Last Thursday, December 15th, one of the most anticipated films of 2022 premiered on a big stage in Brazil: Avatar The Way of Water🇧🇷 The sequel to the 2009 phenomenon actually means a lot more. It signifies a new technical and visual achievement that left the Midas of the seventh art JamesCameron concentrated work for no less than thirteen years. The revolutionary director never tires of delivering cinematic milestones, but that’s what he strives for for years before launching a new production, sometimes with a window of decades in between. James Cameron really is a perfectionist. When Titanic premiered in late 1997, everyone feared the feature film would become one of the greatest fiascos in history, but the filmmaker proved the critics wrong and delivered something unprecedented. It took Cameron 12 years to “break through” cinema again something that was becoming increasingly difficult. But he’s willing to do it again in the 13 years that separate the original Avatar from its sequel. And that’s not all, Avatar 3, Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 are already promised for 2028.
Despite being one of today’s hottest directors and having some of the most famous films in the history of the seventh art on his resume, there are some productions that may not be known to everyone that in some ways had the hand of James Cameron. And it is precisely this work that is the focus of this new article. Check out six movies below you didn’t know the director of Avatar: The Way of Water was involved with.
Well, dear reader, although almost nobody knows the making of the action hero Rambo, in which James Cameron is involved. The first 1982 film, Programmed to Kill, was based on a book written as an antiwar smear. The film created a second wave of popularity in Sylvester Stallone’s career and was hugely successful 40 years ago. So the studio was soon ready to write a sequel this time from an original script and not based on previous material. By this time James Cameron was already a big name in Hollywood, having composed the first The Terminator and preparing Aliens The Rescue (released the following year). So the producers and Stallone had no doubts and planned that the director would write the script for the second adventure of the excombatant, who returned to the jungles of Vietnam to rescue American prisoners. Although it has become an American symbol of the Reagan era, Rambo also engages in antiestablishment political discourse, with the protagonist being betrayed by the country itself. James Cameron now claims that he only wrote the action scenes (some of the most spectacular of the ’80s) and that Stallone, who is also credited with writing the film, was responsible for the work’s political discourse.
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It was the first major success in the career of director Kathryn Bigelow, who years later became the first woman in the history of the seventh art to win an Oscar for directing. And the connection between Bigelow and James Cameron is old and very strong. It turns out the filmmakers were married from 1989 to 1991. Before that they were colleagues and worked on a few productions. The first was Bigelow’s solo debut, the vampire horror western When Darkness Comes (1987). Just note the film’s cast of names like Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein, and note that it was ‘borrowed’ from Aliens The Rescue, autographed by Cameron. Their marriage ended in 1991, but they remained friends and continued to work together. Like this article about a young FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) who wormed his way into a group of extreme sports enthusiast California surfers (led by Patrick Swayze) who like to rob banks in their spare time. The adrenalinepumping action film was directed by Bigelow but produced by exhusband James Cameron.
And James Cameron would be working with expartner Kathryn Bigelow again four years after their marriage ended. This was even more of a personal project as Cameron created the story, wrote the screenplay and produced it for his ex to direct. It’s a pity that the film didn’t turn out as well as it should, it didn’t have the success it had hoped for, but it quickly achieved cult status. Science fiction in the form the director of Avatar and The Terminator likes, Strange Days presents a future where a new virtual technology is a reality. What the director proposes is an artifact capable of turning our eyes into cameras when placed on our heads with the purpose of recording everything we see and recording our memories. So we don’t just have to rely on our memories of certain facts, we can look at them with such recordings. “This is very Black Mirror” before Black Mirror even existed.
This film capitalized on the boom of the new era of 3D that emerged in the postAvatar era. In fact, after James Cameron’s film about the giant bluish creatures, a veritable flood of 3D produced (or converted) works hit theaters. Films like Clash of the Titans, Alice in Wonderland and Tron: Legacy, for example, benefited greatly from more expensive tickets thanks to threedimensional glasses in the style of Cameron’s film. Although he wasn’t directing a feature film of his own, the filmmaker decided to capitalize on the vein he had reinvigorated and wanted to release his own film in 3D. Instead, he was the producer of Sanctuary, a production that came and went without much notice. Released in one of cinema’s deadliest months (February when all the attention is usually on Oscar films), even the production of a name like James Cameron, who was to be found in his posters and marketing pieces, wasn’t enough to get the film up and running bring to. In the story, a diving team must fight for their lives in underwater caves (a subject dear to the director’s heart) when they decide to attempt one of the most dangerous crossings ever explored.
Sometimes artists have to let the opportunity to create that dream work pass them by. This is very true when we talk about filmmakers. A director with the reputation of James Cameron has a very tight schedule and many projects he would like to get off the ground. Achieving everything you dream of is an impossible task. So you’ll have to work with other developers to see this old idea finally take shape. Every film director in the world has that “movie they never made” story, even though it was very expensive and personal. They are the legends of the seventh art. On many occasions such productions are nearing completion, but for some reason they are over before they even begin. Of course, James Cameron has such a story, and one of them is called Alita. Based on the Japanese graphic novel Gunnm, the story of a future where cyborgs (half human, half machine) are a reality and a young woman named Alita must discover who she really is, enchanted the filmmaker who dreamed of becoming herself adapt it for the big screen. Realizing that the Avatar sequels would take many years of his life, Cameron wrote and produced the screenplay, but turned the project over to fellow director Robert Rodriguez.
Since delivering his last film in the franchise he created, Terminator 2 (1991), James Cameron has given a golden key to this story, which he himself had finished in a great way without really having to continue it. But tell that to the ambitious suits of Hollywood, who would always rather back an already famous idea and an established brand than create something new and pay to see it. The strange thing is that many of these constant forays into material loved by the general public can end up with a sour taste due to the feeling of removing every last drop from a saturated material. That’s the case with the Terminator franchise, which has really not been doing well since James Cameron quit directing. It turns out that in order to make the first film, James Cameron sold the rights to the franchise to producer Gale Anne Hurd whom he would marry the following year with a promise that he would direct the film. Since then, the franchise has been in the hands of various studios. But in 2019, Cameron would finally return to the universe he created, inventing history and producing the sixth Terminator.
Here James Cameron also took on the role of producer on Fox’s reinterpretation of the science fiction literary classic. As all cinephiles know, the story had already been brought to the big screen in the form of a 1972 Russian cult production and a 3hour projection, signed by cult filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The American version, named James Cameron as producer, was written and directed by Steven Soderbergh, then fresh from his double Oscar nominations for Erin Brockovich and Traffic (followed by winning the second) and starring George Clooney. The story, set in the future and in space, features an astronaut on an offearth base having very real hallucinations with his late wife.
James Cameron’s only appearance on television (then fresh out of the Titanic phenomenon) led to this show which became a cult following and has a legion of fans today, albeit not as successful as it should have been then and only lasting 2 seasons took. The series was created, produced, written and had one episode directed by Cameron. Aside from that, it served to introduce the world to the talent and beauty of the missing Jessica Alba in her first prominent role. The plot, set in the future, features a group of children who serve as “lab rats” in genetic experiments at a powerful corporation. They all manage to escape, and years later we find one of them in the form of Max, the protagonist played by Alba, who has become a member of a rebellion against the government and is hiding underground in a world on the brink of collapse. She makes it her mission to find others like her.
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