James Cameron, The Dreamer
© Photo: Alex de Brabant
Written by: Abel BERGER
Cinema is an atypical art, to say the least, requiring an often colossal budget, a large crew, and a multiplicity of techniques and specializations that a single individual cannot possess. One may sometimes wonder whether a director should truly be considered an artist in his own right rather than a glorified project manager, certainly with a vision, but whose legitimacy and value can be questioned. Does a director deserve all the praise if his film is a success, to the detriment of the hundreds of almost anonymous technicians who will forever remain a shapeless mass of white letters on a black background of credits (which no one reads, by the way)? Probably not. Nevertheless, there are many directors who fully deserve the title of artist. Among them, one man has distinguished himself through his creativity, his curiosity, and, generally speaking, his talent.
Every self-respecting movie fan should know James Cameron. From Terminator to Avatar , including Aliens and Titanic , there's no denying that Cameron is a great filmmaker. But what interests us today isn't his filmography per se, but rather his art in general. And his art began during his childhood. Young James spent all his time reading, writing stories, and drawing. Taking drawing lessons, he quickly showed great talent in this area, and enjoyed writing and drawing comics inspired by Marvel superhero comics or science fiction novels like How Worlds Collide . The young boy also participated in the life of his community in Canada. For example, he won the annual window-decorating competition several years in a row and drew a portrait of his neighbor, a soldier who disappeared in Vietnam, to raise funds. The shadow of war loomed large throughout James Cameron's youth, and the collective imagination in the midst of the Cold War often turned to the fear of a nuclear holocaust. This constant exposure quickly led the budding director to his favorite subjects: man is a wolf to man, nature must be preserved, and technology is a tool that can save as well as destroy.
As a young adult, Cameron used his artistic talents to enter the workforce. Arriving in the United States, he began earning a living designing B-movie posters. Highly skilled, he found inspiration for his posters in surrealism and sometimes the Renaissance. He sold two posters per month. He found inspiration for each poster almost instantly, and it usually took him no more than two days to complete his work, using the rest of his free time to write, direct short films, and canvass various studios. He later landed a job in the model shop at New World Pictures, where he did matte painting (landscapes for sets) for John Carpenter, the master of horror himself.
In 1982, he was finally entrusted with the direction of the film Piranha 2 , a film so bad that he would do everything to avoid his name being associated with it. Two years later, he finally became known (in a good way) for his film Terminator , which would be the beginning of a great career.
The idea for the film reportedly came to him during a dream in which he saw a metal skeleton emerging from the flames. Upon waking, he reportedly wrote down his dream and tried to find an explanation. He reasoned that the chrome skeleton had a human appearance because, before its skin melted, the creature had to pass itself off as human. The Terminator was born.
His creative process closely resembles the beginnings of psychoanalysis, and dream analysis in general. Freud and Jung themselves regularly took naps in order to write down their dreams upon waking and then interpret them. Freed from their physical and rational limitations, dreamers thus become capable of great creativity. But James Cameron's creativity can also be very rational, even scientific.
First of all, it is very important to note that James Cameron does not "just" direct, he draws for each film numerous storyboards and concept art in order to best share his vision with his team. Great special effects gentlemen such as Stan Winston and the Skotak brothers will joke that their work of inventing designs was generally pre-chewed by Cameron, but that his requests were excessively complex to execute, a prime example being the queen in Aliens . Cameron's designs of alien flora and fauna always have a scientific basis. Indeed, it is important for the director that his imaginary creatures are credible from a biological point of view: they are beings with organs, hunting or reproduction methods, and who interact with their environment. For example, he designed the alien queen with their reproductive system in mind: we see eggs in the first film but they do not seem to be laid by the "classic" xenomorphs who prefer to parasitize their prey. He therefore deduced that these beings must have a society similar to a hive, with a queen at the top. Similarly, it was important to him that the Na'vi clothing and tools in Avatar be made of raw materials that viewers could see on the planet Pandora. Finally, for his film Titanic , he and his team conducted fourteen dives to collect as much footage of the ship as possible for the sake of realism.
James Cameron is also interested in new technologies. He had a camera modified specifically to withstand high pressures for underwater scenes, for each of his films he tries to advance special effects technology, the most obvious being Avatar , and he even piloted a submarine that he partially designed.
In conclusion, by choosing not to focus on James Cameron's scripts or direction, we were able to highlight his other qualities. We can therefore say with a fairly small margin of error that his career is vast and his talents numerous. He is a creative, a jack-of-all-trades, a great designer, filmmaker, screenwriter, inventor—in short, a great artist.