My Vanity Fair piece on Cameron’s badass heroines, from Sarah Connor to Neytiri….
This is how “meet cute” happens in James Cameron’s Avatar: At night in a jungle on the alien moon Pandora, Jake Sully, a cocky Marine played by Sam Worthington, stumbles into a pack of snapping, six-legged predators called viperwolves. This jarhead is about to become a viperpuppy chew toy when a lithe huntress named Neytiri (Star Trek’s Zoe Salanda) intervenes. Luckily for Jake, Neytiri is handy with a bow and arrow. She’s also smart, bilingual, spiritual, great with animals, and—for a 10-foot-tall cyan-colored woman with a tail—a babe.
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Time.com’s Techland blog has excerpted The Futurist chapter on The Abyss. It’s a story about how Cameron nearly died filming the underwater sci fi tale in a nuclear container vessel filled with 7.5 million gallons of water. To me, The Abyss is a defining Cameron moment—it’s a movie where he set out to do something others called impossible, built the technology to realize his vision and, as this story shows, nearly died for it.
Read the excerpt here.
Bookgasm gives The Futurist a hearty endorsement in this review:
It’s ironic that a guy who got his start in filmmaking working for penny-pinching producer Roger Corman has gone on to make the most expensive movies of all time. Then again, nothing about James Cameron’s life is conventional, as you’ll witness several times over in his warts-and-all biography, penned by TIME journalist Rebecca Keegan.
Lucky for her — and us — Cameron allowed himself to be interviewed, as did family, friends and frenemies, making THE FUTURIST: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF JAMES CAMERON as likely a complete portrait as we’re going to get. Like most of his movies, it’s exciting, fascinating and difficult not to consume in a single sitting.
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Campea and I talk Avatar sequel, Cameron’s BFF Guillermo del Toro and more on this interview, my maiden Skype:
My interview with Kim Masters of KCRW’s “The Business” is up. We talk about the Avatar set’s minimalist vibe, whether the movie is really a game changer for the industry and how Cameron convinces studio execs to sign on for his wildly ambitious projects.
