The top-tiered action director of his generation, as well as one of the most allegedly demanding and difficult, James Cameron reshaped 1980s and ‘90s Hollywood with a string of lucrative multimillion-dollar films remarkable for their marriage of technical wizardry and human sentiment. Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic exemplified this union of elements, as one of the highest grossing motion pictures in the history of the medium. It also netted its director a dazzling array of international awards, including the 1997 Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director.
The son of an electrical engineer, Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada, on August 16, 1954. He was fascinated with movies from a young age and would later cite Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as an early influence. Thanks to his father’s job, Cameron and his family moved to southern California in 1971, and the director studied physics at California State University. Following his graduation, Cameron, who had already decided he wanted to pursue a film career, took a job as a truck driver to support his early screenwriting efforts.
Cameron received his first break at the hands of the legendary Roger Corman, who hired the young man (then 25 years old) as a model maker at his Roger Corman Studios. There, the director worked on his first movie, as art director for 1980s Battle Beyond the Stars. Thanks to a combination of skill and dedication, Cameron quickly ascended through the ranks, and the following year, was appointed second unit director and production designer for the schlock-fest Galaxy of Terror. The same year, he made his inauspicious directorial and screenwriting debut with Piranha II: The Spawning (1981), a straight-faced (so to speak) natural horror picture about a government-engineered breed of mutated flying fish that descend on a Caribbean resort and devour hundreds of bodies. With awful special effects (the fish all appear to be hand puppets), buckets of blood, and repellent subject matter, the picture diverged from the deliberately comic, lighthearted overtones of its Joe Dante-directed predecessor, and earned terrible notices. Legend has it that Cameron had such a bad time filming the movie, shot entirely in Italy for executive producer Ovidio G. Assonitis, that it gave him nightmares, the substance of which would inspire his breakthrough film The Terminator (1984). Piranha II: the Spawning was delayed for two years and ultimately took its stateside bow in late December 1983.
Next, the professional relationship between Cameron and Hollywood mega-producer Gale Anne Hurd yielded one of the top grossers of 1984, which Hurd and Cameron co-scripted, Cameron directed, and Hurd produced. Something of an unofficial, moderately budgeted Americanization of George Miller’s Mad Max series, The Terminator opens in the year 2024, when the ongoing battles between humankind and “The Machines” have sparked a nuclear holocaust and reduced much of contemporary civilization to dust. When humankind ultimately wins out, however, The Machines send a seemingly unstoppable warrior (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to 1984 with a mission to kill the infant who would grow up into the man ultimately responsible for their destruction, which sends his mother (Linda Hamilton) and her futuristic warrior-protector (Michael Biehn) on the lam. When it premiered in October 1984, The Terminator earned sensational reviews and grossed dollar one at the international box office, becoming an instant runaway smash. It also wrought instant stardom for former bodybuilder and Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger, and sparked an ongoing romantic relationship between Cameron and Hurd, who later married and then divorced.
That same year, Cameron scripted Rambo: First Blood Part II (released 1985) for director George Pan Cosmatos, then signed to direct Aliens (1986), the sequel to the 1979 Ridley Scott sci-fi opus Alien. In retrospect, the connection between Cameron and the Alien franchise hardly seems capricious given Cameron’s predilection for tough-as-steel heroines as his main characters, typified by Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. Like The Terminator before it, Aliens became a studio cause célèbre and one of the top draws of 1986 on domestic and international levels, making Cameron a household name.
In the late ‘80s, Cameron began to envision and plan another mega-budgeted opus, this one about an oil rig crew’s dangerous attempt to rescue the team on a sunken nuclear submarine, and — ultimately — the subaquatic extraterrestrials who devise a Day the Earth Stood Still-like plan to ensure continued peace amid escalating nuclear tensions by suspending massive tidal waves above major cities. Released in August 1989 (amid a studio blitz of elephantine-budgeted underwater pictures), The Abyss, like Cameron’s prior films, sports feminist thematic underpinnings with a take-no-prisoners heroine, Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio); it also boasts exemplary performances by Ed Harris and Michael Biehn and (like The Terminator, an interesting, politically progressive anti-nuclear theme). The Abyss performed disappointingly at the American box office, however, because it fell prey to massive studio interference when 20th Century Fox forced Cameron to hack out substantial portions of footage from the picture, virtually removing the tidal wave subplot altogether. Meanwhile, Cameron’s off-set life took a particularly unpleasant turn when he and producer Hurd separated during the production; he then became involved with (and married) director Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark), whose Point Break he also co-scripted.
