Oh, to have been in the audience at Stamford Collegiate in Niagara Falls, Ont., to watch the dawning of a fiery young talent. It was the early 1970s, the ecological movement was beginning to sprout – everyone was still talking about the oil spill near Santa Barbara, Calif., two years earlier, and its legacy of sludge-coated birds featured on the cover of Time.
One student, who spent most of his time drawing fantastical creatures in his notebook when he should have been doing math, was infuriated enough to create his first major work, a play called Extinction Syndrome . He wrote it, produced it, created the special effects. The human species – too stupid or lazy to protect itself from the follies of its rulers – dies out, victim of an environmental catastrophe. It was a thematic wellspring he would return to, once or twice, in the decades that followed.
“The idea that governments and corporations were utterly corrupt, evil … systemically wrecking the planet through wars and environmental carnage was pretty much the mainstay of my thought process as a teenager,” says James Cameron, famous now for a few big-screen dystopian fantasies. Then, after a comic pause worthy of Stephen Colbert, he adds: “So you see I haven't moved very much.”
Indeed, he has not. Cameron's new 3-D spectacle, Avatar , which at a rumoured $300-million (U.S.) would be the most expensive movie ever made, revisits familiar themes: At its centre is the story of rapacious humans, having depleted the resources of Earth, plundering the rich ecosystem of Pandora, a wondrous planet inhabited by blue aliens who live in harmony with their jungle environment. (The aliens' world is drawn in shades of sparkly purple, green and blue – imagine a six-year-old girl's idea of paradise, and you're close.) The alien race, the Na'vi, are nominally peaceful but don't take kindly to cigar-chomping mercenaries slashing and burning the trees they worship, and led by a disabled human marine (played by Sam Worthington), they prepare to defend the forest. If Silent Spring and Pocahontas had a 3-D baby, this would be it.
So, how does Cameron, 55, reconcile making a blockbuster movie – by definition a bit of a resource-gobbler – with its overtly green message? “It's an interesting problem,” says the grey-haired, jean-clad director, seeming relaxed this morning, a couple of days after the world premiere of Avatar in London. “We were a relatively small-scale production.”
“Relatively” is a relative term for a man known for his meticulous attention to detail – the luggage tags in his last film, Titanic , had to be authentic Edwardian ones even if the audience never saw them – and also for inventing new film technology if reality doesn't match his vision. That meant devising submersible cameras for Titanic , and a new system of 3-D filming for Avatar that involved shooting the actors using tiny cameras mounted on their heads.
The idea that governments and corporations were utterly corrupt, evil … systemically wrecking the planet through wars and environmental carnage was pretty much the mainstay of my thought process as a teenager. So you see I haven't moved very much.
“The greenest decision [we made] was not to shoot in a rain forest,” he says. “The incursion of a film crew with its trucks and equipment would have had a devastating effect. It would be too strong an irony to make a film about protecting habitat and biodiversity while trampling and bulldozing plants.”
Cameron hardly suits his popular image – or, at least, his on-set one – of a shouty, tyrannical bear. This may be credited to the pleasing first reviews of Avatar , which, like Titanic , had dire preopening word of mouth. There was talk that the film was too long, that Cameron's much-vaunted new 3-D effects caused people's stomachs to churn. But he appears to have pulled another one out of the bag, and reviewers seemed awed enough by the visual wizardry not to notice the triteness of the plot.
