The only two movies that altered James Cameron’s consciousness: “A Jungian experience”
If you’ve ever seen James Cameron interviewed, you’ll know that he comes across as a real straight shooter. He is all business and no-nonsense. When asked about all those stories about how tough he is as a director, he’ll shrug it off as if to say that the actors in question simply weren’t hardy enough to handle a challenge. Still, some of the things he’s had them do, whether it’s shivering in freezing water for hours on end or antagonising the crew with his perfectionism, do indeed seem pretty tough to deal with.
All of this suggests that Cameron isn’t the type of guy who gets lost in fantasyland very often, even though that’s exactly where most of his movies take place. In fact, he’s spent a fortune making movies about blue humanoid creatures on an alien planet, which is about as fanciful as mainstream Hollywood is willing to get these days. Even Aliens and The Terminator trotted out their own parallel universes.
Not surprisingly, Cameron’s creative process is hard to pin down. He doesn’t study other people’s movies as if he were conducting a film class, nor, presumably, does he kick his feet up at the end of the day with a joint and let his mind wander at its will. In a 1986 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he was asked about where he picked up the heart-pounding rhythm of his movies, and he shouted out two films that made such an impression on him that they transported him to another plane of existence.
“I have this curious reaction sometimes when I see a film,” he said. “It’s almost like a Jungian experience where I’m seeing a film that I’ve already seen in my mind. That’s happened to me twice. The first one was Star Wars and the second one was Road Warrior.” When he saw the former, it wasn’t as though he was seeing something completely new. On the contrary, he said it was like seeing something he had already imagined.
Perhaps he’d seen 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Hidden Fortress at some point in the recent past. Or perhaps, as he claimed, he used to have visions of his own type of space opera, one with dogfights in space. “I always felt if I got to be a filmmaker, I would do that sort of thing,” he said, explaining that it was Star Wars that made him want to dip a toe into science fiction.
As for George Miller’s 1981 dystopian movie The Road Warrior (also known as Mad Max 2), it is one of the only movies that Cameron admits to studying like a textbook, going over it again and again on his VCR player. It’s easy to see how he might be captivated by it. Miller’s ability to turn a minuscule budget into a pulse-pounding spectacle is legendary, and it’s earned him countless acolytes in Hollywood.
Guillermo del Toro went to see Road Warrior three or four times a week when it was in cinemas in Mexico and then, like Cameron, obsessively watched and rewatched the film on a VHS, pausing it to deconstruct the filmmaker’s mastery with special effects. Even Quentin Tarantino has paid tribute to the Aussie on multiple occasions.
But for James Cameron to shout him out is a particularly impressive feat. The Avatar director, as we’ve established, doesn’t wax eloquent about very much, and when he does, it’s an honour, even if he’s saying that he thinks he came up with the idea for your movie before you did.
