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Iron Jim
From: Premiere Magazine
Date: August, 1994
By: John H. Richardson
When he made The Abyss he went over budget and over schedule, missing his release date by four weeks.
When he made Terminator 2: Judgment Day he broke budget records and kept three editors working frantically
to make a July 1 release. This time he wasn't just pushing the envelope – he was ripping it to shreds, he
was vaporizing it. He'd been shooting True Lies for five months and counting. Word around town put the budget
at $120 million. "They say he's totally out of his mind," said one rival filmmaker, "spending more money than
anybody ever spent in the history of man."
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With Cameron anything is possible. Fired from his first film, he broke into the editing room and cut the
film back to his original vision. That was before the runaway success of the two Terminators and Aliens
gave him imperial power. Nowadays he directs his crew through a bank of speakers pitched to concert volume:
That's exactly what I don't want, he booms. If they mess up, he says, That's okay, I've worked with children
before. The crews respond by printing up T-shirts with semijokey slogans: YOU CAN'T SCARE ME I WORK FOR Jim
CAMERON. And when it comes to show-downs with movie studios, Cameron is a master. T2 coproducer B.J. Rack
recalls the first screening they held for executives of Carolco Pictures: "Jim was mixing the soundtrack,
and I had a bad feeling – I said, `Are you going to be ready?' He said, `Yeah, yeah' – and he made them
wait. Until 4 A.M. The audacity! And they waited – they were sleeping on the floor."
But reports from the True Lies set were full of superlatives. Cameron had reinvented special effects on
The Abyss and T2. Now, armed with his own personal computer-effects studio, Digital Domain, he was once
again creating – in the words of editor Mark Goldblatt – "eye-popping, mind-blowing visuals." He was
shooting a Harrier jet attack on a Miami high-rise that looked so real even Marine pilots wouldn't be able
to tell the hardware from the software. And there was a chase scene on Florida's Seven-Mile Bridge that
made the stuff in The French Connection look like bumper cars. "It's a huge movie," says Arnold
Schwarzenegger, once again Cameron's star. "It's T2-type of action, but even more creative – things you've
never seen before."
The production was immense – the head of the studios in Santa Clarita where True Lies was partly shot said
Cameron probably picked a facility 30 miles outside of L.A. because no studio in the city had enough
parking. Cameron's traveling circus was dogged by protests from Florida to Rhode Island. In Newport the
city council had to call a special vote to grant True Lies an exemption from the city's noise code. Local
activist Maureen O'Neil complained to the press, "I don't particularly want my neighborhood simulating
Sarajevo."
But all of the whispers, even the nastiest, were tinged with awe. The studio behind Wyatt Earp was
intimidated enough to change its release date and leave a little space between the western and True
Lies, even with Kevin Costner playing Earp. As one envious young producer put it: -They say it's going
to be the Holy Grail of action pictures."
James Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Canada, a town just north of Niagara Falls. His father was an
electrical engineer who worked for a paper mill. He was a strict disciplinarian and Cameron grew up
hating to be told what to do, so he became a master builder and told other kids what to do. They
constructed rafts, slot cars, go-carts, rockets, forts, boats, a catapult that hurled boulders so
large they made craters when they landed. On one occasion they built a submersible "sea lab" and sent
mice deep under the Niagara River. When a neighbor stole some of Jim's toys, Jim and his brother, Mike,
sawed through the branches that held up his tree house. Hospitalization was required.
Cameron's mother was an artist and encouraged him to paint; she helped get his work shown in a local
gallery when he was a teenager. His mother inspired the sympathy for independent women that marks all
of Cameron's work. "I always felt this frustration that she was chained to the house by the kids," he
says.
When he was around fifteen, Cameron saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. "I saw it ten times because I couldn't
comprehend how they did that stuff," he says. He started building models and experimenting with 16mm
film. At night he would lie in bed, listen to "really bad music," and visualize space battles. After
a stint at Fullerton College ("I didn't know if I wanted to be a scientist or an artist"), in California,
he dropped out and married a waitress. He drove a truck for the local school district and lived in a
little house with a yappy little dog.
