Gallic cinephiles gave James Cameron a hero’s welcome at a Paris masterclass on Thursday, ushering the action auteur onstage with a reception so thunderous that it shook the filmmaker’s oft-unflappable public demeanor.
“That’s the record,” he said in between laughs and in a show of uncommon giddiness. “That’s the record for the longest applause I’ve ever had in my life. Thank you. This is a high point of my career!”
The event kicked off a new exhibition at Paris’ Cinematheque Française that positions Cameron as a graphic artist who draws inspiration from his own subconscious. Running until January 2025, “The Art of James Cameron” showcases more then 300 paintings, etchings and production designs pulled from Cameron’s private collection, signed by the filmmaker’s own hand, and exhibited as a kind of career retrospective.
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“I wasn’t involved in the layout or the design or any of that,” Cameron told the audience as the applause finally dimmed. “So when I [first] walked through I thought, ‘Wow, this is my whole journey. It all makes sense to me, now for the very first time.’”
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Dreams and Nightmares
While Sigourney Weaver flanked her longtime collaborator at the exhibition’s opening vernissage, “Proxima” director Alice Winocour stepped in to lead the talk. Still, the star actress remained a prime subject of conversation – leading to an endearing connection between the two filmmakers.
After Winocour said that she wrote many of her scripts sitting below a framed photo of Weaver as Ellen Ripley, Cameron revealed he had done the very same, writing “Aliens” for an actress he had yet to meet while taking inspiration from her photo.
And though the sequel’s visual universe built on the designs of H.R. Giger, the incoming director made sure to leave his own mark on the material by introducing the Alien Queen. “I think Giger was a little disappointed that we didn’t hire him,” said Cameron, listing off the various biomechanoid features that made the new villain such chilling addition. “But I had so many ideas about what I could do in that same area.”
The director also mined a particularly vivid nightmare for the scene in “Aliens” where Ripley realizes she’s in the egg-chamber with the angry Queen, or as Cameron puts, “the exact wrong place to be.”
“[I remembered a dream] where I went into a dark room with every square inch of the walls and ceiling covered in wasps, and I knew that if I moved or tried to escape, they would attack me dead,” he recalled. “Every horror film must go to the deepest and worst place in the subconscious [because] that’s the point. That’s what you to pay your money for.”
‘Avatar’ and Beyond
Given the event’s reflective and retrospective context, Cameron offered little new information about his three upcoming “Avatar” sequels. However, he reassured the audience that work on Part 3 is coming along for an intended late 2025 release and that the scripts for the subsequent volleys are finished, the designs nearly locked and 3D modeling just about to begin.
As for other pursuits, the filmmaker once again brought up his plans to produce a remake of the 1966 tour-through-the-human-body “Fantastic Voyage,” a project Cameron and his partner Jon Landau have toyed with for over a decade.
“We’ve been developing it for a number of years, and we plan to go ahead with it very soon,” Cameron said. “Raquel Welch is not available, but we think we can make a pretty good movie.”
Hope and Dread
Without giving any more specifics, Cameron perhaps offered a thematic clue when describing his appreciation for science fiction as a conduit for both hope and dread.
“Science fiction allows us to imagine futures that can emerge from our present day,” he said. “When ‘Star Wars’ came along, science fiction seemed to suddenly become very upbeat, [all about] entertainment and adventure. But the history has always been about warning, about the misuse of technology and the misuse of science.”
“Who gets to decide what’s good for humanity?” he asked. “Machine intelligence will only be a reflection of us. It’ll be us with all our flaws and all of our potentially evil intentions. Yes, that can be good, but the atomic scientists of the 1930s believed [they would unlock] an infinite power source that would abolish starvation… Instead we got Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War. This is what concerns me.”
Taste for Risk
Reflecting on a career path that began with schlock before building toward some of the highest grossing – and most expensive – films of all time, Cameron saw a clear throughline in his taste for risk.
“The more established you become, the more you risk losing what you’ve already gained,” he said. “But I also think that the greatest risk you can make is not trying something new and different. There’s a tendency, when the budget gets bigger, to start to go for the lowest common denominator – and you cannot do that.”
“Doesn’t seem like it anymore, but in the moment ‘Titanic’ was extremely risky,” he continued. “It was a bunch of women in corsets and hats, a three-hour period drama where everyone dies, including the main characters. That was not what the studio wanted. They didn’t believe in the film. They thought we were going to completely lose our ass!”
