The man who made the most technologically advanced movie to ever hit the big screen has just hung up on me. Not on purpose. Calling from his car, James Cameron was defeated by some very simple machinery—his cellphone.
A minute later, my phone rang again.
“Sorry about that,” he said, “it was totally my bad. I was reaching out to turn up the volume and I hit the disconnect, which is right next to it. I have to learn to keep my hands off the damn thing.”
Cellphone and their pesky buttons are one thing, but when it comes to big budget epics with complicated technology, nobody is as hands on as Cameron. Last December Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all time, making $2,712,115,019 on a budget that fell somewhere between $230 million (according to The New Yorker) to nearly $500 million (so says The New York Times).
“We’re very cognizant of the fact that it is a big expensive movie,” he says. “When you make a film at that highest level you know the imagery is going to be quite astonishing. That’s what I’m all about. That’s what my career has been all about, starting with the Abyss, then Terminator 2 and True Lies and Titanic. Every one of these films was decried in the largest way possible as being the biggest budget films in history. [But] as an artist, there is no second position on my throttle. It’s full throttle so it may as well be the highest grossing film in history because I’m working like it is anyway.”
Cameron may be the go-to guy for big budget spectacles, but despite his track record there are no guarantees of success.
“I don’t know if I knew it until it was really out there,” he says when asked when he knew he had a hit on his hands. “I had a suspicion that the film would perform beyond what its opening weekend would indicate. I thought our challenge was not the film itself as much as the marketing of the movie. We didn’t have Brad Pitt or George Clooney. It was an unfamiliar story. We had to create a brand from scratch and we had these characters that were blue and were maybe a little off putting when people first saw them. There were a lot of marketing hurdles. I was much more concerned about the 30-second TV spot than the film. I knew the film played fine.”
Now, just four months after its record breaking theatrical run Avatar and its eco friendly message is coming to DVD and Blu Ray just in time for Earth Day. This is a bare bones release, with no extras. (The “über edition” with extra footage and supplements will be out in time for Christmas.)
“It was going to take until November for us to do good supplement stuff and I didn’t think people wanted to wait until November to see an Avatar DVD,” he says, “so we put the plain wrap version out.
“By the way,” he adds with a swagger, “[Avatar] is the highest grossing film in history and has nine Academy Award nominations so people should acknowledge that that film needs to be in the marketplace before we start screwing around and getting creative.”
As the 100th anniversary of the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic approaches, there are no shortages of cinematic ways to pay tribute to one of the most famous disasters of the 20th century.
This weekend, James Cameron’s Titanic sets sail again in theatres, this voyage in 3D. The story of Jack and Rose and their unsinkable love may be the best known of all the big boat movies, but it isn’t the only one.
The first films about the sinking were made within a year of the event; 1912 saw three 10-minute films released to quench audience’s thirst for Titanic news. The most famous of the movies featured an actual Titanic survivor.
Saved from the Titanic starred Dorothy Gibson, an actress who was also a first class passenger on the ship. Premiering on May 14, 1912, (just 29 days after the Titanic sank) the movie has Ms. Gibson recalling her experiences as a passenger, while wearing the same dress she had worn when the ship went down.
In a fictional twist she is shown as one of the last people to leave the ship when, in fact, she was the first person to enter lifeboat number seven.
Cut to 1929. British International Pictures was forced to release their epic film on the Titanic under the name The Atlantic when White Star Line threatened legal action. Seems the Titanic’s owner was actively trying to dissuade producers from cashing in on the Titanic disaster.
The next mention of the doomed ship on film came in 1933 in the best picture winner Cavalcade. In its most famous scene, newlyweds embark on their honeymoon cruise. Standing on the deck they discuss their plans as the ship pulls out of dock. Soon it’s revealed they’re standing in front of a life preserver embossed with the name Titanic.
Best of the bunch are Titanic, an all-star docu-drama headlined by Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Wagner, that debuted on April 14, 1953, exactly 41 years after the disaster and A Night to Remember, which is still regarded as the most accurate of all the Titanic films.
Nazis also cashed in on the Titanic
Even Hitler had a hand in making a Titanic film. 1943’s S.O.S Titanic was a propaganda film suggesting British incompetence was to blame for the disaster.
As water funnels into the ship, Captain Smith says, “See if you can find any German people on board. They’ll know how to save the ship.”
In the gap between James Cameron’s last theatrical feature, Titanic, and his new film, Avatar (in theatres this weekend) Clint Eastwood directed 11 movies, Michael Bay made six and even Uwe Boll, a director so reviled an on–line petition demands he stop making films, has made 15 in the time it took Cameron to make just one.
So what’s the hold up?
Some suggest Cameron takes so long between gigs because his commitment to his projects is so intense he wants to be sure he is on the right track before camera starts to roll.
“I want you to know one thing,” he allegedly told one producer, “once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you’ll be able to stop me is to kill me.”
Also, Cameron isn’t bound by the same considerations as most directors.
He wrote the script for Avatar in 1994 and was prepared to wait until special effects technology caught up with his vision.
The luxury of having time is what happens when you make the highest grossing movie in history, a fact he celebrates, wearing a t-shirt that reads “Time Means Nothing in the Face of Creativity.”
Like Cameron, Stanley Kubrick spent more time off movie sets than on. In a career that spanned 46 years he made only 13 movies but spent years developing pictures that never went into production — like Napoleon, an epic look at the life of the French Emperor that he expected to be “the best movie ever made.”
Others choose long lay-offs between projects for different reasons. Actor Casey Affleck (Ben’s younger brother) had three movies released in 2007 but nothing else scheduled until 2010. Why the break?
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t really enjoy playing anybody,” he says, “except Casey Affleck lying on the couch watching the Red Sox … usually, when I’m working, I’m not really having a good time.”
Then there’s Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor whose lapses between projects makes Affleck look like a workaholic. The There Will Be Blood star routinely takes years off between films, once disappearing from the big screen for five years.
When asked why he doesn’t work more often he said, “I like to cook things very slowly. I learnt early on that I couldn’t jump from one kind of work to another. I did it a couple of times and it didn’t work.”
