James Cameron weighs in on water, historical accuracy, and Barbie
Cameron and longtime producing partner Jon Landau look back, and look ahead, as they discuss their 4K remasters ofTitanic, The Abyss, Avatar, and more
Film Features James Cameron
James Cameron is still in the deep end. During a career that has reached from the ocean floor to deep space (and an ocean floor in deep space), the Oscar-winning director has grabbed audiences with his romantic, hopeful visions of the future and the past, creating worlds so convincing people will swear they’re real. With the $2.3 billion box office of Avatar: The Way Of Water and three more Pandora-based installments on the way, Cameron’s only getting started. Since 1997, he has been working with his producing partner, Jon Landau, and together they’ve made some of the most successful movies ever, defying expectations and cultural trends by creating endearing works of pop romance with virtuosic story sense and a mastery of cutting-edge visual effects.
Cameron’s work has never looked better, too. For the first time, Titanic, Avatar, Avatar: The Way Of Water, The Abyss, True Lies, and Aliens, are coming to 4K, with the movies hitting streamers next week. Additionally, in between releasing the new 4K UHD Blu-ray of Titanic (which hit shelves Tuesday), and the two Avatar films (coming December 19), he also premiered the long-awaited special edition of The Abyss.
We spoke to Cameron and Landau about those films, the importance of historical accuracy in movies, and Barbie.
AVC: You’ve returned to the deep many times, but considering all the difficulties of making movies on water, what compels you to keep doing it? Is it the challenge? And Jon, when he comes to you with the script, does the water ever concern you?
James Cameron: I love being underwater. I love being at sea. I know how difficult it’s going to be. Maybe subconsciously, I think we’ll do it because we can and others can’t, but there is a deep human fascination with underwater, with the imagery. And I think a 3D film, a science-fiction film taking place on another planet underwater, how cool is that? Titanic. I mean, you don’t need to tell people how cool that is. It’s just, “Yeah, let’s go see that.”
The Abyss was a little bit of a harder sell, and I hadn’t done any of my actual deep exploration at that point. I was just getting used to the kind of the tools, the remotely operated vehicles and the submersibles, the sort of science and technology of it at that point. But once I made The Abyss, there was no turning back. I had to go, like, really go to the real abyss. Ultimately, in 2012, I went to a place beyond the abyss, called the Hadal depths. The abyss ends at 6,000 meters. But there’s another, you know, 4,000 to 5,000 meters of depth to go to where people haven’t looked. I guess I went all the way to the deep end of the pool.
Jon Landau: For me, when I read something like Titanic, honestly, I don’t even think about the water. I am so wrapped up in the characters’ story. The water is secondary because I know that we’re going to figure out how to do whatever the production issues are.
When I read something like Way Of Water and [James says], “Jon, it’s more water.” I go, “I want more water. Bring more water.” Because I’m a diver, I love scuba diving and being able to share that experience with other people. I think that’s what Avatar: The Way Of Water does: People feel like they are going on their first dive underwater.
JC: Yeah, we wanted to make it palpable, tangible. The thing is, you know the challenges going in. So we started, literally, years in advance before we rolled the film on The Way Of Water, pumping tons of money, millions and millions of dollars into R&D to generate the best computer graphics simulations of water that were possible—far beyond anything that had been done before—because you have to understand the scope of the challenge in any one of these films. We started that process as early as possible, even before we were casting and all that sort of thing, creating those simulations. Then it all paid off in the final image because you can’t tell that that water is not real water. I can’t tell. I have to remind myself, “Oh yeah, that wasn’t real water.” Even though we shot in water, we didn’t photograph the water. We captured the motion of the performer and the facial performance. The water itself, we had no way of capturing. So it all had to be created later as a physics-based simulation.
AVC: Which one is easier to work with: digital water or real water?
JC: Well, I don’t get as wet! On The Abyss, for example, I was underwater 8 to 10 hours a day. The actors might have been underwater a couple of hours a day because we’d only bring them down when we were lit and ready and kind of rehearsed. On The Way Of Water, I was working dry. The actors were in the water, but I wasn’t. The reason for that is that my virtual camera actually gave me a better situational awareness and a better ability to deal with all the aspects above and below water than it would have been if I had actually been underwater with them. Having done both, I can say that that was absolutely the best way to do that. So on my virtual camera, I could see all the all the actors under the water as their characters in the world, with the coral, with the light, with the creatures.
