20 December,2009 08:50 AM IST | | James Dyer /Planet Syndication
His movies often show the danger of technology, but director James Cameron has re-defined 3D viewing single-handedly. twelve years after his last film Titanic, Cameron talks about how his epic adventure Avatar fell into place
WHERE the hell has James Cameron been? More than a decade has whipped past since the director last shot a movie and audiences are suffering withdrawal. After dragging The Terminator off the production line in 1984, Cameron embarked on a systematic campaign to conquer the film industry. A chain of huge, budget-shaping, forecast-shattering projects hit the cinematic landscape like atomic blooms, pushing every boundary and establishing the Canada-born director as one of the most gifted filmmakers of his generation.
And then, in 1997, he launched Titanic, a $200 million chick-flick that critics expected to sink as surely as its namesake. It didn't. Grossing over $1.8 billion, Titanic became the most successful film of all time and Cameron emerged as the director who could do no wrong. On Oscar night, after 11 wins, his arms laden with golden statuettes, he stood up before the Academy, declaring, "I'm king of the world!"
And with that, he was gone.
Cameron dropped off the map when he should have been riding the biggest wave of his career. But it wasn't the pressure of success, a stint in rehab or some need to jack in this crazy thing called Hollywood and carve out a career in shoemaking. Or hip-hop. Rather, Cameron felt a down-to-earth and entirely human need to re-evaluate his priorities.
"I was divorced with a young daughter," he reflects, when we catch up with Cameron at his Lightstorm offices in Santa Monica. "Filmmaking is a full tilt boogie, you know? I was essentially gone from the lives of family and loved ones for a year or more at a time, and it just seemed like the wrong time to do that."
Along with the desire to be a good father and (ex-) husband was a sense that everything was passing him by. Life had moved very fast for the then 44-year-old director. "I wanted to indulge my own insatiable curiosity. I thought, 'Now is the best time in my life to go off and do all the things I wanted to do as a kid, like be a scientist or an explorer."
As it happens, he became both. Cameron embarked on a series of expeditions that would make Magellan green with envy. He travelled beneath the waves to study the wreck of the Bismark, charted a mountain range on the ocean floor and even returned to the skeletal carcass of the Titanic. A trio of deep-sea documentation resulted and boyhood fantasies were realised. But the real discovery wasn't the hidden secrets of Neptune's garden, but rather something more practical.
Intent at bringing the deep and its inhabitants to life, Cameron opted to shoot his last two documentaries in 3-D. Yet, when you're in a cramped submarine four kilometres beneath the sea, there isn't enough room to swing a cat, let alone an IMAX camera. If you think IMAX screens are large, we suggest you take a look at the rigs used to shoot for it; hulking monstrosities that would look more at home bolted to Megatron's shoulder than crushing cameramen under their enormous bulk.
"The camera simply would not fit in the craft," says Cameron with a grin. "So my idea was literally just to slap two HD cameras side by side and blow the footage up to IMAX. And that's exactly what we did." The result was the prototype Reality Camera System a compact and far more versatile tool with which to shoot three-dimensional films.
This new toy opened up a world of possibilities for filmmakersu00a0you can thank him for such wonders as Hannah Montana 3-D and the Jonas Brothers Concert Experience but for Cameron himself, the technology had a far more personal significance. With his new fusion camera and recent strides in visual effects, he realised it was finally time to return to feature films and un-box a dream he'd been sitting on since the mid-90s.
A dream called Avatar.
CONJURED up back in 1995, Avatar was always intended to be the follow-up to Titanic, it was a glimpse into an alien world spun from the imagination of a man who had routinely devoured pulp sci-fi like Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoum series on his hour-long bus ride to school. The project began life as an 80-page 'scriptment' about a disabled ex-Marine who joins an expedition to mine a far-flung world called Pandora, with an intricate and alien ecosystem and predators large and small. Cameron's idea revolved around a race of indigenous aliens called the Na'vi. Nine feet tall, blue-skinned and feline in appearance, they would need to be entirely computer-animated, yet interact seamlessly with the live action.
