The director and actors discuss his typically gruelling film-making process, including learning to free dive, the tech v nature message of the new films – and why there’s still room for ‘big boy toys’
Sigourney Weaver recalls flying back from New Zealand with James Cameron last year, after they had finished filming the new Avatar movie. “I put on Superbad, I got a glass of wine, I had my seat back, slept for 14 hours,” she says. Meanwhile, for the duration of the flight, “Jim is sitting up reading a book that was called something like Is God Dead? I realised that I was not the same kind of human as he is. I mean, the guy is just …” She trails off, grasping for words. “He’s such a marine.”
People often complain that the age of Hollywood legends is over, but everything about James Cameron always seems to be mythologically huge. Where other movie titans owned fleets of luxury cars, Cameron had not just cars but helicopters and even submarines – which he designed himself and took to the bottom of the ocean. Alongside the militaristic hardware, a myth has formed of Cameron as a fearsome, tough-talking army general of a director, subduing and marshalling his crew on set to the extent they once made T-shirts that read: “You can’t scare me, I work for James Cameron.”
