Roundtable: The Career of James Cameron Part 2 (1992-2021)

Anton: As we discussed in our previous Roundtable, we’ve opted not to categorize Cameron’s career by some of the usual forms, be it decade or early/middle/late phases. Instead, in part 1, we charted his ascent to the top of Hollywood. Part 2 is going to look at his career going forward on the plateau of mega-director-producers, up there with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and those few other names that have controlled blockbuster filmmaking over the past several decades.

Once Cameron had finally and firmly made it to the top, what did he do? In some ways, in this new phase, financial resources were perhaps less of a strain upon Cameron than audience expectations and maintaining his status as one of the greatest and most successful directors. Cameron’s ability to walk that line, in spite of each production cycle coming with another prediction about his demise, is quite remarkable. In a sense, this is the “King of the World” phase.

Changing Directions in the 1990s

Anton: The 1990s after T2 are kind of weird for Cameron. He seems to be consciously setting aside the science fiction genre in order to bring his talents and technical interests to new avenues. We get a spy movie romp that brings in domestic romance and satire, followed by a full-on romance in the form of a historical epic. Both these films, although distinct in many ways, share characteristics with the previous works.

As well, after the success of T2, the big question that critics and fans asked of each new Cameron movie was, will this finally sink Cameron? He is notorious for delays and going over budget, which has always fed into this dynamic. This really only applies to the blockbusters though.

Anders: Aren’t all of Cameron’s non-documentary films blockbusters? Maybe that’s what you’re saying. 

Anton: Yeah, exactly. So not Expedition: Bismarck, and Ghosts of the Abyss, and Aliens of the Deep.

Anders: It’s very interesting that he moves away from science fiction, as you note, but still at that same scale. Both True Lies and Titanic were the “most expensive movies” of their respective periods, but each made their money back easily, though obviously Titanic was at a whole other level.

Aren: It’s kind of fascinating to examine how the idea of the unpredictable, whether in terms of genre or economic impact, would become a calling card for Cameron after Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Anton, you point out how he pivots to genres that people didn’t expect him to work in, comedy and epic, and then when he’s the king of the world in terms of box office success after Titanic, he leaves fiction filmmaking behind for a decade to explore the ocean and make documentaries. When he finally returns to science fiction with Avatar, people think he’s going back to his roots, and he is, in a way, but he’s also making this environmentalist epic with newfangled CGI. He’s again giving people something they didn’t expect—as he says in Aliens of the Deep, you’ve got to expect the unexpected. It’s like he takes that as a storytelling directive on how to appeal to popular movie audiences.

Anton: Yes, it seems like a conscious choice to not keep redoing what he did in the 80s and very early 90s.

Anders: Anton, you mentioned that Cameron “set aside” the science fiction genre, even though you describe Titanic in your review as a kind of “time travel” film. And True Lies contains moments as unbelievable as anything in his science fiction films.

But I think of the move away from science fiction for those two films as more of a refining and stripping away, which clarifies and sharpens Cameron’s thematic interests. Both True Lies and Titanic put the love story—which was there in all his films, whether it was romantic love or familial or both—front and centre in a lot of ways. They also both show how technical skills and innovation don’t only apply to science fiction scenarios. Though each is an action film and disaster picture respectively.

Anton: Yes, I would say that although Titanic is a movie obsessed with technology and one about time travel, it’s not about time travel as a science fiction element. It’s expanding what we mean by time travel beyond the stories, like The Terminator, which made it a common-enough idea in modern storytelling.

I hear what you are saying about True Lies and Titanic revealing the core family and romance stories upon which he builds the rest of his narratives. But I still think True Lies is a weird follow-up. I don’t think that Cameron is actually great at managing the satirical tone. He’s too earnest. But it’s also another of his Arnold movies, so it continues previous trends with the casting too.

Anders: I like True Lies more than you do. I find it very entertaining, even if I think it’s his weakest non-documentary feature as I noted in my review. But I agree that satire isn’t the best fit for Cameron. He’s too earnest a person for that. True Lies then feels slightly split between the satire of the spy genre and the more screwball, romantic plot. I think Cameron shoots amazing action scenes throughout the film, but the central portion of the film involving Harry’s surveillance and “recruitment” of Helen is the strongest bit, thematically and script wise.

The film almost doesn’t have a hard enough edge to be really satirical, and so the spoof of spy stuff—Harry as super spy, Helen accidentally shooting the terrorists when she drops the Uzi, etc.—become farcical.

