Cameron applied his usual aggressive directing style to the new milieu of comedy and tested Arnold’s improv chops. During one scene, Schwarzenegger and Arnold pull up in a car and Schwarzenegger stops it and comes around to the passenger side to grab some surveillance documents about his wife. Arnold didn’t say Cameron’s line the first time. Or the second. “He said, ‘Can you say my line once? Can you just one fucking time do it?’” Arnold recalls. “So I said it. He goes, ‘OK now, guess what, smart-ass, we’re gonna do seventeen more takes and I want seventeen different lines.’” The comic had to think of seventeen ways to ask why Schwarzenegger had stopped the car. The winner was “My turn to drive?”
He already had a reputation for action excess before True Lies, but the lengths Cameron went to for the movie’s third-act set pieces sealed it. For one formidable sequence to work, he had to establish convincingly that Schwarzenegger was flying a Harrier jet. The jet is supposed to hover near a Miami high-rise while Schwarzenegger’s teenage daughter clings to its nose and a terrorist dangles from a missile on the wing. To help him accomplish the task, Cameron called John Bruno, the effects supervisor who had won an Oscar for his work on The Abyss. Austin had managed to secure from the U.S. military the use of some Harrier jump jets, from which a full-size mock-up was made. Cameron and Bruno knew they would have to mount their jet on some kind of a motion base to move the plane safely with Schwarzenegger in it and Dushku strapped onto it. They assumed they would accomplish the shot using a green-screen background in the safety of a studio, and they were filming some test footage with a model when Bruno made a suggestion: why not put the plane and its base on the roof of a real skyscraper? This is, plainly, insane. It would involve placing the world’s biggest action star and his adolescent costar on a fiberglass model on an aviation gimbal three hundred feet up in the sky in the middle of a major city. “Nobody would do that,” Bruno says. “Not Spielberg. Nobody. Especially with Arnold in it.” But the more Cameron thought about it, the more it made sense to him. There would be no need for a green screen, because the sunlight and the background would all be there in the shot. It would lend some needed realism to the fantastical sequence. And it would be really, really fun to do. To pull it off, however, he needed to have camera positions. So he and Bruno came up with the idea of using a building that was under construction and had a giant crane next to it. They built a rig to hang a camera crane under the construction crane—a crane on a crane. It was a gonzo piece of rigging, but once they got the hang of using it, they could position the camera anywhere in space around the plane. And they could allow the crane to be in the shots, because it was part of the story that the building was under construction. At the end of the day, they had believable shots of their action hero flying his jet around a skyscraper in Miami.
The only thing Cameron didn’t think of was lightning. There are a lot of thunderstorms in Miami, and the crane was a giant lightning rod. One day the production broke for lunch and the crew traveled down to street level to eat. Clouds starting rolling in, and there was a tremendous crash of thunder. The rig had been hit. Nobody was hurt, and after lunch they all went back to work, a little nervously. For the rest of the shoot, they learned to keep a careful eye on the Miami sky. When they finished with the jet mock-up, the crew took it off the base and used the crane to lift it down to the street. Cameron was watching as they did it and got an idea. “I figured we could strap the stunt doubles onto the mock-up of the Harrier and dangle it off the side of the building and spin it with tag lines, while shooting it from the helicopter,” he says. Just another day on the set of a James Cameron movie. He canceled the shooting he had planned for that afternoon and ran to the helicopter while the stunt guys got their safety rigging on. Within an hour, the lead terrorist’s stunt double was crawling around on the Harrier thirty stories above the street. And Chuck Tamburro, the same helicopter pilot who had dived under a freeway overpass for Cameron on T2, flew the director around the dangling jet in tight circles while he shot the stuntmen on a long lens. Once the cables were digitally painted out later, the ad hoc maneuver yielded some of the most dynamic and real-looking shots in the sequence.
