With the upcoming release of the megabudget sci-fi saga Avatar, superstar director-producer James Cameron is getting a lot of attention. He seems to be the sort of person who inspires very strong feelings. A British tabloid, The Daily Mail, just posted a muckraking article about Cameron, detailing his sometimes bizarre on-set behavior and his four failed marriages (he’s now on marriage number five). The article makes amusing reading, but also suggests a serious question: To what extent does Cameron’s outrageous ego-driven behavior make his outsized accomplishments possible?
This is, after all, a man who has produced, directed, and written some of the most commercially successful movies in recent history. Titanic was a worldwide phenomenon. Aliens is one of the most highly regarded science-fiction movies ever made. The first two Terminator movies helped to define not only modern Hollywood sci-fi, but action-packed, effects-laden Hollywood blockbusters in general. Even Cameron’s lesser films, like True Lies and The Abyss, are pretty darn good. (The director’s cut of The Abyss, available on DVD, features an entirely new ending, and is far superior to the original theatrical release.)
Cameron, then, is a man who has scaled the heights of commercial filmmaking, consistently taking enormous chances and somehow making them pay off. All of this is very admirable. But then there’s the dark side. As The Daily Mail gleefully reports, Cameron is known as the boss from hell, a maniacal taskmaster who works his casts and crews to exhaustion, savagely abuses his coworkers, and has brought more than one underling to a state of emotional collapse. Moreover, rather than acknowledge any possible shortcomings, Cameron seems to revel in his reputation as a high-pressure, take-no-prisoners workaholic who sleeps only four hours a night and expects his colleagues to do the same. This is a guy who, according to The Daily Mail, actually forbade crew members from using the bathroom during marathon shoots.
To call him a control freak, as The Daily Mail does, seems to be a considerable understatement. He comes across, at least from what I’ve read in this article and others like it, as borderline crazy, and some people are said to be actually afraid of him.
And yet …
You can’t argue with success. Or, rather, you can, but it won’t get you very far. Cameron’s bad behavior seems to be part and parcel of the obsessive perfectionism that makes his movies a cut above the rest. Other filmmakers may be easier to get along with, but they don’t have Cameron’s track record. It’s quite possible that you have to take the whole package — the outsized ego and the outsized talent. Indeed, the monstrous ego may provide the drive that powers the talent and the sparks that illuminate it.
It’s kind of a disturbing thought. I’d like to believe that a world without egocentrism and egomania would be a better world. But would a world free of excessive ego also be deprived of “excessive” talent? Would it be a world of mediocrity, of pleasant but uninspired entertainment, of genial but unexciting personalities?
The Daily Mail
quotes Cameron as saying, “I think what is misunderstood about my particular film-making process is that I get people to go that extra mile that they’ve never done before and they go into new territory. They go beyond what they previously thought were their limits, and then afterwards they talk about it like it was a big adventure: ‘Oh, man, we worked around the clock and you know, we all almost died.’‘The more I can lead other people into these situations where they all think they’re going to die, the more fun I’m having. We have a few people that don’t like my version of day camp, but I would say that 80 or 90 percent of them feel like they’ve been through something. They’ve done the best that they’ve done in their professional careers.”
This could be seen as a mere rationalization for his controlling, obsessive personality.
On the other hand, it just might be true.
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P.S. Though I’ve enjoyed Cameron’s other work, I have no interest in seeing Avatar, which looks like a big noisy mess of a movie, the kind of thing that would give me a headache. In fact, The Daily Mail reports that some people who sat through the “immersive” 3-D version became nauseated from motion sickness.
The movie looks like it’s aimed squarely at 13-year-old boys. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d have to reverse the aging process by 36 years to get back into that demographic.
Also, one of my pet peeves is big-budget Hollywood productions that rip off relatively little-known literary works. Avatar looks to have been inspired by Poul Anderson’s 1957 novella Call Me Joe, but as far as I know, Anderson is uncredited, and Cameron is claiming that the story is his own original idea. There’s that outsized ego again …