Iron Jim

With Cameron anything is possible. Fired from his first film, he broke into the editing room and cut the film back to his original vision. That was before the runaway success of the two Terminators and Aliens gave him imperial power. Nowadays he directs his crew through a bank of speakers pitched to concert volume: That's exactly what I don't want, he booms. If they mess up, he says, That's okay, I've worked with children before. The crews respond by printing up T-shirts with semijokey

slogans: YOU CAN'T SCARE ME I WORK FOR Jim CAMERON. And when it comes to show-downs with movie studios, Cameron is a master. T2 coproducer B.J. Rack recalls the first screening they held for executives of Carolco Pictures: “Jim was mixing the soundtrack, and I had a bad feeling – I said, `Are you going to be ready?' He said, `Yeah, yeah' – and he made them wait. Until 4 A.M. The audacity! And they waited – they were sleeping on the floor.”

But reports from the True Lies set were full of superlatives. Cameron had reinvented special effects on The Abyss and T2. Now, armed with his own personal computer-effects studio, Digital Domain, he was once again creating – in the words of editor Mark Goldblatt – “eye-popping, mind-blowing visuals.” He was shooting a Harrier jet attack on a Miami high-rise that looked so real even Marine pilots wouldn't be able to tell the hardware from the software. And there was a chase scene on Florida's Seven-Mile Bridge that made the stuff in The French Connection look like bumper cars. “It's a huge movie,” says Arnold Schwarzenegger, once again Cameron's star. “It's T2-type of action, but even more creative – things you've never seen before.”

The production was immense – the head of the studios in Santa Clarita where True Lies was partly shot said Cameron probably picked a facility 30 miles outside of L.A. because no studio in the city had enough parking. Cameron's traveling circus was dogged by protests from Florida to Rhode Island. In Newport the city council had to call a special vote to grant True Lies an exemption from the city's noise code. Local activist Maureen O'Neil complained to the press, “I don't particularly want my neighborhood simulating Sarajevo.”

But all of the whispers, even the nastiest, were tinged with awe. The studio behind Wyatt Earp was intimidated enough to change its release date and leave a little space between the western and True Lies, even with Kevin Costner playing Earp. As one envious young producer put it: -They say it's going to be the Holy Grail of action pictures.”

James Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Canada, a town just north of Niagara Falls. His father was an electrical engineer who worked for a paper mill. He was a strict disciplinarian and Cameron grew up hating to be told what to do, so he became a master builder and told other kids what to do. They constructed rafts, slot cars, go-carts, rockets, forts, boats, a catapult that hurled boulders so large they made craters when they landed. On one occasion they built a submersible “sea lab” and sent mice deep under the Niagara River. When a neighbor stole some of Jim's toys, Jim and his brother, Mike, sawed through the branches that held up his tree house. Hospitalization was required.

Cameron's mother was an artist and encouraged him to paint; she helped get his work shown in a local gallery when he was a teenager. His mother inspired the sympathy for independent women that marks all of Cameron's work. “I always felt this frustration that she was chained to the house by the kids,” he says.

When he was around fifteen, Cameron saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I saw it ten times because I couldn't comprehend how they did that stuff,” he says. He started building models and experimenting with 16mm film. At night he would lie in bed, listen to “really bad music,” and visualize space battles. After a stint at Fullerton College (“I didn't know if I wanted to be a scientist or an artist”), in California, he dropped out and married a waitress. He drove a truck for the local school district and lived in a little house with a yappy little dog.

Then he saw Star Wars. “I was pissed off,” he recalls. “I wanted to make that movie. That's when I got busy.”

Really busy. He haunted the USC library, reading doctoral dissertations on optical printing, front projection, and rear projection. “All I was interested in was visual effects,” he says. “I didn't know who Humphrey Bogart was.” He started buying lenses and taking them apart to find out how they worked. He built his own dolly track, fooled around with beam splitters – all in the living room of his little suburban house. “My wife thought I was crazy,” he says. “The guy who used to like to smoke dope and go to the river and drink beer and drive fast cars, all of a sudden had gone psychotic on her. She was afraid of me.”

