Dreamwatch

While JAMES CAMERON may best remembered as the director of TITANIC, it is his forays into the future which really define his work, as he tells Jenny Carrillo in the second part of our exclusive interview

Ever since the Canadian born James Cameron moved to Niagra Falls, New York, and wrote his first sci-fi short story at the age of twelve, his love of science fiction and futuristic endeavours have consumed him one way or another. While his background attests to his love of science – he attended California State University to major in physics - he left before graduation and eventually made his name combining both science and fiction, as writer/director of hits like TERMINATOR and T:2, ALIENS, THE ABYSS, and TRUE LIES. Now he’s translated that passion to the small screen, as creator/producer of DARK ANGEL. He hand-picked lead star Jessica Alba, wrote the pilot script and remains hands-on throughout the season. But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the futuristic schemes Cameron is planning for the future…

Q: I hear you’re in talks to ride the Space Shuttle. Is this true?

I rode in Russia’s Ilyushin plane as part of my research for my “Mars” project, because we need to be able to shoot some zero gravity scenes for Mars. The way you do that is the same way that they did it on APOLLO 13, which is a parabolic aircraft that produces 20 seconds of weightlessness. Ron Howard shot on the NASA version and the Russian plane is larger so we would be able to put a larger set in that. But that’s as close as I’ve gotten to space so far! I would love to go and I’ve been very honest about that. I’ve got my toothbrush packed and I’ve told them I’m ready to go on the Space Shuttle any time they want me to go do a film on the international space station!

There are possibilities now for commercial human space flight that have never existed before, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t want to go as a tourist because that is just rides for rich bozos who want to go to space. What interests me is an opportunity to do a film project and to communicate the experience of living and working in space to the average person who has forgotten what a great adventure that is. Now whether that is possible or not, I can’t say at this point, but I do think they international space station would make fantastic, maybe not fictional, but non-fiction experience of some kind.

Can you tell us about this Mars project?

My energies have mostly been focused on my Mars project, which I’m doing as a novel and as five or six hours of network mini-series currently placed at Fox, although they haven’t given us the green light yet. It’s also an IMAX 3-D film, so I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of research with NASA over the last fourteen months, I’ve been meeting with NASA engineers and astronauts, drinking with astronauts [laughs] and in Russia meeting with cosmonauts and riding in the centrifuge there to really experience some of the things that they go through, so that I can write these scripts and novels as accurately as possible.

So, exactly what is this Mars project?

We’re creating a future history and then interpreting it through different media. In other words, we’re treating it as if it’s an event that has happened, landing on Mars, and I’m sort of a filmmaker teleporting myself forward in time to a point after this has happened saying, “We’re going to do this as a book, as a mini-series, as an IMAX film,” but all the same story, I think this allows us to focus on different aspects through the different mediums.

The IMAX film allows us to present the grandeur and the awesomeness of what this would look like and feel like, but you don’t have the drama and character detail. A mini-series has a small screen, less opportunity to be grandiose and visually exciting, but much more opportunity to deal with the human experience of what it would be like to go through this extremely grueling challenge of a new frontier, which is something that I look at, having done the research, as a very tangible thing that will happen in our immediate future. I believe this will be the big event in all of our lives and hopefully you’ll get to experience it through our project vicariously.

Why is it so important to you?

I think it has a lot of philosophical meaning. Also, spiritually and politically, it’s important. We want to remind people that this is something that the human race used to want. We used to want this and we sort of lost the dream collectively, but not everybody has stopped dreaming this dream. I don’t think we’ll be able to shoot a fictional film on space station for a long, long time, but we are looking at the zero gravity aircraft for a certain scenes for the Mars machine, because as you travel to Mars there are periods of time that you would be in weightlessness like on any space mission, and we want to be realistic.