May 17, 2024
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Nice piece. I like Cameron and am looking forward to Avatar. However, he made a good point and then killed it.
“people keep saying they’re going to show you something you’ve never seen before.”
Yup. They sure do. And it’s annoying. And he’s right, it never lives up to expectation. Overhype kills. We all know this.
“we’re actually showing you something you’ve never seen before.”
DURP!
No one will ever accuse Avatar of being overhyped. Maybe in words, but before Comiccon we haven’t seen anything. Still, making the claim that you will show people things they’ve never seen before is always a mistake. Sell the film. Don’t sell the experience. Let the film be the experience.
And when did i miss the meeting on Sam Worthington? I feel like it’s 2001 again and Jude Law is being cast in everything.
Good interview. Always like to hear from The King Of The World – i bet working for him would be a real adventure. Oh, you hear so many stories about his projects being challenging for actors to work on, but it’s worth remembering that actors as a species are a pretty cossetted bunch who literally don’t even tie their own shoelaces.
Ha – nailed it, re: Sam Worthington, anghus. I watched “Rogue” recently and was shocked when he got eaten so early as I was like, “Oh, I thought this was the role that made everyone think he was Billy Bad-Ass.”
And great Cameron interview!!
Funny Comic Con story. All us reporter-types were sitting backstage in what counted for a “green room” waiting for the “X-Men 2” stuff to roll, folks chatting with Bryan Singer – a big circle of nerds gathered round.
Then in walks Cameron, there to talk “Solaris” and you just watched as slowly, but surely, the nerd herd migrated to sit at Cameron’s feet.
“but it’s worth remembering that actors as a species are a pretty cossetted bunch who literally don’t even tie their own shoelaces.”
Tell that to Ed Harris.
A+ interview here, Dave.
Poland is a good interviewer. Thumbs up.
James Cameron is a very talented man…but I do think his stock has perhaps fallen.
Right after Titanic, a decade ago, due to my employment at the time, I was able to get within inches of Cameron as he did a walk through at the then just burgeoning, now I think no longer existing, 1st annual Niagara Falls film festival. That was where he grew up.
People ran up to him with things to sign and hands to shake. Even as only a mild Titanic fan he was one of my idols. …Aliens, T2, The Abyss-I couldn’t believe he was thisclose to me. This was why I went to film school. And a Canadian…I had hope! As I waited for my turn to shake his hand I observed how patronizing, condescending and arrogant he was to everyone in his view. Everyone. As he told people they could only hand him one thing to sign and he never slowed down to accomodate anyone, it was clear that when he said he was “King of the World”…he also meant everyone else was a serf. When the time arose when I could have introduced myself, I withdrew my hand and walked away. To this day, I have no regrets. He ooozed an arrogance that to this day I remember. I still love his films (although Titanic is mediocrity incarnate) and watch them regularly and will see Avatar.
He is a talented man but now, thanks to his “finding of Jesus’ tomb” we know he is no genius. Either a PT Barnum who has no shame or a flake who really believed he found it, I now see him as a talented visual stylist but someone who writes pretty crap dialogue. Although very few people want to talk about it, his Jesus stunt from a few years back made his stock go down with the average person irrefutably. I am amazed he does not get called on it more. It was on par with an old lady who though she saw the baby Jesus in a Cheeto.
I remember meeting Oliver Stone in Toronto in film school when he was shooting NBK and he was one of the nicest people I could have met. Genuine sense of humour and actually, quite humble. And no one can say Stone is less accomplished than Cameron.
That’s my James Cameron story from what I believe was winter/spring 1998.
Nicol, did you meet Stone when he was touring colleges circa ’93-’94? He came to my school too and was really interesting, cool, candid and funny. But he’s reputed to be somewhat of an intimidating live wire on a set, no? Same as Cameron, same as Mann, same as Bay… Movies at that level seem to demand a degree of commitment that’s so all-encompassing I never really begrudge an artist working at that caliber their reputation as a taskmaster.
And that Cameron story you told? Eh, I don’t know, doesn’t particularly bother me, not entirely unsurprising. Isn’t this the dude who wrote to the L.A. Times to bag on that idiot Turan for not liking his movie enough? That alone gets him a one-way ticket into the Lexian Hall of Awesomeness.
Hey Lex,
I saw him in I believe what was the spring of 93. He was speaking at Massey Hall in Toronto. A group of us went. I had just applied to NY film school for Masters. When I went up, for my question period, I had a long question and Stone knew I was a film student. I told him I applied to NYU and he looked at me and smiled and replied ” Do you want a reference?” The whole auditorium roared. He then politely answered my question and later said I could send him a script.
When I went back to my seat many people applauded me. It was a moment I will never forget.
Over a year later, I, shaking in my boots and trying not to get caught at work, called up his office and they let me send him my script. They never produced it but the reader gave me very good coverage and notes. I will never forget…he kept his word. Politics be damned. I root for Stone to this day.
Cameron is talented and I get that sometime very talented people can be difficult, but I think his Jesus stunt cost him cred. I will not be as forgiving on Avatar as I was on Titanic.