It's easy, looking back from the warm glow of a world where such things are commonplace, to wonder what all the fuss was about. But in 1995, pre-Gollum, Davy Jones or even Jar Jar Binks, the whole endeavour was fraught with problems. "When I made Terminator, I was just looking for a low budget movie I could direct myself," says Cameron.
"With Avatar, I literally set out to craft a story that would push my effects company at the time, Digital Domain, to the forefront of visual effects. Unfortunately, when I brought it in to everybody with my tail wagging, they said, 'There's just no way we can do thisu2026 probably not for another ten years.'"
Imagination overreaching the available technology is something Cameron was already familiar with. The Abyss pushed the CG envelope with its seamless pseudopod sequence, while Terminator 2 created an iconic character in its oozing, liquid-metal villain, realised through the use of groundbreaking morphing effects. With Avatar, though, the obstacle was seen as insurmountable, for the time being at least.
Thus Cameron is only now putting the finishing touches on his extraterrestrial eco-tale, the Pocahontas to Titanic's Romeo And Juliet. Fact has caught up with his fiction but, Cameron being Cameron, the vision of Avatar has evolved as well. Not content with fully digital characters, Cameron now insisted they be photo-real, not just in appearance but in the way they moved, reacted and emoted. He wanted the Pandoran jungle to come alive as the Na'vi moved through it and of course, he wanted it all rendered in believable 3-D.
"Ironically, the 3-D has been the least of it because we had that methodology dialled in before was started the film. It was the development of the performance capture tools that was the challenge. With the new capture technologies we developed, the actor can be any character they can imagine and the director can create any environment, any world, any time and any space."
Which brings us to Exhibit B in Jim's Magical World Of Wonders: a photographic, 'e-motion' capture system that takes CG characters to all-new levels of realism, mapping actors' facial nuances, tricks and expressions to bring their digital counterparts to life. Cameron's artificial characters, while alien, are more human than anything that has come before.
If this all sounds like impenetrable techno-babble that audiences will never buy into, that's because they don't have to. (Steven) Spielberg, (Peter) Jackson, (J J) Abrams, (Guillermo) del Toro and other such luminaries have already signed up, swept away by the possibilities Cameron's new-fangled gizmos have opened up. Even now, Spielberg and Jackson are shooting Tintin 3-D, using Cameron's capture tool to breathe new life into Herge's adventurer.
"I invited them over when we were shooting Avatar," he recalls. "I put the camera in their hands and they basically became two kids on the inside, every filmmaker is really just a complete geek. The amazing thing for me was just watching that moment. They were running around the stage, working with the camera, and that's the moment they both kind of looked each other in the eye and said, 'Let's make Tintin.'"
In a way, James Cameron is a curious paradox. His films, from The Abyss to Terminator 2, Titanic and now Avatar have each been at the cutting edge of technical filmmaking, pioneering new techniques for the betterment of the craft.
Thematically, though, each betrays a love-hate relationship with the technology that makes it possible. Terminator shows machines running amok, Titanic the hubris of man-made inventions that ultimately fail, while both Aliens and Avatar see technologically superior forces held at bay by a primitive foe. It's an inherent contradiction that Cameron accepts.
"Technology can overwhelm and potentially de-humanise a production or it can be used to create very poetic and emotional flourishes that wouldn't exist otherwise. The key is to be in control of the technology, not let it control or seduce you. Now, we were seduced by a set of technologies on this filmu00a0several disparate onesu00a0but in the service of a story that's very human."
For Cameron, though, there's absolutely no turning back. In his mind, 2-D is dead and binocular 3-D or 'stereo' as he prefers to call it, will gradually replace conventional movies as the medium of choice. More than 2,000 cinemas in the US are already converted and '3-D ready'. All that remains is for the rest to follow suit and it's big, tent-pole stereo projects like Avatar the longest and most ambitious 3-D film made thus faru00a0that will prove the tipping point.
We are poised, Cameron believes, on the cusp of a cinematic revolution, about to enter a whole new era of visual entertainment. The downside? "You still have to add money," he laughs. "That's the fuel that makes it possible to go to these other planets."u00a0
