Word: cameron
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...April 2008, in a windowless Los Angeles warehouse where Howard Hughes built his airplanes some 70 years earlier, James Cameron, in a hockey jersey and jeans, was doing something élite directors do not do - holding a camera. "Why can't I see anything?" he yelled from an apparently empty warehouse floor to a small crew huddled over computer monitors in a corner. "Oh, oh, oh, I'm in the monster's head!" Cameron backed up, and a peek through his camera lens revealed blackness giving way to a thick and vivid rain forest where a tall, blue, alien version...
Equal parts artist and gearhead, Cameron, 55, has brought to film the time-travel saga of The Terminator, the watery depths of The Abyss and the sinking deck of Titanic. But more than any of his previous movies, Avatar is wholly Cameron's world. The 2½-hr. sci-fi epic follows an ex-Marine named Jake Sully as he struggles for survival on an alien moon called Pandora, home to a tall, blue, humanoid species called the Na'vi and to a mysterious resource called unobtainium, which draws humans in a future century to colonize the planet. Jake...
...costs, Avatar arrives in theaters on Dec. 18 to colossal expectations. The movie industry hopes its immersive special effects spark a big-screen renaissance. Fans crave the next Star Wars. It's a heavy burden, even for a man who seems to enjoy doing only things that are hard. Cameron first laid out his vision for the technology he would use in the film in a digital manifesto in the early 1990s; he then labored to perfect it over the course of a decade and a half, creating cameras that let him peer into virtual worlds and pushing...
Bringing Pandora to Life Despite Cameron's success with Titanic - the highest-grossing movie of all time and winner of a record-tying 11 Oscars - Avatar was not an easy sell to his home studio, 20th Century Fox. Since 1997, Cameron had been largely absent from the Hollywood scene, riding in submersibles, shooting documentaries and building new filmmaking toys. In 2005, Fox funded a $10 million, 5-min. prototype for the movie, but when Cameron delivered a 153-page draft of the script months later, the studio balked. Here was an ambitious project with a lot of risky elements, including...
...about 60% of the finished film, the cast wore clingy Lycra bodysuits covered in markers that were recognized by the 102 cameras on the warehouse ceiling. They donned skullcaps rigged with tiny cameras that imaged their faces. Thanks to software created for the film, the actors appeared on Cameron's monitor in real time as their alien counterparts...