Victoria Sirakova/Getty; Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal via Getty
James Cameronis not ready to make nice.
TheAvatar: Fire and Ashdirector looked back on the highs, lows, and many phases of his storied Hollywood career in a recent interview with theNew York Times. Touching on his reputation as an exacting, demanding, sometimes even difficult director to work with, Cameron offered rare comments about a joke made at an awards show that still stings over a decade later.
"I haven't really been following the controversy overZero Dark Thirty,"Amy Poehlersaid from the stage ofthe 2013 Golden Globes, where that film's director and Cameron's ex, Kathryn Bigelow, was up for the Best Director trophy. "But when it comes to torture, I trust the lady who spent three years married to James Cameron."
The Canadian filmmaker stayed mum at the time about Poehler's wisecrack, which drew shocked laughter from the audience. But he now looks back on the joke as "an ignorant dig."
Mark Fellman/20th Century Studios
"I'm pretty thick-skinned, and happy to be the butt of a good-natured joke, but that went too far," Cameron explained. Especially "at an event which is supposed to be a celebration of cinema and filmmakers, not a roast."
For Cameron, it wasn't so much the joke itself that stung, but the reaction it elicited from the audience — a packed auditorium of his peers. "The fact that people found it funny shows exactly what they think of me, even though they have no idea who I am or how I work," he said.
Reports have circulated in the past suggesting that Cameron is a difficult or otherwise unpleasant force to be driving the forward action of a film. Hetold biographer Rebecca Keeganfor her 2009 bookThe Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameronthat despite a "few bright lights among the younger art department people" on the set of 1986'sAliens, the crew was generally "lazy, insolent, and arrogant."
"For the most part, we despised them and they despised us," he said.
The crew of his 1989 sci-fi thrillerThe Abysseven took to wearing T-shirts on set emblazoned with the message, "You can't scare me, I work for Jim Cameron."
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Some of Cameron's closest collaborators have enthused about the very same qualities that others seem to single out for criticism. Kate Winslet, who reteamed with Cameron onAvatar: The Way of Water26 years after first makingTitanictogether, observed in 2022, "A chef is never gonna send a great dish out to the table if he's not happy with that plate."
She described first encountering the sequel script as "a phenomenal experience reading a Jim Cameron script because it's just so thorough. The guy is such a perfectionist."
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