Armed with some models he had made with the help of two friends, Cameron obtained an interview at Roger Corman's New World Films: “I figured I'd get in there and then I'd spread like a virus.” Which is exactly what happened. “Three weeks after I started I had my own department, I was hiring people,” Cameron recalls. “And everybody else that worked there just hated me.”

After about two years with Corman, Cameron got his first shot at directing. The movie was Piranha II: The Spawning. He arrived on the set in Jamaica to find a crew that only spoke Italian and a production so poorly prepared and underfinanced that there wasn't even a costume for one of the stars, Lance Henriksen. At dinner one night, he and Henriksen bought the uniform right off their waiter. To make sure there were enough rubber piranhas, Cameron stayed up late every night making them himself. “I remember thinking, Who is this guy?” Henriksen recalls.

Cameron found himself under constant attack by the film's principal producer, an Italian named Ovidio G. Assonitis. He refused to show the director dailies but told him, "'It's shit, nothing cuts,'" Cameron says.

Cameron kept brooding about the film. Was it true the footage didn't cut? Finally he flew to Rome and confronted Assonitis in his office. According to Cameron, “He sat behind the desk with a letter opener in his hand, like he was afraid I was going to jump over the desk.” (Assonitis could not be reached for comment.)

That night, Cameron went back and used a credit card to break into the editing room. “So here I am,” he recalls. “I'm looking at all these boxes and I see the word fine, which is Italian for `end,' so I figure these must be the trims. I teach myself how to run the Cinemonta, which is their version of KEM, and I just start recutting the picture.” He went back night after night, until the him was the way he wanted it. Ultimately, Cameron took away a lesson he would never forget: “It made me mistrustful of other people who have creative power on a film,” he says. -Very mistrustful.”

And that's when Jim Cameron started to become Jim Cameron. Alone in Rome, feeling “pissed off and alienated” and so broke he survived by stealing complimentary breakfast rolls left on trays in the hallways of his hotel, he got sick with the flu. He had been playing with an idea about a robot hit man from the future. Now, waking one night from a fever dream, he saw him, like a snapshot. Later he “drew a sketch of half a Terminator, which looked very much like the final one, crawling after a girl who was injured and couldn't get up and run,” Cameron says. “He had a kitchen knife and he pulled himself over the floor with it, dragging his broken arm. I thought that was a really horrific image.”

When he got back to L.A., Cameron told his agent his idea about a robot hit man. The agent said, “Bad idea, bad idea. Do something else.” Instead he fired the agent. He began writing. Wisely, he anchored the sci-fi with human details taken from his own life. He gave his heroine, eventually played by Linda Hamilton, his first wife's job, turning the Bob's Big Boy where she had worked into Bob's Big Buns, and later even cast her yappy little dog. When the script was finished he sold Gale Anne Hurd the rights for one dollar – and the promise that she would never let anyone else direct it.

The Terminator – with Cameron attached to direct – was turned down by all the major studios. Finally, when John Daly's Hemdale got interested, Cameron talked Henriksen into pitching the project in costume. "I went to Hemdale with gold foil from a Vantage pack over my teeth and a cut on my head, and kicked the door open,” Henriksen says. Daly bit, captured by the script, the drawings, and by Jim's complete passion for the project,” he says. Orion Pictures bought the distribution rights.

