The classic movie everyone told James Cameron not to make: “Absolutely do not do this film”
The easiest way to convince James Cameron to make a movie is to tell him that he can’t, as the filmmaker has built his entire career on defying convention, upending expectations, and pushing the technological boundaries of cinema.
He wanted to create the first CGI-generated character to show emotion in The Abyss, but when he came up with the idea, it simply wasn’t possible. This being Cameron, though, he brought in a team of pioneers to help usher in the digital revolution that was about to change the industry forever.
When he wanted to do something similar, except on a much grander scale, for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it was an impossibility when he wrote the script. Visual effects had never been as complicated, realistic, or immersive, so he spent a fortune ensuring that the T-1000 was an integral part of the story, just as he’d imagined.
Nobody had made a film with a $100 million budget before he did it with True Lies; Titanic cost even more and running massively behind schedule had the doomsayers predicting his seafaring romance would flop before it became the highest-grossing release in history, and plenty of people said the first Avatar left no cultural footprint before it ended its theatrical run as the third top-earning release of all time.
Basically, if Cameron says he’s going to do it, then he will. And, more often than not, he’ll do it incredibly well. After the breakout success of The Terminator, the filmmaker was suddenly an in-demand name who’d been pegged as one of the fastest-rising auteurs in the business. Naturally, his first project was to co-write a Rambo sequel with Sylvester Stallone.
After that, he took on the daunting challenge of crafting a worthy sequel to a movie that was one of the greatest sci-fi flicks and horror movies ever made. His concept was simple: whereas Ridley Scott’s Alien was a haunted house in space film, his follow-up was an all-out action blockbuster.
“I had people who were trying to advise me on my career after Terminator say, ‘Absolutely do not do this film,'” he told GQ. “They said, ‘If it’s good, they’re gonna attribute it to Ridley, and if it’s bad, it’s all you. There’s no upside’. And I thought, ‘Well, you’re probably right, and that’s very logical, but I dig it, and I’m gonna do it. I just like it.'”
Under Cameron’s direction, Aliens was every bit the equal of its illustrious predecessor, and the debate over which of the first two instalments is superior is one that remains capable of raging into the night. He was never short of confidence anyway, with the director famously pitching the sequel by adding an ‘S’ to the end of Alien and then drawing two straight lines through the letter to signify dollar signs, and he was more than capable of backing it up.
