After interviewing James Cameron in his sun-drenched offices in Santa Monica, I drove away realizing that this boyish, unassuming guy who walks tightropes in his art, has an incredible desire to communicate—whether it be with his actors, his audience or with his own muses and demons. This man, who technically can “part the sea” in his film-making, yearns, it seems, to make us all feel what it is to be alive.
Cameron grew up in Niagara Falls and moved to Brea, California in 1971 to study physics at Fullerton College. In the early 1980s, he got a break with Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, moving his way up from building miniatures and painting mattes to working as a production designer and second unit director. His first major film, The Terminator, was made in 1984 for $6 million, and ended up grossing $80 million worldwide. He went on to write Rambo: First Blood Part II and Aliens, the sequel to Alien, which he later directed and was released in 1986. Next was the underrated underwater epic The Abyss (starring Ed Harris), shot in 1988-1989, followed by the megahit Terminator II (grossing $500 million worldwide) and the spy romp True Lies and the Academy-Award nominated 3D extravaganza, Avatar.
His films have been distinguished by trailblazing special effects, strong, often passionate writing, and striking economical performances (especially by women actors), but none has approached the narrative ambition, budget or acclaim of Titanic, which set a record in worldwide grosses and tied 1950’s All About Eve for a record number of fourteen Academy Award nominations. Titanic went on to win a total of eleven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.
No, I never did any acting. I was in the founding group of the Theatre Arts program at my high school but I went straight into the writing, directing, art direction roles. I was petrified to be on stage. I hated it. I hated getting up in front of the class to do a speech. Terrified. I still am. I don’t think I ever made the cognitive leap, at that age, that you get to hide within or behind a character so you think it’s not really you out there. A lot of actors can make that kind of dissociative step. I never could, so I never acted. But I wrote plays and I directed them. It’s strange, my career was really a confluence of many things. It took me a long time to sort it all out. I was a figurative artist when I was young. I drew comic books and painted pictures. I thought I might be an artist. Then I got interested in writing and I thought I’d be a writer. Or maybe I’d write some sort of illustrated thing. I was trying to tell a story, provide the narrative function, and use imagery at the same time. I didn’t quite know how to do that. I was doing theatre and then video production which, at that time— 1969, 1970—was brand new technology. To actually have a video camera and recorder in a school was really something. We had no editing equipment so it almost had to be shot like live TV was, back in the fifties. So I was coming at film from all different directions but it was all related to a narrative sense and wanting to tell stories.
Well, there was a big time lapse in there. For the first year of college, I continued with literature and video production but then I sort of thought, “I can’t get there. I can’t get to Hollywood.” I was living in Orange County. It sounds close but it isn’t. No one there was involved in the film business; it might as well have been another state. I gave up on it and decided I was going to be a scientist. I studied physics and engineering. Eventually, I got married, dropped out of school and drove a truck for a few years. I figured I’d probably be a writer and I should experience life and see some of the world. When I was twenty-four or twenty-five some friends of mine got in touch with a group of people who wanted to put up some money to do a very low budget feature. They asked me if I had any ideas. I got involved with their project and promptly took it over. From that point on I was very single-mindedly on the filmmaking track. I realized that was where I belonged. It was no problem staying up all night, every night, for as long as it took. It was that young perspective where you’re willing to sacrifice everything.
Yeah, it gets that way. But I think your ability and willingness to pull seven consecutive all nighters is reduced somewhat when you get into your forties. But there were some times like that on Titanic, especially toward the end. There was a period where I got four hours of sleep over the course of seventy-five hours. It’s fun doing that stuff every once in awhile, just not too often.
The thing that probably held me back, in a way, was that I didn’t really understand the acting process. I had been doing a lot of writing so I approached everything from a character’s perspective. You can know it all in your head but if you can’t give it to the actors in a way and at a rate that they can assimilate then it doesn’t matter. That came with time, I think. Even on Terminator, I still wasn’t very good at that, I don’t think. But I must have been good enough, because I look at that film and I think the performances are quite good, I just think it was a longer process. There was a lot more time spent in rehearsal. I spent a great deal of time working with the actors before we ever got on set. I don’t tend to do that as much, now.
