James Cameron’s 15 favourite movies of all time: “One of my guilty-pleasure films”
James Cameron landed his first film job on Roger Corman’s 1980 sci-fi film Battle Beyond The Stars. As the so-called King of the B-movie, Corman was famed for his quip that if you worked well for him once, you’d never have to work for him again.
He provided a sleazy launchpad for would-be auteurs, allowing them to log their first credit before going on to bigger and better things. Cameron didn’t find that to be the case exactly. After an ill-fated spell as the director of Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, Cameron began work on 1984’s The Terminator, eventually selling the script for $1 with the promise that he got to direct it.
That bold move turned out to be genius. The success of the film paved the way for Aliens, The Abyss, and then Terminator 2. Then, in 1997, having made his name in monster movies, Cameron released the historical romance Titanic, which broke all box office records and won no fewer than 11 Academy Awards.
Its box-office performance is dwarfed by just one film: Cameron’s own Avatar sequel, The Way of Water. This mix of untold commercial success, coupled with a fair smattering of critical acclaim, is a symbol of how much of a cinematic sponge he is. He pores over his disparate inspirations and feeds them into his own creations, as is evidenced by those he sees as his favourites.
Considering he’s Hollywood’s most commercially successful filmmaker, it’s no surprise journalists have so often quizzed James Cameron about his film inspirations. He’s named countless favourites over the years, but there’s one Hollywood classic that reoccurs time and time again: 1937’s The Wizard of Oz. “My favourite film is The Wizard Of Oz,” Cameron told Empire in 2022.
“It’s been with me my whole life, from first viewing on a black-and-white TV as a kid in the early ’60s, to my periodic family screenings of it to this day. It’s still as magical now as it ever was,” he said. “That moment when Dorothy opens the door and steps out of her black-and-white world into the vivid, Technicolor land of Oz still gets me. The genius of that, and how it must have taken the audience’s breath away in 1939.”
Such a family-friendly movie seems a surprising choice for someone who spent their early career working on films about flesh-eating piranhas and gun-wielding robots. Judging from some of his other choices, however, Cameron is still just as enthused by gore.
In a 2020 interview, again with Empire, he confessed his affection for 2002’s Resident Evil, one of the few successful video game-to-screen adaptations. “One of my guilty-pleasure films that I actually think is quite beautifully made is Resident Evil,” he revealed. “Watching Michelle Rodriguez in that film, moving like this feral creature, is joyful.”
Cameron also has a soft spot for the original Alien, directed by Ridley Scott. “The franchise has kind of wandered all over the map,” the director told Vulture in 2017. “Ridley [Scott] did the first film, and he inspired an entire generation of filmmakers and science-fiction fans with that one movie, and there have been so many films that stylistically have derived from it, including my own Aliens, which was the legitimate sequel and, I think, the proper heir to his film.”
Showcasing his humility, he continued, “I sort of did it as a fanboy. I wanted to honour his film but also say what I needed to say. After that, I don’t take any responsibility.” Cameron went on to reiterate his love for Ridley’s filmmaking style: “I will stand in line for any Ridley Scott movie, even a not-so-great one because he is such an artist, he’s such a filmmaker,” he added. “I always learn from him.”
But compared to the next film on Cameron’s list, even Ridley’s expertly-engineered jump scares in Alien seem tame. “The most visceral audience reaction moment I remember from my early film-going years is the jump-scare in Wait Until Dark,” Cameron said in that same Empire piece. “People can talk about Alien or Psycho or whatever all day long, but the scene that I vividly remember truly rocking the house was when Alan Arkin, the killer – presumed by the audience to be dead – leaps out of the dark and grabs poor blind Audrey Hepburn’s ankle.”
Concluding, “Of course, there’s a now-classic music sting – a single massive strum of piano strings that felt like an electric shock up the spine.”
All of these moments that he hails as masterful can also be found in his own filmography. He’s not known for a stand-out trope, and the eclectic list below shows exactly why: he simply loves ‘entertainment’ in all of its vague glory.
James Cameron’s favourite films:
- The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
- Resident Evil (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2002)
- Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1976)
- Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)
- Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967)
- Borat (Larry Young, 2006)
- The Woman King (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2022)
- Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977)
- Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
- Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola,1972)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