Aren: Yeah, True Lies is a strange film because it blends a lot of stuff that doesn’t intuitively fit in a single feature film. It’s screwball, but also epic in length. It’s a satire, but also a full-blown action extravaganza. It’s a romance, but also a spy film. Its tonal mismatch is what makes it more akin to Hong Kong cinema than anything else we get from Cameron, but there isn’t a mastery of the material here as you get in his other films. He’s on uncertain ground in a lot of ways and that uncertainty shows in the material.

To be clear, I really like True Lies, but I agree it’s his weakest fiction film (not including Piranha II). It doesn’t have the fast pace of a true screwball comedy or the critical approach towards its characters that you need for a focused satire. Cameron is too interested in the action and the spy theatrics, too concerned about entertaining the audience, to really hone in on any of these elements. Thus, it’s the biggest curiosity of his career. It’s also the one film of his where cutting 20 to 30 minutes would greatly improve it. But it still works.

Anton: I really do believe that Cameron makes movies that are sometimes too long, and True Lies definitely is. 

Cameron’s Underwater Years

Anton: For a good part of the 2000s, it seems, Cameron wasn’t living in California and working in Hollywood; he was living at sea and working under the ocean. The other pillar of this second period for Cameron is his documentaries, exploring the ocean depths. Expedition: Bismarck, Ghosts of the Abyss, and Aliens of the Deep weren’t expected to be big hits. Rather, they showcase Cameron as increasingly someone who is making advances and doing things not just in the world of cinema. 

Anders: I enjoyed watching the documentaries, if only because of the subject matter and the obvious care and dedication that Cameron puts into these missions is so inspiring. As we noted earlier, Cameron is very earnest, and if his documentaries seem a touch “pedestrian” (I prefer to think of them as “accessible”), it is because he’s not consciously presenting an “essay” or pushing an agenda. He’s exploring questions, probing the mysteries of the deep and the human experience, which are fairly straight forward.

Anton: Yeah, they are straightforward, but what they depict, straightforwardly, is the feature: whether it’s the wrecks of the Bismarck or the Titanic or the strange organisms that are able to live in the dark depths of the ocean. I don’t think they need to do more than that, because most documentaries do not feature things so fascinating in and of themselves. They are very much movies about people trying to capture shots of those things too, and then us seeing the reactions on the faces of the crews, both in the submersibles and on the ships, who are watching. In that sense, they are Cameron’s films about movie-making and the cinematic gaze.

Aren: In some ways, I think these documentaries are the “small and personal” films that he mentions people always ask him about potentially making in the recent GQ profile. These films allow him to focus on things that he’s passionate about, to avoid the big scale spectacle, and to show more of himself on screen. Sure, these are about history and science, about undertaking adventurous endeavours, but they also are about Cameron as a person, about what drives him. We see his family, we focus on what motivates him as a storyteller, and we get a sense of him as a person. These documentaries are very much about their subjects of discovery: the Bismarck, the Titanic, deep-sea ocean life—but they are also about Cameron, as a person, as an artist, as a technician. They are his small, kind-of indie films.

Anton: I watched all three in a matter of days, I found myself having become very fond of the crew members and really enjoying hanging out with Cameron and them.

Going to Space and an Alien Moon with Avatar

Anton: Anders, I liked how, in your review of Aliens of the Deep, you noted that the documentary anticipates, with its comparison between extreme forms of life on Earth and those that might live elsewhere, the next blockbuster that Cameron was slowly cooking up. 

So, I’m curious. When was the last time you saw Avatar before revisiting for the purposes of this retrospective. Had it been a long time, or not, and what effect did that have on your revisiting? I had not seen it since theatres in 2009. I feel like I truly did not remember many details. 

Anders: I only ever saw Avatar in the theatres, in 3D (but not IMAX) back in 2009. I didn’t see it subsequently, though for some reason I think I’ve seen clips of the extended cut elements and was a bit confused if I’d seen them in theatres or not.

Aren: It had been a decade since I had watched Avatar. I saw it three times in theatres during its initial run (all in 3D) and then the following August during its re-release with the first extended cut. I think I watched the Extended Collector’s Edition when I bought it on Blu-ray, with the full three-hour runtime. So I remembered a lot about the film. Even though it had been a while since I had seen it when I went in September for the IMAX re-release, I remembered all the details very clearly.

