The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  The film finally started to come back down to Earth after Valentine’s Day, but it did so slowly. Titanic was number one for sixteen weeks—a record—ultimately grossing $1.8 billion worldwide—another record. Once the money started to pour in, there was some drama about whether Fox would pay Cameron’s back end, now that there was actually going to be one. In truth, they had no choice legally. They had turned down Cameron’s offer to surrender it a year earlier. “I liked that it was a lot of money,” says Cameron, who declines to say just what he made from Titanic. “But I liked it best of all that they had screwed themselves by being greedy, like the dog that drops the bone into the pool to get the one in the reflection.”

  Titanic was nominated for a record fourteen Academy Awards, and it won eleven, including Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Picture, tying the record set by Ben-Hur. Cameron’s films had won many Oscars over the years, but this was the first time the director would get statues for his own mantel. By the end of the night he would also have to make three speeches. Cameron attended the ceremony with Linda Hamilton. “It was nerve-racking,” he says. “And the strap on Linda’s gown had broken, so it had somehow become all about the gown. I was just happy when it was all over.” In his first speech, for his editing Oscar, Cameron kept his cool, letting the other editors speak first, and mentioned his daughter. In his second, for directing, he raised his trophy aloft and shouted, “I’m king of the world!” just as DiCaprio had when he clung to the tip of Titanics bow. It didn’t go over quite as Cameron intended—many interpreted his demeanor as cocky rather than jubilant. “The funniest moment of the whole thing, in retrospect, was the quizzical expression on Warren Beatty’s face when I greeted him backstage,” Cameron says. “His expression was like, ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’” Cameron toned it down for his last speech, for Best Picture—a moment of silence for the victims of Titanic. Though eclipsed in most people’s memories by the “king of the world” sound bite, what Cameron chose to say in that last speech reveals how Titanic, the ship and the movie, had impacted him personally: “The message of Titanic, of course, is that if that great ship can sink, the unthinkable can happen, the future’s unknowable. The only thing we truly own is today. Life is precious. So for these few seconds, I’d like you to also listen to the beating of your own heart, which is the most precious thing in the world.”

  Cameron was forty-three when Titanic was released. However immodest it may have seemed to say so at the Oscars, he really was king of the world. For him, the movie was a career height he never expected to reach again. And for the next several years, he wouldn’t even bother to try. Upon finishing Titanic, he told a Canadian journalist he planned to spend the next year with his daughter building sand castles in their backyard. “I just want my heart rate to beat like a quiet, flat line for a while,” he said.16 He was about to enter a new phase in his life, one of family and exploration. At what would be the apex of his powers as a director, Cameron would step away from feature filmmaking altogether.

  9.

  A MODERN-DAY MAGELLAN

  Toys and Adventures

  After Titanic, Cameron took to calling himself “the world’s busiest unemployed filmmaker.” While various possible feature projects crossed his desk—a. Planet of the Apes remake, Terminator 3, a True Lies sequel, a comet script he wrote called Bright Angel Falling, Spider-Man—he didn’t commit to any of them. He had already conquered Hollywood and, frankly, wasn’t all that interested in it. Instead, he set his sights on uncharted territories—the deep sea, space, and new technologies. “He wanted to live,” says Cameron’s friend Guillermo del Toro. “And he lived to an extent that most of us just dream about. After the Oscars, Jim went to his Disneyland. It was a time for him to have toys and adventures.” Cameron had come of age in an era of exploration. The space race, Jacques Cousteau’s underwater expeditions—in the 1960s, the spirit of discovery was robust around the world. For Cameron, that love of adventure never flagged. “He’d have been one of the ones that would have crossed the country in a covered wagon,” says the director’s mother, Shirley. “Anything new that he could get into.” After Titanic, Cameron had both the means and the time to indulge his wanderlust. “I did feel like I was in a position where I could do other things that didn’t make sense before,” Cameron says. “It’s like that moment in Serpico where he says, ‘You know ballet? From this position I can do anything.’ I’ve got my fuck-you money and I can kind of step away for a while. My career’s not gonna go anywhere. I can do all the cool stuff that I’ve always wanted to do.” Cameron thought he might take two or three years for deep-ocean expeditions and produce and develop some projects to work on later. “It wasn’t full stop, just leave Hollywood like J. D. Salinger or something.” But the director’s break from feature filmmaking would last much longer than he anticipated.

