Bill Paxton:
"God Bless Jim Cameron!"


L.A. Times: There's been considerable debate lately about the dangers of filmmaking, and a name that comes up repeatedly in this context is James Cameron. You've done three films with Cameron ("Terminator," "Aliens" and "True Lies"), and appear in "Titanic," the Cameron film in production. Kate Winslet said she suffered hypothermia and almost drowned twice. You also appeared in Jan De Bont's "Twister," which also saw a number of accidents. Are the studios going too far in their quest for ever bigger visual thrills?

Bill Paxton: James Cameron is one of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived and I defend him. Yes, he's intensely uncompromising, but the life of a Hollywood filmmaker is so fraught with compromise that the only way to get your vision on screen is to be uncompromising.

Though Kate Winslet's claim is probably true, the "Titanic" shoot wasn't arduous for me because my part wasn't as physical as Leonardo's [DiCaprio] and Kate's were.

As for "Twister," we all got bumps and bruises on that movie because Jan likes to put his actors close to the action. Big effects movies are physically demanding and they can be injurious because you're doing things that have often never been attempted before. When you're going up a hill following an 18-wheel flatbed truck with 400-pound blocks of ice going into Diesel-powered grinders that are shooting chipped ice onto you while you're being filmed--obviously, this is not a precise science and people do get hurt.

But God bless directors like Jim Cameron and Jan; if they hadn't cast me in those big movies I never would've had the opportunity to do "Traveller."


©1998 jcortez@tstar.net

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