JL: I would say you need both. Avatar: Way Of Water, we needed to capture our actors underwater water so they would feel the current. You react differently. Your body is different. People suggested to us, “Do a dry for wet.” Do these other things. No. Truth in performance. We needed the water. And then in the CG was the other element because we weren’t photographing our set. We needed that to create an immersive experience.
JC: True of all the films, Jon. I mean, on The Abyss, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had to learn how to act inside a diving helmet. Everybody had to become, first of all, scuba certified, then helmet certified. Then they had to go down into the pitch-dark realm and and act. The same thing on Titanic. There were actual water scenes, water pouring down corridors, flooding, all near-drowning type types of things. It requires a commitment from the actors, and they don’t necessarily know how hard it’s going to be when they sign up for the gig.
JL: I remember a great moment came from Kate [Winslet] on Titanic, when we were in one of the flooded corridors, and she was going through it with the ax and she was struggling. When the take was over, she goes, “Yeah!”
JC: Because it was real. It felt real. I know the scene you’re talking about when she’s pulling herself along the pipe. That water was cold, too. She was not entirely acting when she went “brrr,” and her lips turned blue.
AVC: What is it like remastering all of these things at the same time, bouncing from Titanic to Pandora to The Abyss?
JC: The remasters have been done sequentially over time. It takes time and energy. We weren’t sort of driving toward a release of all six at once. That’s just sort of happened. All the value-added materials and featurettes have come together all at once. Then we just set a target date for the holidays and made that happen. But we have a great team. Geoff Burdick at Lightstorm is our vice president in charge of technical, but he also handles all this archival stuff, all the transfers. And we’ve got a great team at the studio at Disney that creates all the packaging and all that. It’s really a composite effort. I drop in for an intense period to do the transfer. The featurette materials are cut and shown to me, but Jon was more the driving force on all that stuff, at least on the films that he was involved with as a producer.
JL: We didn’t do this in one small window and rush it together. You know, as James said, the plan was done over a number of years. So, we started thinking about what we wanted to add. What’s the added value? Coming up with two brand new documentaries about The Abyss. A new one: “Fear Is Not An Option” is part of the True Lies release. I really love the title. It’s such a great message for everybody to think about. And on Avatar, to be able to look at things like the scene breakdowns.
JC: I love the scene breakdown because you really get to see the actor’s performances and how they translate through to the finished image and you see that it’s absolutely what they did, like at a molecular level. They become blue, they become 10 feet tall, they have cat ears, you know, and giant eyes and all that. But it’s literally exactly what Zoe [Saldaña] did, what Sam [Worthington] did, what Sigourney [Weaver] did. And Sigourney was 69, 70 when we were capturing her for The Way Of Water and for Avatar three. To see her as this 15-year-old character and to see that it is exactly what she did. It’s such a celebration of acting to see it.
In what we call “the scene deconstruction,” where you see all the stages that get you to that final image, we don’t like to show that stuff before we release the film. We don’t want people to see behind the scenes. We want them to believe that this place is real. We know it’s not real. But the second you see somebody in a black leotard marker suit with a head rig on, it’s like, how can you unsee that? But once you’ve gone on the experience of the movie, why not share the magic, the behind-the-scenes?
AVC: You spend much of the 2005 commentary for Titanic responding to criticisms of the film’s historicity and debunking myths. Historical accuracy is clearly very important to you. Right now, there’s a lot of debate over historical accuracy in film, especially with regard to Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. When you watch a movie, does historical inaccuracy take away from the experience?
JC: It does. If I watch a movie and I get excited about what I’m seeing, and I think, “Wow, that really happened.” And then I go read about it, and I’ve realized that they’ve taken all these liberties that sort of seduced me in the moment but turned out not to be true, I’ll never watch that film again.
