"For me, the ending comes first and then you write backwards, and all the threads converge on that. And when it happens, there's a rightness about it that resonates through the rest of the film."
That "rightness" seems to strike a chord with critics, who had heaped an unusual amount of praise on his early films, which included such big-budget sci-fi blockbusters as The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss. "No one in the movies today can match Cameron's talent for . . . hyperbolic, big-screen action," declared Hal Hinson in the Washington Post. Los Angeles Times contributor Kirk Honeycutt simply proclaimed: "[He] is Hollywood's preeminent science fiction director." At the same time, Cameron was generally regarded as a difficult, egocentric perfectionist, who had little regard for production budgets or the feelings of people with whom he worked. "Obsessive and hot-tempered, [Cameron has] developed a reputation as a throwback to commandant-style Hollywood directors such as Michael Curtiz and Erich von Stroheim," Nancy Griffin reported in Esquire.
Titanic Success
However, in the wake of Titanic's unprecedented success--eleven Oscars, a host of other major awards, almost universal critical praise, and (most important of all) a staggering $1 billion in gross revenues worldwide, Cameron is viewed much more sympathetically.
This is a free page. This page contains 189 words. This
biography contains 7,040 words (approx. 23 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our James Cameron Access Pass.
