James Cameron - Building Better Worlds

In new book Tech Noir, James Cameron opens his extensive archives and reveals the hand-drawn designs that fuelled his earliest work. Currently in post-production on Avatar 2 in New Zealand, Cameron hopped onto Zoom with Total Film to discuss the art of moviemaking.

- By Jordan Farley

HIGHLY EVOLVED

Cameron spent most of his childhood in Chippawa, Canada doing two things: reading science-fiction novels and drawing. The influences on, and evolution of, his style – plain to see in Tech Noir – led directly to a career as a filmmaker.

“In those early years, you could see a steady progression of technique. That’s just about drawing all the time, and you get better. Your eye-to-hand coordination; your ability to convey lighting, composition and so on. It peaked in my mid-twenties. And then my artistic expression shifted to cinema. But all those lessons were there. How do you compose an image? What has the greatest narrative impact? I go back to learning to draw from comic-books. I think that’s a really good proving ground for any artist that wants to go into filmmaking. I went in through the side-door of design. I worked as a production designer and art director for a while. And then I jumped to directing. But I think that all of that drawing and painting technique… I know that I was really exercising all those muscles long before I got to have a crew and cameras and actors. When I was doing all that drawing and painting, I think I was secretly – or not even consciously – wanting to be a filmmaker. But it wasn’t easy back then. When I was in my twenties, if you had a camera, and you could record sound, and you could synchronise the sound and the picture, that was a big deal. Today, we don’t even think twice about it, the tools are quite democratised. But filmmaking seemed a little far away from me. I was just building muscle, doing drawings and paintings, and telling stories visually.”

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