The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  After a few days, they resumed diving Titanic. In light of the terror attacks, Cameron put on hold his initial plan to travel to the Bismarck next. By the time the 2001 expedition was over, he had spent 330 hours of his life down at Titanic, more time, even, than the ship’s captain had before the liner went down.

  Jim the Guy

  Cameron’s friends talk about “Jim the Guy” as if he is a whole other man from “James Cameron the Director.” “It’s wild,” says Schwarzenegger. “He literally becomes a different person.” Some people who know them both call his intense on-set alter ego “MIJ” (Jim backward). They try to read Cameron’s face like storm clouds. “I much prefer Jim the Guy,” says John Bruno, who has known the director in both capacities since the mid-1980s. “I can judge him by the way he answers questions, the way he’s talking to people. It’s just a tone. He’ll be sharp with somebody. If he turns around and says, ‘This is fucked,’ then that’s not the day to ask him something.” At work, his friend Guillermo del Toro says, Cameron has a laserlike focus, “and everyone knows what happens with lasers.”

  Del Toro may have the best story about Jim the Guy. The two directors met at Ron Perlman’s Fourth of July barbecue in the early nineties, years before del Toro directed Hellboy or the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth and became an industry darling for his darkly poetic fantasies. The day they met, del Toro was trying to raise money to finish his first movie to be released in the United States, Cronos, which starred Perlman. Cameron had just finished the $100 million T2 and was attending the party with Linda Hamilton, Perlman’s costar from the TV show Beauty and the Beast. Cronos had cost $1.7 million to make in Mexico—at the time, it was one of the country’s most expensive films. “I hear you and I made the most expensive movies in our respective countries,” Cameron said to del Toro. “When can I see yours?” A few months later, Cameron would be the first person in the United States to see Cronos projected, in the Charlie Chaplin Theater at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. Cameron watched the whole movie with Guillermo Navarro, del Toro’s cinematographer, by his side translating it, because the filmmakers had no money left for subtitling. Cameron loved Cronos and found in del Toro a kindred spirit. Like Cameron, the jovial Mexican director had worked his way up on the technical side of filmmaking—he learned makeup and special effects under the master Dick Smith and had done every job on a film set, from operating the sound boom to assistant directing.

  Financing Cronos required del Toro to choose between eating and postproducing his movie. “I lived like a hobo,” he says. But when he was in L.A. he stayed at Cameron’s guesthouse in Malibu, often for months at a time. Cameron and del Toro, both bachelors then, would order takeout together, watch movies, and run errands in Cameron’s sports cars. “He’s an astonishingly scary driver,” del Toro says. “We were very happy to go shopping for laser discs together. I would buy three. He would buy one hundred. He would love for me to suggest weird stuff.” They watched Cameron’s favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz (“because it’s perfect,” Cameron explains, tellingly), anime, and bad Italian horror movies that del Toro picked out. They went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. They also critiqued each other’s rough cuts, sometimes spending days in the editing room together to chew over problematic sequences in their movies. Del Toro helped Cameron avoid being taken advantage of when building the studio for Titanic in Baja.

  But it was when his father was kidnapped in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1998 that del Toro realized just how much he could count on Jim the Guy. Miramax had recently released del Toro’s biggest budget movie, Mimic, a $30 million production, and in his hometown the director was now believed to be a Hollywood high roller. Criminals captured Federico del Toro and demanded a ransom from his son. Then they doubled it. Over the course of the seventy-two-day ordeal, Cameron called and e-mailed del Toro constantly, counseling his friend on hiring the right people to perform the ransom negotiations based on his own experience with personal security. He reviewed the references from the negotiators. It was Cameron who loaned del Toro the ransom negotiator’s salary, a sum big enough to alleviate the family’s financial burden. “Of all my friends, Jim was the Gibraltar stone,” del Toro recalls. He would pay Cameron back immediately upon his father’s release, and move his whole family from Mexico to the United States. “It’s easier to talk about the legend of the artistic dictator,” del Toro says. “Few people know Jim’s other side.” But after Titanic, as Cameron threw himself into endeavors far afield from traditional moviemaking, Jim the Guy would start rearing his head more often.

