“Can you just play the effects by themselves?” Cameron asked.
A harsh sound emanated from the screen as the scene rolled.
“We don’t want that,” Cameron said, recoiling. “I don’t know what that is. That sounds like a cart bumping on a bumpy road. Play me solo what you are going to play against the music. Does it have a name or a number?”
“We call it D-FX,” one of the mixers said.
“Not very creative,” Cameron said, dryly.
The scene continued, silently now.
“Something’s going on but we’re not hearing it,” Cameron said.
The atmosphere in the room was uneasy. Cameron turned to me. “I’m always telling them there’s too many damn knobs,” he said. “I mean you could run a starship with fewer knobs than this.”
“Nothing is playing,” one of the mixers said, audibly frustrated. “That’s bizarre.”
“This is just because a big shot journalist is watching,” Cameron said, again trying to lighten the mood. “It’s classic observer effect, right?” He turned to his team: “No pressure, but…”
Cameron, in his nearly 40 years of filmmaking, has earned a reputation for having a temper. Some would say he’s earned this reputation several times over. On more than one Cameron set, crew members have taken to wearing shirts that read: “You can’t scare me—I work for Jim Cameron.” Cameron is well aware of this. “I think there was a period of time early on where that reputation worked in my favor,” he told me later. “And it took on this Paul Bunyan–esque, slightly larger-than-life quality. And then there was a legitimate time when I looked at like, ‘All right, why am I getting so upset, and what is that solving?’ I’m not saying I don’t get upset once in a while. I mean, everybody, I think, is entitled to a bad day. But whereas before, it might have been once every couple of weeks. Now it’s like twice a year.”
Cameron recalled working with Ron Howard, the famously nice director, on the visual effects for Apollo 13: “And I just watched what a great guy he was. I’m like, ‘I’m a total asshole compared to Ron Howard. I have to get in touch with my inner Ron Howard.’ And he probably has bad days, too, I don’t know, but I didn’t see it. And he was so complimentary to people. I always figured that no negative comment was the equivalent of a compliment. That’s not how people are wired at all. You have to actually say it out loud.”
Cameron, despite his famous temper, has always inspired loyalty; his obsessive focus when he’s in the middle of making a film often obscures the erudite and charming Canadian he is when he’s not working. Weaver, who first met Cameron when she starred in Aliens in 1986, told me: “It really wasn’t until we went to Venice with Aliens for the film festival, when I was sitting at dinner with him, and I went, ‘Jesus, you’re so funny! Where was this guy the whole time?’ ” Others have sworn off working with the director only to return, like Kate Winslet, who spoke wearily after the Titanic shoot of her lack of fondness for Cameron’s penchant for filming in water tanks. And yet Winslet is not only in The Way of Water—she learned to free dive for it, so that she could shoot her scenes underwater. “I think she had something to prove to herself,” Cameron said. “And so, I mean, no extra charge for the therapy, for the healing moment where she got to hold her breath underwater for seven and a half minutes and be the underwater queen.”
Zach Baron
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