Part of me wanted to chuck it all — how lure of sea and fickle viewers nearly killed James Cameron’s film career

THE highest grossing movie of all time nearly never happened as Oscar-winning director James Cameron traded fickle audiences for the certainty of science.

FILE - This 2012 file photo released by National Geographic shows filmmaker James Cameron emerging from the Deepsea Challenger after his successful solo dive to the Mariana Trench, during the filming of Cameron's "Deepsea Challenge 3D," a 3-D film releasing on Friday, Aug. 8, 2014. It has been five years since Cameron’s last feature film, “Avatar.”(AP Photo/National Geographic, Mark Thiessen, File)

DIRECTOR James Cameron’s 2009 hit Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time, having made close to $3 billion at the box office.

But it very nearly never happened.

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After Titanic, James Cameron wasn’t sure he wanted to return to Hollywood, but he was lured back by Avatar. Picture: Supplied

Cameron’s previous film, Titanic, was the movie Avatar knocked off top spot, but since its release in 1996 it had somehow become the done thing to deride the epic.

James Cameron poses at Sydney Maritime Museum ahead of the launch of Deepsea Challenge 3D. Picture: News Corp Australia

In between times the always adventurous Cameron had also been bitten by the exploration bug, organising and leading deep-sea expeditions to the wrecks of the Bismarck and Titanic among others.

Having long been torn between the worlds of science and art — he originally studied physics at college before switching to English — he wasn’t actually sure we wanted to go back to Hollywood and all its vagaries.

“There is certain arbitrariness to filmmaking,” Cameron says. “There is the potential for a fickle audience to suddenly not like the thing that you have worked on for several years of your life. Or you can be bombarded by the critics.

“There is something about the way my mind works that I like engineering because you are only judged by the laws of physics. I love to remind myself that the second law of thermodynamics is not an opinion like a critic’s opinion.

“So in a way your work is held to a higher standard when you are doing engineering projects and I love that. There was a part of me that wanted to sort of chuck it all just do exploration and feed that part of my life — curiosity and my love of science.”

In the end, it was the environmental message of Avatar that lured him back to Hollywood and its monumental success has helped him balance his dual loves.

Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger was designed to descend faster than more rotund submersibles. Picture courtesy National Geographic

During the long gestation periods of the Avatar sequels (the scripts for 2, 3 and 4 are nearly finished with motion capture expected to start later this year), Cameron returned to the ocean in 2012 with the ambition of following two of his childhood heroes, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, the first people to reach the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep.

Kick-starting the process with around $10 million of his own money, he enlisted the help of his fellow adventurer, documentarian and diver, Aussie Andrew Wight, and engineer Ron Allum and their team began to build from scratch in a warehouse in Sydney, a submersible that would be able to withstand the crushing pressures of diving to a depth of nearly 11km.

Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, seen here after their successful descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in January 1960, helped inspire Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge voyage. Picture: Thomas J. Abercrombie / National Geographic

The journey from Cameron’s childhood dreams, through the experimental construction to the actual dive is captured in the documentary Deepsea Challenge 3D, which also provides fascinating insights into the director’s psyche.

He emerges as passionate, driven and a hard-taskmaster — understandable given that he is the one doing the dive, with the ever-present risk of being stranded on the ocean floor or squashed in a microsecond if the submersible failed.

Cameron’s fiery reputation as a director has persisted — but he says his many expeditions have led him to change his ways for the sake of the team around him.

“I think I have learned a lot of leadership lessons over the years and my seven prior deep ocean expeditions helped with that even more than my Hollywood projects.

Cameron emerges from the Deepsea Challenger after a successful solo dive to the Mariana Trench during filming of Deepsea Challenge 3D. Picture Mark Thiessen / National Geographic

“You have to respect the people around you. They all knew that I was going to be the designated driver and I found that you can’t drive people harder than they can drive themselves.

“You can only provide inspiration and maybe a few little psychological clues to how to boost morale at critical moments.”

One of those critical moments came when Wight was killed in a NSW helicopter crash with American filmmaker Mike deGruy, just weeks before the planned record-breaking dive.

Cameron, who had to break the tragic news to Wight’s wife, and his team were devastated by the loss of their friend and such a crucial member of the expedition and debated long and hard as to whether they should continue.

The pilot's chamber of the Deepsea Challenger is displayed in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Picture: AFP

“I thought ‘nothing is worth this — and maybe these risks just shouldn’t be taken’,” reflects Cameron.

“But the entire exploration community rallied around us and even Mike and Andrew’s families rallied around us and said ‘no, you have to honour their legacy. You have to continue because that’s what they stood for’.

James Cameron and Suzy Amis Cameron attend the official launch of Deepsea Challenge 3D in Sydney. Picture: Getty

“I realised they were right. I wasn’t the one leading the charge — we had to sort of pick up the pieces and move on and that was difficult.

“What we found was that it was one thing to decide to pick up your pack and trudge on and it’s another thing to find the heart and the will to do it.”

In addition to the personal challenge of emulating his heroes, Cameron was adamant that the expedition have scientific merit.

The samples of sediment he captured from the seemingly barren ocean floor have so far yielded 68 new species and he has since donated the Deepsea Challenger to the not-for-profit Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

He also intended the film to be a rallying cry to science and the spirit of adventure at a time when research dollars are ever-harder to come by.

“Big cuts in funding are happening everywhere,” he says. “With the economic downturn in 2008, it’s really rampant in Europe and very much so in America as well.

“For some reason ocean funding seems to be one of the first things to go. Space program funding tends to stay because it’s viewed as big jobs programs for the aerospace industry but we really need to realise that this is not just about exploring the deep ocean.

“It’s about understanding the ocean before we kill the web of life in the oceans, which we are doing just about as fast as humanly possible.”

Cameron addresses the audience after a screening of Deepsea Challenge 3D at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Picture: AFP

Originally published as Part of me wanted to chuck it all — how lure of sea and fickle viewers nearly killed James Cameron’s film career