By this point, however, the shoot was behind schedule and over budget. For the second time in a row, a Cameron film looked sure to bear the “most expensive movie ever made” title. Paxton had enough time to film some of his scenes, go off and shoot an entire other movie, and return to the True Lies set for more work. Roseanne Barr would call the director periodically demanding that her husband be freed up from this endless shoot to return to his TV gig. But on it went. After Miami, the crew moved on to the Florida Keys for its most challenging sequence—a massive helicopter and car chase on the Seven Mile Bridge in which Curtis’s character was to be plucked from the roof of a speeding limo and dangled over the water. The helicopters had to fly low and close, which was deafening and made communication difficult. Cameron was coordinating crane movement, actors, stunt drivers, and pensile stunt doubles. “It was exactly the kind of big, crazy, hardware-intensive scenario I love,” he says. He wanted two cameras on one helicopter. Tamburro, the aerial coordinator, needed a copilot in order to fly the precise path Cameron wanted, which included yanking a stunt-woman through the roof of the limo an instant before it plunges off the bridge at seventy miles per hour. With two camera operators and two pilots, that left no room for Cameron in the helicopter. “There was no way I was going to sit on the ground while they had all the fun,” he says. So he paid one cameraman to sit at a picnic table on the ground while he operated the crewman’s mount.
Seeing her double swinging around under the helicopter, Curtis thought this all looked like a good time, and she asked to fly for her close-up. Cameron had planned to shoot that angle in front of a green screen. “But I said, ‘All right, I’ll do it if you will,’” he says. So while Curtis was rigged with a body harness, Cameron was cabled to the air-frame of the helicopter. He stood on the skids and leaned outward at a fifty-degree angle so he could shoot at Curtis downward, handheld, as they flew, with Tamburro keeping the helicopter in a low hover. “Once she was hooked up, we took off and flew over the bridge at sunset, with me gunning down and Jamie screaming her lungs out,” Cameron says. “I’m not sure how much of that was acting.”
When True Lies finally wrapped in March 1994, it was indeed another “most expensive movie ever made,” costing $120 million. It would earn that back and then some, opening at number one and making $379 million worldwide—an impressive haul and a strong comeback for Schwarzenegger but $140 million below the steep bar Cameron and the action hero had set with T2. Critical reaction to the movie was decidedly mixed. Variety dismissed True Lies as “141 minutes of extravagant fodder for an enticing three-minute trailer”8 while the New York Times praised the movie as “the first successful romantic comedy in which trucks, as well as heartstrings, are blown to bits.”9 In addition to the charges of sexism leveled against the film, the National Council on Islamic Affairs boycotted True Lies for its portrayal of Islam, and Muslims picketed theaters carrying signs that read “Open Your Eyes and Terminate the Lies” and “Hasta La Vista Fairness.” There is a heroic Middle Eastern character in True Lies, a double agent named Faisil, played by Grant Heslov, who wipes out most of the Miami terror cell in a hail of gunfire in the third act. But that didn’t provide enough balance for critics who found the Aziz character cartoonish and racist and likened the portrayal to the worst of Hollywood’s old cowboy-and-Indian movies. In response, Fox added a disclaimer to the credits: “The film is a work of fiction and does not represent the actions or beliefs of a particular culture or religion.”10
Pow!
Ultimately, Cameron accomplished three important tasks with True Lies: he tackled a new genre, solidified his relationship with Fox, and, perhaps most important, got his special-effects house off the ground. Digital Domain swapped in backgrounds where green screens were used—including some of the shots on the Harrier that were too dangerous for the rooftop
rig—and rotoscoped out the stunt wires. On its first film, the company earned an Oscar nomination for its visual effects.