Then he saw Star Wars. "I was pissed off," he recalls. "I wanted to make that movie. That's when I got
busy."
Really busy. He haunted the USC library, reading doctoral dissertations on optical printing, front
projection, and rear projection. "All I was interested in was visual effects," he says. "I didn't know
who Humphrey Bogart was." He started buying lenses and taking them apart to find out how they worked. He
built his own dolly track, fooled around with beam splitters – all in the living room of his little
suburban house. "My wife thought I was crazy," he says. "The guy who used to like to smoke dope and go
to the river and drink beer and drive fast cars, all of a sudden had gone psychotic on her. She was
afraid of me."
Armed with some models he had made with the help of two friends, Cameron obtained an interview at Roger
Corman's New World Films: "I figured I'd get in there and then I'd spread like a virus." Which is exactly
what happened. "Three weeks after I started I had my own department, I was hiring people," Cameron recalls.
"And everybody else that worked there just hated me."
After about two years with Corman, Cameron got his first shot at directing. The movie was Piranha II: The
Spawning. He arrived on the set in Jamaica to find a crew that only spoke Italian and a production so
poorly prepared and underfinanced that there wasn't even a costume for one of the stars, Lance Henriksen.
At dinner one night, he and Henriksen bought the uniform right off their waiter. To make sure there were
enough rubber piranhas, Cameron stayed up late every night making them himself. "I remember thinking, Who
is this guy?" Henriksen recalls.
Cameron found himself under constant attack by the film's principal producer, an Italian named Ovidio G.
Assonitis. He refused to show the director dailies but told him, "'It's shit, nothing cuts,'" Cameron
says.
Cameron kept brooding about the film. Was it true the footage didn't cut? Finally he flew to Rome and
confronted Assonitis in his office. According to Cameron, "He sat behind the desk with a letter opener
in his hand, like he was afraid I was going to jump over the desk." (Assonitis could not be reached for
comment.)
That night, Cameron went back and used a credit card to break into the editing room. "So here I am," he
recalls. "I'm looking at all these boxes and I see the word fine, which is Italian for `end,' so I figure
these must be the trims. I teach myself how to run the Cinemonta, which is their version of KEM, and I
just start recutting the picture." He went back night after night, until the him was the way he wanted
it. Ultimately, Cameron took away a lesson he would never forget: "It made me mistrustful of other people
who have creative power on a film," he says. -Very mistrustful."
And that's when James Cameron started to become James Cameron. Alone in Rome, feeling "pissed off and
alienated" and so broke he survived by stealing complimentary breakfast rolls left on trays in the
hallways of his hotel, he got sick with the flu. He had been playing with an idea about a robot hit
man from the future. Now, waking one night from a fever dream, he saw him, like a snapshot. Later he
"drew a sketch of half a Terminator, which looked very much like the final one, crawling after a girl
who was injured and couldn't get up and run," Cameron says. "He had a kitchen knife and he pulled himself
over the floor with it, dragging his broken arm. I thought that was a really horrific image."
When he got back to L.A., Cameron told his agent his idea about a robot hit man. The agent said, "Bad
idea, bad idea. Do something else." Instead he fired the agent. He began writing. Wisely, he anchored
the sci-fi with human details taken from his own life. He gave his heroine, eventually played by Linda
Hamilton, his first wife's job, turning the Bob's Big Boy where she had worked into Bob's Big Buns, and
later even cast her yappy little dog. When the script was finished he sold Gale Anne Hurd the rights for
one dollar – and the promise that she would never let anyone else direct it.
The Terminator – with Cameron attached to direct – was turned down by all the major studios. Finally,
when John Daly's Hemdale got interested, Cameron talked Henriksen into pitching the project in costume.