  In June 2000, Cameron married Suzy Amis, the shy, willowy actress, then thirty-eight, who had caught his eye while playing Rose’s granddaughter in Titanic. The daughter of an air force pilot and a homemaker in Oklahoma, Amis had been recruited as a model at sixteen and soon began living in Paris and appearing on magazine covers as one of the Ford Agency’s “faces of the ‘80s.” In 1986, Amis made her stage debut as a teenage temptress in an off-Broadway play called Fresh Horses—she was the only thing critics liked about it. By the time she was cast in Titanic, Amis had turned in strong performances in movies better known by reviewers than by audiences, like The Ballad of Little Jo, a revisionist Western in which she played a frontier woman who passes as a man in order to get by in a rough mining town. Her son, Jasper, from her marriage to her ex-husband, actor Sam Robards, accompanied Amis on every shoot. During the filming in 1996, Cameron had a three-year-old daughter of his own, Josephine, and a complicated on-again, off-again relationship with her mother, Linda Hamilton. Amis had the spirit of adventure that Cameron found irresistible in a woman—she could fly a Cessna, shoot a rifle, ride a horse. But there was something unusual about her—for an actress, she didn’t seem all that interested in being famous. It was clear to the cast and crew around them that Amis and Cameron had some kind of spark. “I could tell Jim was sweet on her,” Paxton says.

  Cameron and Amis would go on to have three children together, Claire, Quinn, and Rose, and raise them in Malibu with Josephine and Jasper. For the first time, Cameron’s friends and family didn’t hold their breath for signs of trouble. He seemed to have found a partner who balanced, rather than heightened, his intensity. “Suzy is a peaceful, earth-mother type who really brings out the best in him and lets him be him,” says Tom Arnold. “He really respects her. He’s always really respected women. You can tell that in his characters, and if you know him personally, he’s very introspective about his life and mistakes he’s made.” Cameron’s films that deal with marriage have shown a very traditional view—in the end, the warring Brigmans of The Abyss and the Taskers of True Lies reconcile. It’s a happy ending he had never managed to accomplish in his own life. When he made True Lies in 1994, Cameron wanted the poster to be a picture of a hand grenade with a wedding ring for the pin pull. “I had not met Suzy yet, so to me marriage was still a grenade range,” he says. But True Lies ends with the family intact, with everyone in on secrets and acting as a team of spies. “You can see from the way the film resolves that I was a big fan of marriage, fatherhood, and true love,” Cameron says. “And I still am.”

  “Why the Hell Do You Wackos Want to Go to Mars?”

  In August 1999 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Cameron addressed a group of about seven hundred would-be Martians. They were mostly members of the nonprofit Mars Society—scientists, engineers, students, and red-planet fans with earthbound day jobs like teaching and hotel management who advocate Mars’s exploration and settlement. “You people are all out of your minds, you know that?” Cameron taunted them. “You do understand that Mars is really, really far away, and it’s really, really cold? And if you did go there, you couldn’t come back for years? Why the hell do you wackos want to go to Mars?” Cameron, as he would then confess, is one of the wackos. At the time he addressed the convention, he was planning a fictional 3-D IMAX film and a five-hour TV miniseries meant to depict as accurately as possible the first human journey to Mars.
Earlier that year, NASA had launched two probes to Mars, stoking interest in and enthusiasm about the planet, and Cameron had begun to see the human colonization of Mars as our species’ best plan B should Earth become uninhabitable. He had read astronautical engineer Robert Zubrin’s 1996 pro-terraforming tract, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, and hired Zubrin as a consultant on his Mars movie.

  Cameron’s picture was about a group of explorers who travel to the red planet, establish a settlement there, get in a jam, and use their wits and grit to get out of it. Though he was writing a fictional piece, Cameron was interested in making the story as credible as possible. As he had with Titanic in hewing to the history and time line of the sinking, Cameron worked within a rule set, in this case the rules of physics, and drilled down to the finest details. As far as Cameron was concerned, fantastical science fiction like Star Trek and Star Wars made space travel look too easy and leaped over the true challenge and adventure of exploring other planets. “My Mars project was true science fiction, where it’s extrapolation from present-day reality to a very specific future reality,” says Cameron. “That’s different from sci-fi fantasy, which is really what Avatar is, ‘cause in Avatar we go to another world and make up our own rules when we’re there.”

