In its first season, Dark Angel held on to a considerable audience with the help of its lead-in, That ‘70s Show. But by its second season the futuristic drama would become a victim of time-slot shuffling, ending up in the dead zone of Friday nights, airing after a slate of comedy reruns. Cameron was stunned by his impotence in the world of network TV. This was a man who could call a studio chairman and buy himself six more months to finish a movie, but he couldn’t rescue Dark Angel from network programming hell. Nevertheless, the show was profitable, so its creators were shocked by what happened on the eve of their third season. Cameron, Sanchini, Alba, and Eglee were about to fly to New York City for Fox’s upfronts—the meetings where networks announce their new seasons to advertisers and press—when Cameron got word that Dark Angel had been canceled and replaced at the eleventh hour by Firefly, a space Western from Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. Firefly ended up averaging just 4.7 million viewers per show and was canceled after one season. “So that was my ten-minute adventure into network TV land,” Cameron says. “Which was despicable.”
Thematically, Dark Angel had a lot of Cameron touchstones: a strong heroine, a massive technological failure, characters soldiering through a gritty, realistic future world. But the show’s most lasting impact was the launching of Alba as a genuine phenomenon. She would go on to appear in movies like Sin City and Fantastic Four, becoming a kind of postracial sex symbol and heroine. As Cameron had predicted, Alba’s enigmatic beauty turned out not to be a problem at all.
See You in the Sunshine
On May 27, 2002, fifty-one years to the day after the feared German battleship sank off the coast of France, Cameron made his postponed expedition to the Bismarck for a Discovery Channel special. He brought with him two German survivors of the battle that had sent the Nazi superweapon three miles down in the Atlantic with 90 percent of her crew, 1,995 men with an average age of twenty. This was a very different wreck from Titanic. As the Mirs approached the warship, which Cameron called the Death Star, they came upon a giant, faded swastika painted on the side. There was no beauty to the Bismarck. It was a tool of war and a grim grave site. The stoic battle survivors, now in their seventies, were brought to tears by Cameron’s underwater images of the ship.
There was some controversy about how exactly the Bismarck had gone down, and for Cameron, this expedition would turn into a detective story. During World War II, the Nazis wanted to use the Bismarck to cut off the convoy that was Britain’s lifeline. After the Nazi warship destroyed the Hood, one of Britain’s best ships, and killed all but three of its 1,415 men, “Sink the Bismarck!” became the country’s rallying cry. And on the eighth day of the Nazi warship’s first mission, a fleet of British ships and aircraft delivered a steady pounding, sending the feared German vessel down. The victory became a point of British pride, even spawning a movie and a song. But some German survivors had claimed that it wasn’t the Brits’ shelling that brought down the Bismarck but the Germans themselves, who sank the ship to avoid its being boarded.
With his ROVs, Cameron was able to take images and see parts of the warship not viewed since its sinking. He found that none of the torpedoes or shells had penetrated the second layer of the Bismarck’s inner hull, that British torpedoes hadn’t in fact caused any significant flooding. Cameron put forward a theory to explain large gashes observed by a prior expedition: he suggested that the Bismarck had suffered a “hydraulic outburst” when it hit the bottom, causing the sides to bulge out and break in places. It was an important idea in shipwreck forensics, to look not only at what had brought a vessel down but also at what had happened once it hit the bottom. Based on Cameron’s findings, the wounded Bismarck would have sunk without the scuttling, but it might have taken half a day, enough time for many more German sailors to be rescued. The director’s theories weren’t well received by proud British historians, but they were by the scientists who specialize in maritime forensics.
In 2005, Cameron would get involved in another controversial piece of detective work for the Discovery Channel, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, a documentary asserting that Jesus’ tomb may have been found in Jerusalem in 1980, during an apartment construction project. The documentary challenges the notion of the resurrection as a physical act and suggests that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were buried together as husband and wife and that they had a son. Charlie Pellegrino, Cameron’s friend from diving Titanic, was writing an accompanying book and brought the project to the director to executive produce. “I pursue film projects where I think I’m going to learn something, where I believe my curiosity is going to be satisfied in some way,” Cameron said while promoting the documentary in 2007.8 “I was fascinated by early Christianity and how it all began. We now know more about Jesus than we’ve known for literally thousands of years.”
