Hot Directors

So far those scripts have been worth some $350 million at the box office. ALIENS, directed, like The Terminator, by Cameron, opens July 18th, and it's likely to pump up that figure considerably.

Clearly, he has moved out of the Valley. In fact, Cameron and Hurd have a place in the Hollywood Hills, at the top of a winding mountain road, across from Don Henley. But the filmmaker doesn't care about the money, or the change of address that came with it. Within your first ten minutes around him, you realize that Cameron's dominant ethic – a relentless forward motion that Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminating cyborg might envy – is toward perfecting his craft. Fundamentally a director, he gloms onto every aspect of a film – from script to art direction and design (where he apprenticed) to making the shots to editing, scoring and even marketing. He is lanky, six two, and his probing blue-green eyes and reddish-blond beard give Cameron the intent look of an Ibsen figure. He dresses down in jeans and a T-shirt and speaks so softly that his occasional gibes at the industry tend to smolder a few moments before they register. "If something comes back to me,” he says when l speculate that Rambo must have yielded nice royalty payments, "that's fine. But l feel much more satisfied with the money I'm paid directly when l hand something over. That probably seems a weird mentality to the eighty percent of people in Hollywood who make their money scavenging off things they didn't do."

Cameron's early drafts of Rambo, per Stallone's specifications, geared as a kind of buddy picture leading up to Rambo's solo rescue job. When Stallone set to work on the script (the actor is billed first in the screenplay credit), Cameron moved amicably on to directing The Terminator. Although he told The New York Times, "The action is mine; the politics are Stallone's. Cameron (who was booed last year by an LA. film class for disparaging Ronald Reagan) makes no apologies for his hand in what some consider a protofascist epic: "He took it a little farther to the right than I would have, but that's fair. As in any collaborative effort, everybody sort of... pees in the bucket."

Cameron's script had emphasized the "psychological effect of being in Vietnam and the secondary trauma of coming back," a theme that will echo through Aliens. As he sat in Tarzana writing nightly, he switched music when he attacked different scripts: his Rambo work was accompanied by the Apocalypse Now soundtrack; for Aliens, it was Holst's "'Mars 'The Bringer of War'” and the rest of The Planets. And for The Terminator?

"Well... I don't think I've written anything to Bach yet."

Significantly, the music used in The Terminator is not the kind of pure-pop MTV fodder that gets so many pictures financed these days. In fact, the rock that intrudes into Brad Fidel's score to punctuate certain frantic moments sounds intentionally lightweight; the message seems to be that all the Monkees in the world can't save you from the exterminating technological Future Big Arnie epitomizes. It was no accident that the nightclub that provides the jumping-off point for the most masterly twenty minutes of violent suspense since Gene Hackman's car chase in The French Connection is called Tech Noir. Cameron's vision of doomsday is solidly rooted in film noir. The Terminator is the sort of movie that maverick film critic Manny Farber would have liked. It scored big in the kind of crappy cinemas he called itch houses. In his l957 paean to tough action directors like Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks, Farber decried "solemn goiters" like The Best Years of Our Lives, which enjoyed critical acclaim because they "bear the label of ART":

"Hawks and his group are perfect examples of the ominous artist, who is seemingly afraid of the polishing, hypocrisy, bragging, fake educating that goes on in serious art.... It is not too remarkable that (their) films, with their twelve-year-old's adventure-story plot and endless, palpitating moments, have lost out in the film system.... Any day now, Americans may realize that scrambling after the obvious in art is a losing game. The sharpest work of the last thirty years is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising... artists... such as the master of the ambulance, speedboat, flying-saucer movie: Howard Hawks."

Cameron had the good luck, nearly thirty years on, to launch his underground The Terminator into a friendlier arena. The critics seemed to wake up when the public, spurred by word of mouth, stormed the box office. Time promoted it from "the smartest looking LA. night town movie since The Driver" (November 1984) to one of their ten "Best of '84" (January 1985), while Newsweek promised that the film's climaxes "will melt the hinges of your jaws." In Los Angeles, Times critic Charles Champlin called it "a fast, clever, economical, suspenseful and shocking piece of work, with traces of humor to take some of the edge off the violence," and the Herald Examiner saw "the glossiest, snazziest stuff of its kind since The Road Warrior," calling Cameron "a major new directorial talent." The Village Voice cut up some of Cameron's breakneck expository dialogue into an ersatz R&B lyric ("It can't be bargained with/No! No it can't!”), and Joe Bob Briggs was rapt: "We're talking drive-in heaven." Orion Pictures had intended to distribute the film as a possible two-weekend wonder (which would have easily paid off its paltry $6.5 million cost), but it surprised everyone, Cameron and Hurd included, by becoming the major hit of late fall l984. It had been the number-one movie for three weeks when I first visited the couple at the humble midtown Manhattan residence hotel they were lodged in For a week's stay. "We know we're going to get stomped by the Christmas movies," Cameron predicted, Dune, 2010... I'll be lining up to see them – why shouldn't everybody else?"

Their major break was that the stompers stank; The Terminator outgrossed both Dune and 2010 at the box office. Indeed, in the telling category of videocassette rentals, The Terminator finished second only to The Karate Kid for the year.

