How James Cameron Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels

INTRODUCTION

There are few director’s who are as well known by mainstream audiences as James Cameron. After all, he’s directed some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters of all time.

In this episode I’ll look at three movies shot at three increasing budget levels by James Cameron - Piranha II, The Terminator and Avatar: The Way Of Water - to uncover the similarities between them and how he built his career and style as a director.

PIRANHA II - $600,000

“I started working in special effects and I did a little art direction. In fact I got my first directing gig which was Piranha II as a result of Galaxy of Terror. I was doing second unit directing on that film. And they needed a cutaway to a dismembered arm lying on the ground with worms crawling around it. So I have them put a piece of zip-cord, strip it down and lay it underneath the arm and we make it wet so that it’ll conduct and there’s an electrician around behind the set. And the only cue I could think of was action - to tell him to throw the switch. 

What I didn’t know was that these two producers who were looking for a director for Piranha II had come in behind me and they were looking over the setup. And I said, ‘Alright, roll camera’ and they rolled, ‘And action!’ and the electrician behind plugged in and the worms all started to move I said ‘that’s good that’s a cut’. He unplugs. They didn’t see him. Worms stop moving. I turn to them and they say, ‘Come with us we’d like to talk to you about a film we’re making.’”

As the title suggests, Piranha II was the sequel to Piranha, which was basically a B-movie rip off of Jaws that replaced the shark with genetically modified flying Piranhas that could somehow survive out of water. The low budget sequel was taken on by an Italian producer, Ovidio G. Assonitis, known for making B-horror movies. 

James Cameron, who had built up a career as a production designer and special effects director, was initially brought onto the project to do the special effects, but after the first director on the project was quickly fired, due to a creative disagreement with Assonitis, Cameron was replaced as the director of the movie.

Filming of the exteriors took place in Jamaica, with some interior scenes filmed in a soundstage in Rome.

Due to the low budget of $600,000, and an allegedly controlling Italian producer, almost the whole crew was made up of Italians, including the cinematographer, whose name was spelled incorrectly in the credits. This quickly made communication difficult for Cameron, as apparently most of the crew could not understand English.

As the story goes, Cameron was eventually fired from the shoot as director due to constant interference from and disagreements with the producer. After firing two different directors the producer finished directing the rest of the B-movie himself. However, as Assonitis felt that the movie needed an anglicised director name in order to sell, they kept Cameron’s name on the credits.   

Cameron was also allegedly not allowed to view rushes of the footage he shot, and was kept out of the editing process. Although he would later buy back the footage from the distributor so that he could recut, re-score and release the originally intended version for home video.

Although Piranha II will probably not go down in history as a cinematic masterpiece, the low budget horror movie still contains a few directorial stylistic threads that would continue throughout his career. 

One, his fascination with the ocean and setting films in or around water. 

Two, telling stories in a way that draws the audience into the magical world of cinema where realism is replaced by spectacle and plausibility is replaced with a sprinkle of cinematic magic.

Three, his fascination with using special effects and pushing the boundaries  of whatever technology he has at his disposal.

And, finally, presenting larger than life stories with lots of action and set pieces, which are told through the eyes of a focused cast of main characters.

THE TERMINATOR - $6 Million

In the wake of the release of Piranha II, James Cameron fell ill and had a fever dream one night about a metallic, robotic torso. This sparked the idea for his next sci-fi slasher script which he would write about a cyborg assassin sent back in time to kill someone. He called it The Terminator.   

“The first film that I directed that I got fired off of was called Piranha II and I think it was about $600,000. And the second film was The Terminator and that was $6 million.”

Although it was a substantial jump from his first low budget flick, $6 million was still considered a fairly limited budget to tell the kind of action heavy, ambitious sci-fi movie he had written.

“It’s not really about machines from the future. It’s sort of about our relationship with technology. But it’s really kind of about our human potential for dehumanisation ourselves. You see cops as examples. And then, you know, the other idea not to trust technology and even not to trust the fabric of reality.”

Cameron employed Adam Greenberg as the cinematographer on the project who worked with a relatively small camera and lighting package - without any expensive, elaborate gear setups.

Terminator was shot on an Eastman 250T film stock with an Arri 35 BL for dialogue scenes and an Arriflex 35 III for MOS, action or insert shots that didn’t need synchronised sound.

Since the script featured lots of night scenes, Greenberg chose a set of spherical prime lenses with a fast aperture that could let in lots of light - the Zeiss Super Speeds. Also, based on the classic 80s halation that you can see around the highlights, it’s likely that he used a diffusion filter, such as a Tiffen Low Con. 

