James Cameron
Following an Imax screening of his Ghosts of the Abyss, Iron Jim Cameron (aka "The King of the World") took to the stage to discuss the three Ts (technology, Terminators and the Titanic) with Adrian Wootton
* Adrian Wootton
* guardian.co.uk,
* Sunday April 13 2003
Adrian Wootton: We're going to talk about Ghosts of the Abyss and the audience will get a chance to ask some questions about it, but before that, I'd like to ask you a bit about the beginning, actually; to talk to you about your start in the industry. I'm particularly interested in the fact that, after you got your first short film made in the 1970s, you went to work for the legendary, independent, low-budget exploitation cinema producer Roger Corman, and had an interesting experience working for him. What did working with Corman teach you?
James Cameron: Roger wrote a book called How I Made 100 Films and Never Lost A Dime, and the reason was because he never spent the dime in the first place. He learnt to improvise and to flourish, as they say in the Centcomm briefings, in a highly fluid situation, working on a low-budget film. We'd make a film in 21 days and the budget was $200,000. So it's true guerrilla film-making. We learnt how to make sets with McDonalds trays, literally stapling them on to walls and spray-painting them with lacquer to make them look like spaceships. It really was an opportunity to see how production actually works - you can read all the books about film-making, all the articles in American Cinematographer and that sort of thing, but you have to really see how it works on a day-to-day basis, and how to pace your energy so that you can survive the film, which was a lesson that took me a long time to learn.
AW: Did that actually give you the framework so that you felt comfortable, going into The Terminator, that you knew what you were doing?
JC: I was petrified at the start of Terminator. First of all, I was working with a star, at least I thought of him as a star at the time. Arnold came out of it even more a star. But I think because I had written it, I always had a beacon because I knew the characters and so I always knew what to say to the actors, and ultimately that's what it's all about. Sure, you've got to set the cameras, and understand visually the film you're making, but I had done a lot of storyboarding - that was the picture I was best prepared for, out of all my films. Because it was bought by Hemdale, then it went into hiatus for a year when nothing was happening, and I had no other job during that year - I was kind of starving - and I couldn't move on to another directing job until I'd filmed that. So I just storyboarded everything. I was utterly prepared for that film, which was how we were able to make it relatively cheaply.
AW: Just carrying on with Terminator. You mentioned Arnold Schwarzenegger, and obviously you've had a long working relationship with him. What qualities did you see in him, that obviously some other people hadn't seen, that attracted you to him?
JC: I think that people basically saw him as a muscle guy. I had lunch with him after an initial meeting to talk about Terminator, and that meeting had been thrust upon me. He hadn't really sprung to mind at that point. The entire time that we were talking over lunch, I was looking at his face - for me it was about the potential iconography of his face and his manner and bearing. It was about projecting a character and not just the physicality. I mean certainly it was a physical character but if you look at the film, it's not just about the way he moves. I mean he was fully clothed in about 99% of screen time. I guess I saw an intensity that I liked for the character, but I certainly didn't foresee this working relationship that we've had for a couple of decades now.
AW: I've got to ask this question, so let's get it out of the way now...
JC: Terminator 3. I went from driving a truck to becoming a movie director, with a little time working with Roger Corman in between. When I wrote The Terminator, I sold the rights at that time - that was my shot to get the film made. So I've never owned the rights in the time that the franchise has been developed. I was fortunate enough to get a chance to direct the second film and do so on my own creative terms, which was good. But that was in 1991 and I've felt like it was time to move on. The primary reason for making a third one was financial, and that didn't strike me as organic enough a reason to be making a film. I've got a lot of original films I want to make, I'm interested in exploring new technology and doing these kind of expedition projects, a lot of things which interested me at that time. Arnold held on, hoping that I would do the film, and finally I just said, "Look, stop being so loyal, just go charge them a lot of money and go make the movie." And that's exactly what he did.
AW: Which works out well for him.
JC: Yeah, it worked out well for him. I'm the one who has to answer all the questions.
AW: But you've mentioned the technology point, and I was thinking of Terminator and the expression that actually comes from the name of a bar in Terminator: tech noir. It's obviously in Ghosts of the Abyss, and in fact in every movie you've made since Terminator. You seem to be consistently not only exploring the impact of technology but also, to make the films, you're always developing, sometimes in association with your brother, you're consistently challenging technological limits. I wonder about the contradiction in that. You're clearly very ambivalent about the way that technology is used but on the other hand, you're one of the most technophile directors who's ever lived.
JC: Well, I see our potential destruction and the potential salvation as human beings coming from technology and how we use it, how we master it and how we prevent it from mastering us. Titanic was as much about that theme as the Terminator films, and in Aliens, it's the reliance on technology that defeats the marines, but it's technology being used properly that allows Sigourney's character to prevail at the end. And Titanic is all about technology, metaphorically as well as on a literal level, because the world was being transformed by the technology at that time. And people were rescued from the Titanic because of wireless technology, and because of the advances that had been made only in the year or so before the ship sank that allowed them to call for help when they were lost at sea in the middle of the North Atlantic. So I think it's an interesting theme, one that's always been fascinating for me, and maybe it's because I have a kind of engineering background - even though it's my brother Mike who's the engineer, I'm not; and we work with many talented engineers to develop whatever we need. It's also about trying to do things which people hadn't done before, technically, like the computer graphics stuff. T2 was a real turning point in terms of computer graphics in doing human-style, organic, fluid animation and that led directly to Jurassic Park which then went up another quantum level in terms of doing organically textured creatures and it's really progressed from that.
