The truth about James Cameron: what is the film director’s billion-dollar secret?
James Cameron may have been on to something when, after winning the best director Oscar for Titanic in 1998, he claimed exuberantly to be “king of the world”. He has occupied the top spot at the worldwide box office for nearly 25 years, thanks to 1997’s Titanic and 2009’s Avatar, which have grossed more than $5bn (£4.1bn) between them. His latest film, Avatar: The Way of Water, joined the all-time Top 10 after only three weeks and was the sixth-fastest film to make $1bn. It’s now at No 7, with Titanic at No 3 and the original Avatar at No 1. If it were to overtake Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Cameron would end up with three of the four highest-grossing films ever.
Yet before the release of each of his past four films, all said to be the most expensive film then made, Cameron has been more or less written off. He was extravagant, too ambitious and out of touch, claimed commentators. That Titanic speech became a stick with which to beat him, while Avatar’s success was treated as though it was the result of a fleeting madness that had afflicted audiences, with commentators pointing to its lack of “cultural footprint” (“Name three characters,” challenged detractors on Twitter as The Way of Water approached release).
Cineastes tend to sideline Cameron from their lists of great films and great directors. He doesn’t appear on the latest Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films poll and he only squeaked into the American Film Institute’s 100 Years … 100 Movies list in 2008, with Titanic placed at No 83. No one, least of all in Hollywood, seems to understand what makes his films so phenomenally successful. You know they don’t, because otherwise they would be trying harder to do the same thing. So where did it all go right?
Cameron-level success doesn’t look like that of other blockbusters. You don’t see many people in Titanic Tshirts or dressed as Avatar’s Na’vi aliens for Halloween – and it’s not just the high price of blue body paint that stops them. The “cultural footprint” doesn’t look like that of the Marvel movies or Harry Potter. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
The difference is that Cameron fans, or rather fans of his individual films, are
not online picking fights about Batman or speculating about Doctor Strange cameos. Instead, you will find a thriving community at learnnavi.org studying the Na’vi’s constructed language. Created at the University of Southern California by Dr Paul Frommer, who still adjudicates on developments, the language now has more than 5,000 words, including derivatives; enough to write poetry and songs.
“Some people do come in for just the academic exercise,” says Mark Miller, a network engineer and specialeffects creator who is the site’s administrator. “But most folks show up because they are fascinated with the film. We can’t go to Pandora [the Na’vi’s home world], but why not try to, as a fan, be involved in the aspects of it that we can actually participate in? Our users are not necessarily superfans or very nerdy – they just want to feel a little bit more part of that world.”
In the six or seven years after Avatar’s release, there were annual meetings, too, as there were for the more general Avatar fansite tree-ofsouls.net, but those died down when no sequel emerged, as expected, in 2014 or 2015.
Some fans have gone further. Raymond Knowles, a carpenter from Edmonton, Canada, adopted the nickname Mr Avatar professionally about six years ago after he covered 95% of his body with Avatar-themed tattoos (skull, hand and foot tattoos are planned). Knowles, who has four portraits of Zoe Saldana’s heroine, Neytiri, among his tattoos, estimates that he has spent C$35,000 (£21,500) getting and refreshing his body art, with a further C$25,000 on Avatar art for his truck.
A longtime Cameron fan, Knowles saw the film on opening night with his daughter. “I was pretty much in awe. Hardly said a word. Every emotion came out: tears, laughter, you name it.” He went back eight times in two weeks and found his perspective on life changed by the film.
“There were so many correlations to our own planet,” says Knowles. “The ecological message. Cameron talks about how a regular person can be a hero. And Neytiri stuck with me right off the bat. She was the entrance in [to Pandora]. Ever since day one, that was pretty much it. I wouldn’t say I was in love. Obsessed? Yeah, maybe.”
Titanic also changed lives. Viewers have tattoos with the coordinates of the Titanic’s SOS call, the film’s VHS tape and the Heart of the Ocean jewel that features in the plot. Fans have built scale models of the ship, travelled to Titanic museums worldwide (Belfast, where the ship was built, renamed an entire district the Titanic Quarter) and planned life events around the film.