Anders: Watching Avatar is, as Aren notes, dreamlike. What version did I see? It’s hard to remember.

But regardless, revisiting it in IMAX 3D this fall, with my boys in tow, and in the new 4K upgrade, did feel like a bit of a revelation. I had always thought the film was good, if not great, but I was kind of blown away. I can’t really argue against someone who hates the film, though I may kind of look at you like a person who doesn’t like dogs even if I understand your criticism of the hair and drool. I may actually think you have a diminished capacity to feel. I’m only half-joking.

This re-watch of the film was emotionally charged in a way my first viewing wasn’t, where I was mostly impressed with the visual effects and action. I guess I’ve changed. I’ve become a father. The environmental and anti-colonial themes hit harder. But honestly, the film left me just dwelling on it for days again, wanting to recapture the emotional experience of the film, and wanting to talk about it with people who appreciated it as I did this time. I was kind of itching to watch it again. Though, I kind of felt that way with Titanic this time as well.

Anton: I did not have that experience watching the film, but it was also the first time I’ve seen the movie on home video, not 3D. I think that’s something.

I went back to my movie journal notes from 19 December 2009. I had written, in part: 

Avatar is a singular, amazing filmgoing experience!  Quite simply, I have never seen anything like seeing it on IMAX in 3D. . . .  James Cameron’s Pandora is such a beautiful, visionary planet that we don’t think about what’s real and what’s not during the film.  The illusion works supremely.  Our disbelief is not just suspended; it is thrown to the sticky theatre floor covered with popcorn.  First and foremost, Cameron has crafted an experience: he aims for our senses and hearts, and he succeeds in those areas.  However, I was a little disappointed with the not very original story and the simplistic themes about harmony with nature.

My journal indicates that I had come around a bit more to the story after my second and final viewing in theatres:

I’m very interested in the idea of the avatar, which is indeed the unique spin on the familiar story that many complain is missing. . . . The third act is certainly weaker, but is that because the ending breaks away from the simulation of reality? If Tarantino gets to act out his revenge fantasy in Inglourious Basterds, Cameron should be allowed to complete his nature fantasy, with the natural world literally fighting back and winning, something that will never happen in real life.

I’ll return to that idea. That this is a work of fantasy, of yearning for an alternative to reality.

Watching it now, I think the CGI looks great on a 4K television. Nothing looks flat or fudged. I understand the message and story Cameron is trying to tell, but I’m just not entirely caught up with it. I basically endorse the critique of modernity, which is to say, humankind’s current dominance by avaricious technocratic colonialism, but I do not buy the film’s solution. I don’t feel awe or the rousing intense emotional engagement either of you are describing. I remember that after Dune last year, where it lingered around in my head for weeks or months. 

Now, Avatar’s a good movie and a technical marvel, but I do think the story is unsurprising to the point of being dull, as if the narrative is just a template to hold together all the other stuff that is going on. The romance is pretty standard in every way, and Jake is a pretty uncharismatic protagonist. I understand that he is a character who is starting out at rock bottom, and Sam Worthington is good at that part. The problem is that I don’t believe that he becomes the great warrior who brings the clans together. And so, while the special effects continue to make me believe, I do not believe all the narrative arcs I see on screen.

Aren: That’s a fair comment, but I do think the simplicity of the story is a part of its universal appeal. It’s straightforward in terms of plotting, but all the components of that specific story are very unique.

One distinct thing that has happened in the intervening years is that the Avatar graphics have become more impressive over time. They were mindblowing at the time, but they look even better in contrast to all the films made in its wake. As I point out in my review, there’s no murk. There’s no hiding stuff in shadows and dust in the frame. There’s just clarity and light and depth. Man, contemporary Hollywood, best embodied by the MCU, is the successor to Avatar like so many movies were successors to Star Wars. But it learned all the wrong lessons. 

Anton: That’s an intriguing point. Care to elaborate?

Aren: I break it down in more detail in my review, but just as so many blockbusters in the 80s saw themselves as inheriting the legacy of Jaws and Star Wars, so many actually learned the wrong lessons. They played to the commercial instincts of nostalgia and playing on emotion and big marketing campaigns, on the concept of the blockbuster as an approach to cinematic storytelling, on how you could really lean into these big, broad storytelling tropes and advertise the hell out of a movie and you might be guaranteed a hit. They didn’t really tap into the mythic qualities of Star Wars or capture the character-based storytelling of Jaws that really plays to four quadrant audiences. And the same goes for the MCU nowadays, which learned all the wrong lessons from James Cameron’s world-building and world-shattering digital vision.

