The Futurist Read online

  For Dad,

  my very first storyteller

  Contents

  Introduction: The Futurist

  1. A BOY AND HIS BRAIN

  2. THE ROGER CORMAN SCHOOL OF FILM

  3. KICKING IN THE DOOR

  4. THIS TIME IT’S WAR

  5. STARING INTO THE ABYSS

  6. AND THEN THERE WERE TWO

  7. MYTHS AND LIES

  8. THE UNSINKABLE

  9. A MODERN-DAY MAGELLAN

  10. PROJECT 880

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Introduction

  The Futurist

  “First I just want to say that we’re all doomed,” the silver-haired director intoned. He was speaking to an Earth Day audience in Santa Barbara, California, in 2000, mocking his own predilection for spinning apocalyptic scenarios. James Cameron has spent his life looking ahead, warily, expectantly, and in the case of his chosen art form, movies, technologically and artistically. And he is constantly entreating the rest of us to join him there, in the perilous world of what’s next.

  Ever since he left the fate of the planet in the hands of a diner waitress in The Terminator in 1984, Cameron has shown a steady faith in ordinary people to handle extraordinary responsibilities. It could be you who has to save us from the machines, he tells any man or—remarkably—woman sitting in a dark theater watching his film. It could be you who has to decide how to live or die on the Titanic.

  But there is not much that is ordinary about Cameron’s own story. He’s a truck driver who directed the highest-grossing movie of all time before he turned forty-four and then ditched Hollywood to spend a decade of his life exploring the deep ocean and the heights of science. He’s a tinkerer and a dreamer who pioneered tools that revolutionized the way stories are told, technologies that a generation of filmmakers now rely upon as surely as they do sound and color. He’s a too-smart kid who spent his adulthood doing things other people called impossible, from filming a movie two and a half miles under the ocean to making a woman an action hero.

  More than anything else, Cameron has muscled movies into the digital age, freeing filmmakers to tell stories that had once been possible only in their imaginations. It was he who first showed that computers could deliver not just sharp-edged images, but organic-looking forms, via the twenty computer-generated (CG) shots of a water tentacle rising in The Abyss. With the liquid-metal man in T2, he created a CG character, the T-1000, that stretched the rules of physics and the limits of storytelling. On Titanic, he was making a movie in which the special effects didn’t draw attention to themselves but instead disappeared into the reality of a sinking ship, leaving behind only the visceral feelings of beauty, dread, and loss.

  But it is Avatar, more than any of Cameron’s previous films, that has the makings of revolution. He first laid out much of the technology he would use on the film in a digital manifesto in the early 1990s and labored to perfect it over the course of a decade and a half. For this movie, he created cameras that let him peer into virtual worlds and pushed for the industry’s adoption of a digital 3-D format. The result is as if the director had broken through the screen, grabbed the viewer’s hand, and pulled him or her into this exotic, never-seen world called Pandora, a planet of floating mountains, bioluminescent rain forests, and an elegant, tall, blue people called the Na’vi.

  Cameron’s fancy tools, however, are merely tools, just the latest iteration of the ape flinging the bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Technology doesn’t come with the wisdom to wield it, whether to make art or to make war. The dark side of our steady march of scientific advancement is a theme Cameron visits in each of his movies and puzzles over in his private life. His first cinematic “the end is nigh” warning was The Terminator, in which people had unwittingly surrendered our nuclear codes and our very humanity to machines, which waged war against us in 2029. By the time he got to Avatar, twenty-five years later, we were taking our bad habits, our rapacious treatment of the planet Earth, interstellar.

  You have to walk fast to keep up with Cameron on one of his film sets. He moves in hyperspeed. After the first time I visited the stages in the Los Angeles warehouse where Avatar was filmed, I learned to wear my sneakers to work. I was there for a Time magazine assignment and was astonished by what I saw—a reinvention of how movies are made, a virtual set that existed only inside the director’s camera, and in his mind. I knew Cameron to be an innovator, but this was clearly his magnum opus as a future-minded filmmaker. As I watched the director work, I became curious about a man who seemed interested only in doing things that were hard, and in doing them perfectly, and I was determined to follow his intriguing film’s progress more closely.