By this point, Cameron was getting very far from the business of being a filmmaker, but he was so engaged intellectually and emotionally by his expeditions and discoveries that he almost didn’t notice. Between 2001 and 2004 he spent seven months at sea and went on forty-one deep-submersible dives. He was beginning to experience a shift in his priorities. “Previously, everything had been about the film,” Cameron says. “Do whatever, sacrifice whatever, move to England, give up your salary, whatever it takes to make the film, put on the show.” But on the expeditions, for the first time in Cameron’s career, the film wasn’t as important as the moment he was living. Before he closed the hatch on his sub on every dive, Cameron would call out, “See you in the sunshine,” keenly aware that there was a chance he wouldn’t. The expeditions began to change Cameron’s notion of leadership. He was responsible for people’s lives, for deciding whether or not to dive when a hurricane was making its way closer. “It’s not about the movie and the artistic temper tantrums,” he says. “Those are completely out of place.” He also began to see that his critical management style could use some tweaking. “You learn to deal with people from a place of respect,” he says. “Before you open your mouth, if there’s an assumption that you respect that person, you’re gonna deal with them differently.”
After the Bismarck trip, Cameron even bought his own subs, de-touring his family trip to Paris to pick them up in Toulon. Cameron’s wife and children would often see him off and welcome him back from his voyages in port. In 2003, he would film Aliens of the Deep, a hybrid of a Jacques Cousteau documentary and an outer-space fantasy. Cameron teamed up with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists to investigate the ocean’s hydrothermal vents, the site of a unique ecosystem of organisms that don’t require any sunlight to live. The shrimp, crabs, and worms that thrive there derive all their energy from the heat of the vents. Though scientists have known about the ecosystems for years, it was a revelation to most of the film’s audience that life can exist without the sun. In the documentary Cameron posits the theory, supported by astrobiologists, that the vents provide a plausible idea of what life beyond Earth might look like, perhaps on Europa, a moon of Jupiter believed to have liquid water oceans underneath its icy surface. The expedition would fire up Cameron’s imagination to tell his own science-fiction story. The strange bioluminescent flora and fauna he saw informed his creature and plant design on Avatar.
In exploration, Cameron had found his passion, and in movies, he had a way to fund it. But beyond his own enjoyment, Cameron was beginning to see exploration as a cultural value that needed boosting. Where were the twenty-first century’s Magellans and da Gamas? More important, where was the spirit of discovery in the regular citizen, who had once watched the moon landing and been filled with wonder and a sense of possibility? “Exploration is not a luxury,” Cameron wrote in a 2004 issue of Wired. “It defines us as a civilization. It directly or indirectly benefits every member of society. It yields an inspirational dividend whose impact on our self-image, confidence and economic and geopolitical stature is immeasurable.”9
By 2005, Cameron had devoted seven of his midlife years, potentially a director’s most productive,
to the discovery of new places and new technologies rather than to making movies. He was ready now to bring what he had learned about life and work and science back with him to Hollywood.
10.
PROJECT 880
avatar n. 1. The descent to earth of a Hindu deity, esp. Vishnu, in human or animal form. 2. An embodiment, as of a quality or concept: an archetype. 3. A temporary manifestation or aspect of a continuing entity.1
In the Monster’s Head
In April 2008, in a windowless Los Angeles warehouse where Howard Hughes had built his airplanes some seventy years earlier, another secretive and occasionally mad genius was at work. Cameron, in a hockey jersey and jeans, was doing something elite directors do not do—holding a camera. “Why can’t I see anything?!” he yelled from an apparently empty warehouse floor to a small crew huddled over computer monitors in the corner. “Oh, oh, oh, I’m in the monster’s head!” Cameron backed up, and a peek in his camera lens revealed blackness giving way to a thick and vivid rain forest where a tall, blue, alien version of Sigourney Weaver was battling the monster whose head had just blocked the director’s view. On the warehouse floor there was no rain forest, no monster, no Weaver. Just a bunch of guys and their computers. But Cameron’s camera was allowing him to shoot inside a virtual universe of his own creation. He swooped in over the monster’s shoulder and entered the world of Avatar.