I agree with that wholeheartedly. There’s the Sidney Lumet school of thought— which is to tape up the floor, mock up the set on a sound-stage, and rehearse like hell for four or five weeks. Like a play. If you’re not willing to go that far, where people have it so at their command that they can experiment from a position of strength, which is difficult on most film production schedules, then don’t go halfway because you’ll just stop in the middle of what I feel is the stale phase of rehearsal. What I do is I spend a couple of weeks on rehearsal and it’s usually pretty exploratory, character wise. We’ll do a read-through and have everybody just say the scene the way it’s written, just to see if there’s anything that’s just not going to work out loud. It also gives the actors the time to ask questions for a few days. Then we get to a much more creative level where we do basic representations of the set and break the scenes down into an improv version. On Titanic, it was particularly interesting to try doing the scenes in a contemporary idiom. That was really helpful for Leonardo DiCaprio who hadn’t done any period work at all. It was a little tricky for him to make the dialogue real. He had to think it in 1996 street-speak first, and then play it.
All the rehearsal time made for a really good process because, when we went into it, we weren’t trying to find it on set. We would have wasted a tremendous amount of time and energy and Leo would have always been insecure about his earlier work if the character hadn’t already developed. Because on a film, there’s no going back.
I’ve always tried, in every film that I’ve made, to celebrate positive aspects of human nature within an environment where there’s either a natural adversity or the negative aspects of human nature that threaten to overwhelm. I’ve been criticized for being sappy, maudlin, or melodramatic on every film I’ve made for that reason. But it’s easy to be hip. It’s much easier to be hip than it is to be earnest and emotionally honest in a film.
Once the audience knows the story and you know where it’s going, it’s not about what’s going to happen next. The intellectual part of your brain shuts down a little bit and—I’m guessing now—but I know how I feel when I see a film a second time and I know what’s coming, I look at those scenes differently. There’s a poignancy to it that reaches another level. I think that anybody who’s seeing the film for the first time gets that anyway because you know the ship’s going to sink. They don’t know who’s going to die and who’s going to live, but they know that tragedy is coming, and that it’s inevitable. It’s grinding toward them relentlessly. That’s the thing that appealed to me most about making the film. People have talked to me about all of the symbolism and metaphors and metaphor for technology and all of those things. For me it’s very simple; the ship is just a metaphor for mortality. Life is a situation where you know the end is coming but you’re not dead yet. What do you do in the meantime and how do you respond?
Oh, casting is critical. There are ninety-two speaking roles in Titanic and it’s through the casting that they all seem so unique and have a past. Casting is critical and writing is critical and if you’ve done those two things properly, you only have to go the last 20 percent of the way and get the best performance possible from the person saying those words. It occurred to me after going through this huge casting project on this film, that what I wound up selecting—out of all of the various possibilities—were people who had something inherently interesting about them, which gives you an illusion of back-story. It’s an indefinable thing and a very subjective thing. An actor should never feel rejected when they’re not cast. The subjective process going on in the mind of the director or producer finally making that decision is so particular to that individual.
I do a lot on tape first. I’ve been moving in that direction for the last couple of years, because film is a visual medium. I would never do it that way for theatre. But for film, it’s about how that person comes across on screen. Before I know them and talk to them about who they are, I want to have some initial impulse in my mind about how they come across on film. Then I can go to the other levels that I have to get to with any actor. First, who are they as a person? All of my films are long hauls and I always feel like I’m crewing up an expedition. I need to know if we’re going to get along. Then it’s, who are they as an actor? Can we communicate, are we easy together and will we be able to work together? The reason I don’t audition everybody right away is because I like to take a lot of time. I like to do a scene five, six, seven or eight times; whatever it takes. Actors think it’s strange because they’re used to doing a scene once and you’re gone. What can you learn from once? I have to give you the first three takes just so you’re comfortable and feel creative. That’s why I use the video process—I have to have some way of narrowing the field so that I can spend the time with the people I think might be right for the role. I think actors spend too much time trying to second guess what a particular filmmaker wants based on what they might know about them, or what they’ve seen in their work. You have to get past that. An actor should show you what they’ve prepared, but let’s not necessarily stick to just that. I want to see a sense of balance and flexibility. Who knows what’s going to happen when they go into the mix with other actors? A scene can have its own dynamic. Currents will start to flow through a scene and you’ve got to be ready to go with it. Sometimes, in an audition, you can sense when an actor’s coming in over-prepared and is too insecure to get past what they’ve already worked out. They’ve memorized the lines and their choices and they don’t hear the direction. It’s like they think if they move off of it, they won’t know what to do. What I’m looking for is someone who, if I throw them a bone, can catch it in their left hand or right hand. Emotionally speaking.