  I was a fly on the wall during the movie’s performance-capture shooting and as Cameron teleconferenced with artists at Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand, to perfect Avatars 2,500 special-effects shots. I visited his production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, in Santa Monica as he conferred with scientists to shape the mythology of Avatar, and his home in Malibu as he edited the film. I talked to more than fifty of Cameron’s friends, family members, and colleagues. I met his mother, who is an action heroine trapped in the body of a Canadian grandmother, and spoke to his friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has appeared as an iconic villain and hero in three of his movies and spends weekends riding motorcycles with him through the Santa Monica mountains. I talked to Dennis Muren, who helped achieve the stunning advances in computer graphics on The Abyss and T2, and to Peter Jackson, who stood on Cameron’s shoulders to make the Lord of the Rings trilogy before lending his friend his special-effects house for Avatar. I interviewed Gale Anne Hurd, his second wife and first producing partner; Peter Chernin, the Fox executive who green-lighted Titanic and Avatar; Jon Landau, the producer who enables Cameron to realize his ambitious projects; and Rae Sanchini, who runs his company.

  “You can’t help but come away from spending time with Jim feeling that you’re a little bit stupid,” Jackson warned me early in my research. “He’s got such a sharp mind, he’s formidable.” Jackson was right. Cameron’s brain is formidable, fascinating, and equally developed on both sides—the scientist and the artist. I found a man who has both the ability to tease out esoteric engineering problems, like how a futuristic helicopter should land realistically, and to articulate a clear aesthetic vision to a team of artists, like how a lush alien forest should glow eerily at night. He also showed an uncanny ability to tune out a Greek chorus of naysayers and, just as amazingly, to convince lots of rational people to join him in pursuit of his daunting visions.

  One of Cameron’s oft-uttered phrases is, “I knew that would happen!” He says it with annoyance when a stunt goes wrong or a piece of technology fails, or with vindication when a championed actor delivers a strong performance or a crazy technical idea takes off. His movies, so many of which depict the future, have turned out to be far more predictive than your average sci-fi fare. Some of the ideas and images contained in them—robotic weaponry, exoskeletal suits for soldiers, massive domestic terrorism, economic ruin, a camera-driven culture—have come true in the years since they were made. So, too, have the filmmaking techniques he evangelized about, despite the skepticism of his colleagues. When he started work on a digital 3-D camera in 2000, most of the industry still thought of 3-D as an entertainment fad best left buried with Smell-O-Vision or disco. By 2010, every animated Disney and Dreamworks movie will be produced in digital 3-D, as will several live-action movies. Based on Cameron’s track record as a futurist operating in a fictional world, it’s entirely likely that 2029 will require our best survivalist skills.

  But what all futuristic fiction, including Cameron’s, does better than predicting what’s going to happen next is mapping our present
aspirations and fears. Cameron’s movies provide us a place to imagine a path to a better future. Yes, we’re all doomed, Cameron told that Santa Barbara crowd. “But on the positive side, we created this impending doom ourselves, with our brains, with our technology, and we can damn well uncreate it.” Cameron’s career has been built on questioning accepted wisdom and believing in the power of the individual. His outlook, that we can take fate in our hands, has implications far beyond making entertaining movies. It determines the very future we face.

  1.

  A BOY AND HIS BRAIN

  The Beginning of the End

  The end of the world was coming. And he was eight. That’s when James Cameron found a pamphlet with instructions for building a civilian fallout shelter on the coffee table in his family’s living room in Chippawa, Ontario, a quaint village on the Canadian shore of Niagara Falls. It was 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis, and Philip and Shirley Cameron felt they had reason to be concerned about the bomb—the Camerons lived just a mile and a half from the falls, a major power source for communities on both sides of the international border. But for their oldest son, discovering the brochure was a life-changing epiphany. Prior to that moment, the boy’s only real care in the world had been getting home on his bike before the streetlights flickered on, the family rule. “I realized that the safe and nurturing world I thought I lived in was an illusion, and that the world as we know it could end at any moment,” Cameron says. From that time on, he was fascinated by the idea of nuclear war, his fears fueled by the apocalyptic scenarios depicted in the science-fiction books he devoured at night, reading under his blanket with a flashlight. He may have been the only kid at his school to find the duck-and-cover bomb drills neither funny nor stupid. “Was this crazy or just a heightened awareness of truth?” Cameron wonders. “As the world turned out so far, it was a bit paranoid. But there’s still plenty of time to destroy ourselves.”

