THE KING OF B RDA HOLLYWOOD

Three of his movies have taken over $2billon at the global box office, he's pioneered SFX and 3D technologies, and he's been to the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean. That's James Cameron by the way, not Anton van Beek

'OH WOW, I better get off my butt because somebody is doing this stuff, you know, and they're beating me to it,' remembers James Cameron of his reaction to seeing George Lucas' 1977 space opera Star Wars. His response, at the age of 24, was to raise $20,000 from a consortium of dentists to fund a science-fiction short he had written with a friend.

Although the resulting 10-minute film, Xenogenesis (1978), wasn't enough to persuade the investors to hand over the additional money needed to expand it into a feature, it proved the perfect showreel to land Cameron a job in the art department at Roger Corman's New World Pictures. And it didn't take long for this talented, if brash, newcomer to make a name for himself.

When the original art director on Corman's Star Wars cash-in Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) was fired, assistant production manager Gale Anne Hurd suggested Cameron be promoted as his replacement. Impressing Corman with his ingenuity, he progressed to production design and second unit photography on Corman's Alien rip-off Galaxy of Terror (1981)

According to Cameron, the lessons he learned at this time were invaluable: 'Working with Corman taught me a lot of things, from the rock-bottom basics of production and shooting to a sense of confidence that came from working, however briefly, in just about every department. I could load an Arri 2C, run a Moviola upright, and know what type of paint to use on the set at 3am when the camera crew was coming in at six.'