"I went to Hemdale with gold foil from a Vantage pack over my teeth and a cut on my head, and kicked the
door open," Henriksen says. Daly bit, captured by the script, the drawings, and by Jim's complete passion
for the project," he says. Orion Pictures bought the distribution rights.
At first, Cameron focused on finding someone to play Kyle Reese, the good guy who crosses time to save the
world. "The Terminator was not given much attention," says Daly. "He was just a robot." Then Orion
executive Mike Medavoy ran into Arnold Schwarzenegger at a party. "He told me about The Terminator
and said it didn't have a leading man, so I read the script with that in mind," Schwarzenegger remembers.
Cameron was skeptical. "He was like, `Yeah, I'll meet him,' " says actor Michael Biehn, who was eventually
cast as Reese, " `but if you have Arnold play Reese you're going to need King Kong for the Terminator.' "
When they met, Schwarzenegger and Cameron hit it off. Schwarzenegger kept drifting back to the Terminator.
"I kept saying he had to be able to change the weapons blindfolded, and shoot without blinking his eyes,
and how he should walk and look with his head tilted forward," says Schwarzenegger. "Then Jim said, `You
should play the Terminator.' I was, `Oh... I came for the other thing.'" Cameron whipped out a pencil
and started drawing. Schwarzenegger was impressed: "You could almost act off the drawing – the coldness
of the character."
All of his friends and advisers told Schwarzenegger not to do it, the conventional wisdom being that it
was career suicide to play a villain. Finally, Schwarzenegger decided to ignore his advisers. "I ended
up thinking, Ill give it a shot, because this is so well written and the guy is so determined."
But Schwarzenegger had a commitment to do Conan the Destroyer and wouldn't be free for four months. So
Cameron signed on to write Rambo: First Blood Part II and Aliens simultaneously – while also doing rewrites
of The Terminator. With a calculator, he divided the amount of time he had by the number of pages he had
to write and spent the next four months jumping between three different desks, putting on different music
for each script. When he wasn't writing, he was prepping The Terminator, happily showing off his plans to
everyone involved. "He was almost childlike," Biehn says, -like a kid in a candy store."
The Terminator began shooting in February 1984. Cameron arrived on the set with the confidence of a
seasoned pro. "He was like an encyclopedia of technology, and if a shot was a half inch off the way he
visualized it, he would go crazy," Schwarzenegger recalls. But he wasn't just a gearhead; he won over
the actors by giving them room to work. And he surprised everyone by demonstrating the stunts himself:
"He would show it to you without any padding," Schwarzenegger says. "He was totally mad."
One thing about Cameron was...different: He could be unusually blunt, especially about the kiss-ass
culture of Hollywood. Mess with him and he'd saw off the branches under your treehouse. "He's not the
kind of guy who will try to say things in a diplomatic way," Schwarzenegger says. "If you do something
right, he'll say it was disastrous but probably a human being could do no better. If he was dealing with
machines, they could do better. So you walk away going, `I guess he likes it.' "
Shortly before the movie was to be released, Cameron became disheartened by Orion's attitude; in fact,
he says the studio was outright dismissive. -The guy from Orion says, `When you have a down-and-dirty
action thriller like this, it usually plays for two weeks – it usually drops by 50 percent the second
weekend, and is gone by the third week,'" he recalls. Even after the picture opened at number one and
got surprisingly good reviews, Cameron asserts, Orion refused to support it with a beefed-up ad campaign.
"They treated me like a piece of dogshit," Cameron says.