  The pensive eight-year-old boy would grow up to tell vivid stories about worlds ending, from a machine-led war in 2029 to an unsinkable ship’s descent into the deep in 1912. Each James Cameron movie is a warning against his darkest childhood fears and a kind of how-to guide for living through catastrophe with humanity and spirit intact. His own story begins with a long line of troublemakers.

  Philip and Shirley

  Cameron’s great-great-great-grandfather, a schoolteacher, migrated from Balquhidder, Scotland, to Canada in 1825. “He was a bit of a free thinker. He didn’t like the king,” explains Philip, a plainspoken electrical engineer, understating things a bit. The Cameron clan is one of Scotland’s oldest, a family of notoriously fierce swordsmen who were leaders in the Jacobite uprisings, the bitter Anglo-Scottish religious wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some were executed for treason, others exiled. Philip Cameron’s branch ended up on a farm near Orangeville, Ontario, about fifty miles northwest of Toronto, where he attended a one-room school before following work north as a nickel miner to earn the money to enter the University of Toronto in 1948. “Pops is very male, strong. He was always bigger than everybody even though he wasn’t bigger than everybody,” says the Camerons’ youngest son, John David. “He was the guy you didn’t want to mess with. If it took you two turns of the wrench, it took Dad a half.”

  In high school Philip met Shirley Lowe, a slim, blonde-haired, blue-eyed dynamo who drove stock cars in the Orangeville powder-puff derby and won a countywide award for her war bond painting of a city in flames. “Do you want this to happen?” it asked ominously in red paint. While a mother with three kids under age eight, Shirley would join the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, happily trooping off on weekends in fatigues and combat boots to assemble a rifle while blindfolded and march through fields in the pouring rain. She kept up her painting, in oils and watercolors, and one night a week she attended an adult education course in a subject of interest, such as geology or astronomy. “I did those things for me and nobody else,” says Shirley, who professes bewilderment that she might be the inspiration for the gutsy maternal heroines in movies like The Terminator and Aliens. “I don’t know why Jim thinks I’m so self-reliant,” Shirley adds with a shrug, her blue eyes sparkling. Philip looks up from the dining table in their Calabasas, California, home, clearly amused by his wife of fifty-seven years. “Well, you are,” he says wryly. Shirley is creative, impulsive, and fiery, Philip stoic, analytical, and precise. “It’s tough to be diplomatic with stupid people,” he confesses. Their wildly different dispositions would combine uniquely in their son, who became equal parts calculating gearhead and romantic artist.

  When their first child was born, the Camerons were living in an apartment in Kapuskasing, a cold, remote company town in northern Ontario where Philip worked as an engineer at the local paper plant. Shirley had trained as a nurse in Toronto but was now a somewhat restless homemaker. On August 16, 1954, James Cameron arrived in the world one month late and screaming, an image Hollywood studio executives will have no trouble picturing. Because he was their first child, the Camerons didn’t know there was anything unusual about Jim. When he strode into a doctor’s office at eighteen months old, extended his hand, and said, “How do you do, doctor?” they learned their son was a little precocious.