AW: And how's your relationship with your brother, because you've been building things together obviously since you were kids. Is there a lot of sibling rivalry?
JC: Yeah, we're brothers. He's the younger brother, so he's always got to try to impress. And we're both sort of, what's the word used here? Boffins. We're in touch with our inner nerd when it comes to technical systems. And certainly The Abyss was a highly technical film to physically do. We were certainly not faking anything - we weren't on a soundstage where we could fix things later with a little sleight of hand movie magic, it wasn't about that. For me, doing the exploration was at least as interesting, if not more interesting, than the actual making of the film. So I was wearing two hats there, and I'm not sure that directing was my primary focus on that film. Although when the expedition was all done and paid for by the film, I then had to complete the film.
AW: People today are fond of asking you why you went back to the Titanic, but I've read that one of the initial focuses of the movie, Titanic, was precisely because you did want to dive the wreck; that you started by being interested in the wreck and the movie kind of followed.
JC: I can be more blunt than that: I was trying to figure out a way to dive the Titanic wreck and the only tools at my disposal were that I could tell a major studio that I would make a movie about it if they would fund the expedition. Really, nothing has changed. Both films were originated the same way. The first time it was essentially for the thrill and wonder of going to that place and photographing. For me as a director, the going to a place and the direct experience of it is less important than the photographic experience. Otherwise, it's a tree falling in the forest. I have to go shoot it, shooting it is the experience for me.
AW: That's interesting because it seems to suggest that you're cast, in one sense at least, in quite an old-fashioned mould. You're constantly in an innovative position as the director, with the technology and all that, but you also appear to be a newly incarnated version of John Huston, in that you want to go out hunting, so you make a film that allows you to fulfil your leisure pursuits.
JC: Did he do that?
AW: Yes. But the other thing I wanted to talk to you about in terms of your career as a director, a certain mythology has grown up about how intense and demanding you are, and your nickname...
JC: Which one?
AW: I was just going to stick to Iron Jim.
JC: That's actually not a nickname - it was the title of an article.
AW: Do you recognise that you are kind of that... Do you think you have to be a tough guy to make the films that you make?
JC: All directors are. A director's job is to make something happen and it doesn't happen by itself. So you wheedle, you cajole, you flatter people, you tell them what needs to be done. And if you don't bring a passion and an intensity to it, you shouldn't be doing it. Also, by the way, you won't prevail. It's just that some directors are better at hiding it, or they may be more patient than I am. But I think that's part of the territory. But you know, with most of the types of stuff that I do, there are safety issues. Some of the stuff you saw at the end of Titanic, people can get hurt doing that, and so things have to go a certain way, there's a certain precision that's required, procedural even. And that comes from the top, it's very much an old-style, kind of tribal hierarchy on a film set. The director sets the pace and sets the tone and I do challenge the crew to do the best work and be as safe as possible. But I think that gets misinterpreted as unnecessary harshness because people who aren't there and don't really understand what's going on... I've always had actors who want to come back and work with me over and over because they know that I'm going to push them to do their best work. We had a lot of fun doing Ghosts of the Abyss. Feature films tend not to be as fun because there's no kind of underlying experience other than the making of the film itself, whereas with Ghosts, we were doing something really cool, and by the way, we're filming it as we went along, which is fundamentally different. For the first time in my life I was working in a theatre of operations where the filming was secondary, which is an interesting concept - it's hard for a film-maker to adjust to that.
AW: Talking about this, there's a sense that you've deliberately, since the phenomenal success of Titanic, not made another feature film and you have been working on documentary projects - we'll talk about Bismarck as well in a second. But was that because after Titanic you felt that your whole life and career had changed? It must have changed immeasurably because of the success of it...
JC: No, I didn't really think of it that way. I just assumed that the next time I had an idea good enough to want to take me away from my family - my new family at that time - for up to a year, that I would be happy to do it. I've been writing all sorts of things: I did 44 hours of the Dark Angel TV series, and that was nice because I didn't have to be away from home, I could just go on the set for a few days at the most. I had just been through a divorce, I had a young daughter, and I had personal reasons why I didn't feel like I wanted to be away. And you can be away whether you're in town or not, you can be away mentally. I know I'm not the kind of person who can parallel process several different things; I'm a serial processor - I work on this and when it's done I work on something else. So if you have enough self knowledge to know that there is going to be a sacrifice somewhere else... I didn't need to, I certainly didn't need to do it financially.
