James Cameron: Lasting Impact

Q: There can't be many people in Hollywood who can tell Arnold no.

A: I never tell him what to do. We talk about stuff. I think we were more partners on this film than any other. When we did Terminator, he was an acolyte, still learning how to be an actor, and I was the director, so he did what I told him. By the time we got around to T2, he was an international megastar, highest paid actor on the planet, but there was still a sense that it was my baby, because I'd created the first one.

Q: Much was made of his kinder, gentler Terminator in T2. At what point was it decided that he should play the good guy in the sequel?

A: That decision was made in about 1985, when I pitched him that story. That was always the idea.

Q: So the role wasn't tailored to suit the superhero status he'd achieved by the time T2 was actually made?

A: You mean, was he going politically correct? A lot of people said that, but politically correct certainly doesn't prey on our minds very much.

Q: It was actually a kinder, gentler Jim Cameron.

A: At that same time, I was writing Point Break, and I was getting into sort of surf Zen and I thought, That's great--it's sort of Eastern and Western. The T-1000 Terminator that Arnold battles is scary because he's kind of plastic. The more force you use against him, the less effective you are. I was getting into the whole aikido concept. What's the one thing [Arnold] can't win against? That which he can't use his force against. He has to use his brain. You see him use force and he fails. Then he uses more force. [Laughs] That's Western Zen. It's like, "Fuck that aikido shit--bigger gun!"

Q: When you first met with Arnold 10 years ago, wasn't it to consider him for the hero's role in The Terminator--the one played by Michael Biehn?

A: That idea didn't come from me. I went to that first meeting thinking I was gonna have to derail this thing somehow--pick a fight with Arnold so I could say we didn't get along. Funny thing was, we got along great. I thought he was hysterically funny and he loved the script. He didn't particularly love the other character for whom he had been proposed, by people who I will not name who are clearly morons, because quite obviously Arnold was not ready to play that guy then.

Q: When The Terminator came out, your main competition was two highly anticipated sci-fi epics, Dune and 2010--

A: Two overblown and overproduced pictures.

Q: --and you blew them out of the water.

A: You know, some young turk will come along and blow my ass out of the water with my overblown, overproduced picture. That's pretty much how it works, isn't it? It's all a big coral reef.

Q: You were only 29. How good a feeling was it when The Terminator hit big?

A: It was a rush. It was cool. We never had any real great expectations for the film. I didn't think it would capture people's imaginations the way it did.

Q: Did you know what you had?

A: Yeah. I had the movie I wanted to make.

Q: Beginning with Linda Hamilton in The Terminator, and in all your films since, you've had woman characters who are heroic and dominant forces. The argument has always been that until more actresses are able to find roles like that, they won't be able to really score at the box office and achieve parity with male superstars. Why does it seem like you're the only one generating these kinds of roles?

A: I think it's a schizophrenic response on the part of actresses. On the one hand, they want to be politically correct and stay away from violent material, so they look for strength in films where you don't care about strength. And that's not how it works. You can't have a hero without a situation of jeopardy--there's no other way to be heroic, at least in an escapist, action context. And a lot of actresses I find are not willing to commit to that.

Q: So the fact that Sigourney Weaver's role in your Aliens sequel was even stronger and more heroic than her original role was not a selling point with her?

A: Sigourney was a little worried about that stuff with guns. I said, "What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death? I don't think so."

Q: But she ended up playing that part as well as anyone could have.

A: Right, but you can see her backlash. For the next one, Alien3, she said no guns. So they went to a prison planet where there were no guns-- they fought the alien by hiding. Behind doors. And it was somehow less satisfying.

Q: What do you do to guarantee that your films will satisfy?

A: I think ultimately that no matter how cloaked in the sense of reality and dramatic immediacy, you have to remember that film is fantasy. An audience comes into a theater in Encino and is transported to another planet, and gets chased around by a monster in the dark. So a film is dealing with subconscious things--the id-- very primal fears that we don't get to take out and exercise much in our society. It's been a couple thousand years since we've had to worry about things eating us. But it's still there in the medulla someplace.

Q: How do you tap into your medulla oblongata?

A: Two things: First, I'm in contact with my memory of how I saw the world as a kid. And I try to keep that over here in a bell jar so that I can always go look through that lens. And dreams. I stay real alive in my dreams at that stage--what the world looked like at nine or 10. Scary. Childhood is not a blissful state.

Q: How was yours?

A: I'm not saying I had an abnormal childhood in any way. No. I was the only abnormal event in my childhood.

Q: How do you approach your dreams?

A: No method, no books, no armchair psychoanalysis. Just imagery. I love it when I have a nightmare--to me that means I got my money's worth out of that eight hours. Because I pretty much view sleep as a complete waste of time.

Q: Here are some of the headlines from reviews of The Abyss: "Close Encounters of the Wet Kind." "Watered Down." "The Abyss-mal." Any chance you see the negative reaction to this film as similar to what happened with Arnold on Last Action Hero?

A: Yes. It's like this: Terminator was the discovery. Aliens was the glorification. The Abyss was the backlash. T2 was the forgiving. So I don't know where the fuck I am now on the spectrum [laughs]. But the media do tend to lock arms in a way that's quite frightening at times. A perfect example: Peter Travers was the first person to review The Abyss. He reviewed it like it was the second coming of Christ. The best film he'd ever seen. Then everybody else sees it and somehow in there the talk about the budget, something was skewed, and there were a lot of bad reviews. Then, six months later Travers was doing his year-end, best-of roundup and he doesn't even mention The Abyss. Not to single him out, but people do tend to move like a school of fish.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5