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In to the deep
Today, the view from the 23rd floor of my hotel is more than fit for the king of the world. Several days of Santa Ana winds have cleared the smog off the low skyline and afforded us one of those days that LA enjoys perhaps 20 times a year: crystal-blue clarity, a silver thread of shoreline discernible to the west, a glimpse of snowcapped Mount Wilson 100km to the east, with every intervening building and hill formation delicately outlined by the slanting, late-afternoon light. Even the I-5 freeway, bearing north out of town, acquires a soothing, serpentine elegance when seen from up here.
Below us lies what used to be the tallest building in the neighbourhood, the squat, box-like Black Tower — now utterly dwarfed by surrounding hotels, theme park and shopping malls — from where the late king of this particular world, super-agent and Tinseltown eminence grace Lew Wasserman, engineered a series of Hollywood revolutions in the last half of the 20th century. On the other side of the hotel, one can look straight down on Universal Studios, Hitchcock’s Psycho house and possibly even the queues for the Terminator 2 in 3D experience that James Cameron designed and shot for them between bigger projects. The man himself, lean but spry, turns out not to trust skyscrapers in earthquake country.
“I don’t like high-rises,” he offers, “especially in California. I believe in taking risks, but only if there’s a good reason.”
This, from a man who has undergone the punishing rigours of cosmonaut training in Moscow and who, for his new 3D Imax documentary Ghosts of the Abyss, has descended on countless occasions to the bottom of the ocean, with only two inches of a submersible vehicle’s steel hull between himself and instant death. There he was in control; here he is not.
Ever since his complicated, arduous shoots for Abyss and Titanic, Cameron has been “Cap’n Jim” in my mind, with a number of famous nautical surnames affixing themselves to him depending on the circumstances. Sometimes he’s Captain Ahab, the demented visionary madman whose spectre flits about when Cameron is faced, yet again, with impossible odds, usually self-imposed; at others he’s Captain Bligh, the tyrant and flogger he is said to resemble in mid-shoot when the pressure is on; at others, mad Captain Queeg, facing down mutinies and clacking his steel ball-bearings in moments of crisis.
Today I encounter none of these figures. I meet the one I never thought of: Captain Nemo, a witty, genial host eager to share his discoveries and ambitions, fluent and fascinating as he talks of the deep, of deep technology, of men and their machines. Although he hasn’t brought it along, he is, like Nemo, particularly proud of his own Nautilus, a miniaturized 3D Imax camera unit capable of functioning under thousands of pounds of pressure on the ocean floor. Cameron and his brother Mike, proud boffins since their Canadian childhood near Niagara Falls in Ontario (“I am so in touch with my inner nerd!” exults James), helped design and build two units, remote operating vehicles (Rovs) that they christened Jake and Elwood, that could be taken, attached to a pressure-resistant mini-sub, to the wreck of the Titanic, to explore the ship’s inaccessible interior before it is eaten away by rust and time in the next 30 years.
The results can be seen in Ghosts of the Abyss, a stirring, hour-long documentary, and a fitting appendix to Titanic. One takes a seat before an awesome floor-to-ceiling screen, dons polarized 3D specs and just drinks in those dimensions. I’ve seen 3D before — both bad, as with the old anaglyphic process used in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and House of Wax, and good, as with Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D, where the eyeballs and chainsaws just keep flying over one’s shoulder — but this is of another order of magnitude entirely. Air bubbles seem to float just before your eyes, the planes of perspective are miraculously separated, and the layering is remarkably deceptive. I saw the whole audience flinch as a gigantic crane apparently pushed its claw-grip arm right into the 10th row.
“When I first went to the Titanic in 1995,” says Cameron, “I was so in awe of just being there that I couldn’t really think beyond that. Having had a few years to think about it, I knew if I went back it would be with a specific purpose in mind. That purpose was to do the most beautiful imaging of the ship we could, and to do the most thorough investigation possible.”