And I'd always given myself the goal of getting to a certain point where I could put that on pause and explore a lot of the other things that I might have wanted to do as careers before I went into film-making. I think there's a sense in Hollywood, and in film-making in general, that it's almost a self-defining reality, that people only reference the interior of that particular bubble and nothing outside of it is significant. I don't see the world that way, I'm very involved with Nasa, with the space programme, with the science community, with the oceanographic community. And I enjoy all that a great deal. I'm going to have to push the pause button on a lot of that when I make my next film, but now, the time is right. Later this year, we'll be in prep on it and we'll start shooting probably next January. And we're hoping to use the same 3D camera system and I'll be encouraging the studio, 20th Century Fox, to facilitate enough theatres in 3D - I've asked them for a thousand. None of them will be Imax because Imax 3D can't support a feature length; this (59mins) is the longest we could do. In the US right now, this film is on release and it's on 50 Imax 3D screens, but it's also on 50 35mm 3D screens that were created just for this film, so if we can do that for a $12m documentary, we can certainly do more for a ahem million dollar feature. It's a very strange thing about this film, I've done a lot of press in the US for it and I've never been asked about the budget, which seems to be the most obvious question. I guess because it's a documentary, so they don't care, there's no story in it - it's not going to set any records. It could be the most expensive Imax movie ever made - it's not, it's not - but it could have been. You could at least ask the question.
AW: Yes, in the context of your press reputation with budgets, you would have thought that everyone would have asked you that question.
JC: Yeah, I was disappointed.
AW: Let's talk about Ghosts of the Abyss. Obviously you wanted to have this expedition, but why did you decide to do it as an Imax 3D? What were the challenges, when you decided to do the expedition and make the film, that you set yourself to overcome to make it?
JC: The project kind of evolved. We were on two completely unrelated development tracks, technically. One was that we were developing this digital 3D system - and I was developing it for a completely different project and it wasn't even an oceanographic project - and we were working out the camera technology with Sony; the integration of the system, the rig and the way it works and all that, all the engineering was done in the US but the core camera technology was done by Sony. They basically had to repackage their existing high definition cameras into a different physical configuration so that they could fit side by side. And you can see it briefly going into the camera housing in the film, which is those two little grey boxes - they don't look like much, but they're pretty amazing on the inside. And that took a couple of years to do. And that camera technology was just coming out of the laboratory for the first time and we were looking around for a subject. And at the same time, the remotely operated vehicles were getting completed, and we had started building those about three-and-a-half years earlier, with the general idea that at some point we would go back and explore the interior of Titanic. We knew we were going to do it but we hadn't worked out how we were going to pay for it - maybe we could raise money for it by doing a TV special or do it in conjunction with a rerelease of the movie or something like that. Just vague plans. And then it occurred to me that if we were going to go back to the wreck, we should do it once and do it right and film it at the highest possible level at the time, which at that moment I believed was our 3D digital camera system. So then we had to overcome the technical hurdles of putting it into a housing which could withstand the depth of Titanic, where the pressure is 5,300lbs per square inch or something like that. So there was about five months of engineering required just to build that housing, to take the camera down, to work out the optics to shoot stereo through this big acrylic dome port, which you briefly see. I think it's about 1.4m lbs of pressure just on that piece of optical acrylic, and you don't want that thing to fail. Its, what they call the implodable volume inside the titanium cylinder, is great enough that at that depth when it failed it would fail catastrophically. And the shockwave produced would destroy the submersible with us in it, so the housing had to be built as it was itself a manned submersible; it had to be built to the same specifications, tested in pressure chambers, blah, blah, blah. We had to go through all that. Anyway, it just happened that these two completely different technologies just came together at the same time. And I also anticipated the number one question that I would be asked on the press tour, 'why did you go back to Titanic?' - which really is a thinly veiled way of saying 'why don't you get a life and move on?' I actually anticipated that, and so Ghosts of the Abyss was going to be about Titanic and Bismarck, and it was going to be a few dives at both ships, as more of an overview, little bit of a look inside of both ships. And then, because of the September 11 attacks, we were not able to go to the Bismarck leg of the expedition. But we had so much great footage and there was so much story there about Titanic that we would just go back to Titanic which was within our scope to do.
AW: But you did then do [Expedition: Bismarck], in May last year, an almost companion piece on Titanic for the Discovery channel.
JC: That was shot for TV only, but to show you how cool these digital cameras are, we shot that using the same cameras. We shot the Bismarck piece using the same 3D cameras that we shot this Imax film with, but we shot it for TV, which is insane - you never shoot Imax for TV, nobody would ever do that, except we did it on a very cost-effective budget. We did a two-hour special for a little under $4m, with all those visual effects and everything else. It proved the camera system is fairly versatile; it's like a holy grail camera - you can shoot with that camera and release it in Imax 3D, 35mm 3D, digital 3D. You can break off one stream and take that to video, and take the other to broadcast.
AW: Apart from the technological challenge, I was also thinking about the physical challenges. You know, those 12-hour dives. You've got this technology but then you're actually going down for three hours to get your two...
JC: Yeah, you basically freefall through black water for about two hours, then you reach the bottom and you acquire the wreck on sonar and move horizontally to get closer to the wreck. But the total dive - a short dive would be about 12 hours, a long one would be 16 to 18 hours.