Jess Chapman, a freelance writer, got married at the Olympic Restaurant at the White Swan in Alnwick, Northumberland, a venue fitted out with the panelling, glass and ceiling that once adorned the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic. “I watched Titanic when I was nine or 10 and quickly became obsessed. We’d roleplay it: I’d be Rose, my big sister would be Jack and my little sister would be [Billy Zane’s bad guy] Cal. She hates it to this day because we left her out.”
An obsession with the film grew into a fascination with the history of the wreck and the age of ocean liners. As such, Chapman had decided on her wedding venue before she was even engaged; luckily, her husband was amenable. “It’s a perfect film,” she says. What I love most is the dedication to accuracy, but I love James Cameron’s stupid action guff, too. It, and the passion it spawned, has given me more pleasure in my life than anything else.”
The comedian and writer Caitlin Durante, who is based in Los Angeles, watched the film at least once a day for entire summers as a child. She sports several Titanic tattoos. “Some movies are a feature-length historical romantic drama, other movies are a feature-length disaster movie,” she says. “Titanic said: ‘Why not both?’ Brave, subversive, iconic.”
The difference in fan behaviour is clearly not about passion. Demographics play a role, however. These fan groups were never dominated by adolescent males, unlike with many Hollywood blockbusters. Since Jaws in 1975, studios have largely focused on 16- to 25-year-old males, but Cameron’s recent films have also appealed to young women and older adults of both sexes. Perhaps, then, it’s a function of Cameron’s success that his online fandom is so muted. Comic books, video games and sci-fi were once the province of nerds, outward markers of fandom signalling your identity among a community. Because everyone and their mum went to see Avatar, there is less tribalism involved. A Titanic T-shirt doesn’t show peculiar discernment or reveal a particular predilection; it just shows you saw the same film as everyone else.
So how does Cameron get the attention of people who go to the cinema once a decade? Scott Mendelson, a box office expert and film reporter at The Wrap, says that a crucial factor is Cameron’s emphasis on just that: the cinema. “The Way of Water is being sold, and so far embraced, as a film that you need to experience at least once in a theatre, preferably in 3D, ideally in Imax or something like that. That’s part of where its legs come from.”
Since at least 1986’s Aliens, epic spectacle has been part of the Cameron brand, employing envelopepushing visual effects that demand to be seen on the biggest screen possible. He pioneered CGI in films such as 1989’s The Abyss and 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as well as more subtle, real-world environmental effects on Titanic.
The director and Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin remembers going frame by frame through a 35mm print of Titanic with colleagues soon after its release. They were studying its computer visual effects (VFX), then an industry still in its infancy. “Back in 1998, no one expected viewers to pore over every single frame in the way that we can do in HD today, so you could get away with cutting some corners if need be,” says Franklin. “We didn’t find anything to call out even after going over the print in forensic detail. The judicious combination of miniatures, cutting-edge (for the time) computer graphics and stunning fullsize physical effects produced a tremendous result that still has a tangible physicality that makes you believe in the ship.”
Cameron’s perfectionism, going so far as inventing the technology he needs if it doesn’t exist, is notable, although not unique among elite directors. Particularly in his younger days, he was deeply unpopular with his crews – “You can’t scare me; I work for James Cameron” read a crew T-shirt on more than one of his films – and is reported to have nail-gunned mobile phones to the wall if they rang during shooting. But his obsessive focus on greater realism and his ability to oversee every aspect of production are part of his appeal.
“I hear from friends who have worked closely with him that he is a very charismatic leader,” says Franklin. “They may end up being completely wrung out by the experience, but while they are inside the machine he definitely seems to exude that ‘realitydistortion field’ that encourages people to push through all sensible limits. Cameron’s intimate understanding of VFX has always helped him tell stories that would exceed the reach of other filmmakers. His films have extraordinary longevity, despite relying very heavily on VFX: Aliens and even the original Terminator hold up extremely well.”
His technical mastery is why hardcore Titanic and Avatar fans talk about the films’ immersiveness and ability to transport the viewer, whether to 1912 or 2154. “It’s my comfort blanket,” says Durante of Titanic. Meanwhile, there were numerous reports of Avatar fans being depressed by the impossibility of visiting Pandora.
