“I got sucked into that vortex”: James Cameron’s out of control apprenticeship with Roger Corman
Like so many future icons before him, James Cameron got his foot in the cinema door by sitting under the learning tree of Roger Corman, something that wasn’t for the faint of heart, given the prolific producer’s signature method of working.
Corman would stretch every penny as far as it could possibly go. If he ever ended up with a couple of days free in the shooting schedule and with money left over in the budget, he’d regularly make a completely different movie with the same cast and crew on the same sets to maximise his return.
One of Cameron’s first jobs in the business was working as a model maker at Roger Corman Studios. Having written and directed his own sci-fi short, Xenogenesis, in the immediate aftermath of Star Wars, that experience – no matter how limited it was – came in very handy for Corman.
The legend never met a craze he couldn’t capitalise on or a bandwagon he couldn’t jump on, but by his usual standards, Battle Beyond the Stars was massively ambitious. Although $2million sounds like chump change for an intergalactic adventure, it was the most expensive movie Corman’s company had ever made at the time.
When the original art director was fired, Cameron was brought in to help with that department, as well as production and visual effects design. Understandably, he found it to be a baptism of fire. “I got sucked into that vortex. It was totally out of control,” he told LDS.
He added: “This was a film where nobody knew what was going on. Nobody in Corman’s outfit had ever made a film remotely that size. They didn’t understand visual effects. The visual effects people who understood what they were doing didn’t know what a general production was all about. Nobody was talking to anybody; it was complete chaos.”
In a development that would come in very handy several times in the future, Cameron found that he “did pretty well in a chaotic environment.” Not only that, but he found himself in a position to “manipulate the situation” to his advantage so he could learn more about the intricacies of production and leverage his own career to the next level after he’d taken on “five or six” different roles from beginning to end.
There was nothing quite like a Corman crash course in the art of filmmaking, but considering Cameron went on to become one of the biggest directors in Hollywood who made a habit of pushing the medium’s technological boundaries forward while making an absolute killing at the box office, being dropped in at the deep end on Battle Beyond the Stars only to emerge as a multi-faceted creative on the other side played a huge part in shaping his trajectory.
