The Big Picture · Discussion

James Cameron: An Oral History

December 13, 2022/ 50 min/ Alan Siegel

A Ringer oral history of James Cameron, told by the actors and producers who made his films, from a debut he was fired off a week in to Avatar.

13 films across 5 segments.

AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.

Part one: Corman's model shop to The Terminatorthe early years

Piranha II: The Spawning 1982

Cameron's technical directing debut, a Jaws ripoff he was fired off a week into filming. "It was a piece of garbage," he later told Entertainment Weekly.

Born from a fever dream of a metal endoskeleton walking out of flames. Schwarzenegger wanted to play the hero; Cameron cast him as the machine. The financing hinged on a Scandia lunch the broke director and Gail Ann Hurd couldn't pay for. Schwarzenegger bonded over it instead of walking. The moving-car shot was faked by driving a brick wall past on a grip truck.

Part two: Aliensthe war movie in space

Aliens 1986

Cameron landed it on the Terminator script alone, before that film even opened. Sigourney Weaver, a gun-control advocate, balked at the machine guns until Cameron took her to a shooting range. The studio told him to write Ripley out; he refused. The climax pit her power loader against an animatronic xenomorph queen. Won two Oscars, seven nominations, Weaver's first.

Alien 1979

Ridley Scott's original, the horror classic Cameron's sequel had to follow.

Part three: True Lies and the Cameron methodhow he runs a set

True Lies 1994

Cameron threatened to move the most expensive movie ever made from Fox to Paramount to get Tom Arnold cast as Schwarzenegger's sidekick. When Arnold slipped away for an unscheduled monument tour mid-shoot, Cameron slammed the car hood on his return.

Part four: The Abyss and Titanicinventing the tech to shoot it

The Abyss 1989

The CGI water-tentacle pseudopod didn't exist, so ILM's Dennis Muren took months off to learn to code it. Shot in a flooded, unfinished nuclear plant in Gaffney, South Carolina, on brutal six-day weeks. The crew's motto: "life's abyss, and then you dive."

Terminator 2: Judgment Day 1991

Cameron wrote the Abyss pseudopod partly as proof of concept: crack liquid CGI there, or never be able to do the T-1000.

Titanic 1997

Someone spiked the set chowder with PCP; Cameron's drive still broke box-office records. Told Danny Nucci mid-shoot that acting is the one on-set job he can't do better than anyone, and that his dream is a movie with four people in a room, which is why Avatar made sense to everyone afterward.

Part five: Titanic's crown and the road to Avatarking of the world

Ghosts of the Abyss 2003

Documentary; Cameron literally returned to the Titanic wreck.

Aliens of the Deep 2005

A second ocean documentary before he turned to Pandora.

Avatar 2009

Cameron sat on the script until the technology caught up, choosing it over Alita. Weaver said yes to a movie so ambitious she couldn't picture how it would work. It beat Titanic's all-time box-office record.

Alita: Battle Angel 2019

The other script Cameron pulled from his desk drawer alongside Avatar; he handed it to Robert Rodriguez to direct.

Avatar: The Way of Water 2022

More than a decade in the making, out December 16th. Cameron wrote 1,500 pages of story notes and put the cast through underwater training for the performance-capture sequences.

Also mentioned raised along the way

In passing Avengers: Endgame

Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads

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