Star Man The James Cameron Interview

By: Anthony C. Ferrante
Date: Wednesday, November 27, 2002

With TITANIC, director James Cameron created one of the most enduring romantic films of all time and it was set against the sinking of a ship.

With SOLARIS (which Cameron produced and Steven Soderbergh directed), love is on Cameron's mind again as a different kind of romantic fable unfolds on a distant space station near an uncharted planet where unexplained occurrences are happening to the crew.

"This movie

is more like the sci-fi of the '60s which is a science fiction of ideas," says Cameron. "In a way, SOLARIS is kind of a unique film, a throwback to those films and a very individual film in the sense that Steven does stories about relationships, and this is just another way for him to do that. I've made science fiction films, I've demanded that they be about relationships, but I like sci-fi. I like more overt trappings of science fiction myself so oftentimes the relationships get eclipsed."

Based on the Stanislaw Lem novel which was previously filmed in 1972 by Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, SOLARIS is certainly going to surprise a lot of moviegoers with its intelligent take on sci-fi. It's a challenging movie deliberately slow, moody, ambient and more an art film than a big studio love story as it follows Dr. Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) as he's called upon by a former colleague to travel to the space station Prometheus to uncover why the crew has cut off all contact with Earth. Upon arriving, he soon discovers the secret the nearby planet Solaris is wreaking havoc with the psyches of the crewmembers manifesting their worst fears into both terrible and some times pleasing realities. For Kelvin, it's a second chance to reconnect with an exact double of his dead wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) who has been conjured up from his memories - for better or worse.

"One of the first conversations that Steven and I had was this idea that it's about the inevitability of relationships and the fact that you are doomed to repeat your own behavior patterns in relationships," says Cameron. "Now here, it's the same guy in the same relationship with the same woman again, but in fact it's a metaphor. Other people may change, but your behavior in a relationship may not change unless you cause it to be changed and will you take the responsibility to say, 'I don't have to be what I was last time?'"

Surprisingly, 20^th Century Fox

has actually chosen to handle the marketing of SOLARIS in a much different way than originally anticipated. From the original footage they started seeing, they got the impression this film was a big, Thanksgiving day release science fiction film, but soon changed their minds when they saw the finished product.

"It's a hard to market film in the sense that people don't have the grammar to understand the film until they've seen it," explains Cameron. "If you try to sell it as a science fiction film, that's misleading because you get there and it's not. There's no lightsaber duels. So, that would've been a mistake. They went down that path initially. Initially their marketing instincts are usually pretty knee jerk. They had their whole campaign, then they finally saw the film and they loved it, but felt that the campaign was not truthful and the question was, 'How do you get the sense of the film through in sixty seconds?'"

The answer to that question came pretty easy when they realized they had Mr. Titanic himself as a producer, and decided to emphasize the romantic angle and ditch any sci-fi reference which for some may be perceived as not truthful advertising either though Cameron begs to differ.

"For me,

it's like truth-lite," says Cameron. "That is, in the sense that it is saying that it's a relationship piece, and it's saying that it's a relationship between a guy and his dead wife, which that's pretty damn truthful. If you really want to hide stuff, you don't tell the audience that one of the characters in the love story is dead, but it's doing it in a way that doesn't make it seem that it's off-putting until you can get people in the theater and let the film do what it's supposed to do. I think that we also hate trailers and ads that tell us the whole story and you feel that you've seen the film and I don't think that you get that."

This weekend will determine if SOLARIS will turn into a surprise sleeper hit or go the way of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, BLADE RUNNER and John Carpenter's THE THING, which were universally ignored and panned upon initial release and were only years later heralded as modern day classics. But box office will be the last thing on Cameron's mind for the time being he has two documentaries he helmed in various forms of post-production (GHOST IN THE ABYSS, a 3-D large format documentary film exploring the crash site of the Titanic, which is due out in theaters in February, and a Discovery Channel documentary about the crash site of the Bismark). He's also currently mulling over his next fiction film project which he hopes will be lensed in 3-D.

"We've created a new form of 3-D," says Cameron. "We have three films we've developed, and I'm actually going to make all three of them, but it's a question of which order we do them in."

When asked what they are, the ever-secretive director smiles, "You'll see."

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