“It got me off my duff”: the movie that inspired James Cameron to become a filmmaker

Few careers in Hollywood rival that of James Cameron, whose portfolio boasts some of the most iconic films of all time. With 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water—the highest-grossing film of the year—cementing his enduring legacy, Cameron’s genre-spanning works could aptly be classified as “classics”. From Titanic to The Terminator and Aliens, his contributions have shaped cinema history. Yet, even the most celebrated filmmakers must begin somewhere, and for Cameron, it all started with a two-and-a-half-hour heroic venture that would lay the foundation for his signature pacing and storytelling on the silver screen.

Born in 1954, Ontario, the now 70-year-old filmmaker hasn’t always pursued directing as his central passion, but with his interest in physics and science-fiction interpolating throughout his teenage years, it makes sense that his later trajectory would stem from this influence in equal parts.

Starting out with his debut picture, titled Xenogenesis, in 1978, the film would engender a pattern throughout his career, dipping into fantasy as a common theme between blockbusters. Gaining his first real taste of stardom in 1984 with The Terminator, casting Arnold Schwarzenegger in his arguably most founding role, it was a major turning point for the auteur, leading him to another suitably mythical project, Aliens in 1986, the sequel to the Ridley Scott’s gory, sci-fi original.

Later helming the more romantic Titanic, with a budding Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Cameron’s namesake was ever destined for the mainstream. But concerned less with the red carpet and more with his lifelong muse in the otherworldly, the Canadian filmmaker sought to return to his early roots with the release of Avatar in 2009.

A milestone not only in his timeline but also for the use of special effects in cinema, the moment could be inferred as a full circle for Cameron, then three decades into his career, reminding him of what first inspired him to pick up his father’s Super 8 camera all those years ago.  

Speaking to Empire on the watershed moment, Cameron notes that it was the New York-raised director of The Shining and A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, who ushered his own affection for the fanciful when he was 14. Significantly, it was Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that lit an early ember. “I started building model kits of the spacecraft,” Cameron commented. “I read the ‘making of’ book probably ten times. I figured out that if you painted tinfoil black, put a light behind it and poked pinholes in it, you could make a decent star field. My first epic space story had a budget of probably ten bucks. But it got me off my duff”.

Upon considering that Kubrick’s impressive, unearthly flick today might seem a slower pace for some, especially against our diminishing attention economy, at the time, it was a comparative triumph for visual effects. More importantly, it was enough to propel Cameron into making some of the greatest movies of all time. In fact, in some ways, it was the Avatar of ‘68.

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