  Breakups

  When Cameron founded Digital Domain in 1993 with Stan Winston and Scott Ross, his goal was to influence CG research and development and then utilize the company’s advancements to make his own movies better, as George Lucas had done with Industrial Light & Magic in the 1980s. Cameron was Digital Domain’s CEO, chairman of its board, and also the company’s biggest client. It seemed to make sense going in that his films would supply Digital Domain with lots of opportunities to do pioneering, lucrative work in the field. But the director’s personal creative path and the company’s business plan began to diverge, ultimately breaking apart entirely at a tense board meeting at Digital Domain’s Venice, California, offices in 1998. The board had become concerned about conflicts of interest between Cameron, CEO, and Cameron, filmmaker. As a CEO, Cameron’s responsibility was to push for Digital Domain’s growth as a business. As a filmmaker, his motive was to get the most CG bang for his buck. On Titanic, the company had earned its first Oscar but also been overwhelmed by the volume of the work, which Cameron received at a discount. “I always felt that I did both what was best for Digital Domain and best for my films, but the board had issues,” Cameron says. “I had begun to dislike the dynamic. When it was clear that the very controls I needed fell mostly into a conflict-of-interest category, it obviated the upside to me.”

  Cameron couldn’t realistically ask other companies to bid on his effects movies. But what he wanted from Digital Domain—cutting-edge work, particularly in the area of creature design—was beginning to seem impossible in the increasingly corporatized structure of a company backed by IBM and media group Cox Communications. “As a business, ‘no’ comes up more often than ‘yes,’” says Rob Legato, who created Titanic‘s digital stunt doubles while supervising the movie’s visual effects at Digital Domain in the 1990s. “It was a struggle for Jim. Digital Domain came into being because of him, and then all of a sudden there’s a board of directors and you’re no longer taking risks, you’re no longer trying things.” At the same time that Cameron was growing frustrated by his company’s risk-averse strategies, the board was discovering the ugly truth about the special-effects business—it’s just not all that great. A good year for the company was a 5 percent margin. Digital Domain’s president, Scott Ross, wanted to expand, to turn the effects house into a production company, following the model that had grown Pixar from an animation R & D shop to a major Hollywood studio. But Cameron already had a production company—Lightstorm—and he didn’t want another one. Ross was trying to set up an IPO to fund the expansion, and a Goldman Sachs banker was about to deliver a report on the progress of the public-offering plan when Cameron interrupted her, stood up, and read a handwritten note to the board. “I basically thanked them for the honor of serving with men of their excellent caliber and gave my formal resignation as both CEO and chairman of the board,” Cameron recalls. As the director turned to leave, Winston, his creative partner and friend since The Terminator, stood up, echoed Cameron’s remarks, and walked out with him. Publicly, Ross issued a statement thanking Cameron and Winston for their contributions and explaining that “as Digital Domain has matured, the c
ompany has attained an increasing degree of self sufficiency”1 But privately, the board was furious. The names Cameron and Winston were the strength of its brand, and Wall Street wouldn’t be bullish on an IPO without them.

  When Cameron finally got around to making his next effects movie, Avatar, seven years later, he would turn not to Digital Domain but to Weta Digital, Peter Jackson’s award-winning effects house, for most of the CG work. Weta’s filmmaker-centric structure was what Cameron had been hoping to create in his own company. Digital Domain survived without Cameron. Though it never went public or became the next Pixar, in 2006 Armageddon and Transformers director Michael Bay bought the company. In 2009, Digital Domain earned its first Oscar since Titanic for reverse-aging Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “I was proud of what we created at Digital Domain,” Cameron says. “Almost overnight we created a world-class powerhouse for visual effects, which is still—seventeen years later—one of the top houses. But now it’s Michael Bay’s problem.”