I think it’s the opposite experience with Titanic. Titanic is such an amazing story. You don’t have to make things up. Obviously, we made up the foreground story of Jack and Rose and her family and all that sort of thing. But that was to give you a portal of entry into the world of Titanic and the real events of it. But when it came to showing what happened, we were rigorous. We were rigorous about what lifeboat launched, in what order, what time, who was where, and what officers were where. We went through thousands of pages of witness interviews and transcripts from the various investigations that were done afterward and all the history that was available. We had historians on board to check us. We went back. We tried to recreate the ship, the set down to the china and the lifejackets; everything was done with meticulous accuracy.
Now, there’s an interesting thing about history, which is if there wasn’t a video camera or a lot of surveillance cameras around, there would be a lot of gaps, and people’s memories tend to be inaccurate or fill things in. So we’re trying to piece together all this eyewitness testimony that sometimes didn’t agree, right? But, you know, fortunately, we went to the wreck and we did a really, really thorough forensic examination of the wreck as well. There were certain things that I put into the film that I believed happened and, for the most part, have been proven to be true based on subsequent investigations after the movie was made. Some of the things I put in the movie were actually controversial with so-called experts at the time and have proven to be accepted later. So, in a funny way, [Titanic] was a more precise and accurate history than what existed at the time because we had to stand it up and make it happen. We had to get that collapsible lifeboat off the roof onto the deck. Well, how the hell did they do it? Well, we had to figure it out. All of a sudden, that eyewitness testimony now starts to make sense as we went through that process of actually staging the entire thing.
AVC: With all you’re working on, have you two had any time to watch movies this year? Do you have any favorites?
JL: I dig Oppenheimer and The Creator. I thought what they were able to do visually with that was stunning.
JC: We see everything eventually. Maybe not right on the day of release. I still haven’t seen Napoleon. But of course, I always look forward to any new Ridley Scott film, so I’ll see it as quickly as I can. Oppenheimer, obviously. Barbie, I think, is amazing. It’s absolutely amazing. It’s amazing as a social phenomenon that a movie that seems to be about so little is about so much that’s important between men and women and the sort of dialog and the politicization of it. That is really kind of astonishing.
I’ve talked to Greta [Gerwig] a lot about it, and she knew exactly what she was doing, and she was going for something, and she pulled it off. And I think that’s really laudable.
31 Comments
James Cameron doesn’t hide the fact that he now makes movies pretty much solely to fund his seafaring adventures. I respect that, and I actually thought his input in the Titan implosion situation was articulate and helpful.
He’s like an alive and Canadian Clive Cussler!
Also, if anyone things I’m taking the piss with that comment, I will never have the same level of esteem for Cameron as I do for Cussler, not until Cameron hardens the fuck up and pelts a French destroyer with small salad potatoes.
But unlike Cussler he hasn’t made himself a character in his works (yet)! (For those who don’t know, Clive Cussler wrote many shipwreck related books and often the characters went to consult with Cussler himself).
“Clive Cussler wrote many shipwreck related books and often the characters went to consult with Cussler himself”Absolutely incredible. I can’t imagine having that level of regard for myself.
As always…James Cameron doesn’t do what James Cameron does for James Cameron. James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron IS James Cameron.
I highly recommend that people watch the documentary about him going down the mariana trench. It’s incredible. To be clear, it’s practically filled with propaganda about how amazing Cameron is… But if you can look past that, it’s just mesmerizing.
The man does have a sizable ego, there is no doubt about that. But he often delivers on his promises so there’s that.
Yeah I mean from what I remember, the vast majority of the James Cameron ego feeding was only in the first 25% or so, so it’s not too bad overall. And I mean, even if it is ass-kissing, it’s hard to deny it’s at least a little warranted in this situation. They not only pulled off the challenger deep visit, but they did with a group of people who all seemed to be respected and worked together in a collaborative nature while being led by him every step of the way. At least from the rose tinted view that we get, which is a very subjective, pro Cameron view – a well rounded objective documentary in the vein of Burns or Morris, this was not. There are plenty of stories about Cameron being a tyrant on film sets (ESPECIALLY with the Abyss), but it certainly seemed like the people there, at the very least, didn’t despise him. Maybe getting older has made him less of an asshole.Either way, it was amazing to watch. Especially since we watched it during the height of the titan sub clusterfuck – everything in Cameron’s operation seemed so much more professional and safety minded, at least within the insane riskiness of what they were attempting.
