 Filmmaker: James Cameron
James Cameron is best known for his blockbuster hits like Titanic, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens, and True Lies. However, to Cameron's dissatisfaction about the distance, he began his life far away from Hollywood in Kapuskasing in Ontario, Canada. He was born August 16, 1954, but it wasn't until he was 15 that Cameron discovered what he wanted to do with his life. After attending Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cameron was amazed by what he had seen and desperately wanted to discover how the special effects had been created. He immediately found himself a 16mm camera and began to play with models, camera angles, lighting, etc. Nevertheless, he still had a long way to go.
When Cameron's father informed him that the family would be moving from their current home, in Chippewa, Canada (where the family had moved from Kapuskasing), to Orange Country California, just miles from Hollywood, because of a job opportunity, Cameron was thrilled. He dreamed of attending film school because he still knew nothing about cinema history and continued to experience limitations when it came to using the camera right. Unfortunately for Cameron, his family could not afford to send him to a four-year school, so he enrolled at Fullerton College to study Physics, and later English.
A few years later when Cameron saw Star Wars, he knew that he had to pursue his passion for film with everything he had. He spent days at the library reading everything he could find that related to film. He bought lenses and movie equipment to disassemble and study in order to find out how they worked. He became totally obsessed, which lead to the end of his first marriage. However, in 1979 he received his first opportunity in the film industry when some dentists hired him because they wanted to invest their money in movies for a tax break. Although this endeavor was unsuccessful, Cameron learned about writing a screenplay and plotting a film.
Cameron finally landed a job at New World Pictures as a miniature builder and began to work his way up the ranks. The director he was working with at the time, Roger Corman, was impressed by Cameron's ideas about making the special effects in the movie better. It was through this connection that Cameron later got the opportunity to direct Piranha 2: the Spawning, which turned out to be a bust. Cameron was not given the freedom he needed as a director and, after being barred from the editing process, he snuck into the editing room at night and made the best of a bad film. Around this time Cameron fell into a depression and had dreams of machines coming from the future to kill him. This idea later transformed into the film Terminator.
Cameron wrote the screenplay for Terminator purely for commercial purposes, to show people interested in working with him what he could do. John Daly at Hemdale Pictures ultimately agreed to back the production and allowed Cameron to direct it. While he was waiting for the work on Terminator to begin, Cameron began writing the script for Aliens. The sequel to the 1979 film by Ridley Scott, Alien, contained more action and more technical detail amidst a plot regarding soldiers on a mission in space. The producers of Aliens decided that they liked what Cameron had written thus far, enough so to wait for him to finish with Terminator before completing the remainder of the screenplay. They ultimately asked him to direct Aliens as well, and although Cameron still had many problems convincing the studio to promote Terminator to the extent the film deserved (Orion, in conjunction with Hemdale, only suggested that it would be the sci-fi movie of the week and expected it to last no longer than two), after it hit theatres in 1984 and Aliens followed in 1986, Cameron finally had the notoriety to work on any film he desired. Ten years later, in 1997, James Cameron finally received the recognition that he deserves when he received an Academy Award as Best Director for Titanic. Although Cameron went through a lot to get to that point, how he felt about all the hard work he put (and continues putting) into his career can be summed up in his statement at the podium that night: 'I'm the king of the world!'
Featured Film Schools:
|