Now that I have a reputation—an incorrect reputation—for being a taskmaster, a lot of actors come to me with some trepidation and are usually amazed that it’s not that way. There’s been so much written about the making of my films, which are all hard and grueling films, that there’s a misinterpretation about the difficulty factor of the shooting. The physicality of the work gets mixed up with a kind of emotional domination of the cast. Actors are always coming to me with this sense of foreboding and then they’re surprised when they discover that I’m not a dictator.
It depends upon the individual. The way the human immune system works is that there are antibodies which will key into any organism that comes into the body. They will shape themselves to that organism. I think of directing as being an antibody; I have to reshape myself for each person on the set. The relationship is going to be different for every single actor on the set. Some are going to be most comfortable when you tell them exactly how you want them to play the scene and exactly what you want them to do. They’ll throw all of their willpower and all of their creativity into doing the best of that version. Others want to have time to explore a bit. Billy Zane, for example, is an explorer. He’d go to all points on the compass. I didn’t find that to be problematic at all. Even though I had written the script, I cast him because I thought he’d bring some dimensionality to the role. I thought he did and, unfortunately, he didn’t get as much credit for it as I thought he deserved. It was tough for him because his character never had a chance to be liked. His character represented a time and a set of values that don’t really exist anymore, which is why, I think, he got criticized for being a mustache twirler. But he was playing a vulnerability and imbalance that was created by his character’s inability to deal with his own feelings. Billy understood exactly what he was doing.
I throw new ideas at them. And there are different levels. There are times when an actor may never be satisfied with a scene. I remember working with Ed Harris in The Abyss. Ed was never satisfied with a scene and after the first few weeks I realized that was because there was a continual hunger there. His approach is to stay hungry. There’s always something better, something more. He’d be on take ten and have done on take eight, 200 percent of what I ever expected, and he’d be saying, “I’m floundering, help me.” That relationship was about working toward a goal, getting there, refining it, and then—in my mind and separate from my communication with Ed—realizing that I’d gotten it, and then for the next few takes working on Ed to get him to relax and know he had done something worthwhile. A lot of times I’d have to show him the monitor so he could see for himself. There is always a sense, in his mind, that he hasn’t gone far enough in the work. Leo and Kate are also like that, but they always knew when they’d gotten it.
Yeah, it took me a long time to realize that you have to give the “Atta boys” but you can’t go too far because if you do, no one will believe what you’re saying. The second I say, “Cut,” is when my work begins. We’ve just done a take, now what worked and what didn’t work? The first thing to say to the actor is, “What did you think about that?” never, “Oh baby, that was great!” because after a week of that, nobody’s going to believe a damned thing you say.
