JAMES CAMERON

2008 INDUCTEE

James Cameron has a firm hand on the tiller of his own success. “The road to success is like Harold and the Purple Crayon. You draw it for yourself. You have to imagine it first, and then you have to draw it, and then you have to walk it.”

Growing up near Niagara Falls, Cameron was fascinated by the world around him. His mother had an artistic side, and his father was an electrical engineer, which created an interesting conflict: “You have a collision of left-and-right-hemisphere thinking, and I think I got equal parts of both.” He read voraciously, particularly science fiction and fantasy, loved Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. A student at a very athletic high school, Cameron wasn’t particularly keen on sports, so when one of his favourite teachers decided the school needed a theatre arts program, he dove into this project. The group of students formed their own mini independent production company, building props, scenery, the stage and costumes. He credits this experience with helping him develop his strong and independent work ethic.  

As a child, Cameron was always organizing his friends to build a go-kart, a tree house or a fort. He thinks he’s still doing the same thing now that he did when he was nine. “I’m just getting a bunch of kids to help me build a fort, except that now it takes $100 million, and the kids are all my age.”

When Cameron was 17, his father was offered a position at a company in California. Cameron took his love of building technical things, the arts, writing and science fiction, and enrolled at a local college to study physics. Conflicted about his direction in life, Cameron soon dropped out of college and began working as a machinist and truck driver.  

When the film Star Wars was released, Cameron finally realized what he may have know all along: he wanted to tell stories through the medium of film. “What finally attracted me to film in such a definitive way was…it was the only place I could reconcile the need to tell stories and to work in a visual arts medium, and the desire to understand things at a technological level and my fascination with engineering and technology.” He began a course of self-directed study of the technology of special effects, optical printing, and front and rear projection. He took his small savings account and spent it on photography equipment and borrowed money to produce a short film.

His professional career began on Roger Corman’s  Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), where he served as a production designer, matte artist and visual effects director of photography. When the production fell behind, Cameron asked Corman if he could second direct Galaxy of Terror (1981). “In the filmmaking business, no one ever gives you anything. Nobody ever taps you on the shoulder and says, ‘You know, I really admire the way you talk and the way you draw, and I think you’d made a good director.” But Cameron was now a director.  

Cameron wrote three scripts in 1983: Rambo: First Blood Part 2; Aliens; and The terminator, which he also directed. He directed Aliens (1986), and then wrote and directed The Abyss (1989). He wrote, produced and directed Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True Lies (1994), and Titanic (1997).