When The Terminator was in the theaters, another blow came from an unexpected quarter: Science fiction
writer Harlan Ellison threatened to sue, claiming The Terminator had ripped off two episodes of The
Outer Limits that he'd written, "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand," as well as "I Have No Mouth,
and I Must Scream," an award-winning short story. Their plots concerned robots, time travel, altering
the past to save humanity from a holocaust, and a future world where "machines are born to kill." Gagged
for many years by a secrecy clause, Ellison is now speaking about it for the first time: "He got all my
best stuff, but the wonderful thing is, he combined it in a new, fresh, and interesting way. I would have
been very flattered – all he had to do was get on the phone." Over Cameron's objections – time travel and
robots are common sci-fi themes, he says – Hemdale and Orion gave Ellison an "acknowledgment to the works
of" credit and a cash settlement, telling Cameron that if he wanted to fight they'd back him. But if
Ellison won, they'd sue Cameron. The director is still bitter: "I could've risked getting wiped out, or
I could let the guy have his fucking credit."
But Cameron had made a classic. Schwarzenegger's "steel reaper" is as compelling as a nightmare, and the
love story between Biehn and Hamilton made it surprisingly popular with women. The film also displays a
devilish wit unusual for an action film. Consider the scene, for example, in which the Terminator goes Un
Chien andalou one better by carving out part of his damaged eye – and then reaches up to fluff his hair.
The result: The Terminator never stopped, gaining cult status on video and TV. "No matter what picture I
did after that," Schwarzenegger says, "people would say, `When are you going to do another Terminator?' "
Between pictures, Cameron played – and played hard. He went diving, flying, ballooning, anything that put
a little space or speed between him and the ground. Everyone who knows Cameron has a story about him and
fast cars. "I go to Jim's party in my brand-new Acura NSX, and Jim looks at me and says, `Nice car,' "
says Henriksen. "When Jim says, `Nice car,' that's a challenge. So I said, `Jim, why don't you take it
for a spin?' Jim takes it out for ten minutes, and when he comes back all the rubber on my back tires
is gone."
Fast planes are good too. Actor Bill Paxton tells of a time Cameron, shooting a video, lashed a camera
to the wings of an ultralight plane, undid his seat belt to get a better grip, and pointed the plane
straight down. "He goes into a 3,000-foot dive and drops to three feet off the deck," recalls Paxton.
-I go, `My God, another couple of feet...'
"If you're going to hang out with Jim," he adds, "you better have your life insurance."
And then, of course, there are the women. After working with her on a professional basis for four years,
Cameron took Hurd for an evening at the Charthouse, in Malibu. Add beach and moonlight, and the working
relationship became a romance – with a Cameronian twist, iron-man dates: -We went off-road on a four-wheel
drive," says Hurd, "took the hot-air balloon out, and a huge wind came up, and we ended up crash-landing.
We went horseback riding, ice-skating, we shot AK-47s out in the desert." And that was all in one weekend.
As the romance ripened, Cameron and Hurd would race each other to meetings, Hurd in her Porsche and Cameron
in his new Corvette (purchased with his Terminator fee), talking on cellular phones and playing one of
Cameron's favorite games, ditch-'em. One day she'd try to shake him, the next he'd try to shake her. "We'd
be smoking down the freeway at 120 miles an hour," Cameron says, "talking the whole time like nothing was
happening."
Later, Cameron would divorce Hurd and marry Kathryn Bigelow, director of Near Dark and Point Break, and
then divorce her and move in with Linda Hamilton – all formidable women much like the macha heroines of
his movies. The director explains his string of wives by saying he picks women who don't need him, so
naturally one day they realize they don't need him. Hurd says that when she was going through troubles,
Cameron just gave her too much damn space. "He's tough," explains Mike Cameron, "and toughest on the
people he cares about the most."
CAMERON'S NEXT two movies, Aliens and The Abyss, established his reputation as both a brilliant world-class
director and a potentially out-of-control visionary-crackpot. With Aliens he started thinking really big.
"I had been on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so I thought I'd seen the biggest set ever built," says
Henriksen. `Then I got to Aliens."
