James Cameron Interview (page: 5 / 8) Master Filmmaker	Print Interview

What were some other lessons you learned working on that Corman film?

James Cameron: Well, the critical lesson is basically...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Never give up because it's going to be unbelievably hard. It's going to be a ridiculously brutal, uphill fight all the time, and you just have to have tremendous stamina and self-confidence to power through it. You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself. But, you know, what I learned from those early days was to trust my instincts and to not back off, because when the hour gets dark, you're instinct is to -- or your tendency might be to say, "Well, this is just too hard and no, you know, nobody should have to go through this in order to accomplish X," whether it's a movie or whatever. But to -- in the pursuit of excellence -- and... I think you can be in the pursuit of excellence when you're working on a low budget science fiction horror film, if it's how you define it. You have to go all the way. It's that simple. Now I don't mean trample over people. I don't mean turn into a screaming maniac. I mean, you have to be able -- you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can't do it by yourself.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Even though you may know how to do many of these different tasks, you physically can't do it. You need a team, and you need the respect and the trust of that team. That was a lesson that took me a while to figure out, because at first I just wanted to do it all myself. "Ah, you're doing it wrong!" That doesn't work. That doesn't ultimately achieve the vision.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I had to learn to inspire people to give me their best work and I also had to learn to accept what they brought even if it was: Either (a) not as good or (b) good but just different from what I had imagined. And so that the end result of our collected efforts will be exactly that. It'll be all of our efforts together. It won't won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the group. So choose your group well, and go in with that little voice in the back of your mind that says, "Be Zen about it. Be philosophical. It's ultimately going to be the best that these people can do."

That flies in the face of the auteur theory. And I was sort of raised aesthetically on that auteur theory, looking at the much vaunted Hitchcock films that were planned down to every frame and every molecule through storyboarding. It all flowed from the forehead of Zeus, but it's not that way. When you're doing your job best you're a band leader.

How hard was it for you to learn those lessons?

James Cameron: It's tough, and I'm still learning it, but I've learned it well enough to do some of my best work as a result of that lesson, by inspiring the actors on Titanic, the production designers, and everyone on that film. There were several thousand people working on that film. By somehow inspiring them to do their very, very best, they brought me all of the elements, all of the moments that eventually became that film. I couldn't have done it all myself. I couldn't have done a fraction of it.

I've read that you once had to break into an editing room in order to realize your vision of what a film should be.

James Cameron: I suppose I should clarify that. Here was a critical juncture for me. I was hired to direct a film called Piranha II. I was hired by a very unscrupulous producer who worked out of Italy. He put me with an Italian crew who spoke no English, even though I was assured that they would all speak English. I actually had to learn some Italian very quickly, I'm talking about in two week. That's all the prep time I had, because I was actually replacing someone else. I was put into an untenable situation and then fired a couple of weeks into the shoot, and the producer took over directing. It turns out that he had actually done that twice before on his two previous films. That was his modus operand, in order to get the financing and then axe the director.

In the course of throwing me off the movie, he never showed me a foot of the film that I had shot. He held on to the dailies. We were shooting in Jamaica and the dailies would go to New York and be processed. He'd fly to New York and look at them and not send them back for me to see so I wasn't even seeing my own film. He came in and said, "Your stuff doesn't work, doesn't cut together. It's a pile of junk and you're off the movie," and then he took over the film. And I thought, "Maybe I'm just bad. Maybe I'm just not good."

A couple of months later I went to Rome to find out what really happened, and he wouldn't show me any of the film. I had been in Rome prepping the film for a couple of weeks before we went to Jamaica, and I remembered the code to get in. So I went in and ran the film for myself. It wasn't that bad. All I wanted to know was one simple fact. Could I or could I not do this job? So I made a few changes before I flew back. I don't know if the editor ever noticed that I actually fixed a couple of things, but, I had to know whether what they had said was true.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Everyone around me had basically said, "You stink. You suck. You don't know what you're doing." And I just -- and I accepted it but then a little voice kept saying, "I don't think so. I don't think it can be that bad. I remember doing some pretty cool stuff with the actors in this moment and that moment." And I looked at it and it was fine. So then I thought, "You know what, I actually can do this and I just fell in with a pack of, you know, thieves and whackos here." But I also realized that I was going to have to get busy and create my own thing, and that nobody would hire me after that experience. Nobody would hire me and just put me on a film. I'd have to create my own thing and hang on tenaciously to that in order to be able to direct again, and that's why I wrote The Terminator

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

I had many, many people trying to buy that script, but I wouldn't sell the script to them unless I went with it as the director. Of course that was a turn-off for almost everybody, but we did find one low-budget producer who was willing to make the film. That was John Daly at Hemdale, and that's how I got my real start.

In the face of all of that, how do you pick yourself up and persevere? What does it take?

James Cameron: I had dark hours on Titanic that were just as dire if not more dire than on Piranha II when I got fired, or on Terminator when we had all these problems. You have to find some kind of inner strength that says, "What I'm doing is right. It may not seem right to other people and I may not be able to please them right now, but I'm going to have to proceed on this path until I can demonstrate to them that what we're doing is probably the right thing, at least the best that I know how to do."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ultimately you reach a point where people will hire you because you have the strength. Or some people call it vision, I don't. That's a bit of a lofty word because I don't think it's something that comes to you necessarily in the night. I think it's something that's the process of a very rigorous mental processing of the data on a day-by-day basis and the possibilities -- what you can do and what you can't do -- and over time people will realize that you have what it takes to be in that situation where nobody really knows the answer. Although a lot of them think they do or say they do, and you've come up with the right formula. And to have come out of these battle situations a number of times with the right formula on a consistent basis, they tend to trust you more as you go along. They'll never trust you completely.

The "they," whoever the "they" is. In my business it's the studio that's putting up the money, the completion bond company, the bankers. The people that don't really understand the day-to-day sweat, blood and tears of the creative process. That's another lofty term, "the creative process!"

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When you're on a set the creative process consists of... "Oh, my God. How are we going to do that? You're going to have to move the wall back three feet and then you're going to have to pile up some boxes over here and put the camera on it." It's all nuts and bolts things. And then you have to be able to switch that off in a heartbeat and think about what's the actor feeling. You know, what's the character feeling at that moment, and it might be some really important, very pivotal scene for them.

There's a certain tenacity that's required, and that tenacity manifests itself sometimes in unpleasant ways. Other times it can manifest itself in very noble ways when you can get other people to go with you that extra mile.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think a lot about what is misunderstood about my particular film making process, is that I get people to go that extra mile that they've never done before and they go into new territory. They go beyond what they previously thought were their limits, and then afterwards they talk about it like it was a big adventure. "Oh, man, we worked around the clock and you know, we all almost died." And it sounds like an indictment of the production as a bunch of whackos but when, in fact, they're actually -- they want to share the fact that they did this, that they did go beyond. They went beyond in their creative capacity as well, and that's why they always all come back and want to do it again. Maybe just not right away.

I don't make films back-to-back anyway. I usually give them a year to go out and see what it's like on all those other boring movies and then they all want to come back.

You mean a year of to recover.

James Cameron: Oh no. That only takes a couple of weeks. A week in Hawaii usually takes care of it.

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