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.”