After True Lies, Cameron’s next project could have been based on a character he’d been dreaming about since he was a ninth grader in Chippawa: Spider-Man. He had lobbied Carolco, the independent studio behind T2, to purchase the rights to the Spider-Man comics, which they did in 1990. Carolco’s executives had a habit of seat-of-the-pants deal making that endeared the company to Cameron, who had made his $100 million Terminator sequel with it based on terms laid out in a simple half-page memo. But in this instance, a hasty contract would come back to haunt all the parties involved. Cameron wrote a Spider-Man scriptment for Carolco that was widely admired in Hollywood. The comic’s creator, Stan Lee, adored it and gave a Cameron-directed Spider-Man movie his hearty endorsement. “It was the Spider-Man we all know and love,” Lee said of the treatment. “Yet it all somehow seemed fresh and new.”11 When Lee’s Spider-Man series appeared in the early 1960s, it broke ground by featuring a high-school-age hero who was lonely, misunderstood, and, above all, relatable. Cameron’s treatment showed that he hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be a defiantly unhip teenager. He opted to make his Spider-Man movie an origins story, explaining how Peter Parker developed his web-slinging powers. But he made some thoughtful changes to the iconic character, starting with Spider-Man’s wrist shooters. Lee’s comic called for Peter Parker to build them himself, but Cameron thought a biological explanation was more plausible. “I had this problem that Peter Parker, boy genius, goes home and creates these wrist shooters that the DARPA labs would be happy to have created on a twenty-year program,” says Cameron. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, he’s been bitten by a radioactive spider. It should change him fundamentally in a way that he can’t go back.’” In Cameron’s treatment, the wrist shooters simply grow as Peter becomes spiderlike. Here’s how he described the character waking up the morning after he was bitten:
He notices his wrists. They are oozing a pearlescent white fluid from almost invisible slits about a quarter of an inch long. He pushes on the skin next to one of the slits and a dark shape, the size and color of a rose thorn, emerges from beneath the skin. It shoots a jet of liquid silk into his face. … He gets out of bed and pulls the silky webbing off himself, realizing how strong the stuff is. He looks again at the horrifying “spinnerets” on his wrists. He is hyperventilating, freaking out. Like the guy in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” he has woken up to find out he is a bug.12
Cameron also updated the comic’s supervillain, Electro, for the information age in a character he called Carlton Strand. Electro was a robot that functioned on pure electric power, while Cameron’s Strand could touch a computer or a cable and absorb the data flowing through it—an acknowledgment that information itself is real power. Cameron’s scriptment is darker and more adult than anyone expected from a comic-book movie in the 1990s—Peter Parker says “motherfucker,” and Spider-Man and Mary Jane have sex atop the Brooklyn Bridge. Adult-oriented comic-book adaptations like The Dark Knight and 300 found huge audiences more than a decade later, but Cameron’s writing was a dramatic departure from the accepted wisdom about the genre at the time, namely that it should be nearly as family-friendly as a Disney movie. It would have been fascinating to see what the creator of the rough-edged characters of the Terminator franchise did with the adolescent superhero. But the James Cameron version of Spider-Man never happened, because Hollywood’s real-life supervillains descended—lawyers. When Carolco filed for Chapter 11 in 1995, it became clear the company’s claim to the Spider-Man rights had been tenuous all along. “Here I am working on Spider-Man, and it turns out that there’s a lien against the rights and Sony’s got a piece of it, and Carolco doesn’t really own it even though they think they own it,” Cameron says. With Carolco down, Cameron tried to get Fox to go after Spider-Man. The studio would have been happy to buy its top-earning director his pet project if it had just been a matter of rights, but procuring Spider-Man now meant entering a nasty legal fight and potentially a bidding war involving multiple other studios and producers with overlapping claims on the project dating back to when Marvel had first put the film rights up for sale in 1985. “They’re so risk-averse,” Cameron says. “For a couple hundred thousand dollars in legal fees they could have had a two-billion-dollar franchise. They blew it.”
At a certain point, Cameron’s heart wasn’t in it either. He had another myth occupying his mind—Titanic. And by the time Sony finally emerged with the rights in 1999, Cameron was no longer interested in telling a story that wasn’t wholly his own. Nonetheless, his early-nineties treatment served as an important source for the Sam Raimi–directed Spider-Man movie that was released in 2002 and the franchise that has gone on to earn $2.5 billion so far. The most notable similarity is the origin story—Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker has organic wrist shooters, just like the ones Cameron detailed in his scriptment. Asked why he doesn’t have a credit on the film, Cameron pauses for a beat. “I’d say that wasn’t terribly polite of them.” Disputes over screen-writing credit are common in Hollywood and tend to be resolved by the Writers Guild of America against writer-director hyphenates like Cameron in favor of those who earn their income solely through screenwriting. On a project like Spider-Man, which is based on existing characters and passed through the hands of multiple teams of writers over the years, the credit claims are potentially numerous. At the end of the day, the sole screenwriting credit for Spider-Man went to Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible writer David Koepp. Unlike other Spider-Man writers who waged unsuccessful battles via the WGA over their contributions, Cameron never fought for his name to appear on the film. Thanks to Titanic, he was a very wealthy man who could afford to forgo the potential residuals. And there was, of course, always the possibility that the movie would be bad, which it wasn’t. But the decision to let the issue drop was a classy one.