Anders: It’s not even that I think it’s the best franchise world, but I think what you’re saying is a strength. 

Anton: What do you mean by that? You don’t think Avatar is the best franchise world? There’s other franchises you prefer, surely, unless you’ve totally lost it.

Anders: No, you know Star Wars is still my favourite cinematic franchise. What I mean is it may not be my favourite cinematic franchise, but it might be the pinnacle of blockbuster storytelling. Maybe I don’t want more “Intellectual Property.” In fact, I’m kind of glad there was such a long period between the films. This sequel doesn’t seem like a franchise “extension” or a cash grab. It feels like a genuine return. It’s more like a T2 situation, or even The Phantom Menace—I understand that comparison doesn’t track for people who hated The Phantom Menace, but there’s a sense of excitement and the return of something that had only lived in our imaginations for almost a decade and a half (as an aside, man does time fly when you get older. It’s been 13 years since Avatar. It was 16 years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. Those don’t quite feel like comparable gaps).

Anton: So you guys think Avatar is a pinnacle in franchise movie-making. I don’t. Do you think that Avatar is the summation of Cameron’s career and interests?

Aren: It’s not the pinnacle of franchise movie-making, but it does seem like the Platonic ideal of the tentpole special effects extravaganza. If blockbuster movies are events, nowadays, and digital spectacles, then Avatar is the movie that other blockbusters must be compared against.

As for it being a summation, for starters, there’s the opening lines about needing to wake up. If we examine Cameron’s documentaries as outlining some of his personal interests, if we look at Titanic and T2 as capturing his philosophy towards technology, we can see the synthesis of all these elements in Avatar, which is about the liberating capacity of technology to change the world that technology is destroying. Cameron is using blockbuster storytelling to convey his personal moral worldview, about environmentalism, about anti-imperialism, about curiosity and joy of the natural world. There are many lines in the movie that sum up Cameron, perhaps the key one being Mo’at’s comment about seeing if Jake’s insanity can be cured. This insanity is our modern way of thinking.

Anton: Just as Cameron laments the insanity of people building the tools for a nuclear holocaust in The Abyss.

Anders: Yes, the waking up thing is really key. It’s obviously a lot like The Matrix, actually, with its final urge to those listening to “Wake Up,” as the Rage Against the Machine song plays at the end.

Aren: Yeah, Avatar is truly building on The Matrix in many ways, just as The Matrix is building on The Terminator films. But unlike The Matrix, the message in Avatar isn’t subjective. Its lessons are concrete: stop destroying the earth, stop pursuing profit, respect nature, and empower people who live in harmony with nature. Cameron really does want people to understand we live on Pandora.

Anders: Yes. It’s not about the subjective nature of reality. This isn’t Descartes’s demi-god tricking us. I remember between my two viewings of Avatar, 13 years apart, one of my reservations about the film, one of the things that slightly bugged me about the movie, was I felt it kind of embraced the mind-body dualism philosophy of The Matrix in having Jake enter the “avatar.” Now, I don’t subscribe to dualism as a philosophy, even though I do like The Matrix a lot. But as you point out, Aren, in Avatar, the world he’s entering is more real, it’s not the “desert of the real” that Morpheus describes. The film is about repairing our relationship to reality, exchanging the empty, exploitative reality of the Earth we’ve destroyed for a more real-reality. It’s a redemptive narrative.

Anton: Interestingly, if The Terminator lays the hard, strong basic concept upon which basically every robot apocalypse in pop culture builds, then The Matrix is one of the most important conceptual layers built on top. And it brings in a biotech angle, with human bodies providing the energy for the robots, and virtual reality. 

Now Avatar is not a robot apocalypse movie. But it does caution against our destructive technologies, and more importantly the rapacious vices driving them, but its solution involves biological transhumanism, involving a sort of biological virtual or remote reality—think of the terms, “virtual” and “remote,” in the way that we talk about them during Covid for matters of distant communication—and a kind of biological, ecological internet. We get Pandora, with its interconnected trees forming a planetary brain, and Skynet, who uses global communications. Does that make Eywa a light goddess equivalent to the dark god Skynet? (On a side note, I will say that I also do not buy an ecosystem in which, it seems, most plants and animals come with their own USB plugs and ports; upon rewatch, that’s more than a little contrived.)

