, that Curtis was a no-go. “I thought, Oh, too bad. She would have been great. But this thing is Arnold’s baby, so I have to honor his choice,” Cameron says.
So began a three-month search to find the perfect Helen. Cameron met with lots of actresses, and screen-tested one with Schwarzenegger, who seemed like a strong choice. Then one night, after a long day of location scouting in Washington, D.C., the director returned to his hotel room to find a videotape on the table. It was A Fish Called Wanda, the John Cleese comedy, which Cameron had asked his office to get months earlier so he could check out Curtis’s recent work. He popped it in, planning to wind down for ten minutes with a glass of wine, and ended up staying up till 2:00 a.m. watching the movie. “Jamie was pitch perfect in her dual role and was sexy and charming and fun,” Cameron says. “She had to play Helen.” But how to deal with Schwarzenegger? The director returned to L.A. and called his friend, who dropped what he was doing—whatever it was, it involved wearing purple board shorts—and came over to Cameron’s office immediately. “I said, ‘How much do you trust me?’” Cameron recalls. “And Arnold said, ‘Of course, I trust you completely’ ‘No, really, no bullshit. How much do you trust me?’” Schwarzenegger made it clear he was being sincere. “Then it’s going to be Jamie Lee,” Cameron told him. Schwarzenegger froze. “I can only guess what he was thinking, but his jaw clenched for a long time and then he relaxed and said OK.” Schwarzenegger would throw himself into the film, never showing a hint of resisting the casting choice once it had been made. In the end, he happily agreed to share with Curtis something rarely surrendered willingly in Hollywood—his above-the-title credit. “Even though he can believe he is utterly correct and is accustomed to acting on his instincts and being in charge, Arnold listens to the others he trusts, like Maria Shriver, and even sometimes me,” Cameron says.
The script called for Helen Tasker to strip for her husband, Harry, thinking she was stripping for an arms dealer. The scene proved to be one of the more controversial of Cameron’s career, with some critics accusing him of misogyny. “A strain of crudeness and mean-spirited humiliation, especially toward women, runs through the film like a nasty virus,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Kenneth Turan,5 while Roger Ebert called the dance “cruel and not funny”6 Curtis had heavy input into how the scene was filmed. As Cameron had originally written the sequence, she would be naked but shot in silhouette. One day during preproduction, the actress blazed into Cameron’s office, lobbying to play the scene differently. She wanted to undress only to her bra and panties and deliver an awkward striptease fully lit. To make her case, Curtis peeled off her clothes and started performing a klutzy burlesque in her underwear in front of the director’s desk. “It was that day that I realized how cool my job really was,” Cameron says. “I stammered out, ‘Yeah, sure, Jamie, that’s a good idea.’” Curtis’s suggestion allowed Cameron to play the scene with a bigger wink, adding a pratfall where Helen slips in the middle of her amateur pole dance. The director and his actress blocked out the dance while Schwarzenegger was in his trailer, and he wasn’t in on the gag. Watch the scene closely—as many Curtis fans have—and you’ll see that when the actress falls, a concerned Schwarzenegger jumps up to help her and then sits back down in the shadows, realizing he’s breaking character. “It plays because Harry realizes he’s breaking character from the shady arms dealer he’s posing as,” Cameron says. “We did a second take, but it wasn’t as funny.”
Interestingly, some of the scene’s biggest champions were women, who seemed to pick up on the fun Curtis was having when she filmed it. Caryn James of the New York Times called Curtis’s evolution in the film from a mousy legal secretary to a tangoing superspy “witty and liberating” and praised Cameron for charting “the comic course of a female stereotype falling to pieces.”7 While male critics interpreted the striptease as demeaning, many female critics saw it as freeing—perhaps they noticed the twinkle in Curtis’s eye, while the men were distracted by her other assets. “Jamie Lee’s character was empowered by tapping into her sexuality in a way that she hadn’t been doing in her marriage,” says Hollywood blogger Anne Thompson, who was writing for Entertainment Weekly at the time. “She managed to pull it off in a way that was not at all icky for me.” The performance would win Curtis her first Golden Globe. And True Lies, with its husband-and-wife spy fantasy, paved the way for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s married assassins in Mr. and Mrs. Smith eleven years later.
Because he was uncertain about his comedy script, Cameron wanted to hedge his bets by casting witty actors whom he could count on for some improvised laughs. Curtis was one. Now he’d need to find a really funny guy to play Gib, Schwarzenegger’s sidekick. At the time, Tom Arnold was married to Roseanne Barr and was writing for her hit sitcom. Arnold’s road to Hollywood had been a bizarre one—he worked in a meatpacking plant slicing up pigs in Ottumwa, Iowa, before embarking on a stand-up-comedy career in the eighties and developing a cult following for a routine in which he taped a live goldfish to a little motorcycle and shot it through a ring of fire. He’d played five scenes as a bartender in the Dustin Hoffman movie Hero but was otherwise a stranger to the big screen. Mostly, Hollywood knew him as a human punch line, Barr’s opportunistic husband. But somehow, Arnold’s agent got him a reading with Cameron. “I was the last person in town to audition for True Lies,” Arnold recalls. “I was like, there’s no way I’m gonna get this. This is too big of a part. I just wanted to tell people I met Jim Cameron.” The director brought in Schwarzenegger to read with him, and the preening action hero and excited comic were both jostling for the camera. “Tom was fun in the reading, completely manic, an opposite to Arnold’s solid, brooding determination,” Cameron recalls. After Schwarzenegger left the room, the chubby comedian took Cameron aside. “He’s not that big,” he said. “I think I could take him.” The line cracked the director up and sealed the deal.