AW: What's the physical impact of that? Do you have to train for it?
JC: It's just really cramped - it's like being wedged into the seat of a Volkswagon for 18 hours. Bill [Paxton] mostly dove in Mir 2, which didn't have all the camera equipment inside.
AW: Yeah, he had more room.
JC: But on my side of the sub, we've got all the monitors and all the equipment and switches and power boards and I'm just [squirming] for 18 hours.
AW: I think Bill is a real asset to the film.
JC: I notice there's a real consistency in his character from Aliens through to this.
AW: He's terrified all the time. [laughs]
JC: People can't maintain that level of consistency all the time.
AW: But he is like the talisman in your work - he's been in a whole number of your films.
JC: Yeah, he was True Lies, playing a character called Simon, who was also scared. [laughs] But I gotta give him credit. It's not apparent in the film but he made four dives; after the first dive, he was really terrified. So I have more respect for someone who conquers their apprehension and goes back; and he also learnt what he had to learn in order to be a contributing member of the dive crew. He handled the communications, you saw him using the navigator software to help us navigate through the wreck. He even operated the ROV and the 3D camera at one point.
AW: I'm sure the audience would agree with me that the real wonder of Ghosts of the Abyss is not only the lighting of the wreck, but the wonder of when you get inside and you go into the staterooms. How much did you think you were going to find? Were you expecting to get so much that was so spectacular?
JC: I think we expected little pockets of interesting individual artefacts. I don't think we were expecting to find the complete preservation that we found in some areas. In my mind, it's complete preservation - I see all the woodwork. Sometimes it's a little hard to see in the video that the ROV sends back but the reception room, for example, all of that wood panelling was intact from one end of the room to the other and nobody expected that to be the case. When Robert Ballard first explored the wreck in his submersible dives in 86, he sent his Jason Jr vehicle down to the grand staircase and looked in - they couldn't get inside - and their conclusion was that it was all just rusting steel; that all the wood had been destroyed by some kind of wood-boring organisms. Why there are wood-boring organisms 12,000 feet down in the middle of the Atlantic, I don't know, but they're there, and they had eaten most of the decking and most of the wood around the grand staircase. But it turned out that if you went in deep inside the ship, there's no current flow, so there's no nutrients and nothing to support biological activity at that level and everything's still very well preserved.
So it's a question of building this very small, very nimble vehicle that could move into these tightly enclosed spaces without disturbing it because, as you can appreciate, with the buildup of silt over 91 years, the stuff is as fine as cigarette ash and if you breathed on it with the thrusters, it would just stir up and you wouldn't be able to shoot anything. So, previous attempts to send ROVs into the wreck hadn't worked because the ROVs hadn't been designed specifically to do that task, but the two ugly little robots that we built are actually very, very sophisticated designs based on their doing exactly what they were there to do.
AW: You've made these two films, Ghosts of the Abyss, and the Bismarck piece for television. Are there going to be more James Cameron documentaries - not necessarily in this vein but are you going to use that technology to make more documentary material in the near future?
JC: We're about halfway through photography right now, we started last summer, out in the Atlantic. And we're going to complete this summer in the Atlantic and the Pacific, diving these hydrothermal vent sites, which are really quite spectacular. They're about one to two miles down along the mid-Atlantic ridge and east Pacific rise, and they're geological formations caused by essentially water erupting out of the bowels of the earth at super, super high temperatures, hot enough to melt lead, literally. So you have to be quite careful in photographing these things or you'll melt your submarine. But they're surrounded by communities of animals that look like they've come from another planet. The most truly amazing thing that I've ever seen with my own eyes and we're shooting it in 3D, and that's going to have a very different feel than Ghosts of the Abyss but it will be released in Imax and it's really making the connection between innerspace exploration and outerspace exploration.
Because there are a lot of biologists and astrobiologists who feel that these animal communities represent what we're very likely to find on other places like Mars and Europa - a moon of Jupiter which is covered by ice but has a liquid ocean which is bigger than the Earth's oceans combined. And that's within our solar system, it's within reach. In terms of finding extraterrestrial life, it's probably going to be that type of ecosystem, not the kind of ecosystem that we've experienced. So it's sort of a combined science fiction, natural history experience in 3D, built around the diving as well.
AW: In terms of Ghosts of the Abyss and Titanic, people have said that you've probably dived the wreck of Titanic more than anybody else now, one of the few people who've dived it on multiple occasions.
JC: The Mir pilots, the two guys you see in the film, they've dived it more than I have. But I think I've dived it more than anybody who's not a Mir pilot.
AW: Is this then the swan song of your love affair with Titanic? Do you feel that with Ghosts of the Abyss you've completed a particular obsession about that wreck?
JC: Yeah, I think so, but I think, as Bill says it at the end, "You leave Titanic but it never leaves you." I feel that once you become attached to an event that's captured your interest and in which you become kind of an expert, you're always associated with it. I'm not sure I'll ever go back to Titanic on an expedition, unless we needed some more shots for a feature film or something, but I can't see that right now. But there are lots of other really, really interesting deep ocean subjects that I do want to be filming. So I see a sort of bifurcated career path at this point, still doing the big mainstream entertainment films and alternate that with seasons of expedition films.
