Few franchises have had a steeper fall than the Alien series. In 1992 Alien³ appeared to near-universal derision. James Cameron nailed the essential problem when he said, “[director David] Fincher pissed me off by killing off Newt, Hicks, and Bishop, essentially trashing the entire ending of Aliens in the first few minutes of Alien³.” Absolutely correct. In the place of Cameron’s great characters, Fincher’s film substituted Sigourney Weaver’s wacky desire to have her character die, use no guns, and (in effect) “make love” to the aliens. The result was catastrophic.

And yet is that very different from the disastrous decisions Cameron himself has made since Aliens appeared in 1986? Take his Terminator franchise — the director’s initial script note when first conceiving of the sequel read, “Young John Connor and the Terminator who comes back to befriend him.” Cameron’s buddy and fellow Terminator scribe Bill Wisher remembers that “The idea of a boy and the Terminator seemed real funny to me, and we both had a good laugh about it. But after we finished laughing, Jim looked at me seriously and said this was the story we ought to do.”

For those of us who thought that a Cameron-helmed Terminator 2 would build on the space marine look-and-feel introduced in the first film and perfected in Aliens — in the process bringing the story into that way-cool dystopian future, perhaps with Sarah Connor traveling forward in time to somehow reunite with a still-living Reese and change history for the better — Cameron’s decision to make Arnold the good guy and build the movie around a Hollywoodized moppet was the worst possible outcome.

It wasn’t just the decision to make one of the greatest villains in movie history into a joke that ruined Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it was the simplistic preachiness underlying the plot. Joe Morton, the actor who portrayed the doomed Miles Dyson in the film, recalls that, “[Cameron] told me how Terminator 2 was going to be an anti-nuclear film and that it would show authority figures as the real Terminators. I had read the script and so I remember laughing and telling him ‘Sure Jim. I think kids are going to walk out of the theater after seeing this movie, saying ‘Did you see the way the Terminator shot that guy in the knees?’ But Jim insisted that it would be much more than that.” (more…)

“Filmmaking is a trauma that is akin to combat,” says James Cameron. Anyone who has ever attempted to make a movie knows exactly what he is talking about. Loads of money is on the line with little guarantee of success. Dozens of personalities need to be managed, many of them with ideas and egos in conflict with the director’s vision for the picture. The hours are brutal, the conditions often cold, hot, dirty, or dangerous, and before long everyone is perpetually exhausted. On a film set, a particularly nasty strain of Murphy’s Law reigns: anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at exactly the most inopportune moment.

The vast majority of people making movies soon find themselves happy to get any semblance of a decent shot in the can for editing later — never mind genius imagery, they’re just happy to have escaped with their lives. That genuine entertainment, never mind genuine art, is created in this environment is nothing short of a miracle. It takes a person of singular mind and indefatigable intensity, someone who refuses to accept defeat or take “no” or “impossible” for an answer, sometimes dozens of times every day for months on end.

In the documentary Superior Firepower: The Making of ‘Aliens’ (found on some DVD versions of the movie), one can see various members of the crew gingerly handling the subject of James Cameron’s reputation as a hard, unforgiving taskmaster on his sets.“He didn’t know any other way to work,” said Jenette Goldstein, who played Vasquez in Aliens. “He wasn’t going to waste anyone’s time or money. And he expected no one to waste his.” Prompted to explain the crew’s animosity towards Cameron, Sigourney Weaver deadpanned that, “They were big Ridley fans.” The late Stan Winston, special effects and creature creator extraordinaire, called Cameron’s Aliens set a “tough, demanding atmosphere,” before musing that the director was “cursed with a vision.” In the thick of war, little heed is paid to how genteelly orders are given — why would filmmaking be any different? (more…)

“And then some bulls*** happens.”

That’s how the initial treatment of Aliens (then called Alien II) tapered off after a mere twenty pages. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill had done little more than describe the basic setup: “Ripley and soldiers” versus the eponymous creatures. The rest, they decided, was for the guy who wrote The Terminator to flesh out.

Getting fired from Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, a schlocky job-for-hire, convinced James Cameron there was only one way he could make his Hollywood dreams come true. “I knew I was never going to be offered another movie,” he later explained about that time, “unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film that made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects that would justify my existence on the project, and I also had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that studios were likely to trust me with.”

