The Times‘ Dave Itzkoff has a cool front page piece on the controversies swirling around Avatar in which I hold forth on, among other things, the use of allegory in Cameron’s films:
Ms. Keegan said that it was possible to read “The Terminator,” his breakthrough 1984 movie, as an anti-technology polemic, an anti-war film or a modern gloss on the birth of Jesus.
“Or,” she said, “ you could just watch it as a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger stomps around like a robot.”
The also story quotes sci fi site io9’s editor, Annalee Newitz, who wrote one of the sharpest cultural critiques of Avatar I’ve read yet.
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.”
READ MORE AT LATIMES.COM
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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