  Cameron got his hands on an unofficial NASA study document called the Design Reference Mission 2.0 (DRM) that laid out different concepts for traveling to Mars, and he began analyzing the math. What Cameron discovered was that the DRM math didn’t really add up. When he asked NASA engineers about it, they sheepishly agreed, saying the DRM was “notional,” meant to be a thought exercise. “And I had taken it seriously, for months,” Cameron says. But he had also been embellishing and improving on the DRM, and had even designed his own Mars lander and rover, combining them into one, which he called a “lander rover.” It was a design that had not previously appeared in NASA literature. But when Cameron brought his drawings and spreadsheets to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to show the engineers there, they conceded that his unorthodox idea could actually work. This was a functional spaceship design by a man who had just a few junior-college physics classes under his belt. “If Jim Cameron had been a trained engineer, he would have been a remarkable one,” says Zubrin. “As it is, he comes up with a lot of creative ideas. Some of them are a little off, but the ones that are good, more conventionally trained engineers would never have come up with.” In 2011, NASA will be sending a $4 billion ship to Mars—a lander rover. It’s not Cameron’s design, but it’s similar.

  Cameron had hoped his Mars movie, which would have been the first fictional 3-D IMAX movie, would boost the 3-D format. But a number of things happened to dampen interest in the red planet and the perceived potential of the movie commercially. The two Mars probes launched in 1999 failed, to the great disappointment of Mars watchers. And two other Mars films opened in 2000, Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars and a Val Kilmer movie called Red Planet, both of them critical and commercial disappointments. If he was going to inspire the industry to embrace 3-D, Cameron felt he had to turn to a potentially more widely appealing movie. “He said, ‘Look, I know the fact that those movies didn’t do well doesn’t mean a Mars movie won’t do well,’” Zubrin recounts. “‘But there’s that impression. And if I’m going to take this 3-D IMAX technology and make it universal, I have to have a movie that’s so successful that no theater will turn it down.’” So Cameron decided to make what he thought would be a more commercially viable sci-fi movie his first fictional 3-D effort—Avatar. “I figure I just need to make the Mars film before we really go to Mars, and that gives me another twenty-five years or so,” Cameron says.

  Although Cameron temporarily shelved his Mars project, his real-life space-travel ambitions only grew. In 2000, he approached Energya, a privately run Russian space program, about going up to the Mir space station and filming a documentary there with his 3-D cameras. He underwent exhaustive medical tests—eye exams, tooth exams, treadmill tests, a colonoscopy—and passed the rigorous training in Moscow. But by the time Cameron returned to the United States, the Mir space station was being shut down due to lack of funding. Energya called Cameron and proposed that he go to the International Space Station instead, which sounded great to him but meant involving NASA, a cautious bureaucracy that had just been embarrassed by the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, arriving on a Russian ship without NASA’s blessing. “I said that I didn’t just want to be a space tourist,” Cameron recalls. “I wanted to stay on the ISS for a month and make a 3-D film about living and working in space.” Cameron’s filming mission was gaining momentum. He got commitments for nearly $30 million in funding, but he needed more, for insurance. He learned that training for the project, in which he intended to perform a space walk, would mean spending eighteen months abroad. At this point Cameron had a young and growing family. He asked NASA to give him six months to think over the project. In that time, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, killing all seven crew members, and NASA became a very different place. “There was no way my mission made sense in a post-Columbia environment,” Cameron says. “They weren’t even flying their own people, let alone pushy filmmakers.” Cameron shelved the project, but his relationship with NASA continued.