The film provided Cameron with plenty of opportunities to hone his fighting skills. To begin with,
Twentieth Century Fox didn't want Hurd to produce Aliens. In one meeting, she recalls, "they basically
said, `How can a little girl like you do a big movie like this?' " They won that battle and set off for
England, where they had to contend with a scornful British crew that was convinced it was working on a
crappy sequel to a great (British-directed) thriller. Cameron fired his cinematographer early on and
Hurd threatened to fire others when a mutiny surfaced. The crew took to calling Cameron Grizzly Adams,
and tea breaks were taken with metronomic regularity.
Fox wasn't exactly overwhelmed by the project – the studio thought its summer hit was going to be
SpaceCamp. Instead, Aliens made $83 million and established Cameron as a hot director. It also showed
a mind at work, with thematic passion and a mordant sense of humor (listen closely at the end of the
credit roll for the slurp of that baby facehugger). Clearly, Cameron wasn't just doing time on Planet
Action – he wanted it all, and art too.
But it was The Abyss – which Cameroids call, probably accurately, the toughest shoot in film history
– that showed just how obsessed Cameron really is. Inspired by a recurring nightmare of a vast wave
rolling unstoppably toward shore, it is a wildly ambitious story that ranges from the troubled love
of a man and woman to the nature of humanity and war, expressed through some of the most pregnant
nautical metaphors since Herman Melville.
But the genius of The Abyss isn't so much what's onscreen (which is, alas, flawed) but what it took
to get it there. With just four months of preproduction, Cameron and Hurd faced the task of building
the largest underwater set ever constructed, a set so huge each section of it weighed 40 tons. They
found an abandoned nuclear plant and filled its two containment units with a total of 10 million
gallons of water, designed a filtration system to keep the water clear, craned in a tarpaulin big
enough to keep the water dark, and then began inventing underwater filming equipment. With Mike,
who had spent the past fourteen years as an aeronautical engineer, Cameron worked on deciding what
they needed for the "talking helmets," farmed the assignment out, and turned to developing a "diver
propulsion vehicle" for the cameras that eliminated the need for underwater cranes and dolly tracks.
The Sea Wasp DPV earned the brothers the first of five patents they have been awarded so far on
technical film equipment. They come up with ideas in the following way, Mike says: Jim dreams up his
shot. figures out what he needs to execute it, then finds out if the thing exists. If it doesn't, he
tells Mike to make it. And when his brother says that from an engineering standpoint it can't be done,
"Jim says, `Don't use the word engineer around me ever again.' "
The DPV done, Cameron decided to reinvent special effects, turning to Industrial Light & Magic to
help create the "pseudopod" water creature; the effect took eight months to produce. but the process
gave ILM a huge jump on the use of computer graphics for film, making movies like Jurassic Park and
Terminator 2: Judgment Day possible. Cameron wrote the script so that if the effect didn't work, he
could cut the movie without it.
Filming underwater , proved to be incredibly arduous. The water was so highly chlorinated that it
burned skin and turned hair white. Even the mundane details were complicated – how does a script
supervisor work underwater? (By covering each page in plastic.) How do you take a bathroom break
underwater? (By peeing right in your wet suit.) The actors were stretched to the breaking point.
When the camera ran out of film in the middle of her death scene, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio stormed
off the set, screaming, "We are not animals!" Ed Harris tells (in The Abyss's fascinating laserdisc
special edition) of a day so hard, he burst into tears on the drive home. Neither actor would return
calls for this story.
It was on The Abyss that Cameron began to get a reputation for abusing his crews. One crew member,
who asked to remain anonymous, says: "He just has this tunnel vision to get what he wants done. His
crew gets battered and he doesn't care." Cameron loyalists – and there are many – cope through black
humor. "One of the Jim jokes on The Abyss," says crew member Ed Marsh, "was, `I'm letting you breathe,
what more do you want?' "
Cameron admits that he's "very, very hard" on his crews – and he doesn't apologize a bit. "If an NFL
coach didn't browbeat the guys and say, `You fucked up and you didn't do this'... I mean, it's perfectly
acceptable in sports that mistakes and laziness should not be tolerated. If you're working on a big movie,
it must imply that you're the best – you presented yourself as a varsity athlete. So fucking be one. That's
my philosophy." Asked if he fires many people, Cameron gives a dry laugh. "I would never do anything as
merciful as firing someone. For fucking up, you have to stay till the end."