When it comes to action, Cameron edits it tighter and more coherently by creating little pockets of quick cuts that group different shots of the same action or idea together, rather than just cutting back and forth between various unrelated shots.

“I think it’s a very analytical process. I remember literally having a discussion with the editor and saying, ‘Look, in this battle sequence every single time we’ve improved the battle we’ve done it putting like with like, by putting the attack with the attack, the retreat with the retreat and grouping things that way.”

The cars in the chase sequences were never allowed to drive faster than 40 miles per hour. So, Greenberg helped to create a faster sense of motion with light. He placed film lights with operators on moving vehicles next to the shooting vehicle. The operators could quickly pan and move the source around to create lighting and reflections that gave the illusion that the streetlights were passing by quicker than they actually were. 

Another analytical way of creating a menacing tone for The Terminator was to often shoot him from a low angle, while the camera shot Sarah Connor at a more comfortable, familiar neutral angle.

Overall he also used a large amount of backlight - placing hard light sources behind the actors in almost every night scene. Generally using softer sources for Sarah Connor and harder backlight for other characters. And don’t forget about the 80s hair light. This created a more silhouette-y shadow-y look which both helped to hide some of the visual effects and created the moody noir feel that they were after. 

 Another way of masking special effects was through a combination of clever angles and editing. Cameron’s philosophy was if you supply the audience with a shot A and a shot B, the audience will quickly fill in shot C using their own imagination. A good example of this is in the famous eye extraction scene. By showing shot A, a profile shot of the blade lifted up to an eye, and shot B, blood dripping into water, the audience fills in the gruesome shot C, the cyborg cutting out its own eye, by themselves.

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER - $400 Million

After the huge financial success of Avatar in 2009, a sci-fi epic which pushed the technological boundaries of motion capture and CGI, Cameron promised a series of sequels.

It took over a decade of development and production to create the first in a series of follow ups - which were all filmed simultaneously.

Avatar combines live action capture, as well as motion capture that is later used to create computer generated characters, in computer generated environments. As I mentioned before, a trademark of Cameron’s work has been how he pushes the technical limits of gear and technology. He has shown an interest in visual effects his whole career, so much so that he started his own VFX company, Digital Domain, in the 1990s.

Since Avatar uses an unusual process to make the movie, let’s break down the full workflow of how it was prepped, shot and then finished in post.

Cameron selected his old cinematographer Russel Carpenter, who worked on Titanic, to shoot the film. The photographic process started in 2018 where Carpenter oversaw the virtual lighting of the CGI sequences, using a programme called Gazebo which was developed by Weta FX visual effects house. He pushed for lighting with different colour nuances for different virtual spaces. This virtual lighting was also valuable as he would have to match it in the next step of the process which was shooting live action scenes with real human characters.

These scenes were filmed in 3-D, using a 3-D rig designed by one of Cameron’s companies, with two Sony Venice cameras and Fujinon zoom lenses. They had to frame for two different aspect ratios during shooting. The taller 1.85:1 was used for 3-D presentation, while the wider 2.39:1 ratio was used for regular 2-D screenings.

They also made the unusual decision to shoot at 48 frames per second, instead of the more regular 24, which decreased the amount of motion blur. To compensate for the one stop loss of light that comes from shooting at a higher frame rate, they shot using the Venice’s higher ISO base of 2,500.    

Once the live action portions were done they turned to capturing the virtual performances using motion capture technology.

“So, it’s a set without a set. Your coral reef is going to be some pieces of tubing which are screwed together to create contact points for the actors. So if they’re pulling themself through coral we don’t build the corral. We build that which they need to touch and then we warp reality to fit their hand contacts later.” 

Motion capture doesn’t really use cameras in the traditional sense. Instead, actors are put in skintight suits that have reference markers or sensors on them. A few cameras, or sensors are then placed around them that are able to capture how the actor moves in a 3-D space.

This data is then later used in post production to give a digital character the same movement as the actor on set.

For the underwater sequences with digital characters, Cameron played out scenes with his actors in mocap suits in a custom built pool in a studio. Actually shooting underwater gave a more realistic sense of motion but came with some challenges. They had to construct underwater housings for the mocap cameras, and shoot at a wavelength of light near ultraviolet which would better capture motion through water. The pool was lit by rigging 60 Skypanel S-60s over the water. They then placed little plastic beads on the water’s surface. This both diffused the light and minimised capturing reflections underwater - which would cause false data.

After all the live action and motion capture footage had been acquired they could then plug the footage back into the pre-designed lighting and virtual environments. From there an intensive post production team was used to build and finish the characters, movements and environments in the film.