Thanks to Xeri

JAMES CAMERON’s Dark Angel has, in the course of its first year, established itself as a challenger to the crown of top SF TV show. As the second season begins, Jenny Cooney Carrillo meets the Titanic ego who is out to build a better Angel.

Everything that James Cameron touches seems to turn to gold. In his long established career he has brought movies to audiences that have become hugely successful and starred some of the biggest names in Hollywood. After his Oscar win for Titanic, Cameron declared he was ‘King of the world’. Though he may not be king, he is definitely Hollywood royalty and his success continues with his first foray into television, Dark Angel. The science fiction drama he created, centering around the genetically altered Max (Jessica Alba), has become an instant hit, earning a Golden Globe nomination for his leading lady in its first season. Busy with movies and television and a new baby with his wife Suzy Amis, you’d think the writer/producer/director would slow down and enjoy his success. But that’s not in his nature.

Dreamwatch: What interested you in making the switch from movies to television?

James Cameron: When you make a film there’s a long period of time where you’re writing and planning. It’s basically office work and it’s boring, quite frankly. When you’re making television, you’re in the production all the time. You are constantly out there every single day making film. And even though I’m not on the set every day actually doing the shots, there’s an energy to it, it keeps the creative wheels turning. It’s also that television is an art of compromise. You have an image in your head and you’re not going to be able to achieve it, do for a perfectionist like me it takes away the need for perfection and allows me to concentrate on the craft of writing, making good scenes on the page, casting good actors and the things that are ultimately the strongest aspects of the show. A lot of film-makers myself included, get very involved in the music and the sound mix and they need every sound and visual effect to be perfect, but in the end that’s not how films really work. Films work in the hearts and minds of the audience based on whether or not they like the characters and the storyline or situation. In television you have all that every single day of the year while you’re shooting so it’s a good way to keep these skills current. I find it more satisfying in a way.

You are involved with a number of projects, from space and underwater exploration to TV to film to science. How do you keep it all straight?

Its madness, plus I have a new baby at home! It’s a juggling act and the key is to have good teams on each one of those activities that are self-sufficient when I’m not there and yet I can mesh with me creatively when I am there. They need to know how to reach out and get what it is they need at the right time and in the right way. I have video teleconference capability at my house and at my offices so I spend a lot of time video teleconferencing, which is almost like being there but is much more effective in terms of time management. It is all an issue of time management, which is a curse when you are interested in so many different things like I am. You only have so much time on the planet, so you have to make it count.

The season finale of Dark Angel was quite surprising. In what direction will you be taking the show this season?

I can tell you some broad stroke stuff. We looked at what we believed worked best in the first season and what didn’t and we realised that we have a good central relationship. We have a fabulous central character and so we’re going to keep all the things that we think are good about the series. We are probably going to push it more into science fiction on the basis that there were certain shows in the first season that didn’t necessarily have to be told in a future world. We want to maintain the kind of exoticism that we reached about 50 per cent of the time in the first season. We was to increase that percentage a little but and I think that we have addressed that issue by bringing some new writers to the staff that have a little bit of a science fiction background. We always set out to do a science fiction show that was more of a drama and had less robots and spaceships flying around. We succeeded in the first season and created our own vocabulary, built the story, but now we are going to bring in more genetically altered kids into Max’s world and explore more of that. The changes are not going to be drastic though and we are still maintaining the same style, the same kind of street level hip-hop and the streetwise feel of the show.

How did you develop the part of Original Cindy?

Well, we really like the actress Valerie Rae Miller and we have fun writing for her and I think the direction for her character now that she knows Max’s secret is going to be for her to get a bit more actively involved in some of the cases. At the end of the season we got into a bit of a rut because she knew Max’s secret but wasn’t actively involved in anything, she was sitting at home talking about Max’s problems. She felt a little let down. I think we were all so focused on where we were going with the shows at the end of the season that we lost focus on that storyline. But now Original Cindy is going to woven into much more of the plotlines and she won’t have the super powers that Max has but she’ll be out in front more, put into jeopardy a bit more.

You can probably take some of the credit for the engagement between two of your show’s stars, since you cast them together. How do you feel about their off-screen relationship and whether this will impact the show?

I think that I should be automatic godparent to any children they have [laughing]. It’s actually like a genetics project, in a way. We found Jessica and we found Michael, but how can you predict those things? Although the interesting thing is we found Jessica and we had her audition with all these guys and we would watch her reaction to them to see if there was any chemistry, and the chemistry was definitely the best with Michael, so maybe there was a little feedback into that decision-making process. In terms of how that affects the show, you know the classic problem with a show that has a relationship or a romantic relationship at its core is that you’re always in this kind of dynamic equipoise. You don’t really want to consummate the relationship. You’ve got to keep them under tension with each other and you’ve got to somehow sustain that indefinitely throughout the run of the show so we have to create obstacles.
At the end of the season they express to each other how much they love one another, but in the next season you will see very grave obstacles put in the path to their being together so in the back of your mind you will know how they really feel, but there will be forces that tear them apart. I can’t be more specific than that because the fun is in seeing how it all unfolds. So I don’t think their off-screen romance will be a detriment but instead it will serve to reinforce how they really feel about each other. The reason sometimes love scenes between married couples don’t work in films is because you feel as though you are looking in the people’s private life. You have to be cognitive of that and you have to write to sort of take advantage of that sort of thing. We had the problem with Titanic of people saying they didn’t want to see it because they already knew what the ending was. So we wrote it so that there was information that the viewer brought to the film which actually got the viewer involved in seeing how the film would play out. The trick is to turn things like that that are kind of like baggage into positives. So that is what we plan to do for subsequent seasons.

With the size of your involvement in television work and Dark Angel, do you have time to plan your next film project?

I’m always planning and always writing, developing scripts. I’ve got a stack of scripts up to my chin that are coming in and we are doing new drafts, revisions. I have four scripts that I am developing for myself right now, and then a number of others that we are developing which I will produce but will not direct. So there is actually a lot of stuff going on.

In the light of some recent films trying to match the success of Titanic, what do you think it takes a film to match that?