  Cameron would be ending another, much more personally meaningful partnership that year, with Linda Hamilton. After an up-and-down relationship that started during the filming of T2 in 1991, they had married in July 1997 but were already separated by the summer of 1998. In the mid-nineties, Hamilton had begun treatment for the mood disorder that had plagued her for years, and she and Cameron had hoped to find some stability as a family with their daughter, Josephine, then five. But Cameron had just spent three years of his life immersed in making Titanic. When he finally emerged from his single-minded focus on work, his home was far from peaceful. It was clear even at the Oscars in March that the couple was troubled. They bickered on the red carpet, in full view of cameras. Asked by a reporter if Titanics eleven Oscars had changed her husband, Hamilton sounded like anything but a proud wife, replying sharply, “He was always a jerk, so there’s no way to really measure.”2 In December, Hamilton would file for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Years later, she would talk openly about her struggle with mental illness and how it affected her marriages. “By the time Jim and I were together, I was really spiraling out of control,” Hamilton told Oprah Winfrey in 2005. “I fought him. I fought everything about his life. I really said a lot of cruel, aggressive things to him. You know, words that should never be spoken to one that you love.”3 It would be Cameron’s fourth divorce.

  Going Deep

  For Cameron, peace is found under the ocean. After finishing a movie, he says, “I usually go diving first, to decompress by literally decompressing. I find the underwater world to be a great antidote to Hollywood. Nobody down there knows who you are. You’re just part of the food chain.” Cameron wanted to get back into the sea as soon as possible after Titanic, not just as a scuba-diving tourist but as a deep-ocean explorer. He figured his best shot would be selling a documentary about revisiting the wreck—this time with new technology that would allow him to take audiences deeper inside it—and packaging it with a trip to the sunken German warship the Bismarck. He also saw the expedition as an opportunity to test some new 3-D cameras he had been developing with Vince Pace, a technician and cameraman who had helped build the underwater lighting system that had won a technical Oscar on The Abyss.

  When Cameron first contacted Pace about building 3-D cameras together in 2000, most of Hollywood still considered the format a fad best forgotten. After a brief golden era that began with Bwana Devil, a 1952 drama about man-eating lions, and peaked that same decade with a string of Vincent Price horror films including House of Wax and The Mad Magician, 3-D languished, only to be revived every decade or so as a gimmick and then abandoned again. With traditional movie cameras and projectors, 3-D was cumbersome for filmmakers and exhibitors and sometimes dizzying for audiences. Making a 3-D movie involves filming an image with two cameras: one representing the left eye, the other the right. When synchronized and watched through glasses that allow each eye to see only its own movie, the two films create an illusion of depth. But with traditional movie cameras, perfect synchronization is nearly impossible, and the imperfections lead to ghosting images, sometimes even making audiences nauseated and giving them headaches. Cameron had experimented with 3-D for T2 3-D: Battle Across Time, a twelve-minute, $60 million movie made to accompany a Universal Studios theme-park ride in 1996. Despite relying on two heavy film cameras mounted together—an unwieldy package the size of a 450-pound washing machine—his team was able to achieve some revolutionary dynamic shots by relying on a system of cables. The project excited Cameron about the prospects for 3-D in the digital era. As he had done so many times before in his career, the director ignored the prevailing wisdom and set about finding out for himself what the real potential of 3-D was. If he liked what he saw, he vowed to film his next feature using 3-D cameras.

