Dreamwatch April 2001

To The Max
By Jenny Carillo

Perhaps most famous – or infamous – for declaring himself the “King of the World” when receiving multiple Oscar awards as writer and director of TITANIC, James Cameron has switched gears from making top-grossing movies to entering the television world with the new science fiction drama DARK ANGEL, which tells the story of Max (Jessica Alba), a genetically engineered young woman who is running from her past while searching for a future.

The strong female lead is typical of the characters Cameron creates (Ripley in the ALIEN series, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in TERMINATOR/T-2, and even Kate Winslet’s feisty TITANIC survivor). Unlike other science fiction series that concentrate on futuristic gadgetry and concepts, Cameron retains a very human aspect to his characters and may be the key to why he is so successful. While DARK ANGEL marks a change for this multi-faceted writer / director, it is merely one of many new projects that will take him in new directions.

Q: You directed the most successful movie ever and then disappeared for a couple of years, and now you have resurfaced with a television project. How did it happen?

Well, from my perspective I didn’t go anywhere [laughs]! I think that people assume, if they know you best as a film director and you’re not releasing a film that you’re just this kind of deadbeat slacker, that you’ve haven’t done anything. Well, I’m the busiest unemployed film director in Hollywood.

As for reappearing with television, we have a very large number of projects, and DARK ANGEL is just the first one to market. We will be very busy for the next few years with projects. I was lucky enough to be able to get into the business with a longtime friend of mine. Chick Eglee, who has been producing television for twenty years, and we have formed a company. He is a remarkable man, very creative, so it’s been a very enjoyable process for me. The only reason I didn’t get into the television before this, and I had considered it, is because Chick was busy. I didn’t want to do television unless I could be involved with someone who really knows that world because, I admit freely, I didn’t know a lot about it. I mentioned this to Chick when he was finally free, and he said, “hey, let’s do this,” and DARK ANGEL is the result.

How long have you been developing the series?

Chick and I sat down about two years ago and said, “okay, what’s a good series?” We literally just went through what we liked and didn’t like, bouncing ideas off one another. Over a period of months we came up with about eight or nine story concepts and we decided to develop them all verbally and see which one sticks. What kept coming back was an unformed concept we called ‘Experimental Girl’, about a genetically enhanced young woman, so we decided to use this concept to make the first series for Cameron/Eglee Productions. I think it was a good choice because it speaks to Chick’s ability as a dramatic ensemble writer and my own strengths in science fiction and suspense. Then with television we have new constraints, like budget, so part of the fun and challenge for me is figuring out what action we can have in each episode.

What did you find most appealing about Jessica Alba?

Well, you might assume that we cast Jessica because she is one of the most beautiful young women in the world, but that would be a wrong assumption. We had many other standards when looking to hire for her character, Max. We knew we had to find someone who was appealing as a person, who was appealing as a person, who was a very good actor, who had certain weaknesses and vulnerabilities as a character. We know that it’s boring to create a superhero or a very capable character with no flaws. We wanted to see the world from behind her eyes, through her, a kind of emotional perception, which is why we had the flashbacks and why there’s so much back story with her.

When Jessica came in I saw a very capable young actor who could deal with anything dramatically that I threw at her. There were close to a thousand people who auditioned and we narrowed it down to a hundred or so on tape. From that I saw about thirty in person and Jessica seemed to me far beyond the others as an actor. We felt we had to have her, but she was not all that interested in doing television. She was at the point in her career where she was ready to jump in to feature film, but we were able to talk her into doing this with us, and we feel very fortunate to have her.

It’s wonderful that you are continuing in the tradition of strong female characters.

I think our approach is a bit gritty. We want to play her as a very real person with a lot of personal problems, a dark past, things like that. In my feature career I’ve had a lot of strong female characters, and I feel this is a continuation of what I’ve already been doing for films.

Did you know from the beginning that the character was going to be of mixed race?

I would say that, absolutely, race was an integral part of our casting process. We were looking for an actress who was perhaps of mixed race so that we could say, “Look, this character is supposed to represent the best in all of us; the best of the human race.” We didn’t want to fall into the chauvinistic mistake, that I think science fiction films have made in the past, where the superior race happens to have a certain Nordic quality as opposed to the alternative, which I don’t think has ever really been explored. So, yes, that was one of our driving concepts when we were casting.