AW: Are you excited about going back to doing a mainstream entertainment film?
JC: Yeah, sure, because we'll be doing something really hard. I'm only interested in it if it's really hard, like impossible, like there's no way that you can do it, no way you could survive and you're doomed going in. That's interesting.
[Laughter]
AW: Will this be pushing the digital technology barriers further forward? For instance, among the the many announced projects associated with you, there was a project called Avatar, which was about synth actors or complete digital performance.
JC: This will be in that vein, but not quite as aggressive as Avatar. But it will involve some computer-generated characters, and that will be challenging. I think we're on the cusp of being able to do that, and certainly The Two Towers proves that that can be done pretty effectively and in an entertaining manner. The trick to it is it needs to be actor-driven, it can't be keyframe animation. It might be a CG character that you see on screen, but there has to be the nuances of an actor's human responses behind it and done through performance capture and motion capture.
Question 1: Congratulations, it's a fabulous film. I know you were quite interested in the Imax film, Titanica, and considering your engineering background, did you not consider building a 1570 3D camera that was more sophisticated than the old Imax ones? Did you not consider doing it in on film rather than digitally?
James Cameron: We never considered doing this on film. We had such a hard time making a 35mm camera that could be deployed outside a submersible. You've got to remember that Titanica was shot by taking a 2D Imax camera inside the submersible and essentially using the submersible as the camera housing, which is just terribly, terribly limiting because it's essentially an 18-tonne, 25-foot long camera housing that can't look up or down, has to stay level and can only sort of turn, go forward and back. You're not operating the camera - a Russian submersible pilot is operating the camera, because you can only lock the camera into the U-port. So, on our 95 expedition, we decided that we had to mount the camera externally, put it on a pan-and-tilt mechanism so that we could look down and up and all those shots looking up at the hull, at the bow, emphasising the scale of the ship, those were created by having the ability to pan-and-tilt.
Putting a 35mm camera - a single eye, a monocular 35mm camera - with a 12-minute film load outside the submersible was a six-month engineering problem, to build the titanium housing and develop the optics for that. And it ran for 12 minutes. With the digital camera, we were able to shoot six to 10 hours of footage per dive. So you can appreciate that if you have a camera which runs for 12 minutes and you make a 12-hour dive, you're just going to squirt the film off in just a second. And that's a huge limitation. I believe it's probably impossible to build a 1570 camera that could be operated outside the submersible, and I wasn't satisfied with the paradigm of shooting through the port from the inside. And again, as I said before, the high definition 3D camera was developed for a completely other project and we just realised that applying it to this environment would work really well.
Believe me, with the engineering hurdles involved just in adapting the HD camera to function outside the submersible, I'm not going to shoot on film anymore, it just seems so obsolete to me. I look at the stuff I shot on film, compared back to back and on the same screen size, with HD footage, and there's just no comparison. There are qualitative differences, and we'll have to learn to master that. I love 1570 projection, and for those of you who are not Imax-savvy, 1570 means 70mm film, 15 perforations of the film, which is a single frame of an Imax film and the Imax film runs horizontally through the projector. It's quite a remarkable system and to do it in 3D, they essentially have two projectors mounted one above the other. So there's this enormous amount of film. Probably a-third of a tonne of film screaming through the projector up there in the projector booth just to show what they showed here. And eventually they'll be able to do that digitally as well; they have the means now, it's just the question of the expenses of installing it.
Q2: Apart from contractual obligations, what's the thing that tips you over into doing a project? And secondly, are you going to go into space?
JC: Well, I've never made a movie for contractual obligations. The contract may determine who I make the film for, but not what film it is. Every film has its own origin - Terminator I wrote as something that I thought they might let me direct, so it was written for the streets of Los Angeles, to be shot low-budget with very few visual effects but enough to make it cool. Aliens, I just liked Alien, so when I got the opportunity to do the sequel, I just didn't think about it.
AW: Considering that Ridley Scott had made a really terrific movie...
JC: You think?
[Laughter]
AW: ... you were setting yourself a major, major challenge.
JC: It was like, from a logic standpoint, it was all downside for me to do Aliens. And I had people, some pretty well respected people in Hollywood say: 'This is career suicide, don't do it. If your film is good, they'll attribute it to the first film, and if your film is bad, it'll always be negatively compared to the first film'. So there's absolutely no logic to it, but I thought it would be cool so I did it. That's why you make a film, because you like it and you want to see it. You see it in your head and you want to see it on screen and there's only one way to make that happen. You can't get someone else to make it for you. Certainly, I've produced a few films now and I've learned that it's their film - you become a facilitator, a colleague, a sounding board, a partner to a certain extent, but it's their film, not yours. So if I want to see it, I have to go do it myself.