  Cameron was also working with his brother Mike on building miniature robotic cameras he could send in to explore the nooks and crannies of the Titanic wreck. Snoop Dog, the ROV he had used in 1995, was too big to sneak into portholes, and it relied on a cable connected to the Mir submersibles for its power source. If the cable got snagged, the robot was lost. Cameron funded the research for his own mini ROVs starting in 1998. It took three years and one million dollars each to engineer the Cameron brothers’ two bots, which were given the names Jake and Elwood in a nod to the Blues Brothers. More than anything, Jake and Elwood were a triumph of miniaturization. Most robots that could operate at the two-and-a-half-mile depths of the Titanic wreck were the size of refrigerators. Jake and Elwood are closer to the size of microwaves. Unlike Snoop Dog with its cable, Jake and Elwood relied on an internal battery and sent data back to monitors through a fiber-optic cable the width of a human hair, which spooled out from the bot. It was two thousand feet long and could get caught or broken without the ROVs being lost.

  In September 2001, Cameron found himself back aboard a Russian sub, making his way to the Titanic site, this time with considerably more technological firepower. He also brought Bill Paxton along on the expedition to provide a layman’s view of the dives for the documentary cameras, as well as scientists and historians, including his consultants on Titanic, Ken Marschall and Don Lynch, and his friends John Bruno and Lewis Abernathy With Jake and Elwood, the expedition crew was able to see sights no one had seen since the night the Titanic went down—leaded-glass windows, wrought-iron gates, a mahogany sideboard that, remarkably, was still neatly stacked with White Star china dishes despite the violence of the ship’s breakup and sinking. Jake and Elwood were a huge success. But on the second dive, Elwood abruptly began to lose power. The ROVs battery exploded and it drifted to the ceiling of D deck and stuck there. Now Cameron had his own wreck within the wreck. The expedition took on a new purpose. “I wasn’t gonna leave a million-dollar vehicle inside the Titanic,” Cameron says, “but to get it back I had to risk another million-dollar vehicle, the only other one in existence.” The bots had been designed to be able to rescue each other. They were lined with Velcro, and one could attach to the other and pull it. But a first attempt didn’t work, nor did a second on the following dive. The crew was determined not to leave Elwood behind. “The one Blues Brother doesn’t desert the other Blues Brother!” Abernathy roared. It was he who suggested a very low-tech tool that was employed on the final rescue attempt.

  Cameron and his crew departed in a calm sea on the morning of September 11, 2001, determined to bring Elwood home. They were going to try to retrieve a cutting-edge piece of technology using a coat hanger as a harpoon. About an hour into their descent, Cameron’s youngest brother, John David, who was manning communications aboard the Keldysh, sent a message down to the director in Mir 1: “Terrorist activity. World Trade Center. Air travel stopped.” The crew in the sub wasn’t sure what to make of the information. “Do not understand,” Jim Cameron said. “Are you recommending we abort the dive? Over.” “Do not, I say again, do not abort dive,” John David responded.4 Both sub crews had heard the message. They could only wonder what was going on in the world
above them. But soon they were back on the ocean floor, immersed in bot rescue. Cameron was operating Jake, trying to spear the mesh around Elwood’s propellers with the hanger. After a few attempts, he snagged him, but the robots weren’t moving. Now Elwood was hanging on to Jake. Cameron was ready to give up on Elwood and cut the connection between the two ROVs, but that didn’t work either. He couldn’t sever them. So he tried one last time to tow Elwood in, giving Jake all his power. Suddenly the tug on the line changed. “Hey, we’re going!” he yelled.5 Both bots were coming home.

  The crew members in the Mirs were ebullient when they emerged at the surface and boarded the Keldysh to share the good news. But the mood on the Russian ship was grim. They were surfacing to a changed world. The crew in the subs learned what they had missed—a terrorist attack had toppled the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon, and a hijacked plane was down in Pennsylvania. Three thousand people were dead. “All of a sudden everything we’re doing means nothing,” says Cameron. “It felt like it was so trivial. You’re invested in your own fantasy, feeling like it’s life or death, and then you realize it’s stupid, it’s juvenile.” But after absorbing the initial shock of the news, the expedition crew began to see the parallels between the tragedies. Titanic was the defining disaster of a new century, and so was 9/11. The Titanic was a “safe tragedy,” Cameron says, a metaphor from another era that helped them talk about loss and grief and shock.