Another dispatch for Vanity Fair, this one on how to tally Avatar’s budget…
In Hollywood, the saying goes, the really creative folks are the accountants. Certainly the number-crunchers at 20th Century Fox, the studio distributing James Cameron’s costly and complex epic Avatar, will be kept busy over the coming months as box office grosses pour in and profit participators line up for their share. As ticket sales are tallied, and investors are repaid, the question will be, Was Avatar worth it?
Determining the final cost of this film is a trick in itself. Wildly different reports have been published, ranging from $230 million (The New Yorker) to nearly $500 million (The New York Times). Avatar’s official budget lies somewhere in between, probably closest to the figure the Los Angeles Times’s John Horn and Claudia Eller cited earlier this month—$280 million for the production, plus marketing costs. “It is the most expensive film we’ve made, but now, having the luxury of hindsight, it is money well spent, so I’m not concerned about it,” James Gianopulos, co-chairman and C.E.O. of Fox Filmed Entertainment, told CNN in early December.
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My conversation with The News Hour’s Arts Correspondent, Jeffrey Brown, for his ArtBeat blog, covers the spare Avatar set, the technique of performance cap, and what Cameron was up to all those years after Titanic…
The Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Goldstein was one of the first advocates of The Terminator, back when Cameron was a no-name B movie director. So it was especially cool to see this shout-out to The Futurist on his Big Picture blog. P-Goldy pulls out two Cameron-on-set stories, both from the True Lies chapter…
Luckily, I just got hold of “The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron” by Rebecca Keegan, a Hollywood-based contributor to Time magazine. Keegan spent time with Cameron on the set of “Avatar,” but better still, has collected a host of wonderful bigger-than-life Cameron tales.
One of my favorites unfolds during the making of “True Lies,” which Cameron shot over a six-month period in late 1993. Cameron ended up using a new cinematographer, Russell Carpenter, who is now a star, but at the time his biggest credit was “Pet Sematary II.” After being subjected to what Keegan calls Cameron’s “merciless management style,” Carpenter soon found himself on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Carpenter recalls that one of his worst moments occurred when he was seated with about 25 other people, watching dailies of that day’s shoot. Unhappy about the way Carpenter had lit Arnold Schwarzenegger in a scene where the star looked at himself in the mirror, Cameron growled: “I’ve got the highest-paid actor in this or any parallel universe and I cannot see his eyes.”
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