I also don’t think Pandora is Earth, or I don’t know what you mean by that. That we have to see the world as if it were like Pandora, to re-enchant it, curing it of our modern disenchantment? I’m more inclined to think that Earth in Avatar is Earth today.

All this is to say that, with Avatar, we also get Cameron’s most comprehensive statement of philosophy, how he views the world. Unlike the Wachowskis, Cameron is more pantheist than gnostic. 

Anders: Yes, he’s not a gnostic. He’s definitely more of a pantheist. 

Aren: He’s a biological materialist. And thus a spiritual materialist. 

Anders: So, he wouldn’t see Jake’s eventual becoming Na’vi as dualist, since all life is connected. Literally.

Anton: So, in some ways, Cameron almost has elements of monism, like Milton. There is no “spirit” and “matter” divide. But Milton places them in a hierarchy, saying that what we call the “spiritual” is closer to God. In Milton, everything is basically atoms too.

Anders: So he’s like Spinoza too, the other great monist. Contrary to Descartes, Spinoza believed that the world was comprehensible and that we could discover its true nature, which would resolve the contradictions. And for Spinoza, “God” and “nature” are one. 

Anton: In any case, for Cameron, when he talks about “energy,” he means both energy, in a Physics sense of the word, and energy, in a New Age or Chinese philosophy medicine sense (qi or chi, life force), but it is still all materialist.

Anders: In our first roundtable, I commented on how Cameron does believe that technology is one of the ways we can come to understand the world. He’s interested in the way technology can allow us to inhabit other environments. That is, the study of cybernetics and the cyborg as a “cybernetic organism” that uses technology to increase our capacity for communication and the feedback systems of nature. Folks like the anthropologist Margaret Mead suggested “cybernetics” as feedback that crosses between disciplines, or even cultures. So, there’s a lot of philosophical and academic predecessors here, but for our purposes, let’s note that in Avatar, the Na'vi “avatars” are a kind of advanced form of cyborg tech that allows humans to live and communicate on Pandora. But because of Cameron’s pantheism, to embrace the cyborg interconnects you into the whole of Pandora’s life, granting a possible connection to Eywa.

Anton: So the technology bridge divides, allowing humans to live in the inhospitable (for them).

But the connections to Milton go further, or rather the whole early modern period, when new European advancements in exploration and travel and materialist thought led to the start of the Scientific Revolution as well as the European colonial conquest of much of the globe. I think Avatar is engaging with that whole question, with its treatment of an Indigenous alien people.

In my academic life, I study the familiar and the strange as concepts that govern how we think and engage experience. Another thing that Cameron does is bring in how the alien-human encounter in sci fi is basically a parallel to all these accounts in the original travel narratives. We can’t conceptualize the strange, so it defines those first encounters.

Anders: Great point about the alien invasion parallel. That’s there in other sci-fi texts, such as War of the Worlds, which inverts the colonizer-colonized situation, kind of “what if aliens colonize Earth the way we (British) have colonized other lands?” But Avatar puts the humans back into the colonial role.

Anton: And The Martian Chronicles. But that’s where Avatar is really weird as a “colonial” encounter. Going in the body of the Other.

Aren: Yes, Jake Sully doesn’t “go native.” He literally becomes a Na’vi, shedding his old human body and fully merging with the Na’vi.

Anders: Exactly. You have to be literally “born again.” Die to the old flesh, to use Christian language.

Anton: It’s almost a yearning for a prelapsarian approach to the legacy of colonialism, which goes hand in hand with his repudiation of the “modern” approach to nature, as something to be controlled, exploited, and remade for human benefit. It is an anti-Baconian text.

Anders: Aren notes that basically Pandora is Earth. It’s an unspoiled Eden.

Anton: So I will agree with that. It’s a prelapsarian Earth, or at least, what that would look like for Cameron.

Aren: Pandora is basically Perelandra (Venus) from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. There are so many science-fiction antecedents for Avatar, not only the ones you guys have noted, but also the ones I mention in my review, like A Princess of Mars and The Word for World Is Forest and Stranger in a Strange Land. The colonial encounter is a foundational block for science-fiction storytelling. Even think of Star Trek: the Federation offers a utopian vision of how human civilization can work and the Prime Directive and rules of first contact are idealized forms of how humans should encounter distinct races and cultures. It offers a corrective to how humanity has so long treated discovery and cultural exchange.