At first, Cameron focused on finding someone to play Kyle Reese, the good guy who crosses time to save the world. “The Terminator was not given much attention,” says Daly. “He was just a robot.” Then Orion executive Mike Medavoy ran into Arnold Schwarzenegger at a party. “He told me about The Terminator and said it didn't have a leading man, so I read the script with that in mind,” Schwarzenegger remembers. Cameron was skeptical. “He was like, `Yeah, I'll meet him,' ” says actor Michael Biehn, who was eventually cast as Reese, “ `but if you have Arnold play Reese you're going to need King Kong for the Terminator.' ”

When they met, Schwarzenegger and Cameron hit it off. Schwarzenegger kept drifting back to the Terminator. “I kept saying he had to be able to change the weapons blindfolded, and shoot without blinking his eyes, and how he should walk and look with his head tilted forward,” says Schwarzenegger. “Then Jim said, `You should play the Terminator.' I was, `Oh... I came for the other thing.'” Cameron whipped out a pencil and started drawing. Schwarzenegger was impressed: “You could almost act off the drawing – the coldness of the character.”

All of his friends and advisers told Schwarzenegger not to do it, the conventional wisdom being that it was career suicide to play a villain. Finally, Schwarzenegger decided to ignore his advisers. “I ended up thinking, Ill give it a shot, because this is so well written and the guy is so determined.”

But Schwarzenegger had a commitment to do Conan the Destroyer and wouldn't be free for four months. So Cameron signed on to write Rambo: First Blood Part II and Aliens simultaneously – while also doing rewrites of The Terminator. With a calculator, he divided the amount of time he had by the number of pages he had to write and spent the next four months jumping between three different desks, putting on different music for each script. When he wasn't writing, he was prepping The Terminator, happily showing off his plans to everyone involved. “He was almost childlike,” Biehn says, -like a kid in a candy store.”

The Terminator began shooting in February 1984. Cameron arrived on the set with the confidence of a seasoned pro. “He was like an encyclopedia of technology, and if a shot was a half inch off the way he visualized it, he would go crazy,” Schwarzenegger recalls. But he wasn't just a gearhead; he won over the actors by giving them room to work. And he surprised everyone by demonstrating the stunts himself: “He would show it to you without any padding,” Schwarzenegger says. “He was totally mad.”

One thing about Cameron was...different: He could be unusually blunt, especially about the kiss-ass culture of Hollywood. Mess with him and he'd saw off the branches under your treehouse. “He's not the kind of guy who will try to say things in a diplomatic way,” Schwarzenegger says. “If you do something right, hell say it was disastrous but probably a human being could do no better. If he was dealing with machines, they could do better. So you walk away going, `I guess he likes it.' ”

Shortly before the movie was to be released, Cameron became disheartened by Orion's attitude; in fact, he says the studio was outright dismissive. -The guy from Orion says, `When you have a down-and-dirty action thriller like this, it usually plays for two weeks – it usually drops by 50 percent the second weekend, and is gone by the third week,'” he recalls. Even after the picture opened at number one and got surprisingly good reviews, Cameron asserts, Orion refused to support it with a beefed-up ad campaign. “They treated me like a piece of dogshit,” Cameron says.

When The Terminator was in the theaters, another blow came from an unexpected quarter: Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison threatened to sue, claiming The Terminator had ripped off two episodes of The Outer Limits that he'd written, “Soldier” and “Demon With a Glass Hand,” as well as “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” an award-winning short story. Their plots concerned robots, time travel, altering the past to save humanity from a holocaust, and a future world where “machines are born to kill.” Gagged for many years by a secrecy clause, Ellison is now speaking about it for the first time: “He got all my best stuff, but the wonderful thing is, he combined it in a new, fresh, and interesting way. I would have been very flattered – all he had to do was get on the phone.” Over Cameron's objections – time travel and robots are common sci-fi themes, he says – Hemdale and Orion gave Ellison an “acknowledgment to the works of” credit and a cash settlement, telling Cameron that if he wanted to fight they'd back him. But if Ellison won, they'd sue Cameron. The director is still bitter: "I could've risked getting wiped out, or I could let the guy have his fucking credit.”