Cameron's friends all talk about this side of him, alternately worrying over it and excusing it. They say
that Cameron gets frustrated because he can do every job on a movie set better than anyone working for
him. They say that he's so passionate about his films that sometimes, when the budget simply can't accept
a shot he wants, he pays for it out of his own pocket. And they all say that no one works harder than
Cameron himself – at least three people have described how, after a long day underwater, Cameron was
required to spend an hour decompressing, and he would hang upside down to relieve the strain of the helmet
and watch dailies underwater on a video monitor. (Paxton says that by the time the actor visited the Abyss
set, Cameron had figured out how he could push the limits of the Navy dive tables and spend less time
decompressing.)
What's striking, ultimately, is how tender and defensive people are about him. Mike Cameron probably puts
it best: "I've been the recipient of a lot of his derogatory remarks, and it does hurt your feelings. But
he really is a bighearted guy. The people who are close to him know that, and they just kind of tolerate
the viciousness." Maybe the reason they are so willing to forgive is that, as everyone says, Cameron's
furies are never personal. "His movies have an ego, and you don't fuck with his movies," says Biehn, "but
he doesn't have an ego. When he throws a tantrum, it's almost like the movie is throwing a tantrum."
Despite all the tension, Cameron still took time for his brand of fun. One person said he raced his
Corvette around the underwater tank, though Cameron's response to this anecdote was, "Not true, but a
good idea." However, there's no doubt he continued his lifelong avocation of torturing his little brother
– in this case, casting him as a drowned corpse. According to Mike, "He said, `You're going to go down
25 feet, you're going to open your eyes because dead men don't close their eyes. we're going to put a
live crab in your mouth, and when it's time to shoot we'll tell you "Action" and you let the crab out
of your mouth.' " They did five takes. "Two times, I had to crush the crab because Jim was taking too
long setting the lights. I'm sure it was a sheer delight for him."
After a frantic postproduction and many fights with the studio, The Abyss ended up a case of too much
too late. Its biggest problem was the ending – or, rather, the endings. There were at least three, each
more extreme than the previous one, until it practically exploded with its own ambition, and all the
really great stuff – the magical pseudopod, the unbelievably intense love-death sequence, Ed Harris's
powerful final descent – was snuffed out by a burst of Message. In the end, The Abyss made only $54
million and got mixed to negative reviews. Hollywood snickered.
Seven years after the release of The Terminator, it was finally time to make T2. Cameron had been
toying with the idea almost since the first movie wrapped. "Arnold and I were talking about making another
picture," says Cameron. "I said, `Well, I'm not going to make the same film. You're going to be a good
guy.' He thought it was kind of a wacky idea. but he liked it." Cameron had also dreamed up the
shape-shifter idea for the T-1000. but it hadn't been technically possible until The Abyss. The
real problem was making the deal – there was bad blood between Schwarzenegger and Hemdale's John Daly.
Ultimately, Hemdale got into financial trouble at the same time that Carolco's high-rolling Mario Kassar
was pursuing Schwarzenegger. "I said (to Kassar), 'Hemdale has no money,' " Schwarzenegger recalls. "
`Go for it right now, and we'll do it (for Carolco).' " Once the deal was in place, Cameron sat down
and started writing.
Again the scope of tbe film was vast – for the night-freeway chase scene, the production was caught
short when its cabling was stolen and had to rent every electrical cable it could get its hands on to
light four miles of freeway. The T-1000 effect cost $5.5 million and took eight months of work for 3.5
minutes of screen time.
Despite the tech-heavy nature of the movie, Cameron hit the set determined to get the acting just right.