Cameron is undoubtedly a tyrant, but he puts himself on the frontlines of each production, so you have to respect it.
There’s a great story I love where Schwarzenegger was late to the set of True Lies, and Cameron read him the riot act in front of the entire crew for holding up filming and costing them money. Tom Arnold asked why he let Cameron talk to him like that, and Schwarzenegger simply replied, “Because he was right.”
yeah it’s like i guess there’s a fine line between ‘uncompromising’ and ‘egomaniac’ and i guess that difference is actually being right.he also seems like a fun guy to hang out with and have a few drinks, but could also mentally destroy you with a few choice words.
Funny he doesn’t exactly name his theories that were controversial with historians that’s become accepted fact, and he skipped over two major historical controversies, his depiction of First Officer Murdoch and owner Bruce Ismay.The Murdoch one was bad enough he apologized to his grandson and his Scottish village for making this great hero look like a coward and a murderer. While its probably true he did shoot himself minutes before the ship went down, its still a debates topic and if he did, the circumstances were not depicted accurately and he definitely never took a bribe.Ismay is perhaps less well known but also tragic. The movie depicts him semi causing the disaster by saying don’t slow the ship down and later he cowardly hides in a lifeboat. Absolutely not true, nobody ordered a speed record broken because the Titanic itself wasn’t going to be the Lusitania, it wasn’t made for speed. Also, Ismay helped load lifeboats with Murdoch according to numerous witnesses. To a point of actually annoying him. That part of the ship allowed men in lifeboats and Murdoch ordered him into one of the last lifeboats. This is all a problem because the slander of causing the disaster and being a coward comes from Hearst owned newspapers that basically asked why didn’t he have the kindness to die. It fucked up Ismay and traumatized him. Always being told, you lived while 1500 died, its tragic and unfortunately most Titanic depictions including Cameron repeated this. Lastly there’s more minor things like claiming gates were closed intentionally to kill the poor. Some gates were locked but its more the stewards forgot to open them, there’s no attempt to intentionally kill the poor. I know this because more women in third class survived then first class men. The worst position to have is either a stoker, steward, or second class man. Titanic survival is rather fascinatingly gendered. This is mostly due to Second Officer Lightollers baffling decision to only load women and children as opposed to Murdoch.Anyway, rant over. I’m somewhat hot and cold on Titanic as a historical piece. As a technical achievement its second to none however.
Yeah, I was going to say that I’m pretty sure no officer of the ship shot a bunch of people crowding around life boats.
The answer to that is complicated as hell. This happened within ten minutes of the ship sinking. Getting a timeline is difficult due to the chaos and the fact very few people survived who didn’t get into a lifeboat. A couple people like Eugene Daily and I believe the Duff Gordons said they saw AN OFFICER shoot someone rushing the lifeboats and later himself. The Gordon’s were loaded by Murdoch for the record and while Lightoller survived and said it didn’t happen, well… he’s not a trustworthy man judging by his later ww1 record. Four officers were given guns, Chief Officer Wilde, Murdoch, Lightoller, and 4th officer Boxhall. Boxhall and Lightoller survived, Wilde and Murdoch didn’t. Wilde is hard to pindown during the entire sinking, Murdoch isn’t. One witness said the chief officer shot himself, but Murdoch was wearing a chief officer uniform since he was originally given the rank and temporarily demoted since Wilde was retiring soon after the maiden voyage. If he did shoot himself, its because the crowd was tipping over the Collapsible lifeboat which would doom everyone, if your on the ship when it goes down your just dead. Shot or not. Murdoch also clearly never attempted to save himself and wasn’t even wearing a lifebelt, so he was going to die.All that said, the film depiction includes a bribe and a minor character being accidentally shot which is an unreasonable depiction regardless of what happened.
I appreciate the succinct comment-length history lesson.
