If the word avatar is one you’ve been tempted to look up in a dictionary, it’s a good bet that James Cameron’s latest bank-breaking cinema blockbuster isn’t aimed at you. If, on the other hand, you already have up to half a dozen personal avatars living lives of their own in cyberspace, then welcome to heaven.
Originally from Sanskrit, and used to describe the earthly incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu, avatar is a common term among digital games players for the pixelated representations of themselves in the online world. Avatar is also the title of Cameron’s new epic science-fiction adventure, in which a crippled former marine is given the body of an alien to infiltrate the culture of a world under invasion by the Earth.
It is hugely ambitious, colossally expensive and Cameron’s first film since Titanic in 1997. That movie was labelled in advance as an overpriced folly but went on to make boxoffice history.
When Cameron picked up his Oscar for best director, to join those for best film and best editing, he famously emulated his star Leonardo DiCaprio’s arms-outstretched pose on the doomed ship’s prow to declare: “I’m the king of the world.”
During the dozen years since, some thought the king had abdicated, his career sunk without trace. But Cameron had other things on his mind. He had written Avatar in outline two years before Titanic and was waiting for technology to make it possible.
Avatar is likely to have been the most expensive movie yet produced. Cameron is not remotely daunted. “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success,” he told The New Yorker magazine, with all the hubris that often has critics wishing the world’s most successful movie director will fall on his face.
Cameron is not just aiming to add to his Oscar collection but to save cinema itself, with revolutionary 3-D technology that will awe audiences and, for the foreseeable future, be impossible to reproduce at home. Avatar is being hyped as an “immersive experience”, its key technology an innovative camera designed by the director himself, which enables him to see his actors in their computer-generated onscreen forms.
“If I want to fly through space or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale. It’s pretty exciting,” he enthused. “It’s like a big powerful game engine.”
That will be music to the ears of a key audience, 15 to 24-year-old males, the first generation in nearly a century that the cinema is in danger of losing. With computer gaming growing faster than the movie industry, Hollywood has desperately been making game spin-offs (Resident Evil, Final Fantasy).
Cameron hopes to restore the movies to their supremacy — although there is an Avatar spin-off game, too — and the big Canadian may be the man to do it. At 55 he still has a natural affinity with the enthusiasms of his target audience.
He was born in the small mining town of Kapuskasing, near Niagara Falls in Ontario, where Phillip, his father, was an engineer and Shirley, his mother, a painter. He described her as being “very bold and occasionally irrational in a good way”, while his father was “coldly analytical, strongly disciplined”.
Cameron Sr also disapproved of his geeky son’s addiction to sci-fi comics, which he would throw in the bin. Cameron inherited qualities from both his parents and began writing short stories while developing an interest in astronomy and engineering, building model rockets and aeroplanes out of junk.
As early as nine he boasted that he could make a better movie than the vintage sci-fi horror picture King Kong vs Godzilla, but it was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that really rocked his boat. He saw it 10 times and was inspired to start experimenting with his father’s home-movie camera.
The family moved to California and at school and college, where he studied physics, the geeky young “Jim” got bullied by the jocks. In the end he dropped out, married a waitress and got a job driving trucks. He did not go back to a college reunion until he had won his Oscars and outstripped the jocks.
He maintained his interest in the movies, however, moving to Los Angeles and borrowing money to make a 12-minute short called Xenogenesis. Despite a minimal plot, the short demonstrated his skill at special effects and was enough to get him a job in the modelmaking department of a low-budget film company. However, it was a nightmare that would make his dreams come true: a vision of a robot assassin from the future.
He swapped his waitress wife for the film company’s head of marketing, Gale Anne Hurd, persuaded her to get investment for the film and let him direct it, then chose a muscle-bound, Austrian-born body-builder as his star. It cost a modest $6.5m (about £4m at today’s rates) but became a cinematic — and political — milestone. The Terminator made Cameron a hot property overnight and set Arnold Schwarzenegger on the road to becoming the governor of California.
Cameron went on to direct Aliens, the second in the sci-fi horror series starring Sigourney Weaver, and recrafted the storyline around her character, Ellen Ripley — the only survivor from the original movie — giving the film an unexpected emotional depth. He then nearly threw it all away with The Abyss, a deep-sea sci-fi spectacular in which the director overindulged his passion for the grand scale, building the world’s biggest underwater set, which required 7m gallons of water.
The film was a critical flop while the tensions involved led Cameron to a second divorce. But his prodigious technical talent was rewarded when the film won an Oscar for best visual effects. He bounced back in sparkling form with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, garnering more best effects Oscars along the way, then turned his attention from sci-fi to True Lies, an action thriller about a secret agent who suspects his wife of infidelity.
In making Titanic he once again got carried away with the science of creating illusion, spending millions on a scale replica of the liner, vast sets and sea-bed explorations. The film went wildly over budget, sparking rumours that it could ruin 20th Century Fox, and nearly gave Cameron a breakdown.
In fact, it refloated the whole of Hollywood. His transformation of the disaster story into a tragic romance captured the global imagination, bringing in $1.8 billion and turning DiCaprio into a megastar.
In the years that followed, Cameron found himself increasingly dismissive of the Hollywood studio bosses who had given him such a hard time over his extravagance and turned his attention to underwater exploration, designing camera housing systems and working on robotics. While he had — not unlike his sci-fi author hero Arthur C Clarke — seen the ocean depths as the nearest most of us would come to experiencing another world, he was asked by Nasa to join an advisory board designing cameras that may one day go to Mars.
All the while the world of Avatar had been taking shape in his mind. It was only when he saw the computer-generated character of Gollum in the second of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies that he realised the CGI technology was advanced enough to do what he wanted.
Now he believes it is so advanced that Neytiri, the 10ft-tall alien native warrior princess in Avatar, will evoke “actual lust” for a character who — despite having the actress Zoe Saldana behind her movements, voice and facial expressions — will be “made of pixels”.
Cameron believes there is a certain “geek population that would much rather deal with fantasy women than real women”. He is not ashamed to admit that, now married for the fifth time (to the Titanic actress Suzy Amis), he has at times belonged to that population.
The director can be irascible and demanding to work with: he reduced a starlet to tears in The Abyss by telling extras to urinate in their wetsuits to save time, let Kate Winslet believe she was drowning at one stage in Titanic to get a better performance and hit the Avatar star Sam Worthington with a 10ft rubber stick to get the right reaction in a battle scene.
In Cameron’s own words, Avatar makes Titanic “look like a picnic”. It will no doubt be controversial, too, as an attack on the greed-driven human pillaging of our own world’s natural beauty and resources, as well as a thinly veiled criticism of the “war on terror”. The conflict on the distant planet of Pandora is the result of human mining and scorn for the local populace, while the campaign to suppress them is described as “shock and awe”. The human marines sent in are told — in language familiar from the deserts of Iraq — “You’re not in Kansas any more.”
Beyond the ground-breaking technology, Avatar may be that rare thing: a blockbuster that makes people think. “It integrates my life’s achievements,” said Cameron. Making humanity reach for the stars from the comfort of their multiplex seats.
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