As for space, this has been widely rumoured and with some substance - we did explore the possibility; we got partway down the path of negotiating with the Russian space agency and Energiya, the privatised corporation that actually provides all of Russia's manned space support activities and hardware. So if you want to go to space, you go to Energiya, because they're the ones who fly the Soyuz missions. And also working with Nasa to do a coordinated effort. It started off as an idea to make a 3D film of the Mir space station, which shows you how far back we're going now. We got partway down that path, then the Russians ran out of money and they had to de-orbit Mir, and we had a one-year period where we tried to re-engineer it to see if we could at the international space station, which initially seemed impossible. But it turned out that Nasa was actually looking for ways to support commercial activity at the space station - that's why it was built originally. So I went to them and said: 'Look, a film can be a commercial activity. It doesn't all have to be pharmaceuticals'. The second biggest export from the US is intellectual property in the form of entertainment. So I made a case on a purely business model basis and we were working on that pretty much up to the point that Columbia failed. Now there's such a huge setback to the international space station programme that I've told Nasa that I'm going to step out for a while and let them solve that problem. I'll be supportive to them in anyway I can in terms of what they need in public reach and media support while they're doing what they need to do.
But it would be really dumb to try to get in the way of getting the international space station done and up on its feet as a research centre, which is going to take at least a couple more years. So then we'll revisit it at a point where it makes sense, if it ever makes sense. And if I'm not fit enough to fly by that point, because you have a window and my biological clock is ticking, then I'll just get someone else to do the on orbit work and we'll focus on the technical development to be able to make the camera flyable. That's a pretty longwinded answer to a simple question. I could have just said, yup.
Q3: I was just wondering if you're ever going to release Xenogenesis on DVD?
JC: [laughs] I'd be really scraping the bottom there.
Q4: And secondly, is there any truth to the Battle Angel Alita rumours going round at the moment?
JC: Yeah, Battle Angel Alita is one that's definitely in our production queue. It's a film that I'm going to be directing, it's a question of when we do it, in what order we do things. But if you're not familiar with that, it was an anime that was based on a manga - great character, really cool and it's something I'm looking forward to doing. And we'll probably do that in 3D, too. I'm just going to do everything in 3D now. I'm going to shoot my daughter's birthday party in 3D.
Q5: Are you a Doc Savage fan, because I've noticed that in two of your movies, especially in The Abyss, there are similarities with the Doc Savage adventure titled The Red Terrors. Am I wrong or what?
JC: Wrong. I've never read a Doc Savage book, though I know that there's a series of Doc Savage books. I always liked the covers, though, back in the 60s editions. The man of bronze, with the ripped shirt.
Q5: There is also another Doc Savage adventure, titled...
JC: You can't talk me into this, you know. No is no.
Q5: It's really peculiar because there's a man turned into a statue of liquid air exactly like in another Doc Savage adventure.
JC: We've seen that before - people turned into stone, pillars of salt, etc. These are archetypes.
Q6: You quite often take the role of producer now. To what extent is that contradictory to the role of the director, and what do you think the relationship should be between the producer and the director?
JC: I don't think producing and directing are contradictory. There's only really one type of director in the sense that it's a very defined role. But there're a lot of different types of producers -anybody from somebody who just wafts through at the beginning and puts two different people in contact and they go off to do 99.99% of the work and the producer gets the credit, to somebody who's in the trenches, on the set, everyday, working as a line producer. There're different levels of that. When I produce another director's work - I've produced two for Kathryn Bigelow and one for Steven Soderbergh, that's pretty much it for features. But for television as producer's medium, I did 44 episodes of Dark Angel, which is a one-hour drama, and that's an awful lot of producing. I see them as complementary tasks. When I'm producing my own films, I'm complementing my own activities as director, making sure that I have the things I need in order to be able to make the film.
When I'm, say, working with Steven Soderbergh, I don't sit in a chair behind the video monitor on the set and comment on the way he's framed the shot. I didn't even go to the set on [Solaris], I worked with him at the script stage, I watched all the dailies, sent him a few email comments. I like to work with directors who don't need adult supervision. And then worked with him in post-.production, because so many films are found in post-production, not least of which was Ghosts of the Abyss, which had 900 hours of material that had to be whittled down to one. I think it's really about supporting the director, supporting their vision and not turn it into your vision, as a lot of producers do. There are producers in Hollywood who are frustrated directors - well, I'm not a frustrated director, I can make a movie anytime I want to. So probably the best thing I can offer a director is not to try to do their job or take their job. By the way, most producers can't say that with a straight face because they are frustrated directors.
AW: That leads me to a question about collaboration. We've talked about the actors you've worked with who come back time and time again, but that's also true of your editor, Conrad Buff...
JC: Conrad's done four films with me.
AW: ...and Russell Carpenter in terms of cinematography. Is that something that's very important to you, that collaboration with a team that goes forward picture after picture? Or do you think it's more important to mix it up?
JC: I think you have to do both. It's good to work with people whose strengths you know and understand and you develop a shorthand and that's great. But I also think you want to shake things up and see how other people do things. You can get kind of entrenched. I've worked with a number of composers and I would with any one of them again, but it's always exciting to see how other people's creative process works.