There are the God given qualities—the instrument, the eyes, the face, the voice, the body, a certain connection between the brain and the body, how you move your hands, how you act with your whole being. I think a lot of those things are innate. There needs to be a psychological constellation of things at your disposal; the ability to work hard, to concentrate and not be distracted, to focus. The most important thing, regardless of all of those other things—and certainly there are a lot of actors who are missing certain elements—the one thing you can’t get away without, is the ability to summon to the surface an emotional state which, we as a population are conditioned against from our earliest childhood. We’re conditioned not to cry, to be strong, not to show our feelings in public, and actors have to break through all of that conditioning and be in control of it at the same time. That’s what I find to be the great magic—to be able to summon the demon and then control it directly. It can’t just be wild and out of control because then you might get takes that may be at an inappropriate level. You’re acting over a period of time and all of the little pieces of the jigsaw need to go together to create a performance that will have a modulation to it that is perceived by the audience over the course of two or three hours. You’re doing this over the course of a six-month period. Film acting really diverges from stage acting at that point. You’re not building up energy over time to a peak, you’re having to dissect it into slices and know what slice you’re doing at any given moment in the shoot. The director has to help, in a way, by knowing what slice the actor is in so they don’t do too much or too little; so the slices all form the big picture. That’s where rehearsals are helpful—you have to know how far the actor can go and what they can create—to know what you’re going to look for when you get to that big cathartic scene. Otherwise, you might end up holding back too much.
Great acting is not the release of emotion; it’s the repression of the emotion, and it’s what leaks around the edges that’s most powerful. Sometimes I think that so much of the process is instinctive. Actors just do it. I don’t mean to take away from their training, but there’s a certain quality of acting that cannot be taught. At least for the best of them. For the great actors, it has to be there and it has to be instinctive.
I’ve never taken classes in directing, I just found my own way of doing it. For me it’s a learning experience every time I do a scene with a new actor. I’m always learning something. I can’t articulate it into a set of rules. There’s an instinctive psychological thing that happens. If I’m not feeling that emotion myself, I can’t articulate it. If I’m on the set as the director, I know why the characters are doing and saying what they’re doing. They have to be emotions that I’ve experienced at some point. I’m not saying that I could jump in front of the lens and recreate them visually for the world, but I can recreate them enough that I can somehow articulate or get across the feeling of what’s needed.
It’s insecurity. I think there’s an inherent insecurity on the part of actors and there’s an inherent confidence. They wouldn’t want to do it or be drawn to do it, otherwise. They wouldn’t be drawn to the act of standing up in front of other humans and trying to express something. Ray Bradbury calls it “the sublime ego,” which means that it is the beautiful thing in an artist that allows them to believe, however fleetingly, that they have something to say. It applies to painting, it applies to writing, to everything. If you don’t have some aspect of that sublime ego than you’re not going to be an artist. You’re not going to think that what you have to say is any more important than what anybody else says. I find that most actors have that and also a great insecurity. That insecurity fuels their greatness. I think it is those insecurities that create the great performances. If they didn’t have that, they’d be hacks. There’s nothing worse than an actor who’s so confident that they know exactly what they’re doing. Those actors are going to stay at a certain level and never go beyond it.
You might come in to shoot a scene four or five months after we’ve initially rehearsed it. For me, this is where the creative work really starts because now you’re in wardrobe, you’re on set, you have the environment. Especially on Titanic, but in all my films, the physical environment of the scene forms the staging of it, and the staging is such a critical aspect of how people are going to react to each other emotionally and how they’re going to express themselves. So what I usually do is ask everybody to come in before they’re dressed, I get some really basic lights on, and I send the crew out. Depending on the complexity of the scene, it may be only a couple of minutes or three or four hours, but there’s no other way to do it. I let the actors take the space. I’m not going to tell the actors where to go, although I may give them a rough idea. If you’re doing a dinner scene, for instance, somebody’s going to have to do the seating. Logistical stuff gets discussed, but I try not to impose what it might look like at this point. So we just play the scene a little bit and see what happens. You’ll see how people move, how they might relate to furniture, to each other, and you see interesting things. You have to learn that about a scene before you decide where someone might stand. You’ve got to start getting the scene on it’s feet and things will either happen by instinct or a process of exploration. What an actor chooses may completely change, from a director’s standpoint, how you set up the scene, but you don’t want to impose that stuff to start with, you just find what works best, unless there are physical limitations. You keep it very amorphous for awhile until things start to feel good, discoveries are made and people start to feel pretty confident. Then I say, “Okay, everybody go get dressed.” They usually leave the set with some bounce in their step because they know that they’ve got some definition as to where they’re going with it.