It’s also important that Cameron films speak to women in a way that few of his A-list contemporaries even attempt. “He has consistently created meaty roles for women,” says Anna Smith of the podcast Girls on Film. “We need to see ourselves reflected on screen, especially within the typically male-dominated action genre.” Now, films are accused of being “woke” simply for having a central female character, but Cameron has been creating or developing three-dimensional female leads for four decades, from Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Aliens’ Ripley to Titanic’s Rose and Avatar’s Neytiri.
It’s not just that Cameron seems actively to like women; he also likes the type of family drama or broad-strokes romance that is more associated with female audiences than big sci-fi directors. “You look at him and you think he’s this big, macho dude,” says Mendelson. “But on the inside he’s basically a hippy flower child that just wants everybody to love everybody else.” Cameron said he re-issued Titanic in 3D not to cash in on the craze for the format after Avatar, but because it allowed men to cry safely behind the 3D glasses.
“As I try to figure out how to create real emotional stakes for the characters, my stories somehow always become love stories,” Cameron told Empire magazine in December. Not just love stories, but unapologetic love stories that you can devour over and over. The sinking of the Titanic and the destruction of Avatar’s Hometree are merely the backdrop for a story of good defeating evil and love triumphing over cynicism.
“He has this unerring ability to give moviegoers what they don’t even know they want and, crucially, have them come back for more – because you need audiences to go back again and again to hit this big,” says Phil de Semlyen, Time Out’s global film editor. “No one would claim his storytelling is innovative. But his secret sauce is that there’s always a heart beating beneath the spectacle.”
Ultimately, the combination of epic action and heartfelt sincerity may be the crux of it. Perhaps it’s the sincerity that is hardest to replicate, or maintain, in Hollywood. Beneath the veneer of all those pixels, there is something thoroughly old-fashioned in Cameron’s stories. Clearly, that is something that people still crave. They can get huge battles or groundbreaking effects elsewhere in the focus-grouped, carefully engineered efforts of other franchises. What Cameron, almost alone, seems to offer is the combination of new worlds and epic adventures with big, soppy love stories. If Pauline Kael was right and cinema is all about kiss kiss, bang bang, no one else comes close.
Cameron talks about how a regular person can be a hero. And Neytiri stuck with me right off the bat
Raymond Knowles
the bartenders’ white cuffs and collars – the Chippendales’ signature feature.
It unravels, of course, as these things always do. De Noia’s creative visions collide with Banerjee’s business focus. Resentments grow, Banerjee’s demons surface as his family in India do not approve of what they see as the eldest son’s ill-gotten gains, and soon we are hurtling towards disaster and the end of various short and not terribly happy lives.
There is a lot of potential here for an interrogation of sex-swapped stripping – in a patriarchal society, for example, can you exploit men in the same way as you can women? When most of the men feed off the attention of the women in the audience (and are frequently seen enjoying more of it backstage), instead of being stalked by the fear of it turning violent at any moment, is the job fundamentally different? Star Chippendale Otis (Quentin Plair) is uncomfortable with being kissed and touched by patrons and is told it’s part of the job – but is also accommodated in his wish to take more responsibility and be taught business basics by Banerjee. It’s hard to imagine the same trajectory being followed by a bunny in the Playboy mansion. Then again, Otis is omitted from the Chippendales’ first calendar because Banerjee thinks a picture of a naked black man will deter customers. Is racism more acceptable because it comes from a business decision by a man who, as he notes himself, is a victim of it every day?
Much is hinted at but never followed through. Welcome to Chippendales remains as superficial as the shiny tan on a dancer’s body. Only Bartlett brings any real heft to proceedings, capturing the deep loneliness of his life as a semi-closeted gay man who can’t even get his “acceptable” gifts fully recognised by his notional boss and who eventually plays the ultimate price when he finally finds love and the confidence to step out on his own.
The sleaze, glamour and general air of excess that hung about the 80s is nicely captured, and all eight episodes can be easily binged. But you do long for some depth, some nuance, and perhaps an actor less fundamentally gentle than Kumail Nanjiani, who might have captured more convincingly the darkness lurking in Banerjee’s soul.