James Cameron:Hollywood's 3-D visionary

By Matthew Garrahan 2009-12-23

In 1981 a young Canadian filmmaker got his first big break when he was asked to direct a cheap horror movie that featured ferocious flesh-eating fish and lots of bikini-clad women.

James Cameron has come a long way since working on Piranha II: The Spawning . The release this weekend of Avatar, his first film in a decade, has been hailed as a transformative event in modern cinema because it is the first live-action blockbuster to be filmed using 3D technology.

With a production and marketing cost of $425m (€297m, £264m), Avatar is among the most expensive films ever made. It is also a bet that audiences will respond to 3D - and that Mr Cameron, director of Aliens and the first two Terminator films, still has what it takes.

His track record suggests that he does. He steered his last movie, Titanic , to a haul of 11 Oscars and worldwide box-office takings of more than $1.6bn. Since then, he has lived and breathed Avatar - at a preview screening in Santa Monica two weeks ago, the 6ft 2in 55-

 year-old told the Financial Times that he had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision of an alien world populated by a long-limbed race called the Na'vi.

In his denim shirt and jeans, Mr Cameron, who these days has a mop of white hair, was most animated talking about the system he developed to create a life-like, computer-generated face modelled on the actor playing the part of the alien.

Personable and friendly, he was the antithesis of the reputation he has earned over the years as an obsessive perfectionist willing to push his cast and crew to unreasonable extremes.

Yet he admits he is not afraid to pull punches. "I'm not in this to phone it in and do mediocre work," he told CBS's 60 Minutes recently. In a sign of how he runs a set, there is a baseball cap in his office with the letters HMFIC on it (it stands for Head Mother F***er In Charge).

"He's a perfectionist who knows every single part of [the] movie-making process," says Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now California's governor, he first worked with Mr Cameron on Terminator . He originally wanted the role of Kyle Reese, the film's human hero, rather than the cyborg killer, but was convinced by Mr Cameron to switch parts. He worked with Mr Cameron on three films and considers him a good friend. "He's a driven guy, a disciplined guy," he says. "He blows up sometimes on the set and can be very demanding. But that is because he knows exactly what he needs and will fight for it until he gets it."

The director was born in Canada and spent his early years in a town close to Niagara Falls. At 17 his family moved to southern California. There, Mr Cameron decided to deviate from the path his father, an engineer, had set out for him. He dropped out of junior college and found jobs as a machinist and then a truck driver. "I just became this blue-collar guy," he told the New Yorker. "But I was constantly thinking as an artist, so I'm painting, drawing, writing, thinking about visual effects and filmmaking."

He spent time at the University of Southern California library, where he devoured books about the technical aspects of filmmaking. After making a short film with two friends he landed a job working for Roger Corman, the B-movie king, who nurtured the early careers of Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson and Ron Howard.

Film became a positive influence, blighted only by his desire for perfection. "I went from being this bum who liked to hang out and smoke dope by the river to this completely obsessed maniac," he once said.

If Corman taught him the basics, he has Stanley Kubrick to thank for sparking his interest in filmmaking. Seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of 14 had a profound effect on him and left him dreaming about making science fiction films.

But he has not limited himself to science fiction: Titanic was a historical love story written off by pundits and reviewers who had to eat their words when it broke box office records.

His wife, actress Suzy Amis, appeared in the film. Married five times, he may find himself competing for an Oscar next year against Kathryn Bigelow, one of his ex-wives. Her Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker is, like Avata r , a strong contender.

Strong female characters populate his work: think of Sigourney Weaver's gun-toting Ripley in Aliens , or Linda Hamilton's hard-as-nails Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day . "He likes to write about [women] and he likes to marry 'em," William Wisher, one of Mr Cameron's oldest friends, told the New Yorker recently. "If there's one or two themes that run through his life and work, that's at the top of the list."

 Perhaps more than any other working Hollywood director, his films push the technological boundaries of cinema. Avatar was shot using a new generation of cameras and computer technology pion