But Cameron had made a classic. Schwarzenegger's “steel reaper” is as compelling as a nightmare, and the love story between Biehn and Hamilton made it surprisingly popular with women. The film also displays a devilish wit unusual for an action film. Consider the scene, for example, in which the Terminator goes Un Chien andalou one better by carving out part of his damaged eye – and then reaches up to fluff his hair. The result: The Terminator never stopped, gaining cult status on video and TV. “No matter what picture I did after that,” Schwarzenegger says, “people would say, `When are you going to do another Terminator?' ”

Between pictures, Cameron played – and played hard. He went diving, flying, ballooning, anything that put a little space or speed between him and the ground. Everyone who knows Cameron has a story about him and fast cars. “I go to Jim's party in my brand-new Acura NSX, and Jim looks at me and says, `Nice car,' ” says Henriksen. “When Jim says, `Nice car,' that's a challenge. So I said, `Jim, why don't you take it for a spin?' Jim takes it out for ten minutes, and when he comes back all the rubber on my back tires is gone.”

Fast planes are good too. Actor Bill Paxton tells of a time Cameron, shooting a video, lashed a camera to the wings of an ultralight plane, undid his seat belt to get a better grip, and pointed the plane straight down. “He goes into a 3,000-foot dive and drops to three feet off the deck,” recalls Paxton. -I go, `My God, another couple of feet...'

“If you're going to hang out with Jim,” he adds, "you better have your life insurance.”

And then, of course, there are the women. After working with her on a professional basis for four years, Cameron took Hurd for an evening at the Charthouse, in Malibu. Add beach and moonlight, and the working relationship became a romance – with a Cameronian twist, iron-man dates: -We went off-road on a four-wheel drive,” says Hurd, “took the hot-air balloon out, and a huge wind came up, and we ended up crash-landing. We went horseback riding, ice-skating, we shot AK-47s out in the desert.” And that was all in one weekend. As the romance ripened, Cameron and Hurd would race each other to meetings, Hurd in her Porsche and Cameron in his new Corvette (purchased with his Terminator fee), talking on cellular phones and playing one of Cameron's favorite games, ditch-'em. One day she'd try to shake him, the next he'd try to shake her. “We'd be smoking down the freeway at 120 miles an hour,” Cameron says, “talking the whole time like nothing was happening.”

Later, Cameron would divorce Hurd and marry Kathryn Bigelow, director of Near Dark and Point Break, and then divorce her and move in with Linda Hamilton – all formidable women much like the macha heroines of his movies. The director explains his string of wives by saying he picks women who don't need him, so naturally one day they realize they don't need him. Hurd says that when she was going through troubles, Cameron just gave her too much damn space. “He's tough,” explains Mike Cameron, “and toughest on the people he cares about the most.”

CAMERON'S NEXT two movies, Aliens and The Abyss, established his reputation as both a brilliant world-class director and a potentially out-of-control visionary-crackpot. With Aliens he started thinking really big. “I had been on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so I thought I'd seen the biggest set ever built,” says Henriksen. `Then I got to Aliens.”

The film provided Cameron with plenty of opportunities to hone his fighting skills. To begin with, Twentieth Century Fox didn't want Hurd to produce Aliens. In one meeting, she recalls, “they basically said, `How can a little girl like you do a big movie like this?' ” They won that battle and set off for England, where they had to contend with a scornful British crew that was convinced it was working on a crappy sequel to a great (British-directed) thriller. Cameron fired his cinematographer early on and Hurd threatened to fire others when a mutiny surfaced. The crew took to calling Cameron Grizzly Adams, and tea breaks were taken with metronomic regularity.

Fox wasn't exactly overwhelmed by the project – the studio thought its summer hit was going to be SpaceCamp. Instead, Aliens made $83 million and established Cameron as a hot director. It also showed a mind at work, with thematic passion and a mordant sense of humor (listen closely at the end of the credit roll for the slurp of that baby facehugger). Clearly, Cameron wasn't just doing time on Planet Action – he wanted it all, and art too.

But it was The Abyss – which Cameroids call, probably accurately, the toughest shoot in film history – that showed just how obsessed Cameron really is. Inspired by a recurring nightmare of a vast wave rolling unstoppably toward shore, it is a wildly ambitious story that ranges from the troubled love of a man and woman to the nature of humanity and war, expressed through some of the most pregnant nautical metaphors since Herman Melville.