This he has certainly achieved. In an eight-week expedition with a Russian ship in 2001, he shot 900 hours of footage in and around the wreck. His Rovs, attached to fibre-optic cables feeding images to the surface, penetrated areas of the ship’s cabins and holds — even the gigantic engine room — that have not been seen since 1912. For Cameron, working with a 16-member crew took him back 25 years to his days as a pioneering effects designer and art director for Roger Corman’s egalitarian, all-hands-on-deck independent studio.
“The weird thing is that Ghosts is the one experience that comes closest to the Corman days, kind of like making a student film. We go on an expedition ship and we only had 16 people, which is about how many lighting electricians you’d expect to find on a feature — not the whole crew! Logistically speaking, the underwater shooting was easier. There were fewer people and the camera was remote. But for the surface shooting, with the ship rolling, stuff sliding around, trying to work with a crane and a new, experimental camera hanging on the end of it, everyone has to pitch in, like guerrilla film-making. When the crane has to be moved, everyone has to help. When camera gear needed to be hauled up four decks, everybody hauled it — I hauled it and loved it. It was very like a non-union film, but it had to be. And the work process was very satisfying. It was diametrically opposed to the ways I’d worked previously, where everything was imagined in advance, written, storyboarded, with a detailed shooting schedule. There’s a rigour and a discipline to that kind of work. This was a whole different thing.”
It is five years since Titanic stormed the international box office and won Cameron his Oscar, but he hasn’t been idle in the interim, even though he could probably sit on his couch chucking bundles of thousand-dollar notes into the fire for the rest of his life and never feel it. No, our boy keeps himself busy. He developed his zippy post-apocalyptic sci-fi TV show Dark Angel, filled with Cameronian TechNoir and starring nymphet Jessica Alba as another of his tough, resourceful chicks in charge. He has been to the bottom of the Atlantic to shoot “black smokers,” underwater volcanoes formed by molten magma hitting cold water, and capable of supporting an entirely sunless ecosystem. He has explored the wreck of the Bismarck, and most impressive of all, he has undergone preliminary testing to qualify for space travel.
“Would I love to go into space? Absolutely, but more realistically, this underwater work is something that satisfies that same exploratory urge. With a dive, from the time we leave the bottom of the sea, we’re essentially freefalling upwards, and when we hit the surface we’ve splashed up, like an Apollo mission splashes down. Then we’re just bobbing around helplessly until the recovery crew picks us up and opens the hatch. The comparison with a space mission is very apt.”
Something about Cameron’s extracurricular obsessions — “Top and/or bottom of the world!” — dovetails neatly with his films, and is possibly responsible for their purity and single-mindedness. He came out of the effects and sci-fi side of the business, never went to film school, and early on in his career says he had no idea who Humphrey Bogart was. Detached in certain ways from film history, his own movies are therefore about themselves, not about other movies. There is another rich, full life being lived by him that has nothing to do with dark screening rooms and old movie marathons, homages, visual quotations or plot plagiarism. Although he may superficially resemble such problem-loving techno-fiends as Kubrick and Hitchcock, Cameron reminds one more of old-timers like gentleman hobbyist Howard Hawks, an aviator and big-game hunter in his off hours, or Budd Boetticher, who had been a bullfighter before he made all his lean and sinewy westerns.
Cameron lived lives outside the incestuous, butt-kissing seventh circle of Hollywood, refuelling himself with real and transformative experiences that inevitably broadened his mind and enriched his cinematic palate. Cameron may be a tyrant on set, he should probably hire rewrite people to juice up his dialogue, and I’m not putting him in the pantheon alongside Hawks just yet, but his movies are nonetheless pace-settingly unique until his imitators have picked them clean.
So what next for the conqueror?
“I can’t say too much about it except it’s gonna be 3D and really cool. Not on the scale of Titanic, probably more on the scale of T2. I’m working on the script right now. It’s early in the process, although we’ve been designing the film for the last year, but I’m not yet satisfied with the script and I’m gonna rework it myself. It’s gonna be science-fiction-action. It’s all the stuff you wanna see. Heh heh.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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