Madman/genius: James Cameron

One of James Cameron's favourite phrases is: "I eat pressure for breakfast."

He likes to shout it at the worried film executives who see the budgets for his films spiralling out of all control and are pleading with him to stop the spending.

He barks it at the exhausted, tearful actors who beg for a break and the put-upon designers who have made an alien slightly the wrong shade of blue. And he is probably muttering it to himself several times a day this week as, once again, he puts his career on the line.

 

As the creator of some of the 20th century's most popular films, Cameron's talent is not in doubt. But with his latest movie, Avatar, being branded the most expensive film ever made at $300 million (Dh1.1 billion) — breaking the record he first set with Aliens ($100 million [Dh367.29 million]) and then with Titanic ($200 million [Dh734.58 million]) — the pressure is most certainly on.

Overwhelmingly confident in his own vision, Cameron said he could not envisage Avatar failing: "It's hard for me to imagine that it's not going to work for people."

But executives at Fox, the company which has put up the majority of the money, are "very scared, nay terrified, that it is all going to go wrong", one movie insider said.

The question is, has Hollywood's most monstrous genius finally gone mad? After all, his latest project hinges on his rather eccentric belief that he can make cinemagoers fall in love with blue people.

Cameron, 55, first envisaged the concept for the film 14 years ago — but it has its roots even further back than that; when he saw Star Wars and realised George Lucas was living his dream career. He has been working on his science fiction epic solidly for four years.

And his attention to (some would say obsession with) detail has known no bounds. Nearly two of those years were spent just creating the technology to make the film possible.

Some of the characters in Avatar come from drawings the science fiction geek first drew as a child (he is a talented artist). Its world, the extraterrestrial moon Pandora, is peopled entirely from his imagination and its heroes, the Na'vi, are ten feet tall blue aliens he loves like his own family.

His mastery of the whole project is astonishing: he is the scriptwriter, the producer, the director, the cameraman, the picture editor, the special effects creator and even — at times — the make-up man. "I always do make-up touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt," he says. "It saves so much time."

There are 3,000 different special effects in Avatar; Cameron has studied each of them at least 20 times. Whether a rock looked too soft, or an alien too gentle, Cameron would send it back to the drawing board. "If I wanted it done this badly, I'd hire a f*****g temp," is one of his preferred insults to people who have worked tirelessly on a project for days on end.

‘We're not animals'

You can't work for Cameron without devoting your whole life to the project. Fourteen-hour days are mandatory. Twenty-hour days are common. Cameron does not need to sleep for more than four hours a night.

On watery film sets such as The Abyss and Titanic, cast and crew would often be in chilly water for ten hours a day causing colds, flu and even kidney infections.

On the set of True Lies, his 1994 film with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, he told everyone that using the lavatory was a sackable offence and he meant it. On the set of The Abyss, where many of the crew found their hair bleached albino white because they were in chlorinated water for so many hours, actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio reportedly ran from the set crying "We are not animals", when he suggested the cast relieve themselves in their wetsuits to save time.

His temper is legendary and he is known as the scariest man in Hollywood.

Kate Winslet, whose role in Titanic made her a huge star, says she would never work with the director again after her "ordeal" in which she nearly drowned, came down with flu and chipped a small bone in her elbow. "He's a nice guy, but the problem was that his vision for the film was as clear as it was. He has a temper like you wouldn't believe. There were times I was genuinely frightened of him."

But there are no apologies from Cameron; indeed, he seems to revel in his reputation. "I think what is misunderstood about my particular filmmaking process is that I get people to go that extra mile that they've never done before and they go into new territory," he says.

"They go beyond what they previously thought were their limits, and then afterwards they talk about it like it was a big adventure. The more I can lead other people into these situations where they all think they're going to die, the more fun I'm having."

In fairness, there are some who do love it. Sigourney Weaver, who worked with him on Aliens, is back for Avatar. While Avatar actress Michelle Rodriguez says: "That guy is so amazing. He thinks in 12 dimensions at all times. He can sit there and talk for hours about the advancements in molecular science, about mythology and story building, character building. This guy is a genius."

Still, Sam Worthington, who plays hero Jake Sully in the new film, admits Cameron pushed them all to the limit to get the scenes he was looking for, including physically hitting him. "He'd throw foam or debris to get me to react, because the action was being created later on the computer. And Jim would go: ‘Hmmm, this ain't working, right, so I'll just hit you with a stick'."

It is no surprise that few women have been able to cope with Cameron's obsessive standards and workaholism. He loves strong women, both in his work and his life — but the two seldom go hand in hand. It is no surprise that he has been married five times — with his break-ups usually coinciding with the times he has been working on a movie.

Although there are many who consider the way Cameron treats other people as a mark of his genius, it has made him plenty of enemies in Tinseltown.

AJ Benza, an actor and television host, said: "James' tactics on set made Sigourney Weaver cry, made Linda Hamilton cry, Kate Winslet cry and Jessica Alba cry. What kind of a person does that? There's got to be some deep-rooted stuff going on in his brain."

Cameron's view? "What people call obsession or passion, for me it's just a work ethic. I think it comes from an insecurity that I'm not good enough."

Born in Kapuskasing near Niagara Falls in Canada, his father was an electrical engineer and his mother an artist. He did not get on with his father and became engrossed in science fiction from an early age. His epiphany came when he saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Although he had a natural aptitude and love of engineering, he turned his back on it — mainly, it seems, to annoy his father. He says of his early career: "I would say that my father was completely unsupportive in any way, shape or form and was sharpening his knives waiting for me to fail, so he could say: ‘Ah-ha, I was right. You should have gone into engineering.'

"Because there was zero support there, it made me angry enough that I had to succeed. It made me mad and I had to prove that I was right, and it made me mad enough to get good and to survive."

Expensive gamble

Now, with his great alien epic, there are many people who are hoping Avatar will prove his nemesis.

Websites have called the film an alien version of Dances With Wolves — a notoriously costly gamble — while special half-hour previews of Avatar, released earlier this year, played to almost empty theatres.

For all its high-tech, cutting-edge graphics, the public has to emotionally connect with Cameron's protagonists. And the big question is, will they fall in love with 10ft (3.05 metres) tall blue aliens?

At a high-security screening last week (in typical control-freak fashion, everyone there had to sign a contract stating they would not review the film until Monday) the reaction was profoundly mixed.

"Why should we care about blue people?" asked one critic. Another found the film "a bit preachy about the environment".

More worryingly for Cameron, the 3D effects, which are supposed to mean that Avatar is the "first film of the future", left several viewers feeling nauseous. "I definitely would not eat before seeing the film," one told me.

While his gamble with Titanic paid off handsomely, there is a real, and growing, concern that Avatar may be an obsession too far for Cameron — and that the only monster that people will remember is the one who made it.