The result, as Cameron told a reporter at the time, was that he didn't buy his own lunch For two weeks. The couple had offers aplenty, Cameron to direct and/ or write and Hurd co produce, but not many that allowed them to work those jobs on the same picture (an inclination that was strengthened when they married in Hawaii in April last year). And there was the Aliens script he had worked long and hard on: "I had a lot of emotional investment in it. I didn't want to see it botched up by somebody else.” So the deal was struck with Twentieth Century Fox – Jim directing his own script, Gale overseeing day-to-day operations as line producer. For him, it was an ascension owed to a singleness of purpose dating back many years.

James Cameron was born August l6th, 1954, in a town called Kapuskasing in Ontario's northern wilderness. His father, an electrical engineer for a paper company, moved the family to Niagara Falls in l959 and then to Orange County, California, in 1972. By then Cameron was showing enough movie-junkie stripes to ask, when told of the move, if that wasn't, maybe, near Hollywood? He enrolled at California State University at Fullerton, studying physics before emerging to drive a truck in order to finance early screenwriting efforts. In the Sixties and Seventies, some of the hungriest and best directors-to-be (Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese) – those who simply wanted in – had gone to work for Roger Corman's bash-'em-out production company. So did Cameron, who caught on as a miniature builder for the cult classic Battle Beyond the Stars. In two weeks he was supervising "process projection" – "a department I made up just for the occasion.” Then, two days into shooting, the film's art director departed. "So they're looking for a dummy to volunteer." He did. Money and time pressures were intense, as always on Corman flicks; Cameron pioneered the use of fast-food styrofoam trays to simulate spacecraft wall panels.

Gale Anne Hurd joined Corman's New World pictures after graduating Phi Betta Kappa from Stanford, advanced to director of advertising and publicity, then demoted herself to gofer in order to enter the production side. Diligent work on Humanoids From the Deep won her an upgrade to assistant production manager on Battle, where she worked alongside Jim. They were both on the Corman fast track. "Like, when baby sea turtles are born on the beach and they run for the water," Cameron says. "The seagulls get ninety-nine out of a hundred. The one that makes the water lives."

True to his metaphor, Cameron escaped New World in l982 to land in scuba gear on Grand Cayman island, shooting Piranha ll: The Spawning – a sequel to Gremlins director Joe Dante's New World graduation thesis, Piranha – for an Italian producer.

"Which version did you see?” asks Cameron when I say I'd seen Piranha ll. "Were there a lot of topless women lolling around on a yacht?" Apparently, the producer had volunteered to shoot second-unit footage and spent his days rolling film of the aforementioned sirens, which he spliced into the Italian release. Cameron managed to salvage his own cut, which has a nice, wry streak and features Lance Henriksen battling blood-crazy flying piranha, for a brief stateside run. It was dying its grisly death in West Texas drive-ins even as Cameron sat in Tarzana polishing his trio of blockbusters. "Your first movie is where you make all your mistakes. I'll never be worse than that... l did learn some technical jargon in Italian." Like? "Get the motherfucking camera over here now."

On an afternoon early thus year, on the set of Aliens at Pinewood Studios in London, idiomatic hollering is being left to Cameron's salty first assistant director: "May we have the floppy creatures, please?" he says, and the rubbery, prehensile alien life-forms known as face-huggers are marshaled and rigged to threaten Sigourney Weaver and ten-year-old actress Carrie Hein. Their almost mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of the film. "I have to say I wasn't that interested in doing the sequel,” says Weaver, who was not contractually bound to portray again the sci-fi classic's sole survivor, Ripley. "But it was a very good script. Nonstop frightening. It was really Jim and his openness. I could tell right away he and Gale were interested in making their own move, doing much more with character and relationship."

"I like the Forties thing," says Cameron. "A strong, Howard Hawks-type woman, with maybe one guy in the group really strong enough to mean anything to her. Strong male characters have been done so many times. With strong females, there's still a lot of room for exploration." Indeed, all the action in The Terminator came down to one woman's desperate stand.

For Aliens, Cameron has fleshed out his story with a combat scenario that led to the project being nicknamed Grunts in Space. The Vietnam metaphor is intended. The Hawksian "strong guy" among the space troopers who accompany Ripley on Aliens's "bug hunt" is Michael Biehn, the rangy, handsome good guy from The Terminator. (Loyalty is one of Cameron's major traits: also aboard are Lance Henriksen, who's been in each of the director's three films; Bill Paxton, who was pounding nails in sets at New World when they met and who had a bit part in The Terminator; James Horner, who scored Battle Beyond the Stars; and special-effects maestro Stan Winston, who created Schwarzenneggar's life-size mechanical double for The Terminator.

Now, with Weaver and the little girl trapped by face-huggers, crewmen turn the sprinklers on full. Everyone wears foul-weather gear and top-grade ear protectors – Biehn and his marines we'll trigger full magazines of deafening blanks through their weapons. A stuntman who plans to throw himself through a glass window paws gently for traction as Cameron raises a blank-loaded pistol in the air. The riggers, using wires, flex a face-hugger's wickedly phallic tongue just under Weaver's nose. She squints at Cameron. "You want me to look demure?"