Anton: So Cameron is yearning for another way that things could have gone, when the Old and New World collided, and also how that colonizing mindset manifested not just towards peoples but, often as the original motivators, towards the natural word and its resources, its so-called commodities, the “things to be used.” So much science fiction, about exploration, and discovery, and seeing new worlds and new peoples, is the modern Western world confronting that aspect of its history. Technology involves enhancing our ability to control and modify nature. The first encounters and colonization narratives get back to the origin of this modern world, which is bound up with science but also with colonization and the exploitation of the world. Avatar is about all of this.

Cameron and Special Editions

Anton: With Avatar and its extended cut, which I haven’t seen, I thought it would be worthwhile to bring this together and comment on the special editions in his work, and the re-releases, such as Titanic in 3D. Like Spielberg or Lucas, he’s a director who does continue to engage with earlier work, although not from the distance of the Star Wars special editions.

Anders: As I said earlier, I’ve only seen the theatrical version of Avatar, but the clips I’ve seen of the extended versions have slid into my dreams of the film.

I noted in my review of The Abyss that Cameron “learned his lesson” about trusting test audiences and cutting material that he thought was important. The Abyss is a really more cohesive and thematically coherent film in its extended cut. The theatrical version just loses too much of the plot.

Anton: I think the Aliens special edition is inferior, while The Abyss is superior.

Anders: Agreed. The Aliens special edition brings in unnecessary thematic repetition (making Ripley a literal mother) and ruins the pacing and introductions of Newt and the colony.

Aren: Agreed on those counts. I think the Avatar theatrical cut is the best, since the pacing is exceptional in it. It also has the key cut from Jake’s dream to him waking up from cryo on the spaceship orbiting Pandora. In the extended cut, we see Earth, which does add to the vision of humanity’s desecration of its home, but you almost don’t need it, since Jake talks about Earth in a way that we understand the destruction.

We also connect that he’s talking about Earth as our current Earth, one that we are mining, literally, for all its worth, so it might be more effective for Earth to be entirely offscreen (except for the flashback of Jake accepting the mission), since the viewer can just slot in the current world they live on for the one that Jake left behind.

Anton: That sounds right to me.

Anders: Yeah, you just travelled through it to see the film and you’ll have to return to it after.

Cameron As Author: Genesis Stories and Inspiration

Anton: Each of our reviews has talked a bit about the creative process for Cameron. It’s funny how with many if not most of his movies, Cameron can pinpoint a particular moment of inspiration for them. Whether or not we entirely buy his accounts of his creative process, what do we make of this? There is something about his works having a strong sense of being fully-formed, in spite of the combination of different elements. We talked about him being high concept, but it’s never that his works are a mix-match or pastice. He really synthesizes things and makes them his own. He forces his signature onto everything.

Anders: Yeah, from the dream that spurred The Terminator, to the short story he wrote as a kid that became The Abyss, to the kismet of watching A Night to Remember and getting an invite to a Titanic documentary that spurred his own film about the ship, Cameron is often inspired by these kinds of visceral experiences. Aliens and True Lies are the only films with other people’s material as the primary inspiration.

Aren: Anton, I think you outline it right there, when you say that he forces his signature onto his work. Cameron has a commanding, totalizing vision, so it’s important for him to prove that his films are a result of his own creativity. It’s born out of ego, but not in the way people may sometimes think—his “King of the World” speech at the Oscars made everyone think he was an egomaniac.

Anders: As an aside, that always puzzled me. Did people not remember that line from the movie?

Anton: Looking back, is it not that everyone was just envious. He was the king that night.

Aren: It’s more that he doesn’t want someone else taking credit for his work, nor does he want someone else shaping it. He is confident in his vision and wants to live and die with the success of that vision. He’s lucky enough (or smart enough, depending on how you want to look at it) to have never made a film that was a failure, aside from Piranha II. So he has been proven right time and again. 

Anders: Cameron is really keen on letting people know that these are his ideas. And he’s not going to be blackmailed into giving someone money who claims to have had his ideas first.

Aren: Perhaps it’s becoming cliche at this point for me to draw things back to Piranha II once again, but that film truly is the instructive lesson for Cameron as an artist. He had a film taken away from him and then its failure was blamed on him despite his lack of creative control of the process. He said never again, and was determined to ensure that every film he made after that one was his. Clearly, the refusal to compromise has worked well for him.

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