What bothered me was Stone may be hard on set…but he was good with his fans. I do not know how he is now, but it seemed to me that Cameron looked down on his fans. Not cool.
I think he bought his press where Stone has had enough criticism to appreciat those that appreciate him.
Where did you see Stone? He is a great lecturer.
I could be completely wrong but I get the sense Cameron has mellowed a bit over the years. I’m sure he’s still intense on the set and everything, but he doesn’t seem quite as full of himself now. I wonder if doing all those documentaries away from the spotlight helped.
Nicol D, we disagree about most everything, but you’re right: Cameron’s whole “Jesus’ Tomb” thing was weird and in the end, dumb. I don’t know how many people remember that, though — I’d actually forgotten about it and I tend to follow what he does regularly.
‘Cameron is talented and I get that sometime very talented people can be difficult, but I think his Jesus stunt cost him cred.’
yeah, vast swathes of people from all walks of life the world over are still reeling from JC’s – and how DARE he have those initials? – ‘jesus stunt’. i mean, i can STILL hear whispering about it in the corridors…coming from behind closed doors…even the walls…
that jesus stunt is looming over big jim like a shadowy spectre and he doesn’t even know it, poor delusional sap
(‘I will not be as forgiving on Avatar as I was on Titanic.’
uh-oh, ‘avatar’ had better watch its ass!)
‘Although very few people want to talk about it, his Jesus stunt from a few years back made his stock go down with the average person irrefutably.’
sorry, i forgot to include that little gem above.
man, it’s just all gone pear-shaped for poor cam
Jeez Leahnz, sensitive much.
The man said he found the lost tomb of Jesus Christ, was found out as a fraud, ridiculed by all serious historians and archaologists and you have nothing critical to say?
Nothing? We’re not supposed to talk about that at all in context of his bravado?
right, nicol, it’s not your sheer REDONKULOUSNESS at issue here, it’s me being a delicate flower…
provide ONE IOTA of proof that cameron’s “Jesus stunt from a few years back made his stock go down with the average person irrefutably.”
the average person. IRREFUTEABLY!
go on then
“‘Although very few people want to talk about it,”
Probably because very few people even remember it.
“Probably because very few people even remember it.”
/raises hand
Nicol, Leah’s comment (if I may be so bold as to speak for her) is part of the whole ‘whatever Nicol says is probably wrong’ paradigm that some of us have developed over time.
Gee, I wonder how that happened.
Bladiblah.
OWN HIM, IO.
Though gotta say, I have ZERO recollection of Jim Cameron doing some Jesus search. Geraldo looking for Capone’s vault though? SEARED into my consciousness.
Lex, this is why I hate you (sometimes).
Unless you meant to write,
‘OWN’ HIM, IO.
And I think that’s what you meant.
Jeff that doesn’t make a lick of sense, so schmoke another bowl with your roommates, charge another round at the Ye Rustic In (or do you FAVOR the DRAWRING ROOM?) or call it a night.
YEP YEP.
Also, Cameron should use more REDS and YELLOWS and hire MEGAN FOX. YEP YEP.
BEGGIN
BEGGIN
“paradigms are hard to change ’cause all you get are nickels” (my granddad used to say that, it struck me as both idiotic and profound. mostly idiotic)
nicol is a sneaky bugger, i’ll give him that; he’ll construct a seemingly reasoned or innocuous comment and then sneak in some insidious, pompous absurdity like “although very few people want to talk about it, his Jesus stunt from a few years back made his stock go down with the average person irrefutably”, as if he’s the ‘truth-bringer’ about cameron or whoever and the stick up his butt is multi-pronged so it must be inserted up every other butt on the planet.
most ‘average movie-going people’ MIGHT know who james cameron is if you asked them, ‘oh the TITANIC guy’ at best…(and i tell you what, cameron probably took one look at nicol waiting in the queue at that niagara falls thing and thought, ‘look at that little prick…i bet he’s gonna bug the shit out of me — AND people on a blog years from now’)
LEAH, YOU’RE HOT.
FOR REAL.
YEP YEP.
No one gives a shit or remembers about Cameron’s Jesus thing. I haven’t even heard of it. But I’m not a crazed Christian or right-wing nut. Luckily, neither is Nicol…he went to one of them liberal film schools!
Now that it’s been dredged up, I have a vague recollection of the whole tomb business — but I had completely forgotten about it until now.
To most people, Cameron is that guy who did Titanic and then vanished for the next decade. If you press them, they might remember that he’s the same guy who did Terminator.
Then again, if you ask the average person who did Terminator, they’ll probably say: “Um, Arnold?” Regular folks don’t give a shit.
…about directors, I should have said.
“Nicol, Leah’s comment (if I may be so bold as to speak for her) is part of the whole ‘whatever Nicol says is probably wrong’ paradigm that some of us have developed over time.”
Actually, this particular time I took Leah’s umbrage to be more about the specifics of Nicol’s overgeneralizing with the whole “average person” and “irrefutably” bullshit than with his general level of BS, though I don’t disagree with your sentiment, Jeff.
