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.
In my latest VanityFair.com piece about the Oscars’ Best Editing category, I explain the crazy complex way Avatar was cut. I’m pretty sure you need an extra lobe in your brain to pull it off:
Unlike for most films, Avatar’s editing process began the moment Cameron called action. An Avid editing suite sat stage-side at the spare Los Angeles warehouse where Cameron shot the performance-capture portions of the movie. Instead of dailies, the director watched minutelies: he reviewed every single shot in the moment. Cameron had almost limitless options editorially because of the manner in which he was shooting. In a traditional live-action film, when multiple actors are in a scene, the editor is limited to the performances in a particular take. But Avatar’s editors could combine different takes. In one scene, they might choose Sam Worthington’s Take-Six, for instance, and Sigourney Weaver’s Take-Two. While this provided tremendous flexibility, it was also hugely complicating. And it was just the first of many edit steps.
Next came the camera moves. Cameron was working from a virtual toybox that allowed him to shoot in his C.G. world using the performances he had already filmed. The actors were long gone from the soundstage as the director decided how close to make his close-up and where to pan. Day after day, as Cameron shot and reshot and reshot the scenes—this process did nothing but indulge his usual perfectionism—Avatar’s three-man editing team stitched the narrative together….
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My latest Vanity Fair dispatch is about Cameron’s award season speeches, and how they get him into trouble…
There is one event, more than any other, that sealed the public image of James Cameron, and that is the last five seconds of his 1997 Best Director Oscar acceptance speech for Titanic. In the second of three speeches he would deliver that night, Cameron quoted Leonardo DiCaprio’s line from his film, “I’m the king of the world! Wahooooooo!” and lifted his trophy triumphantly. “The funniest moment of the whole thing, in retrospect, was the quizzical expression on Warren Beatty’s face after he gave me the Oscar,” Cameron recalled, when I asked him about the speech for my book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. “His expression was like ‘what the fuck were you thinking?’” What Cameron had intended as a heartfelt display of his exuberance had come across instead as self-congratulatory, especially to a room that had already seen Titanic collect most of the awards and box office receipts they hoped would go to their own films.
The delicate art of delivering an acceptance speech comes easily to some—Meryl Streep’s flustered gratitude and Robert Downey Jr.’s laconic wit could be how-to tutorials for the 30-second medium. But Cameron, for all his industry stature, has never seemed entirely at home behind a Hollywood awards podium.
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In this Vanity Fair piece, I tackle the issue of Oscar-worthy CG performances….
When John Hurt played the title character in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man in 1980, it took a gifted makeup artist seven hours each day to sculpt Hurt’s bulbous forehead and twisted mouth. The actor was utterly unrecognizable under the heavy, Quasimodo-like prosthetics, but he managed to communicate sadness, grace and humanity in the role, and garner an Oscar nomination for his performance.
Thirty years later, computer-generated special effects are replacing the dying art of prosthetics, but an actor has yet to earn a nod from the Academy for a purely virtual performance. One who could break the digital barrier this year is Zoe Saldana, for her work as Avatar’s alien heroine, Neytiri. To win a nomination for best actress, Saldana would have to overcome Hollywood’s skepticism about the motion-capture process director James Cameron used to make Avatar, a technique that relies on animators to enhance an actor’s work.
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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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In a VanityFair.com piece, I detail Cameron’s involvement in the BP oil spill cleanup.