|
The Inspirational Years - Xenogenesis
Everything changed in 1977 when he wandered into a local theater and saw Star Wars for the first time. Cameron had become part of an informal group that trekked religiously to the lcoal cinema every time a new science-fiction entry unspooled. They were usually disappointed at the hack work that Hollywood was spewing forth. "But I walked into Star Wars and just went 'Wow!'" he recalled, remembering that magic moment. "Star Wars was what I had been seeing in my head all along, I saw that all the things I had been imagining could now be done."
Cameron was suddenly and appropriately inspired. And he knew he had to alter his professional game plan if he was going to play in the big leagues. He began casting around for major financing for a serious themed film. In Brea, Cameron met William Wisher and Randall Frakes, who also wanted to make movies, and who are still his two best friends. Eventually he was introduced to a group of dentists who wanted to put up money for a low-budget movie. Cameron and the dentists met.
"They asked me if I had any ideas," he revealed to US magazine in 1991. "I had lots of ideas. I got involved with them and promptly took the whole project over." Cameron submitted a batch of ten story lines and was surprised when the dentists decided on a special-effects alien movie called Xenon Genesis, starring Wisher as a futuristic man in an orange jumpsuit who battles an armored robot with a metal pincer for a hand. "It really was a surprise," remembered Cameron. "They picked the one idea we thought they'd be least likely to pick. It was a concept that involved a lot of spacecraft, machinery, and hardware. But we thought, 'Heck, if they want to do that, fine.'"
The dentists proposed a budget of $400,000; they eventually turned over $20,000 in actual cash. Jim had been counting on at least $150,000. This drastic change in finances caused an immediate alteration in plans. What had originally been designed as a full-length feature would end up being a 12-minute mini-feature that would be used as a calling card to get further financing for the full-length opus. "They wanted me to do Star Wars but, of course, they didn't want to spend that kind of money," Cameron recalled in a 1989 Omni magazine interview.
"But I was game. I had nothing to lose." Once again Jim turned to his friends for cast and crew. Space suits were sculpted out of tinfoil. When he was able to secure Fullerton College's eye clinic as a location, Cameron immediately tailored the script to maximize the use of that set. Jim designed all the models from scratch, he would go out and buy these models of battleships and airplanes and take the pieces and cobble them all together. But, while outwardly confident during the early days of filming Xenon Genesis, Cameron was internally insecure at the prospect of making a real movie with real money.
"On the first day of shooting I found myself with forty thousand dollars' worth of rented camera equipment and no idea how to use any of it," noted the fledgling filmmaker years later. "I spent the first few days learning how to load the cameras and change the lenses. I spent a lot of time on the phone with the camera-rental company, asking a lot of questions. Finally we figured that if we kept calling, they'd figure we didn't know how to use the camera and would come down and take it away. So we had to figure it out the hard way. It was like, 'If it goes over this sprocket, then it should go over the next one.' we finally figured it out and got it running."
Jim overcame his insecurities and was soon shouting orders and making outrageous demands of his friends, just like the Cameron of old. He made full use of his arsenal of equipment and took his first major foray into big-time special effects. "The first thing we did was an in-the-camera glass matte [combining a painting on glass, held in front of the camera lens, with a real landscape] that worked out real fine." In the meantime, the dentists putting up the seed money had started to get nervous about how their dollars were being spent.
Consequently, the initial stream of money finally stopped, four months into production on Xenon Genesis. Cameron was greatly disappointed, but finally turned philosophical about having the project dropped. "The financing for the movie never completely coming together was probably for a good reason," reasoned the director in a 1984 issue of Fangoria magazine. "I hesitate to think what kind of film I might have made at that point in my development as a filmmaker."
In point of fact, James Cameron was feeling quite fulfilled. Despite sitting on a pile of footage that might never be used, he felt he had, in his own mind, passed a test. What he had shot was respectable for somebody who was totally self-taught, and indicated that he was on the threshold of the nxt big unknown event in his career. Jim returned to the pile of film that was the unfinished Xenogenesis. He decided he had enough footage to edit into a special-effects laden promo reel that was a shortened version of the proposed full-length production. The result was a 12-minute, 35mm entry that Cameron was quite happy with.
"It was crudely edited," he assessed in a 1985 Film Comment interview. "But there was a visual narrative there and the special effects are pretty good. It showed certain basic skills. Those who had seen the film claimed that Xenogenesis had the look of a real film. And Cameron was confident enough to take a chance to screen it in some local theaters. The response from audiences was good, and inspired the young filmmaker to take what he considered the next step. "I was totally broke and needed a job. I thought, 'I've got to get my hands dirty in the real film world.' Even if it was totally down and dirty."
|