Schwarzenegger says, "He worked harder on the different emotions, talked us through it more, insisted
on rehearsing." But he was still doing whatever it took to get the shot he wanted. For the scene in which
a helicopter flies below an underpass, Cameron felt that the shot had to be done twice to get both forward
and rear angles.
But the budget – which reportedly started in the $70 million range – was soaring. Carolco executives
called Schwarzenegger for help. "They said, `We hope we have your support.' I would say, `There's no
way.' " One of the sequences Carolco wanted cut, Schwarzenegger says, was the roadhouse scene, in which
his character gets introduced. "Only a studio guy would cut a scene like that out."
Meanwhile, Cameron and Carolco fought over the ending. Cameron's ending (which can be seen on one version
of the laserdisc) puts Hamilton in age makeup many years in the future. Carolco demanded a screening, and,
as Kassar flew to George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in a helicopter through a storm, Cameron started the
screening without him. Afterward he snatched up the preview cards and refused to show them to Kassar.
But the viewers all said the same thing: Lose the ending. Finally, Cameron relented, and the existing
ending was added. The result, of course, was one of the biggest hits of all time, a commercial and
artistic success.
Like the others, T2 spawned its own crew T-shirt: TERMINATOR 3 NOT WITH ME.
After T2, Cameron put together a $500 million deal that would give him total power over his films,
even ownership of the negative. He also started a company called Digital Domain, based on an idea he
got driving in his car – it would "domesticate the highfalutin' digital effect," so that even
realism-oriented filmmakers could use it. If you wanted a house in the middle of a cornfield, you
could grow the corn right in the computer. Cameron called up ILM whiz Scott Ross, who said computers
couldn't do that yet. Cameron replied: "I know. We'll make it happen." IBM pitched in the money, and
now Digital Domain is working on Interview With the Vampire, providing miniatures, mattes, composites,
morphing, and even digital enhancement of special effects makeup. Cameron was also having a baby with
Linda Hamilton and working on a script for his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow. Then Schwarzenegger called him
up and said, "I have the picture you have to do next."
The film Schwarzenegger had in mind was a French film called La Totale!, a comedy about a man who
pretends to be a boring joe when really he's a secret agent. The problem is, he's done such a good
job of pretending that his wife is nearly ready to leave him. Cameron liked it and wrote a script,
only to find his shiny new self-financing deal freezing up when he couldn't get any completion-bond
company to insure him. After some wrangling, Fox and Cameron agreed to an acceptable budget and Fox
put up more cash.
Then the studio threw out the numbers. "Once we got into the logistical problems, we knew we weren't
going to make that schedule," says Jon Landau, Fox's senior vice-president of feature production. The
actors were prepared. "When you make a deal with Jim's company, they don't hire you with an out date,"
says Jamie Lee Curtis, who signed on as Schwarzenegger's wife. "It was made very clear to me in an
unspoken way that I shouldn't be making plans for the last day of the movie."
Filming began during a heat wave last year. Working at the Santa Clarita studios, the crew started
with interior scenes between Curtis and Schwarzenegger. "[The first scene] was just two people getting
ready for work, that wonderful dance that married people do, where they're oblivious to each other,"
says Curtis. For three weeks they established the relationship, shooting in a simple and linear way.
Then the action started.
"It's not the ordinary scenes you see with car crashes," says Schwarzenegger. "Imagine riding a horse
through a hotel lobby and into an elevator, going up the elevator with the horse and people in tuxedos
and dresses, then going on to the roof."
And that was the easy stuff – in Miami, Cameron shot the Harrier jet. "The first time I saw that, my
jaw dropped," says Curtis. "They took a real Harrier jet and mounted it on top of a hydraulic – it
looked like an upside-down spider, with all these legs moving up and down. They were up there for
three weeks, with every piece of equipment – a Technocrane, a Lenny arm, a Powerpad. It's outrageous
what he did. And it went flawlessly."