The Spider-Man story says as much about Cameron’s business style as it does about his comic-book tastes. For much of the director’s career he has had no agent or publicist, relying instead on a tight circle of colleagues like Lightstorm president Rae Sanchini and Titanic and Avatar producer Jon Landau to mediate between him and the outside world. Cameron is vehemently antilitigious. His lawyer, Bert Fields, and Fields’s team at Greenberg Glusker review Cameron’s contracts but rarely hear from him personally. “He’s not a guy I would call and say, ‘Let’s do lunch,’” says Fields, who at various points has represented Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Tom Cruise, and Michael Jackson. “He would say, ‘Why, what’s wrong?’” Cameron rarely lunches or parties and applies none of his laser-beam focus to the Hollywood power struggles detailed in industry blogs or the pages of Variety. “He’s not money motivated, which is unusual,” says Fields. “Jim doesn’t say, ‘What does Spielberg make?’ which some of my other clients do. I don’t think he thinks in those terms.” When it comes to his Spider-Man credit and any potential lost earnings, Cameron’s inner circle seems more aggrieved than he does. “I didn’t feel that injured.” He shrugs. “Slighted, but not injured.”
8.
THE UNSINKABLE
“Take Me to Russia”
Quentin Tarantino once told this joke on The Howard Stern Show:
This Hollywood guy dies and goes to heaven. Peering through the Pearly Gates, he glimpses someone riding overhead in a crane with a movie camera and says, “I didn’t know James Cameron was dead.” Saint Peter replies, “No, that’s God. He only thinks he’s James Cameron.”1
Before Titanic, Cameron already had a reputation in Hollywood for on-set tyranny, profligate spending, egomania—pretty much everything short of the wholesale slaughter of innocent extras. By the time he finished Titanic, he would add to his notoriety by a factor of 1,000. But the grueling experience of filming this movie, possibly the most arduous shoot in Hollywood history, would fundamentally change Cameron as a director and as a man.
As a teenager, Cameron discovered
A Night to Remember, both the seminal 1955 nonfiction book by Walter Lord that detailed Titanic‘s final night and Roy Ward Baker’s faithful 1958 film adaptation of the story. Like the rise and fall of the great civilizations he studied in history class, the story of the glittering steamship’s sinking enthralled him. It was the end of the world—his abiding fascination—told within the microcosm of a 2,223-passenger ocean liner. But it wasn’t until oceanographer Robert Ballard found Titanic more than two miles deep in the North Atlantic in 1985 and dived the wreck in 1986 that Cameron began to pay attention to the ship with the eyes of a storyteller. In a documentary about Ballard’s sub dives, he saw his first glimpse of an ROV—a remotely operated vehicle—that Ballard had taken down to Titanic on his submersible to explore the wreck. Intuitively, Cameron understood how the ROV worked, the tethers, the thrusters, the lights. “I realized that robots were being used in the deep ocean,” he says. “It was a science-fiction dream come true. Inner-space exploration with all the trappings of outer-space fiction.”
Cameron largely forgot about Titanic for the next several years. Then in 1992, for no reason whatsoever, the director took a VHS copy of A Night to Remember off his shelf and watched it. “I realized by the end that it would be a fantastic movie to retell that story, probably with a love story added to the mix of real characters,” he says. “And with the new robotics, you could do a wraparound present-day story of the real wreck and tie the two together. It all popped into my mind at once.” After watching the tape, Cameron started sifting through a stack of new mail, stopping on a black card covered with rivets, meant to suggest the hull of Titanic. The card was an invitation from Al Giddings, his underwater cinematographer on The Abyss, to a screening of Titanic: Treasure of the Deep, a documentary Giddings had just directed about an expedition to the wreck. Coincidence or kismet, the documentary would stoke Cameron’s growing interest in a fictional Titanic movie. At the screening, he was intrigued by footage that showed the filmmakers working with a team of Russian sub pilots on a research ship called the Keldysh, diving in their advanced Mir submersibles to the twelve-thousand-foot depths of the wreck. After the event, Cameron made his way through the crowd of more than eight hundred people to speak with Giddings. “He was so blown away he was kind of stuttering,” Giddings recalls. The two filmmakers huddled in the theater that night, talking until the janitors kicked them out just before midnight. “Jim said, ‘This is incredible. I want this to be my next movie. Take me to Russia.’”
The Futurist Page 17