But the genius of The Abyss isn't so much what's onscreen (which is, alas, flawed) but what it took to get it there. With just four months of preproduction, Cameron and Hurd faced the task of building the largest underwater set ever constructed, a set so huge each section of it weighed 40 tons. They found an abandoned nuclear plant and filled its two containment units with a total of 10 million gallons of water, designed a filtration system to keep the water clear, craned in a tarpaulin big enough to keep the water dark, and then began inventing underwater filming equipment. With Mike, who had spent the past fourteen years as an aeronautical engineer, Cameron worked on deciding what they needed for the “talking helmets,” farmed the assignment out, and turned to developing a “diver propulsion vehicle” for the cameras that eliminated the need for underwater cranes and dolly tracks. The Sea Wasp DPV earned the brothers the first of five patents they have been awarded so far on technical film equipment. They come up with ideas in the following way, Mike says: Jim dreams up his shot. figures out what he needs to execute it, then finds out if the thing exists. If it doesn't, he tells Mike to make it. And when his brother says that from an engineering standpoint it can't be done, “Jim says, `Don't use the word engineer around me ever again.' ”

The DPV done, Cameron decided to reinvent special effects, turning to Industrial Light & Magic to help create the “pseudopod” water creature; the effect took eight months to produce. but the process gave ILM a huge jump on the use of computer graphics for film, making movies like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day possible. Cameron wrote the script so that if the effect didn't work, he could cut the movie without it.

Filming underwater , proved to be incredibly arduous. The water was so highly chlorinated that it burned skin and turned hair white. Even the mundane details were complicated – how does a script supervisor work underwater? (By covering each page in plastic.) How do you take a bathroom break underwater? (By peeing right in your wet suit.) The actors were stretched to the breaking point. When the camera ran out of film in the middle of her death scene, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio stormed off the set, screaming, “We are not animals!” Ed Harris tells (in The Abyss's fascinating laserdisc special edition) of a day so hard, he burst into tears on the drive home. Neither actor would return calls for this story.

It was on The Abyss that Cameron began to get a reputation for abusing his crews. One crew member, who asked to remain anonymous, says: “He just has this tunnel vision to get what he wants done. His crew gets battered and he doesn't care.” Cameron loyalists – and there are many – cope through black humor. “One of the Jim jokes on The Abyss,” says crew member Ed Marsh, “was, `I'm letting you breathe, what more do you want?' ”

Cameron admits that he's “very, very hard” on his crews – and he doesn't apologize a bit. “If an NFL coach didn't browbeat the guys and say, `You fucked up and you didn't do this'... I mean, it's perfectly acceptable in sports that mistakes and laziness should not be tolerated. If you're working on a big movie, it must imply that you're the best – you presented yourself as a varsity athlete. So fucking be one. That's my philosophy.” Asked if he fires many people, Cameron gives a dry laugh. “I would never do anything as merciful as firing someone. For fucking up, you have to stay till the end.”

Cameron's friends all talk about this side of him, alternately worrying over it and excusing it. They say that Cameron gets frustrated because he can do every job on a movie set better than anyone working for him. They say that he's so passionate about his films that sometimes, when the budget simply can't accept a shot he wants, he pays for it out of his own pocket. And they all say that no one works harder than Cameron himself – at least three people have described how, after a long day underwater, Cameron was required to spend an hour decompressing, and he would hang upside down to relieve the strain of the helmet and watch dailies underwater on a video monitor. (Paxton says that by the time the actor visited the Abyss set, Cameron had figured out how he could push the limits of the Navy dive tables and spend less time decompressing.)