Q7: What advice would you give to aspiring film-makers?
JC: Well, at least I have a smart ass answer, which is that if you have to ask that question, you're not going to make it. But that's not really fair. The point is that everybody's going to have to find their own path. And any advice that I would give you would apply to what it was like when I was breaking in back in 1981 and probably wouldn't apply now. I think the most important thing if you're an aspiring film-maker is to get rid of the "aspiring". How do you do that? You make a film. I don't care if it's two minutes long and shot in Super 8 or DV or whatever. You shoot it, you put your name on it, you're a film-maker. Everything after that, you're just negotiating your budget.
[Laughter and applause]
Q8: How do you see the director's moral mandate? When you read a script or write a script yourself, do you think of what people might think after the film?
JC: I think I understand why you're asking that question. You saw three clips, back to back, that consisted of mass carnage. I think that my films do have a pretty high moral and ethical threshold. I'm very interested in issues of... good and evil is a really pat way of describing it, but it's really about human behaviour, duty and the right path. If you look at the films carefully and strip away the preconceptions about Hollywood action movies and people with machine guns and look at what's happening - it might be quirky to some people but I do think there's an absolutely clear moral path through all of them. I am interested in celebrating the higher and more noble aspects of the human condition - heroism, for example, Ripley was willing to put her own life second, that's the highest path a human being can take. Those are themes that are as important in my films as the technology themes and the pure kinetic action front.
I do think there's a kind of downside to that kind of power that all film-makers have, and you have to acknowledge that that power exists and not be irresponsible. Some film-makers just don't care, they say they want freedom of speech, for their vision not to be inhibited, and the dark side of humanity is part of it. But if you look at Terminator 2, there were guidelines, and those guidelines were self-imposed, not by any outside agencies or studios - they didn't care as long as they had plenty of shoot'em ups. The people who financed Terminator 2 were the same people who financed the Rambo series, so they weren't going to be telling me what my moral mandate was going to be. But John Connor never points a gun and never fires a gun at anybody. It's a fine line but I didn't want to create a cool character who kids might want to emulate but who goes around pointing guns at people. Which, by the way, is better than Rob Reiner's Stand By Me, where they solve all their problems by pointing their .45s at the big, bad teenagers. Which film is more moral? I had this argument with Rob Reiner, by the way.
[Laughter]
AW: And he didn't have a good comeback to it. You must have caught him off-guard.
JC: It was a six-page letter- I think it caught him off-guard.
Q9: I was wondering how you felt about Solaris being misunderstood by audiences and at the box audiences? And also, which up and coming directors do you admire?
JC: We knew exactly what we were doing and we were inspired by the original Tarkovsky film and we knew precisely what Steven's vision of the film would be. I was certainly disappointed with the box office because I thought that with George Clooney attached that it would do better just on the momentum of that. But it's a challenging film and audiences like light entertainment, and this is certainly not that. It's about death, loss and everybody pretty much kills themselves in the film at some point; in some cases, twice. So it's a very dark film and we didn't ever expect it to make a couple of hundred million dollars but we did expect it to make its money back, which so far it hasn't managed. But it's doing much better internationally than domestically in the US, so I think we'll be okay in the long run; it'll just take a while. But fortunately, European audiences have responded to it better than the US. Because basically, nobody showed up in the US from the opening weekend, which means that it wasn't disappointing to audiences - it just didn't have that something to make them want to go see it instead of something else.
Q10: How long do you think 35mm film will last as a format?
JC: I think it'll be around for a while because people will choose it, but I think it's being made obsolete, on a purely practical basis, pretty darn rapidly. It still can do a couple of things you can't do with HDTV - there are some frame-rate issues. A lot of people seem to think that the colour space is inferior in HDTV to film, but they're wrong. It's actually superior and it's getting better. The thing that everybody has to realise is that with HDTV you have greatly superior resolution, equivalent colour space, and less contrast ratio overall. I shouldn't say that: you have the same contrast ratio in the final projected image but you don't have the dynamic range to be able to make the mistake of overexposing or underexposing two stops and fix it later. But in HDTV you shouldn't be making that mistake because you can see the image on a HD monitor and that image is what your final film will look like, so there's no mystery, no going to dailies the next day to see how it comes out. It becomes a more controlled and disciplined process.
But 35mm is still necessary for certain high speed, very slow motion types of shots, and in fact to do a movie fully in HD right now you're still going to be carrying a 35mm camera for certain types of shots. So it's not a panacea yet - we're in a transition phase, which we will be, call it if you're pessimistic, for the next five years. I'm going to make my next film digitally, so as far as I'm concerned I'm already through it, I'm just working through some of the bugs. But call it five years from now, it'll all be just a matter of choice. I like to hear the film run through the camera, I like to hear it flap out, I like to use the time they need to reload the magazines to go get a cappucino - for whatever reason, I like the grain, the crappy, messed-up look of film.
Q11: What's the secret of great cinema?