  Chippawa

  When Cameron was five, Philip’s job took the family to Niagara Falls, and from there they moved to a comfortable split-level in Chippawa, where they would live until 1971. The family kept growing—next came Mike, Valerie, Terri, and John David. The Cameron kids freely roamed the shores of Chippawa Creek, which is actually, by non-Canadian standards, a rushing river. There were fishing trips and daredevil hikes above the deep gorges. Cameron once slipped off an algae-covered board down a hundred-foot cliff, catching a tree limb and scrambling back up, a misadventure he never shared with his parents. “What happens on the hike stays on the hike,” he says. He became a tinkerer, building and experimenting, often with his brother Mike. They made go-karts, rafts, tree houses. A favorite toy was the Erector Set, which Cameron had earned by selling greeting cards. (Shirley paid off the neighbors to buy them—mothers can keep secrets, too.) He used the Erector Set to construct Rube Goldberg contraptions for dispensing candy and Coke bottles. Once he built a mini bathysphere with a mayonnaise jar and a paint bucket, put a mouse in the jar, put the jar in the bucket, and lowered the bucket off a bridge to the bottom of Chippawa Creek. When he pulled it back up, the mouse was still alive, but probably not without having had a good shock. Another proud engineering milestone was the Summer Vacation Trebuchet, a siege engine Cameron constructed out of an old hay wagon at his grandparents’ farm near Orangeville and used to launch twenty-pound rocks at spare-lumber targets he had dragged into the cow pasture.

  The Cameron boys’ handiness with tools was not always constructive. When some neighborhood kids stole their toys, Jim and Mike visited the lead suspects’ tree house and sawed through the limbs. When the juvenile criminals climbed up to their woody retreat, it toppled to the ground. “That one they got in trouble for,” says Shirley, nodding. “You don’t do things where people can get hurt.” Philip was the stern disciplinarian in the family, usually able to get his point across in few words. “My dad used to warn me, ‘If you mess up I’ll take you to the woodshed,’” remembers John David. “I was pretty confident I knew the house, and I didn’t think we even had a woodshed. The threat was worse than any actual act.”

  Early on, Cameron demonstrated a knack for assembling large groups in service of his own goals. When her oldest son was about ten, Shirley noticed his younger siblings and several neighborhood children streaming into her side yard carrying scraps of wood and metal. “I said, ‘What are you gonna do with all this junk?’” Shirley recalls. “Jim said, ‘We’re gonna build something.’” When Shirley checked on the project a couple of hours later, the kids had constructed an airplane. “Guess who was sitting in it being pulled?” Cameron was very good at telling people what to do. He took it upon himself to keep his younger sibling
s in line when the family went out to dinner. The oldest boy would fold his hands on the table and start twiddling his thumbs, a cue to the little ones to follow and not to grab the salt and pepper shakers.

  Shirley encouraged her son’s artistic side. At his request, some Saturdays they traveled eighty miles to the Royal Ontario Museum, where Cameron pulled out his sketchbook to draw helmets and mummies. “Everything I saw and liked and reacted to I immediately had to draw,” he says. “Drawing was my way of owning it.” He created his own comic-book versions of movies and TV shows he liked, from pirates inspired by the 1961 Ray Harryhausen fantasy Mysterious Island to spaceships he saw on the first season of Star Trek in 1966. He easily won all the local design contests—to paint a mural on the Seagram Tower at Niagara Falls or the bank windows at Halloween. At age fourteen, he painted a Nativity scene for the bank for one hundred dollars, enough to buy Christmas presents for his parents and siblings.

  The Cameron kids are an intense bunch, biochemically turbo-charged. Close in age and temperament, Jim and Mike were sometimes coconspirators, sometimes rivals, often both at once. Mike would grow up to be an engineer like his father, building the sophisticated filmmaking and diving technologies used on The Abyss, Titanic, and his older brother’s documentaries. Both bright and convinced of their own opinions, the two oldest Cameron boys are a technically potent and often explosive duo. They could turn a theoretical conversation on space travel into a rowdy brawl. “When they’d mix, there would be fireworks, good and bad,” says their youngest brother, John David, who likens the Cameron family dynamic to “Japan before warfare; everybody’s got their own systems.”

  Dinner was served at 6:00 p.m. at the Cameron house every night and timed with military precision. “I make good carbon,” Shirley says of her culinary efforts. “I burn things.” Her sons talk glowingly of her chili and pot roast but say that it was best when Shirley didn’t bring her adventuresome spirit into the kitchen. At a certain point, dinner with the Camerons would become a contact sport. “The more of the family that gets together, the more chaotic and loud and bright and crescendoed it gets, from who gets the goddamned dish,” John David says. “There will always be a moment when somebody says something that shouldn’t have been said. It’s priceless. But it’s participatory. If you sit idly by, you’ll get chewed on.”