What's striking, ultimately, is how tender and defensive people are about him. Mike Cameron probably puts it best: “I've been the recipient of a lot of his derogatory remarks, and it does hurt your feelings. But he really is a bighearted guy. The people who are close to him know that, and they just kind of tolerate the viciousness.” Maybe the reason they are so willing to forgive is that, as everyone says, Cameron's furies are never personal. “His movies have an ego, and you don't fuck with his movies,” says Biehn, “but he doesn't have an ego. When he throws a tantrum, it's almost like the movie is throwing a tantrum.”

Despite all the tension, Cameron still took time for his brand of fun. One person said he raced his Corvette around the underwater tank, though Cameron's response to this anecdote was, “Not true, but a good idea.” However, there's no doubt he continued his lifelong avocation of torturing his little brother – in this case, casting him as a drowned corpse. According to Mike, “He said, `You're going to go down 25 feet, you're going to open your eyes because dead men don't close their eyes. we're going to put a live crab in your mouth, and when it's time to shoot we'll tell you “Action” and you let the crab out of your mouth.' ” They did five takes. “Two times, I had to crush the crab because Jim was taking too long setting the lights. I'm sure it was a sheer delight for him.”

After a frantic postproduction and many fights with the studio, The Abyss ended up a case of too much too late. Its biggest problem was the ending – or, rather, the endings. There were at least three, each more extreme than the previous one, until it practically exploded with its own ambition, and all the really great stuff – the magical pseudopod, the unbelievably intense love-death sequence, Ed Harris's powerful final descent – was snuffed out by a burst of Message. In the end, The Abyss made only $54 million and got mixed to negative reviews. Hollywood snickered.

Seven years after the release of The Terminator, it was finally time to make T2. Cameron had been toying with the idea almost since the first movie wrapped. “Arnold and I were talking about making another picture,” says Cameron. "I said, `Well, I'm not going to make the same film. You're going to be a good guy.' He thought it was kind of a wacky idea. but he liked it.” Cameron had also dreamed up the shape-shifter idea for the T-1000. but it hadn't been technically possible until The Abyss. The real problem was making the deal – there was bad blood between Schwarzenegger and Hemdale's John Daly. Ultimately, Hemdale got into financial trouble at the same time that Carolco's high-rolling Mario Kassar was pursuing Schwarzenegger. “I said (to Kassar), 'Hemdale has no money,' ” Schwarzenegger recalls. “ `Go for it right now, and we'll do it (for Carolco).' ” Once the deal was in place, Cameron sat down and started writing.

Again the scope of tbe film was vast – for the night-freeway chase scene, the production was caught short when its cabling was stolen and had to rent every electrical cable it could get its hands on to light four miles of freeway. The T-1000 effect cost $5.5 million and took eight months of work for 3.5 minutes of screen time.

Despite the tech-heavy nature of the movie, Cameron hit the set determined to get the acting just right. Schwarzenegger says, “He worked harder on the different emotions, talked us through it more, insisted on rehearsing.” But he was still doing whatever it took to get the shot he wanted. For the scene in which a helicopter flies below an underpass, Cameron felt that the shot had to be done twice to get both forward and rear angles.

But the budget – which reportedly started in the $70 million range – was soaring. Carolco executives called Schwarzenegger for help. “They said, `We hope we have your support.' I would say, `There's no way.' ” One of the sequences Carolco wanted cut, Schwarzenegger says, was the roadhouse scene, in which his character gets introduced. “Only a studio guy would cut a scene like that out.”

Meanwhile, Cameron and Carolco fought over the ending. Cameron's ending (which can be seen on one version of the laserdisc) puts Hamilton in age makeup many years in the future. Carolco demanded a screening, and, as Kassar flew to George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in a helicopter through a storm, Cameron started the screening without him. Afterward he snatched up the preview cards and refused to show them to Kassar. But the viewers all said the same thing: Lose the ending. Finally, Cameron relented, and the existing ending was added. The result, of course, was one of the biggest hits of all time, a commercial and artistic success.

Like the others, T2 spawned its own crew T-shirt: TERMINATOR 3 NOT WITH ME.

(continued in Iron Jim pt 2)