James Cameron and his never-ending battle between originality and invention
If a legacy were to be defined entirely by firsts, milestones, records, and revolutions, then James Cameron is, without a doubt, one of the most important filmmakers in history. That’s true as it is, but there’s nobody else to have ticked off quite as many industry-shaking accomplishments as he has.
He’s won three Academy Awards from seven nominations and has trophies for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ to call his own, which barely even scratches the surface of what he’s accomplished. Making history even once is something the majority of filmmakers can only ever dream of, but Cameron has turned it into the habit of a lifetime.
The Abyss featured the first computer-generated 3D character as well as cinema’s first digital water effects, Terminator 2: Judgement Day was Hollywood’s first $100million production, Titanic was the industry’s maiden $200m film, while his doomed romance became the first movie to ever cross a billion dollars at the box office.
Avatar revolutionised 3D filmmaking by developing its own technologies to create the most immersive experience possible, one that saw it become the first-ever $2 billion box office hit. Titanic and sci-fi sequel The Way of Water followed suit eventually, which means that Cameron isn’t only the only director to have ever helmed three $2 billion-grossing movies but three of the four top-earning motion pictures of all time.
That’s a staggering impact to have made on the medium, but a recurring thread throughout Cameron’s incomparable track record of invention, imagination, and innovation is that his narratives have often come under fire for being rote, uninspired, or formulaic. In fact, his stories have been so derivative that he’s been sued countless times for allegedly stealing ideas, and even though he’s never been found guilty by the strictest definition, that doesn’t make it any less curious.
Harlan Ellison threatened to take Cameron to court for ripping off his short story Soldier as the basis of The Terminator, and while it didn’t go to a judge, it’s telling that the author has since been credited as on every version of the 1984 classic to have been re-released in cinemas or distributed on home video ever since a settlement was reached.
William Green, Filia and Constantinos Kourtis sued the sequel after their concept for a fantasy flick called The Minotaur – which featured a creature that could shapeshift into human form – was purportedly read by Cameron before Robert Patrick’s liquid metal T-1000 kicked the doors down on the CGI era. True Lies was already a remake of French-language comedy La Totale!, but he was still dragged into pending litigation after it was alleged the original he remade to great effect with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis had been pilfered from Lucien Lambert’s 1982 screenplay Emilie.
Sally Mann secured a settlement for alleging Titanic plagiarised her photographs for the nude sketches Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jake draws of Kate Winslet’s Rose, in addition to Stephen Cummings claiming the fictionalised storyline had liberally drawn from the experience of his real-life descendants. The Avatar saga has so far been sued at least half a dozen times, which is destined to happen all over again whenever the next wave of sequels begin rolling out.
That isn’t to suggest that Cameron has built his name on piggybacking off other people’s ideas, but there aren’t many directors of his status to have been sued on the basis of allegedly stealing ideas quite so often. There’s no evidence to say the Oscar winner keeps his ear to the ground for ideas, stories, and concepts he can pillage, but it nonetheless underlines the distinct lack of originality in his writing.
Titanic was a relatively by-the-numbers love story bridging class divides that’s been told thousands of times, Aliens and Terminator 2 were sequels, True Lies wasn’t an original tale to begin with, and Avatar has been compared to a hundred other films for its standard outsider-to-saviour storyline that’s been a staple part of narrative structure and convention for centuries, never mind the fact he probably won’t be doing anything else with his directorial career except churning out similarly-inclined follow-ups.
Cameron has repeatedly elevated cinema to a new level in terms of scope, scale, spectacle, cutting-edge technologies, and a steadfast refusal to accept there’s nothing in his mind that can’t be developed to achieve his vision even if he has to build it himself, but it’s been a very long time since one of his features came bearing a story or screenplay that was anywhere close to being daring, refreshing, or even above nondescript.
He’s always been a much better director than he is a writer, and while his career hasn’t exactly suffered as a result, that constant war between originality and invention has gotten him sued a remarkable number of times. That doesn’t make him a thief by any stretch, but it does illuminate how he’s spent decades failing to come up with any narrative-driven ideations that other people haven’t already thought of.