At this point, Cameron hadn’t released a feature film in over a decade. Except for a brief stint playing himself on the HBO show Entourage in 2005, he had been largely absent from the Hollywood scene, riding in his subs, filming his documentaries, tinkering and building new filmmaking toys. But now the director was back on a set, telling a story that had been knocking around in his brain for years, about an ex-marine’s struggle for survival on an alien planet called Pandora. Pandora’s floating mountains and bioluminescent jungle are home to a tall, blue humanoid species called the Na’vi and a number of exotic creatures—six-legged horses, glowing wood sprites, winged banshees. A mysterious resource called unobtainium is plentiful there, drawing humans in a future century to colonize Pandora. Because the planet’s air is toxic for humans, a group of genetically engineered human-alien hybrids, or avatars, are sent in, including wounded former marine Jake Sully.
Avatar would not be based upon a comic book, novel, or video game, making it unique for a big-budget film in its time. This would be a wholly original piece of work from one man’s brain, meant to entertain and—as the best futuristic fiction does—raise timely questions about the present. The director wrote his first treatment for Avatar twelve years before he ended up inside the monster’s head. The only problem with making the movie in 1996 was that it was impossible. The technology did not exist.
The Digital Manifesto
Cameron jokes that he is like a Plains Indian who wastes no piece of the buffalo; in his case, it is ideas that are made use of down to the marrow, sometimes decades later. He started creating some of the images in Avatar in the 1970s. While driving a truck for the Brea Unified School District, Cameron began to paint some fanciful scenes that would linger in his mind—flying jellyfish, wood sprites (which he called “dandelion things”), blazingly colorful bioluminescent forests and rivers, fan lizards, and big-eyed cats. In 1978, when he wrote the sci-fi spec script with his friend Randall Frakes called Xenogenesis, they had to create a number of planetary environments to tell the story of a woman and a man looking for a place to start a new Earth. Cameron painted cloud-wreathed mesas, luminous forests, and multicolored flying creatures for the unproduced feature, which ended with the voyagers ultimately finding the planet that would become their new home but discovering that its air was toxic. The human children who inhabited the world would have to be genetically modified in the womb to survive there. These hybrids would grow up tall and lean, with robin’s-egg-blue skin and golden eyes. One of Cameron’s late-seventies paintings was of a tall, slender, blue girl standing in a field of magenta grass. There were flying creatures he called air sharks that had rows of glassy teeth that jutted forward like snake fangs. In 1996, when he wrote the first treatment for Avatar, the air sharks became bansheerays because of their stingraylike silhouettes. In the design process for Avatar that began in 2005, they became less raylike, grew four wings, and were christened simply banshees. All of the ideas had been around for years in Cameron’s mind, looking for an outlet. When he started to write the treatment for Avatar, the story gelled in three or four weeks, and the creatures and characters, as well as many new ones, quickly found homes. “It spilled out,” he says. “But only because I had been processing it in my imagination for decades.”