Then on to the massive limo-and-helicopter chase on Florida's Seven-Mile Bridge, which took weeks to
film. Cameron asked Curtis to perform the final stunt herself. It involved hanging from a wire under
a moving helicopter a hundred feet off the water. "Will you be there?" she asked. "Ill be shooting you,"
he said. So up they went, the director acting as his own cameraman, -hanging out of the helicopter door
with nothing but the Seven-Mile Bridge and lots of water and manta rays underneath him."
As the scope of the film expanded, so did the stress. To keep things moving, Cameron ordered the troops
around like Patton – via those speakers. The crew dubbed him Mr. Microphone. "People who would screw up
constantly would hear about it in a very direct manner," says Tom Arnold, who plays Schwarzenegger's
sidekick.
Occasionally, Cameron went too far even for Schwarzenegger. One day, he said that anyone who went to the
bathroom could just keep walking – and he wasn't kidding. "That's over the top," Schwarzenegger admits.
"He would rather pee in his pants than leave the scene when things are clicking. But an electrician
doesn't feel as dedicated as he does."
But again, Cameron's fanaticism inspired his troops. Says Schwarzenegger: "There was one thing that blew
me away about the guy – there was a particular action scene that required a weapon to be fired in a very
tight area. I asked Jim about it, and he said, `Well, well find out if it's safe.' And he gets in this
area and has the weapons guy fire it past his face a couple of times – the fact is, he has balls, man.
He'll do anything."
Filming was endless – True Lies shot so long that Paxton worked on it for a while, went off and played
the lead in another movie, and came back to shoot some more. Tia Carrere, who plays an art dealer, signed
on for seven or eight weeks' work and ended up cashing checks for seven months. "It kept going and going,
like the Energizer bunny," she says. Cameron admits to 130 shooting days, give or take a few, but add
second unit and the occasional unofficial first unit and it's anyone's guess; the rumor is 180 days.
(Cameron insists that True Lies isn't the most expensive picture in history – Spartacus was, he says,
-adjusted for today's dollars.") "Fox was sweating bullets, just like Mario did," says one insider. "But
what could they do? They want more pictures from him, plus the dailies were great."
Finally in March, Fox announces that principal photography is finished. A week later, in a small editing
room in Santa Monica, Cameron watches a shot of fingers fumbling for an electronic bug. He turns to his
editor. "Cut to it with the fingers already on the bug, so she's not fumbling. If it doesn't cut smoothly,
then play with it some more.
Cameron jumps to another editing room, then another. Despite a deadline so tight that within a few days
he'll end up pushing his release date two weeks, Cameron seems relaxed, even happy. He jokes that "all my
available RAM is taken up by True Lies dailies," but he seems confident about the movie, and he has even
managed to keep things going with Linda Hamilton since she moved out with their baby daughter during
preproduction. "Maybe that's what it takes," he says. "We're both pretty happy with the arrangement for
right now. And the baby is outstanding, beautiful – total engineer." He shows a one-sheet he came up with
for True Lies – a hand grenade with a wedding ring for a firing pin. The tag line reads, EVEN PERFECT
MARRIAGES HAVE THEIR BLOW-UPS. Suddenly it all comes clear: Cameron is probably the only person in the
world who can make gearhead action-romances that aren't just sincere, they're autobiographical.
Cameron and his editor watch Schwarzenegger in a tender moment, trying to break through his teenage
daughter's shell. "She's very subtle," Cameron says. "She's listening to what he's saying, but she's
not going to blurt out, `Oh, Daddy.' That's excellent, let's go to Six. I like her in Four too."
Then it's off to dailies – yes, despite the wrap announcement, Cameron is still shooting. In a few
days Schwarzenegger – already at work full-time on another movie – will quietly slip out to shoot one
last scene.
Maybe the last. "I called [Cameron] a perfectionist once," says Tom Arnold. "And he said, `No, I'm a
greatist. I only want to do it until it's great.' "
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