JC: I don't think there's a secret. When a lot of other people were going to film school, I was working as a machinist and going to the drive-in theatre. I'm just an audience member who got to go to the other side of the line and make movies. And I'll always be that guy sitting in the theatre wanting a good time. Whatever the pretension and intellectual aspiration you put on top of that, bottom line, it has to be a crowd-pleaser. So I get to do my independent films through other people, like Steve Soderbergh.
Q12: Technology aside, what are your your inspirations? Literature, painting, photography, what do you look to?
JC: All of those. I think both classical literature and pulp science fiction - probably not in that order of importance to me in my development. Other movies, good ones and bad ones. I studied art, I loved various schools of painting, and I try to light with a painterly eye. Not with this one - it's a documentary and we didn't know what was going to happen from one second to the next; we were just like: "Grab the camera, run!" But generally speaking, on my films, I like to be involved in the cinematography because I love that - I'm an artist, I paint.
Q13: How happy were you with the films that you made, especially since a number of them are now available in director's cuts? Also, would you go back to low-budget film-making, just to test yourself?
JC: This is a low-budget film - this was a $12m film. Bismarck was a two-hour film made for $4m - that's pretty darn cheap. That's like shopping at K-mart. The answer is, I'm already doing that. And television is low-budget film-making. But for feature films, I like the big show. As for the first part of the question, it's not about thumbing my nose at the studio or anything like that - it's really about celebrating the different medium of DVD and celebrating the fact that the consumer has a choice. You can buy the release as is, or you can buy the special edition and see what the movie would have been like half an hour longer. Which is really the film of the script.
The movie which is released is usually the film found after the meditative process of post-production. Aliens is an example of a film which would have been better with some of the scenes in the special edition but arguably so. But The Abyss, I think, if I had to do it over again, I would have gone for the special edition but there were certain reasons why that didn't happen and I can't really blame it on the studio per-se - it was really my own perception of the marketplace at the time; there didn't seem to be a market for a three-hour movie, and some of the visual effects hadn't been done and we'd kind of lost faith in the impact of some of the things which later proved to be more important than we'd thought at the time. Quite frankly, with that film, we had this great love story and these great dramatic scenes and I just felt like I wanted to move the emphasis away from the big effects and closer to that.
AW: The Abyss seems to be the most personal and character-driven of your films - it does seem to have a very strong moral viewpoint. Very vocal anti-conflict message. Would you regard that as your most personal film?
JC: I don't know - I don't think in those terms. They're all personal films - they may not look like it but it's all stuff that I'm working through. When I was 10 years old I became aware that there were nuclear weapons that could incinerate us all, I realised that instead of this happy innocent place I thought the world was. The Terminator was my attempt to work through that. It came from some inside place. But any film-maker would say that. Unless they're some film-maker for hire and they're doing the next Charlie's Angels or something. I don't mean to put that down, it's a cool gig. But for stuff that you originate yourself, it has to come from some personal place.
Q14: How did you feel about Newt and Corporal Hicks from Aliens being killed off in the opening minutes of Alien 3?
JC: That David Fincher - I wanted to wring his neck, but I got over it because he's such a good director, the bastard. I really liked the photography and a lot of aspects of the film, but I do think that it was such a disappointment to the fans of Aliens that in the opening minutes of his film that he had to make a statement about not letting what went before to cloud his vision and he let that get in the way of making a successful sequel. I think there's an art to making sequels - you've gotta make it cool and fresh but not at the expense of the things that the audience really cared about from the previous film. Fincher and I are really pals, so it's not like that lasted very long.
Q15:: What are you thoughts and feelings about music in your films and how closely do you like to brief the composer?
JC: This is a tricky area, especially for a visual director like me. I'm not trained in the proper sense - I can't read music, but you really kind of have to go to school on the musical vocabularies that are open to you and work very closely with the composer. Because this is the one area of the film - other than the performances that you're going to get from the actors, but even then, that's pretty closely scripted so you can imagine in advance what you're going to get. But the composer, you don't know what they're going to come back with.
Q16: Lots of directors sort of have temp scores with which they tell composers what they want - do you do that?
JC: Oh yeah, you have to work through the temp score. If you think about it, you've got hundreds of years of music to choose from and you can work through very specifically what works scene by scene, moment to moment in the film, and what serves the film and how little gestures can mean so much. All those little things, and that should be the film-maker's choice, not the composer's. The film-maker works on a film for a year or 18 months and the composer comes in at the end for a month.
Having said that, the composer has a very difficult job - you can have a temp score which illustrates each scene perfectly but is not a cohesive whole, so I find the best composers are the ones who can translate a kind of abstract of why the temp score is working. A good composer can see the temp score as a window into what the director wants, but a really good composer will honour that but also suggest alternatives. I thought Joel McNeely's music on this was very good and there were a few places where he just cribbed from the temp, but in other places, he went in a diametrically different path. Same with James Horner on Titanic, but not so on Aliens, which was not a good experience because of my own limitations; also James was not very collaborative at that point. So we both got a whole lot better by the time we worked on Titanic, and he was so damn good. We talked it through and we ended up having such a great working relationship that we've stayed friends since then.
AW: I'd like you all to put your hands together and thank James Cameron.
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