In a VanityFair.com piece, I detail Cameron’s involvement in the BP oil spill cleanup.
An aquatic gearhead with more than 2,500 hours logged underwater, Cameron owns his own fleet of submersibles and ocean-ready robots. This week, drawing on his contacts in the deep-sea science world, the director convened a meeting of more than 20 scientists and engineers in Washington to brainstorm fixes for the leak.
“I know a lot of smart people who regularly work a whole lot deeper than that well,” Cameron told me, referring to BP’s 5,000-foot gusher. “I figured this group of top sub guys and deep-ocean scientists and engineers could maybe come up with something constructive.” The director did not, as many news outlets reported, respond to a call from the Environmental Protection Agency, but rather organized the meeting himself, and invited government bodies including the E.P.A., the Department of Energy, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Coast Guard to participate.
Cameron says he first contacted BP a month ago, but was told they had the crisis handled. “I didn’t want to be another well-meaning idiot with a bunch of suggestions,” Cameron says. “But when the situation went on without a resolution, I figured the guys I knew had to be as smart as the engineers at BP, so it was time to sound the horn.”
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Cameron got back to me while on his way to the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference, where he also fielded questions from Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about his BP role, shown in this video from the event.
Why, if effects-driven movies like Avatar are the lifeblood of Hollywood these days, are VFX shops struggling—so many laying people off, shutting down, scraping by with thin profit margins? That question nagged at me, so I tackled it for this TIME Magazine story called “Hollywood’s VFX Sweatshops.” I’ve heard from LOTS of VFXers since the piece came out, many relieved to have issues like outsourcing, change orders and the possibility of a VFX guild discussed out in the open.
A chunk of my book covers Cameron’s role in founding the effects company Digital Domain, with Scott Ross and Stan Winston, in 1993. This is from a section of The Futurist about Cameron’s “Digital Manifesto,” a passionately argued 13-page document he wrote in 1992, laying out where he expected filmmaking to go in the coming years. Remember, it’s 1992—Bill Clinton just took over the White House, Jay Leno just took over The Tonight Show, T2 won the Oscar for visual effects and the VFX world is atwitter about something called morphing. Cameron, as usual, is looking ahead, describing a process almost identical to the one he would employ 13 years later to shoot Avatar:
In his manifesto, the director described something called “performance capture,” in which an actor would don a “data suit,” sending a stream of information about the actor’s physical movements to a workstation, where they would be inserted into a “synthetic environment.” Artists would then use software to turn the actor’s digitized performance into a fantastical character. “Jack Nicholson could create not just the voice but the total body performance of a
demon, while puppeteers nearby cause his tail to lash and his pointed ears to furl and twitch,” Cameron wrote. “The actor can truly ‘become’ his animated character.”
When I sat in on C
ameron’s meetings with Weta Digital to review their visual effects shots for Avatar, he regularly told artists things like, “Just reference a rattlesnake’s quadrate bone.” A science groupie, Cameron grounds even his most fantastical creatures and plants in some kind of reality.
In this photo essay for Time, I show the deliberate visual parallels between life on Avatar and life on Earth, with a welcome assist from Avatar creature designer Neville Page. Page and I talked about the Thanator’s armored black skin, which is modeled on the chitinous texture of a caterpillar’s cocoon, the tree-swinging Prolemuris, Pandora’s version of the “Missing Link,” and several other Earthly muses for Cameron’s fictional world.
In a recent piece for The Harvard Business Review, I laid out some of Cameron’s rules of management, gleaned as I watched him work on the Avatar set and interviewed him and about 50 of his colleagues. You can read the whole thing here, along with some interesting comments from entrepreneurs about how Cameron-style leadership would or would not work in their industries. One commenter brings up the restaurant world’s version of Cameron—Gordon Ramsay. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it’s a great analogy, another wildly successful, hard-driving perfectionist prone to dropping f-bombs.
In a VanityFair.com piece, I detail Cameron’s involvement in the BP oil spill cleanup.