  In 2002, the director became a member of the NASA Advisory Council, an independent civilian board that offers input to the NASA administrator. This put him at a table beside men such as astronauts Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn, and a cadre of renowned scientists and engineers. He also helped design a 3-D HD camera to go on future Mars missions. Cameron’s main function at NASA has been to guide the agency in telling its own story better and to serve as a kind of motivational speaker for its scientists and engineers. In a 2005 speech to aerospace professionals in Orlando, Florida, Cameron entreated NASA to showcase the passion of its scientists and to let ordinary people get to know them, identify with them, and experience space travel vicariously through them. “There are six billion of us here on the ground who are not gonna get to go and a handful of us who will,” he said. “Those who go become the avatars for the rest, the eyes and ears, the hearts and spirits for the rest of humanity.” The rapt crowd in Orlando greeted the speech with thunderous applause. Cameron is a science groupie. His ultimate dream is to get to space, but hanging out with astronauts and becoming a part of their world is a nice consolation prize.

  Experimental Girl

  Cameron keeps a running ideas list on his computer. In his own cryptic shorthand, he sketches out possible characters and scenarios—concepts inspired by an article he just read in Scientific American or a person he met. There are dozens of them, some just a few words long, others a descriptive page or two. “I’ll run out of time before I run out of ideas,” he says. One of the concepts on Cameron’s list in the late 1990s was the phrase “experimental girl.” It was that idea that would evolve into the director’s first foray into network TV and would launch the career of an unknown teenage actress named Jessica Alba.

  Cameron had been looking for a project to do with an old friend from his Roger Corman days, Charles (“Chick”) Eglee. Eglee wrote Cameron’s first film—Piranha II, a creative experience they would both rather forget, except for the friendship—and went on to become an executive at Steven Bochco Productions, producing dramas like Murder One and NYPD Blue. Twentieth Century Fox was encouraging Cameron to try creating a TV show, and Lightstorm president Rae Sanchini supported the notion. “TV just seemed like a good avenue for some of Jim’s ideas,” Sanchini says. “The stakes aren’t so great. You can experiment, try things, you can respond to things happening in society. There’s a lot of fun stuff about TV and the immediacy of it.” In the fall of 2000, Cameron’s “experimental girl” would become the new Fox show Dark Angel. Max Guevara, a genetically engineered female supersoldier, lived in a dystopian future society—Seattle, Washington, in the year 2019, after an “infocalypse.” Terrorists had detonated an electromagnetic pulse weapon in the atmosphere
over the United States, destroying most computer and communications systems and plunging the country into an era of economic depression, rampant crime, and authoritarian government. Sanchini looked at hundreds of actresses for the role of Max, including Rosario Dawson and Jacinda Barrett. Alba had been a working actor since the age of thirteen, appearing in a Nickelodeon show, a few episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 and the Drew Barrymore comedy Never Been Kissed. But she was finding that her exotic looks—she’s Mexican, Danish, and French Canadian—were preventing her from getting lead parts or the kind of regular work she could make a living from as an adult. “If I didn’t get Dark Angel, I was just gonna go to college and figure something else out,” Alba says. She had been warned about Cameron—that he was fiery, a little scary. So she was shocked to arrive for her audition at Lightstorm to find him holding the camera and lighting the room himself, without the usual phalanx of casting assistants and producers. “He said he wanted to write the script around whoever was gonna play Max,” Alba recalls. “We talked about Max’s backstory How does she deal with emotions? I was kind of taken aback. Here was this hugely powerful man, and he was interested in what an eighteen-year-old thought.” Cameron specifically did not want a blonde-haired, blue-eyed supergirl. “He said he believed the future of the world would be biracial,” Alba recalls. “At the time that was taboo a little bit. But he really wanted me to own it.”

  Dark Angel’s two-hour pilot was an accomplishment in a variety of ways. It was one of Cameron’s first projects to come in at budget, for one thing. At $10 million, the show was extravagant by TV norms, costing nearly twice as much as a typical two-hour pilot. But by Cameron standards, it was delightfully low rent. “It was fun to be working down and dirty and fast instead of these movies that take forever,” he says. When Dark Angel premiered in October 2000, Time praised the show’s dark vision and Alba’s athletic performance. “We have seen the Woman of the Future, and she kicks butt,” the magazine said.6 Other critics agreed, and even New York Times political columnist Maureen Dowd weighed in, confessing that she was more interested in watching Dark Angel’s “snappy dialogue, captivating style and gripping fight scenes”7 than the leaden 2000 presidential debate the pilot aired against. Apparently, many viewers felt the same way, as more than seventeen million people tuned in.