Nicol, do you know what “irrefutably” means? It means “impossible to refute,” which your broad stab at Cameron certainly is not. I’m willing to bet you serious cash that an independent poll of the “average person” would reveal that most of them either don’t even know about the Jesus thing, or that it’s not changed their opinion of the man as a filmmaker one iota.
Further, Nicol, your entire spiel there smells of you being put off by what you saw as Cameron’s attitude on that one particular occasion, which you are then using to broadly slam the guy. Hell, maybe he was having a crappy day. Maybe it was hot, maybe he’d just had a fight with someone, maybe he was quitting smoking, or maybe he had to be somewhere at a certain time and was trying to accomodate as many stargazing autograph seekers like yourself as he possibly could, but he was sick to death of people who just wanted to say they’d shaken his hand.
Bah. While we’re betting, though, I’d also be willing to bet you that it is in fact irrefutable that a vast majority of MCN commenters think you’re full of crap at least 80% of the time. Anyone else wanna jump in on that bet with me? Leah, IOIO, Lex, Joe, JeffMCM?
Lex, I’m irritated at the suggestion that I’m some kind of free-wheeling pot-smoking hippie type. I think I’m well-established enough here as a rod-up-my-butt type for you to know that I don’t do any drugs beyond alcohol (and I haven’t been to either the Rustic or the Drawing Room in at least 6 months).
Kim, I’d go for a solid 80, sure. My issue with Nicol, though, isn’t that he’s dumb or anything, but rather that he’s very un-genuine. It would be more honest if, in this thread, he had said “James Cameron’s Jesus stunt made me dislike him” instead of extrapolating his feelings to the general population (thereby avoiding it as a personal issue) with ” his Jesus stunt from a few years back made his stock go down with the average person irrefutably”.
Personal statements of opinion are useful. Hiding those behind ‘other people say ______ which just happens to agree with me’ is kind of, I don’t know, shifty and dodgy and to use a phrase that I’ve used before, intellectually dishonest.
Jeff were you really not high when you came up with that movie about the guy that gets torn up by farming equipment? Not saying it was a bad movie, but you had to be high when you wrote it.
I had all but forgotten the Jesus tomb thing. Even back in the day that thing got less play in church than Habakkuk. Cameron
Martin, I assure you I wasn’t. It probably came to me in a dream. I know that’s where I got the idea for another (much crappier) short where I dreamt that I decided to chop off all of the fingers on one hand, then wanted to chop off the remaining fingers on the other hand, and had great difficulty doing so (because, you see, of the lack of useable fingers).
For the record, the Jesus tomb thing was stupid of him.
kim, i’ll take that bet, too. and you’re exactly right, it was very specifically nicol’s absurd statement that cameron’s image had been irrefutably tarnished in the eyes of the ‘average person’ and that his cred isn’t what it used to be due to ‘the jesus stunt’ about which i took umbrage. like jeff said, nicol could have very easily said that the jesus tomb documentary made HIM think less of cameron, but no, it had to be every average person, irrefutably. tiresome.
incidently, here’s a link to the ‘discovery channel’ programme in question fwiw (which i did watch at some point tho my memory of it is vague at best), cameron did not direct the show about the archaeological discovery but served as executive producer.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/02/25/tomb_arc.html?category=archaeology
though the documentary may have been ill-advised (personally i think it’s rather interesting), the programme was based on legitimate archaeological and scientific findings, and far from a circus of charlatans of ill-repute as nicol would have us believe.
(and just a word re: big jim’s oft maligned screenplay for ‘titanic’, it’s interesting that so many people that really should know better seem to equate screenplay = dialogue, which is totally off-base. some of the dialogue in ‘titanic’ is undeniably clunky, but a screenplay is far more than just dialogue, it is the framework of the film encompassing setting, character, story structure and continuity/flow, and in this respect the screenplay for ‘titanic’ is quite well constructed)
leahnz: “(and just a word re: big jim’s oft maligned screenplay for ‘titanic’, it’s interesting that so many people that really should know better seem to equate screenplay = dialogue, which is totally off-base. some of the dialogue in ‘titanic’ is undeniably clunky, but a screenplay is far more than just dialogue, it is the framework of the film encompassing setting, character, story structure and continuity/flow, and in this respect the screenplay for ‘titanic’ is quite well constructed)”
Brava, leah. As a writer, this is a pet peeve of mine. It’s called “SCREEN-writing,” not “dialogue-writing.
That fucking SONG is the main thing that gives TITANIC its now-unfair reputation. I think that fucking horrible song has not just done more damage to this once-mighty movie’s rep than anything else people deride (the script, Zane, the pacing), but it might be the #1 example in film history of one isolated cheesy/dated/shlocky element making a great majority of a film’s onetime fans turn on it completely.
yay yancy! perhaps you should write a strongly-worded letter…
(i’ve never heard anyone deride the pacing of ‘titanic’ but i have personally witnessed a very heated discussion and someone subsequently losing a $100 bet on whether or not the dion song is actually in the film itself)
I BOUGHT TITANIC ON DVD TONIGHT AND I’M GOING TO WATCH IT TOMORROW FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE OPENING DAY 1997 AND CRY LIKE A LITTLE *BITCH.*