Cameron knows a lot about a lot of subjects—he can talk energy policy with a think-tank researcher, helicopter engines with an engineer, and the Punic Wars with a classical historian. But one of his rare blind spots is Hollywood gossip. This is not a man who watches E! So he gave Arnold the gig and called Fox to let them know, never e
xpecting a problem. “I had never seen Tom on Roseanne, and I’d never particularly taken into account actors’ television baggage,” Cameron says. “I just saw a guy that could play the character as I imagined him.” Fox, as Arnold later learned, was mystified by the casting choice. “They go, ‘Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you watch TV?’” Arnold says. Cameron confessed that he didn’t really. The studio said it wouldn’t approve Arnold, and Cameron threatened to take his picture elsewhere. Ultimately, the director got his way, as he had with Schwarzenegger on Curtis. He filled out his cast with old friend Bill Paxton as a con man, Art Malik as the terrorist Aziz, Eliza Dushku as the Taskers’ daughter, and Tia Carrere as a female villain.
The Raw Deal
There was a fatal flaw in Lightstorm’s bold new financial plan, which revealed itself quickly when Cameron’s company started prepping True Lies. None of the funding from Fox or Lightstorm’s patchwork of foreign partners kicked in until there was a completion bond in place, a written contract that guarantees a movie will be delivered on schedule and within budget. But no bond company would cover True Lies without a detailed budget, which meant that Cameron needed to be far down the road of preproduction—having bought the story and hired the actors—in order to have the bond issued. If the funding is based on the bond, and the bond is based on work that requires funding, “that big shiny dragster engine ain’t gonna start,” Cameron says. The director’s team had assembled his deal backward—they should have locked in equity financing first, before selling off distribution rights. Now he was committed to making a movie with Hollywood’s biggest action star, and he had no money to do it and nothing to sell to raise the money.
Cameron fired Kasanoff, the architect of the plan, and asked Sanchini, who had arranged the IBM financing for Digital Domain, to sort the mess out for him. The first person she turned to was Fox’s new head, Peter Chernin. Originally, Fox was committed to providing only a portion of the funding on True Lies, but Sanchini and Cameron convinced Chernin to make Fox the movie’s primary financier, insuring any cost overruns and removing the need for a completion bond. In exchange, the studio took over worldwide distribution rights to True Lies and two of Cameron’s future films. “Peter really stretched to help us out,” Sanchini says. This was the beginning of a lucrative long-term relationship between filmmaker and executive that would endure the crucible of making Titanic. Chernin and Cameron have some important qualities in common. They’re both well-read men—Chernin was an English literature major at UC Berkeley—and both straight shooters, neither of which are terribly common traits in show business. “I like Jim ‘cause he’s smart and he’s not full of shit,” says Chernin. In terms of its budget and logistical problems, True Lies would prove to be merely “the kindergarten version of Titanic,” Chernin says. Not that anyone knew that at the time.
After the financing crisis on the movie was solved, Sanchini, who Cameron says “basically saved my bacon,” stepped in as president of Lightstorm. And the director got back to the business of making his movie. Lightstorm reverted to a more traditional model, a filmmaker-led company that relied on a studio to finance its pictures. “It’s a comfortable arrangement that works like this,” Cameron says. “I propose a movie which they know will cost a lot, they whinge and cry that it costs too much, but they say yes because we made money all the previous times. Then I make the film and they whinge and cry and say it’s never going to make money, then it does, then we start the process all over again. If one of these things ever doesn’t make money it will break the loop, and all bets are off. So my boss is really the audience, not the studio.”
“Nobody Would Do That. Not Spielberg. Nobody.”