Cameron wrote the treatment in large part to inspire the artists at his special-effects house, Digital Domain. They had created digital composites on True Lies and would be kept busy on Titanic for at least the next eighteen months, but neither movie involved much CG animation, nor any creature or character animation at all—Cameron’s and Stan Winston’s whole motivation for founding the company in 1993. In the early days of planning Digital Domain in late 1992, Cameron had written a “Digital Manifesto,” a passionately argued thirteen-page document laying out where he expected filmmaking to go in the coming years. In his manifesto, the director described something called “performance capture,” in which an actor would don a “data suit,” sending a stream of information about the actor’s physical movements to a workstation, where it would be inserted into a “synthetic environment.” Artists would then use software to turn the actor’s digitized performance into a fantastical character. “Jack Nicholson could create not just the voice but the total body performance of a demon, while puppeteers nearby cause his tail to lash and his pointed ears to furl and twitch,” Cameron wrote. “The actor can truly ‘become’ his animated character.” Having broken ground on The Abyss and T2, Cameron was rubbing elbows with the brightest minds in special effects, and this is the stuff they were talking about. “It all seemed pretty obvious from where we were sitting,” he says.
To most of Hollywood, the possibilities of lifelike CG characters driven by human performances wouldn’t be obvious for at least another decade, when a creature named Gollum first showed his pale, dessicated face. In the mid-nineties, video-game developers began to employ the performance-capture technique Cameron had described in his manifesto, although it was usually called motion capture, or mo-cap. In 1997, Cameron used mo-cap himself in a limited way to create the digital doubles that walked the decks of Titanic, and in 1999, George Lucas relied on the technique to animate the movement of his controversial Gungan character Jar Jar Binks for the Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace. But it was in 2001—the year, not the movie—that a director first deployed mo-cap in a transformative way. Briefly in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and more extensively in the second and third movies of the fantasy trilogy, Peter Jackson created the most believable computer-generated character in a movie to date, the Hobbit Gollum. Shakespearean-trained actor Andy Serkis performed scenes as the amphibious villain while wearing a blue suit and a few hundred markers on his face and body. Then artists at Jackson’s Weta Digital took the data from Serkis’s performance and used it to create a wholly new character. Gollum looked like Serkis—he had his face, his body twitches, his pathos and rage—but he was the grotesque, froglike creature that J. R. R. Tolkien had written about in his novels. The merging of live performance and special-effects work was akin to Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, only instead of green greasepaint, the effects enhancing the actor’s performance were zeros and ones painstakingly chosen by CG artists.
Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis employed a variation of the performance-capture technique to animate Tom Hanks in Polar Express in 2004, but his characters turned out creepily unlifelike. While Gollum, a nonhuman in a fantasy world, had come across as real, Hanks, who played five human characters on a train ride to the North Pole, appeared to be dead-eyed, wearing a mask. Polar Express crossed an important line, into the so-call
ed uncanny valley, a hypothesis born out of robotics that holds that when facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, the effect is disturbing to an audience. Directors who stayed firmly planted in the fantasy world would have more success with motion capture. Jackson revisited the technique to animate the giant ape in King Kong (2005), and Gore Verbinski used mo-cap to give Bill Nighy his tentacled beard as waterlogged villain Davy Jones in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies (2006 and 2007). By 2007, mo-cap was widespread enough to inspire a backlash—the credits of the Pixar movie Ratatouille boasted, “100% Genuine Animation! No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film.” By 2009, seventeen years after Cameron’s Digital Manifesto, there would be more than twenty special-effects houses offering some kind of motion capture as a service.
In 1996, Cameron wrote Avatar because he wanted to challenge Digital Domain with humanlike creatures that would require performance capture to realize. He deliberately focused his story on characters that fit within narrow design parameters: the Na’vi, a species of ten-foot-tall blue aliens with catlike ears and tail but humanlike features. “If they were more human, they could be done with makeup, which was boring, would not advance the cause, and had been done for thirty years in Star Trek,” Cameron says. “If they were less human, they could not have been performed by humans effectively.” When the effects supervisors at Digital Domain broke down Cameron’s early Avatar treatment, the consensus was that the movie would take a lot of time and money and would probably look fake. “It made them very uncomfortable, and they were fearful of it wrecking the company,” Cameron says. While wrangling with Twentieth Century Fox to fund Avatars R & D, he got absorbed instead in Titanic, and his sci-fi epic slipped to the bottom of the pile. It would not be until after he saw Jackson’s Gollum that Cameron felt up to the task of attempting Avatar.
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