“I shamelessly cribbed from their style”: the filmmakers who shaped James Cameron’s success
Purely in terms of commercial success, few directors can hold a candle to James Cameron. The likes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas may best him in terms of accumulated numbers, but in Spielberg’s case, it’s because he’s directed so many more movies, and in Lucas’, it’s because he created the most beloved franchise known to man. Cameron has only directed nine feature films, and yet two of them have become the highest-grossing movies in history. It begs the question: who were Cameron’s influences when he was starting, and how did they shape the filmmaker he became?
Cameron’s early forays into the movie business were as art director on 1980’s Battle Beyond the Stars and production designer on 1981’s Galaxy of Terror. He also served as a special effects photographer and matte painter on John Carpenter’s Escape From New York, which sounds like a factoid scientifically created to make film geek’s heads explode.
The ambitious young filmmaker was then hired as special effects director for the B-movie Piranha II: The Spawning. When the original director walked off the project, he seized his opportunity. Soon, Cameron was both writing and directing that film, although he has since all but disowned it and doesn’t consider it his true directorial debut.
Instead, Cameron feels that The Terminator is when he truly arrived as a filmmaker. He wrote the seminal sci-fi horror after having a fever dream about a cyborg exoskeleton walking out of a blazing inferno, and it was released to massive acclaim in 1984. That same year, Cameron also co-wrote Rambo: First Blood Part II after star Sylvester Stallone re-wrote enough portions of Cameron’s script to finagle a credit. Soon after, he signed up to write and direct Aliens.
During this period of his career, Cameron’s success was undoubtedly built on the foundation of his screenwriting. His scripts were perfect pieces of engineering – sleek, sophisticated story delivery devices designed to keep executives turning the pages. He made complex sci-fi concepts simple and understandable with an economy few could match.
During a January 2023 Empire feature entitled “An Audience with the King”, a succession of Hollywood’s biggest writers and directors were allowed to ask Cameron about his work. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunner JD Payne decided to enquire about these early writing efforts. In particular, he wanted to know if there were any screenwriters whose work Cameron took inspiration from.
Fascinatingly, Cameron admitted that when he started out as a screenwriter, his work was a hodgepodge of two main people: Walter Hill and Michael Mann. Cameron had gotten his hands on a copy of Hill’s script for The Driver, a crime thriller starring Ryan O’Neal, which is the very definition of ruthless efficiency.
Cameron revealed, “I marvelled at the economy of words in Walter’s script for The Driver. One-word sentences stacked vertically on the page; almost haiku.”
Reading Mann’s script for Thief, his 1981 heist film starring James Caan as a skilled safecracker, was similarly revelatory. Cameron said, “Michael’s script for Thief was equally spare and relentlessly paced.”
Reading the work of these two masters revealed to Cameron that he didn’t need to be excessive with his word count, and flowery bouts of purple prose wouldn’t necessarily get the job done. If he could be as to-the-point and forceful as possible, in as few words as possible, it would turn his scripts into compulsively readable page-turners. He admitted: “I will say now that I shamelessly cribbed from their style while writing The Terminator and Aliens.”
This isn’t to say Cameron necessarily still writes like Hill and Mann. Instead, he believes he evolved into his own distinct style as he gained more and more confidence in himself. These days, he’s a completely different writer, even down to his willingness to allow others in on the process.
He explained, “I started out as a lone wolf, writing The Terminator at a booth at Du-Par’s restaurant on Ventura Boulevard at 3am, but I’ve come in the last couple of decades to respect collaboration.”