Production on True Lies started in August 1993 in Santa Clarita, California, during a heat wave. By the time principal photography wrapped more than six months later, Cameron would have pushed his crew through six cities and the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake. A bathroom shoot-out was the first action sequence on the schedule. The scene took up less than half a script page and was budgeted to take a day to shoot. Peter Lamont, the British production designer who had built Cameron’s spaceships in Aliens, was on board to help create the sets. Two days before the crew was set to film the washroom sequence, Cameron surveyed the space and deemed it insufficient. He wanted the bathroom three times as big and rigged so there could be water spraying and lights strobing—which would look fabulous, but this was the first anyone was hearing of it and it required a total redesign of the set. “The washroom started out quite small and gradually grew in stature,” says Lamont. “The whole thing got better and better, with real tiles, real mosaic on the floor.” But the shoot dragged on and on—by halfway through day one, they hadn’t even gotten through the first line of dialogue. Stephanie Austin, Cameron’s producer on T2, was back working with the director and in charge of communicating with Fox. By day three, the crew was still in the bathroom. “Everybody’s in a panic, and the studio is calling to see how we’re doing,” says Austin. “I said, ‘Jim, where are we going with this?’ He was completely oblivious as to why we would be worked up about it.” In the end, the bathroom sequence took five days. It would prove to be among the easiest parts of the shoot.
Jon Landau, Fox’s vice president of production at the time, visited the set during the washroom marathon and scratched his chin. It was plain to see that Cameron was a man on his own mission. Call sheets—the stated plan for the day’s shoot—didn’t seem to affect the director’s process at all. Fresh off supervising another talented obsessive, Michael Mann, on The Last of the Mohicans, Landau, a New York native and USC grad, knew production inside and out. And the executive’s personality, an unlikely combination of boyish enthusiasm and preternatural calm, suited the organized chaos of a Cameron set perfectly. “I liked Jon, and when you like the guy who’s the studio executive on your film, there’s something there,” Cameron says. After True Lies, Cameron would bring Landau on as Lightstorm’s resident producer.
Cameron was also getting to know a new cinematographer on True Lies, Russell Carpenter, whom he had originally interviewed for “The Crowded Room” when he was looking for a nonunion DP to make a low-budget film. Casting the right director of photography is as important as casting the right leading man, and it’s a matter of finding a DP with both technical ability and chemistry with the director. True Lies was a huge step up for Carpenter professionally. His biggest prior credit was Pet Sematary II. But he was talented and had two qualities that suited a firebrand like Cameron well—a hunger for the gig and an agreeable temperament. During preproduction and the first few weeks of shooting, Carpenter enjoyed a honeymoon period with Cameron. But eventually, he became part of the crew family and therefore subject to the director’s merciless management style. “I went through days where I felt, ‘I’m just this far from a nervous breakdown,’” Carpenter recalls. One of those days occurred while screening dailies at Light-storm. Cameron and his department heads were there, about twenty-five people in all, watching a scene where Schwarzenegger returns home late at night and looks in the mirror. When the shot came up on the screen, Schwarzenegger’s reflection was dark. Carpenter made a note to himself to ask the photo lab to lighten it and glanced over at Cameron, who was looking down at his lap and shaking his head. “Jim said, ‘I’ve got the highest-paid actor in this or any parallel universe, and I cannot see his eyes,’” Carpenter says. “I’m starting to freak out.” A few more shots went by, and Cameron was getting angrier and louder. “He said, ‘Where did you learn to read a light meter?!’” Carpenter wanted to turn into liquid mercury and melt under the crack of the door. When the lights came up, the DP stalked to the parking lot, called his wife, and told her he had given it his best shot but was sure he was going to be fired. As he paced on his cell phone, apoplectic, some other Cameron regulars were watching and laughing. Carpenter glared at them. “He does that to everybody,” they told him. “Every cinematographer who has ever worked with him.” Carpenter didn’t believe it, so h
e called Mikael Salomon, Cameron’s DP on The Abyss. “Did he use the line, ‘Where did you learn to read a light meter?’” Salomon asked. Carpenter exhaled. “I just realized, ‘OK, this is just gonna be an endurance test. It becomes a game of last man standing.’” The truth is, Cameron doesn’t fire people that often. His phrase is “Firing would just be too merciful.” And not only did he not fire Carpenter, he hired him on two subsequent projects.
While filming in Washington, D.C., Schwarzenegger got in the habit of taking impromptu field trips from the set with other cast members, much to Cameron’s consternation. On one occasion, the production had traffic blocked on Constitution Avenue. When a light went out on the set, Schwarzenegger figured it would take twenty minutes to fix and roped Tom Arnold into a tour of the capital. Snagging the van he drives in the scene, the action hero cruised his sidekick past the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building, several Smithsonian museums. But while they were gone, instead of taking twenty minutes to fix the light, it took twenty seconds, and Cameron, with one of the capital’s busiest streets closed, couldn’t find his actors. “We come back around and Jim is standing in the middle of the road, arms crossed,” recalls Tom Arnold. “I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck.’” Cameron lunged in the passenger door to get into Schwarzenegger’s face. “He’s like, ‘Do you want Paul Verhoeven to direct the rest of this motherfucker? You do that shit again and that’s what’s gonna happen,’” Arnold remembers. Schwarzenegger was contrite. “I said, ‘Why’d you take that from him?’” Arnold says. “‘Cause I was wrong,” Schwarzenegger told him. “He was blowing up, accusing us of holding up the production,” Schwarzenegger recalls. “But by the time lunch came around, it was all forgotten.”
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