So a guy who already specialized in sci-fi special effects and production art decided to add screenwriter to his list of talents. Using his fiery fever-nightmare about a killer robot as his jumping off point, and calling on many of the seminal sci-fi influences of his youth, he proceeded to write The Terminator. Each effect and action scene was thoroughly dissected on paper: Could I do this on a micro-budget? What special effect tricks could pull it off? Just like his early demo-film Xenogenesis, this would be a movie designed not just to entertain, but to show Hollywood what he could do. (more…)

Science fiction is a strange genre, liberally blending the past, present, and future into wonderful new forms. It takes a special mind to seamlessly achieve this mixture, to get an audience to truly believe that what they are seeing on the screen, fantastic as it is, is a living, breathing (and, in the case of Aliens, screaming) world. James Cameron is one part cerebral Vulcan scientist and one part wistful artistic hippie, with more than a bit of raging Scottish highlander sprinkled on top. It’s hard to imagine the movie ever coming into being without that curious makeup fueling its creation from first to last.

Cameron was the oldest child in a Canadian family of five. Born in 1954 and growing up near Niagara Falls, he was just in time to catch the tail end of the atom bomb/Sputnik hysteria and to spend his teen years watching Vietnam play out on the nightly news. “In my youth I was an absolutely rabid science fiction fan,” he says. “I read all the classics, all the old Ace paperback novels. I was really into people like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut. When I read science fiction I saw stuff in my head that I had never seen in films.” He also loved the films of underwater pioneer Jacques Cousteau: “I began to think of the deep ocean as outer space. This was an alien world I could actually reach.”

Dad was a quiet, thoughtful electrical engineer who gave his son a healthy interest in hard science. With his younger brother Mike playing Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein (Mike would himself become an engineer, and later developed some of the equipment his filmmaker brother used to explore the depths of the sea) Cameron regularly engaged in scientific experiments. One day saw them constructing a submersible “out of a mayonnaise jar, an erector set and a paint bucket,” complete with a live mouse as crew, and sending it to the bottom of a river on a rope (the little critter survived). Another time, they had the fire department chasing (and bystanders reporting as a UFO) a hot-air balloon constructed with dry-cleaning bags and lofted into the air by the heat generated by on-board candles. (more…)

One of the things that I find most unpleasant about the current movie-going experience are the trailers. They’ve become slicker and louder than ever, but nevertheless a relentless homogenization has set in. The reason that a spoof video called A Trailer for Every Academy Award-Winning Movie Ever Made went viral earlier this year was because it deftly mocked a great number of the tired conventions used by modern-day Hollywood’s editors and marketers. See for yourself:

YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen

The above short wouldn’t be so funny if the horrid little things weren’t so ripe for parody. To be fair, the trailers of old were just as bad in their way — if you watch classic film DVDs and take the time to run the special features, you’ll soon grow weary of seeing every film advertised as the GREATEST CINEMATIC TRIUMPH EVER! But we’re supposed to be better than that these days, we’re supposed to have evolved, right? In truth, our stuff’s just as cheesy, and will be revealed as such in a couple decades, when people yet unborn will watch them on some as-yet-unfathomed format and chuckle at how predictable and “of their time” they are.

Every once in awhile, however, a trailer comes along that’s startling in its freshness, that manages to break all the rules and become memorable in its own right. So it was with the two-minute teaser to Aliens, first spied by my then fifteen-year-old self in the spring of 1986. Can’t remember which movie I was at — Cobra probably, or maybe The Karate Kid Part II. But I’ve never forgotten that daring, brilliant bit of marketing: (more…)

In the video below [click to play], Oscar-winning director James Cameron spills some of the story beats for his long-in-production (four years) “Avatar,” which finally hits theatres this December 18th.  

He wrote the script fourteen years ago, before the technology was available to film it, spent nine years developing the cameras, and is now shooting live action in “Stereoscopic 3D.” Cameron’s shown bits of the film to friends and says they describe the experience as completely immersive, a “dream state … dreaming with your eyes wide open.”

Sounds like an amazing experience awaits.  The story, however, sounds awfully familiar:  Most of the action is set in the 22nd Century in the Alpha Centauri star system on a large Earth-like moon called Pandora … … (sorry, had to let a flash of Nerd Panic pass) … filled with lush rain forests and exotic creatures. A humanoid race, the Na’vi, inhabit the planet. They’re ten feet tall, striped like tigers and sport large tails. They’re also primitive, using bow and arrows to hunt. (more…)