I think you have to keep the excitement level up. I used to sit outside the scenes and watch, but now I’m more involved with them. Sometimes I can also sense that I’ve taken the actors in a wrong direction and I tell myself to back off and let them find it. There are some directors who just sit back and let the actors work but I can’t do that. I trust them and if I screw up, I’ll know it. Like with Bernard Hill, who played the captain in Titanic. I eventually had to start operating the camera myself because he was doing stuff that was very subtle and I wasn’t seeing it on video. I kept thinking, “He’s like a stone, he’s not doing it.” So I’d go in and try to juice him up a little and he’d resist. He’d do it, but there was a sense that he didn’t think it was right. I wouldn’t see it until the dailies—because what he had done on the takes before I directed him were just the right level, but it was too subtle for the video to see. A lot of stuff in Titanic was like that and I wound up jumping on and operating the camera a lot more than I normally do, because there were nuances of performance and a sense of connection that I’d get with the performer doing it that way that I didn’t necessarily get watching the video monitor. My operator was a better operator than I am, but I would rather sacrifice perfect operating in order to see what was going on. It’s just being able to see really, really clearly what’s in the eyes and what’s in the nuances. I found that, with Gloria Stuart, I also wanted to get on the camera and operate because she was just so able to modulate the level of her emotions.
There are individual things with individual people that upset me and I just grit my teeth, but I try never to shout. It’s hard, because actors are probably the people who are most attuned to the states of other people. But there are times when I try to just grit my teeth when someone goes off to craft services for twenty minutes while the rest of the entire unit is standing around. For me, there’s a certain work ethic that I have that I know some actors don’t have. But I let the A.D.s [assistant directors] deal with that. It would compromise my artistic relationship with the actors to deal on that level. Sometimes I’ll deal with it jokingly, but there’s nothing that makes me really crazy. I can forgive just about anything. I think I have a good sense of how hard it is to get up in front of that cold, glass eye and be real, be truthful, be human—all of those things. To put yourself in that stripped down, vulnerable state over and over again. I think whatever it takes to get you there is worth it.
I’m tempted, now that I’ve got a little bit of down time, to join a workshop and do some acting myself. I know I’d be bad, but that’s not the point. It would improve my work as a director. I think by doing that, I can learn more about what actors need. The director’s job is to serve. With actors, it’s, “What can I do to help?” What can I do to be useful to you? What information do you need, what guidance do you need?” Sometimes it can be like throwing a ball back and forth really quickly. It’s not as intellectual a process as some people think. Not for me. It’s totally instinctive. Film running through the camera is the cheapest thing on the set so, if an actor wants to try something, I’m game. Journalists get it all wrong. They think that a director who goes through a lot of takes is inherently hard on actors. That’s backwards. When I walk on a set, I say, “Let’s just start shooting, we’ll use it as rehearsal,” we may be on take five before we even really start shooting. I make film the cheapest resource.
I try to get that out of the way from the beginning. And I’ve never had an actor say to me, “Why do we need to do that again? What didn’t I do?” I’ve also been fortunate in that I’ve never had a scene where one actor peaked in three takes and the other one didn’t get warmed up until take ten. Then you’re really messed up. Maybe that’s part of the audition process and seeing if they can build. I like actors who can make a discovery in take three, keep it and build on it. There’s always the sense of holding out for magic. Sometimes it comes. And sometimes it comes on take twelve. It probably took five hours to light the shot so what’s three minutes for another take? The only person who suffers is the person in the next scene who’s waiting to go on.
This film was so big. There was so much technical stuff, so much organizational stuff and so many people; I kept having to remind myself why I did this film. I did this film because I thought that event, that story, offered an opportunity as a filmmaker to deal with the full spectrum of human emotion in a way I’d never really gotten to do before. Everyday, I’d be driving up to this giant ship and I’d have to say, “It’s not about the ship.” On this film we made it our goal to make the emotions first, the performances first and everything else was second. On the top of this massive, technical mountain were the people, their emotions— really, just the simplest things.