He can also be very dismissive when it comes to historical accuracy. Just note that ‘so-called experts’ remark in this interview. That’s just blatantly disrespectful towards historians.But honestly, minor things can be forgiven. But he’s dancing around the fact that he got huge things wrong for no apparent reason in Napoleon. It’s incredibly well-known that he was one of the biggest Egyptophiles in his day. It’s just utterly ridiculous to then put in shots of him bombarding the Piramides of Giza. Like, c’mon, man…
Why not? Napoleon being an Egyptophile isn’t relevant to the story. Changing things even for “no reason” is perfectly fine. It’s all about the specific story you’re telling and what images make it work best.
Napoleon being an Egyptophile is important to his character. And his character is important to the movie. Otherwise it’s hardly a Napoleon biopic. And part of the movie is about his invasion of Egypt, one of the main reasons was to open it up to French ‘scientific’ research. Him being an Egyptophile was one of the main reasons why we even have those scenes of Napoleon in Egypt.
Biopics are allowed to take liberties for the sake of the story they’re telling- which is not the same as the factual story of the person’s life.Amadeus was a biopic, Fitzcarraldo was a biopic (and the real Fitzcarraldo took the boat apart before transporting it over land), The Music Lovers is a biopic.
They’re ‘allowed’ to do whatever they want, that’s not the point. If anything the point is; what’s the point of making that change? I know what they can do, I love Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Movies that delve more into what kind of person they were, their personality, or how the filmmaker see the person they’re making a biopic about. Impressionistic works, if you wanna label it as something.So yes, I’m well aware that biopics can take liberties. From what I’ve seen, I don’t think Scott’s Napoleon belongs in the rows of impressionistic biopics. Plus, even more impressionistic biopics care about the character they’re making the movie about. Sure he has an opinion about Napoleon and wants to depict that, but it’s not a free-wheeling, let’s-put-Converse-on-the-floor type deal. And like I said, I do think that Napoleon’s obsession with Egypt is important enough to his personage that turning that around is just sloppy. What’s the point of making that change? What would Scott even want to communicate with it? If anything it’s a good opportunity to reinforce Scott’s view of depicting Napoleon as a petulant child of a tyrant, caring so much about those old relics and monuments that he’s willing to sacrifice thousands of lives over them. But instead we get… what, exactly?
I suspect it may be something along the lines of wanting to show Napoleon as brashly making his mark on history, placing himself alongside the world’s great conquerors, while not being entirely heedful of the consequences. Is he an Emperor or a vandal? That sort of thing. Or maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing and wants to make that mark, wants to be known as a destroyer. The Revolution itself was a messy business after all, but preferable to the prior status quo. The monuments of Egypt were built for kings, maybe it’s thumbing his nose at monarchs past and present.I dunno, what do you think?
James Cameron didn’t direct Napoleon though, and he apparently hasn’t even seen it. Probably unfair to say that he got huge things wrong for no apparent reason with it.
Ismay is treated even worse in the (quite bad) Titanic Broadway musical, where he’s basically the main antagonist. In more than one scene, he demands the captain speed up the ship while sinister music plays in the background. (Murdoch is portrayed heroically though, IIRC.)
Oh Jesus really? Well that fucking blows. I don’t like the rich but like, Ismay doesn’t deserve this. His testimony from the Titanic hearings is just sad. He couldn’t bare to look at the ship sinking, a judge said why like he didn’t care. He cared too much to see all these people die on a ship he owned.
Every time an article like this comes out, I skip straight to the comments section hoping you have a comment like this.
Interesting stuff.The Titanic didn’t split in half above the water, right? That always seemed like the most obvious liberty.
How the ship split apart is hotly debated. Cameron was correct it lifted out of the water and broke, but later research concludes it wasn’t nearly as dramatic an angle. But that research is mostly around 2012 for the 100th anniversary so I can’t really be mad at the film for this. Same for how any pre 1980s Titanic film doesn’t feature a split because that wasn’t accepted history yet.
Good post. Are you the pirate historian?
Correct. Although I have other historical interests like female crime and general maritime history. I haven’t written papers on those but I have read a lot. I have an Eastland Disaster documentary coming out and I did research for a project on Murdoch once that never happened.
I still like thinking of you not as a historian who specializes in pirates but a pirate who is also a historian.
I will gladly accept that. Hell, maybe I’m actually a 300 year old Anne Bonny who has gotten into history to pass the time. The world may never know……..