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Sorin Adam Matei

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James Cameron’s profile and Avatar behind the scenes images from Wired Magazine

James Cameron
Image via Wikipedia

James Cameron‘s career is profiled by Wired in expectation of his latest release, Avatar. The movie has the ambition to be the best and most photorealistic 3d digital animation movie of the 21st century. It follows in Beowulf‘s footsteps, although the cat like ten foot alien ladies do not stand a chance in a competition with Angelina Jolie‘s golden nude scene in Beowulf (if this is what the movie strives to beat). Avatar, Cameron hopes, has the added advantage of a far more sophisticated special and digital effects toolkit. The entire movie is shot on a sound stage while the scenes are composed and “reshot” with a virtual camera.

How close the movie will come to achieving its ambitions remains to be experienced in the theaters. I have taken a look at the latest trailer, though, and I still have a lingering taste of thinly rehashed Fern Gully storyline. It seems to focus on the heartless exploitation of a virgin rainforest by a jargon spewing, tie wearing corporate stereotypical character (think the dude who cost a French bank 7 billion in weird and illegale trades). While generous, the topic is so exhausted and so caricatural I am afraid there will not be much drama to be squeezed out of it.

Returning to the Wired profile, this is worth reading for the little bio morsels it dishes out. Did you know that Cameron gave up his share of profit for Titanic when the megablockbuster seemed to become a gigantic dud?

In 1977, a 22-year-old truck driver named James Cameron went to see Star Wars with a pal. His friend enjoyed the movie; Cameron walked out of the theater ready to punch something. He was a college dropout and spent his days delivering school lunches in Southern California’s Orange County. But in his free time, he painted tiny models and wrote science fiction — stories set in galaxies far, far away. Now he was facing a deflating reality: He had been daydreaming about the kind of world that Lucas had just brought to life. Star Wars was the film he should have made.

It got him so angry he bought himself some cheap movie equipment and started trying to figure out how Lucas had done it. He infuriated his wife by setting up blindingly bright lights in the living room and rolling a camera along a track to practice dolly shots. He spent days scouring the USC library, reading everything he could about special effects. He became, in his own words, “completely obsessed.”

via James Cameron’s New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever | Magazine.

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