In 1990, Cameron rebounded from the disappointment of The Abyss by writing, producing, and directing Terminator 2: Judgement Day and enjoying the massive acclaim that it generated. The movie made an asteroid-sized splash at the box office and Cameron drew high praise for its revolutionary special effects and use of CG imagery. The director then inked one of the most infamous and lucrative studio deals in recent history, a five-picture contract signed with Fox in 1992. Cameron’s next directorial effort, 1994’s action comedy True Lies, starring Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Tom Arnold, cost over $100 million; it also reeled in a massive take. In addition to directing, Cameron produced and scripted the film, and cast favored collaborator Schwarzenegger in the lead role.
After a producing and screenwriting stint on the 1995 dystopian saga Strange Days (directed by Bigelow, whom Cameron divorced during an affair with Terminator star Linda Hamilton), Cameron married Hamilton, then shifted course and revisited the historical inspiration for many of the underwater sequences in The Abyss: that of the 1912 USS Titanic disaster. Titanic was troubled from the beginning on many fronts; by a budget of astronomical proportions (originally budgeted at $125 million, it eventually cost at least $200 million, with the director forfeiting much of his salary and gross percentage points to finance it); by on-set injuries and mishaps (including food allegedly spiked with angel dust by unhappy studio workers as a “prank”); and by the difficulty of filming the actual Titanic wreck on the ocean floor. Yet it reeled in unholy profits (over $600 million in the U.S. alone) and massive numbers of viewers (particularly teenage girls, drawn to its romantic flights of fancy) who kept it afloat from its late 1997 debut well into mid-1998. Though its claim to fame as the highest-grossing motion picture of all time does not generally take inflation into account, it received a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations, eventually winning 11, and pulled in well over $1 billion at the international box office. Upon receiving the film’s Best Picture Oscar and after winning Best Director earlier in the evening, Cameron exulted “I’m the king of the world!” — a line exclaimed by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson in the film itself. It was perhaps the most-quoted line from Titanic, thus making a permanent mark on television viewers, film enthusiasts, and incredulous media commentators everywhere. Amid this success, Cameron divorced Hamilton and went on to wed Titanic actress and former model Suzy Amis (The Ballad of Little Jo).
After Titanic, Cameron temporarily retired from the production of big-screen fictional narratives, and segued into other areas of filmed entertainment, most immediately the Fox network’s highly touted action series Dark Angel (2000-2002). That series starred then 19-year-old actress Jessica Alba as the heroine of the title, Max Guevara, who came into being after she was created in a futuristic genetics lab. As the series opens, Guevara promptly escapes from the facility as a child, doing everything in her power to evade her captors, a pursuit that continues into Guevara’s adult years. She is ultimately convinced by a “cyberjournalist” (Michael Weatherly) to take up the reins of a career as a post-apocalyptic crime fighter. Hopes swung high for Dark Angel, but in the end, the series was canceled after only two seasons.
After producing the 2002 Steven Soderbergh-directed remake Solaris (the original having been directed by Tarkovsky), Cameron segued into several underwater-themed documentaries, notably an official follow-up to Titanic called Ghosts of the Abyss (2003). In that effort, Cameron and friend Bill Paxton (who co-starred in the Titanic movie) take 3D cameras underwater to locate and film the “final resting place” of the infamous, ill-fated 1912 vessel, from the inside and out. The IMAX picture received generally (if not unanimously) enthusiastic reviews when it premiered in spring 2003. For Cameron’s follow-up documentary, the 2005 Aliens of the Deep, the director pursued far more ambitious concepts, and (perhaps as a result) reactions waxed far more favorably. In that picture, Cameron used advanced CG imaging, a team of NASA researchers, and concepts from astrobiology to “imagine” what creatures on neighboring planets might look like. Hailed by critics, Aliens of the Deep caught fire with the public when it premiered in January 2005.
Cameron then decided to return to feature filmmaking for the first occasion in over 10 years, with 2009’s mega-budgeted sci-fi opus Avatar. The original story of the picture, as authored by Cameron in the late ’80s, tells of a paraplegic military veteran (Sam Worthington) who undertakes a colossal interstellar journey and settles on an alien planet.—allmovie guide
