JAMES CAMERON INTERVIEW
Deepsea Challenge 3D is perhaps James Cameron’s most personal project yet, a dive to the deepest part of the world’s oceans that has been a long dreamed about expedition by the filmmaker/deep ocean explorer. He ploughed his own cash into getting the ball rolling on the expedition, for which he solo-piloted a submersible to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a mere 6.8 miles deep. The ocean has, in one way or another, infused most of Cameron’s films except on this project, he was the star of his own story. Hardly one to document such an event with any degree of objectivity, the task of directing the documentary fell to long time friend and Cameron collaborator, Andrew Wight.
During the expedition’s initial stages, Wight and Underwater Cinematographer Mike DeGruys were tragically killed in a helicopter crash on the NSW South Coast. The deaths caused the production to scramble and an Australian filmmaker, Ray Quint, stepped into the breach. A director directing The Director, Quint had to sift 1200 hours of expedition footage (shot by Titanic and Avatar VFX Supervisor John Bruno) to fashion an emotional narrative which would give the story heft and drama.
Discussing the project on 2014 trip to Sydney, Co-Director Quint is a genial and understated presence, overshadowed understandably by Cameron, who’s an intimidating specimen: stratospherically successful, fiercely intelligent, well versed in an astonishing amount of sciences and looking ridiculously healthy, no doubt a result of his Veganism. Essentially he’s everything you are not and could never be, though that doesn’t change the sincerity of his technological acuity or his environmental awareness.
In terms of the film production, Ray Quint’s approach to the project’s various strands that he found himself pulling together was to find an emotional core: “I knew that this was a project that was dear to Jim’s heart…and for a lot of people who come to see this film they’ll be interested in the science of it and in the exploration but there’ll also be a bunch of people interested in ‘Jim the filmmaker’. So once I’d constructed the narrative, it was about what else I needed to tell this story.” This meant Quint had to access the emotional side to Cameron, who’s guarded and measured at the best of times: “I wanted to give it a thematic core… this idea of curiosity, exploration and inspiring that in young people and to Jim’s credit, he went along with that …often I would have to say to Jim ‘what were you hearing, what were you feeling? Cameron laughs “yeah, he had to coax that out of me… it was the same with the narration, I was concerned it would just be me droning on…but Ray insisted on it as a kind of narrative glue”.
It was in this spirit that Quint created Deepsea Challenge 3D’s re-enactments with young Jim in his pretend cardboard submarine, to add an emotional element to the film. Cameron seems reticent to stoop to sentimentality or open himself up to scrutiny: “There were certainly things in there that Ray wanted, that I was uncomfortable with, like my kids on screen…from a security standpoint one doesn’t want to do that (but) it spoke so well to the theme of inspiring children and part of what I was doing was being a role model to my kids. People ask me ‘why would I take these risks?’ but I think there’s a greater risk in not standing for something in life. I want my kids to know that they should feel empowered, that they should stand for something and go for their dreams.”
Cameron’s single-mindedness defines the style of his filmmaking, always pitting himself against insurmountable challenges and risks to realise epic visions.
This is an ethos essential to who he is as a person: “There are lots of people who live with risk every day, emergency medical workers, doctors without borders going into Ebola infected villages or fighter pilots patrolling hot zones; they have a risk/reward equation that they run for themselves and they are sanguine with the outcome ‘I’m doing this because it defines me as a person and it has meaning.’ We had to deal with that on this mission because we had lost two team members, so we started to question ourselves and the whole raison d’etre of the project...but (Mike DeGruy and Andrew Wight) were explorers and they had put themselves in harm’s way repeatedly in their lives because they believed that the outcome was worth it. So we decided to complete the film, to honour Andrew’s original vision and to complete the expedition.”