Terminator 2: Judgement Day was revolutionary for its use of CGI. The villain in the film, the T-1000, was envisioned by Cameron as a form of liquid metal and required cutting-edge effect shots. “We eventually wound up with 42 CGI shots, and it took a year and was very, very challenging to get the very last shots done,” Cameron says. “We’re just finishing up Avatar 3 with 3,500 CGI shots. So that’s a huge leap across three-plus decades.”
Cameron’s next film, True Lies, was an action comedy—a tonal departure from his previous work. So was Titanic, which, in Cameron’s telling, was born after he walked into Fox exec Peter Chernin’s office with a photo of the Titanic and said, “It’s Romeo and Juliet on that.” He just needed $120 million to make the film.
“I cast Kate [Winslet] very quickly,” Cameron says. Getting DiCaprio proved to be more difficult. He didn’t want to do the project, even though everyone around him said he should; he didn’t feel the role was challenging enough. “He didn’t want to just be handsome young Leo,” the director says. “He signed on to do the movie when I told him he wasn’t ready to do the film.”
Technology had to catch up with Cameron before he could realize his vision for Avatar, which he originally wrote in 1995. The first Avatar pioneered performance-capture techniques; the newest entries in the series perfected the technology. “We spent a lot of money on research and development,” Cameron says. “Every nuance, every glance, every tiny little bit of eye movement, everything the actors did would be preserved. So we spent three years and $40 million perfecting that before we ever worked with actors.”
What’s been consistent throughout Cameron’s career is his desire to keep learning. “I’m just fascinated by any kind of challenge,” he says. “I don’t want to do anything that I’ve done before.”
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Set design, Viki Rutsch. Produced on location by Preiss Creative. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
