James Cameron: Interviews

Iron Jim

57 Iron Jim John H. Richardson/1994 From Premiere Magazine, August 1994, 44–49, 52, 54–55, 97. Reprinted by permission of John H. Richardson. By February the town was starting to talk—James Cameron was at it again. When he made The Abyss he went over budget and over schedule , missing his release date by four weeks. When he made Terminator 2: Judgment Day he broke budget records and kept three editors working frantically to make a July 1 release. This time he wasn’t just pushing the envelope—he was ripping it to shreds, he was vaporizing it. He’d been shooting True Lies for five months and counting. Word around town put the budget at $120 million. “They say he’s totally out of his mind,” said one rival filmmaker, “spending more money than anybody ever spent in the history of man.” With Cameron anything is possible. Fired from his first film, he broke into the editing room and cut the film back to his original vision. That was before the runaway success of the two Terminators and Aliens gave him imperial power. Nowadays he directs his crew through a bank of speakers pitched to concert volume: “That’s exactly what I don’t want,” he booms. If they mess up, he says, “That’s okay, I’ve worked with children before.” The crews respond by printing up T-shirts with semi-jokey slogans: “You can’t scare me—I work for Jim Cameron.” And when it comes to showdowns with movie studios, Cameron is a master. T2 coproducer B. J. Rack recalls the first screening they held for executives of Carolco Pictures: “Jim was mixing the soundtrack, and I had a bad feeling—I said, Are you going to be ready?’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah’—and he made them wait. Until 4 A.M. The audacity! And they waited—they were sleeping on the floor.” But reports from the True Lies set were full of superlatives. Cameron had reinvented special effects on The Abyss and T2. Now, armed with 58 james cameron: inter views his own personal computer-effects studio, Digital Domain, he was once again creating—in the words of editor Mark Goldblatt—“eyepopping, mind-blowing visuals.” He was shooting a Harrier jet attack on a Miami high-rise that looked so real even Marine pilots wouldn’t be able to tell the hardware from the software. And there was a chase scene on Florida ’s Seven-Mile Bridge that made the stuff in The French Connection look like bumper cars. “It’s a huge movie,” says Arnold Schwarzenegger, once again Cameron’s star. “It’s T2-type of action, but even more creative— things you’ve never seen before.” The production was immense—the head of the studios in Santa Clarita where True Lies was partly shot said Cameron probably picked a facility thirty miles outside of L.A. because no studio in the city had enough parking. Cameron’s traveling circus was dogged by protests from Florida to Rhode Island. In Newport the city council had to call a special vote to grant True Lies an exemption from the city’s noise code. Local activist Maureen O’Neil complained to the press, “I don’t particularly want my neighborhood simulating Sarajevo.” But all of the whispers, even the nastiest, were tinged with awe. The studio behind Wyatt Earp was intimidated enough to change its release date and leave a little space between the western and True Lies, even with Kevin Costner playing Earp. As one envious young producer put it: “They say it’s going to be the Holy Grail of action pictures.” James Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Canada, a town just north of Niagara Falls. His father was an electrical engineer who worked for a paper mill. He was a strict disciplinarian and Cameron grew up hating to be told what to do, so he became a master builder and told other kids what to do. They constructed rafts, slot cars, go-carts, rockets, forts, boats, a catapult that hurled boulders so large they made craters when they landed. On one occasion they built a submersible “sea lab” and sent mice deep under the Niagara River. When a neighbor stole some of Jim’s toys, Jim and his brother, Mike, sawed through the branches that held up his tree house. Hospitalization was required. Cameron’s mother was an artist and encouraged him to paint; she helped get his work shown in...