Did you know that James Cameron was fired from filming a movie early in his career? A look back at a story that is inevitably surprising when we talk about the man who is today the king of the world box office.
It’s unlikely, but James Cameron, the absolute master of the box office with the monster successes of Titanic and the Avatar films, the essential of the seventh art who now wants to resurrect a cult SF franchise, has already been fired from ‘a film shooting. Yes, purely and simply fired! It was at the very beginning of his career and the Canadian filmmaker has kept such painful memories of this experience that he has long wanted to erase the film in question from his filmography.
This dark episode in the career of the man who recently warned against Artificial Intelligence dates from the beginning of the 80s. Then specialized in special effects, Cameron, who had never yet officiated behind the camera for a feature film, is chosen to take the controls of Piranha 2 – The Flying Killers after the producer Ovidio G. Assonitis fired (already!) the original director, a certain Miller Drake.
James Cameron is not only the director of Piranha 2, the sequel to Joe Dante’s Piranha. He is also a screenwriter alongside Assonitis and Charles H. Eglee. It is therefore he who is at the origin of this story telling the investigation of a diving instructor, her scientific companion and her ex-husband after two women were killed by piranhas. Piranhas like no other since they fly!
Everything seems to be going well when James Cameron is hired, but after two and a half weeks of filming, he is laid off. For what ? In an interview with the Daily Dead websiteOvidio G. Assonitis states that Cameron “experimented” on point “that on the eighth day of filming, there was already a six-day delay on what was planned.” A real problem according to him for a film with a low budget and a tight schedule.
The Italian producer is not tender with Cameron. “He had lost control of the situation… (…) The actors hated him because he was arrogant, sometimes vulgar but above all presumptuous”, loose Assonitis. It is ultimately the maniacal side of the apprentice filmmaker – in this case the time wasted waiting for a cloud to appear in the sky to obtain perfect light – which will decide him once and for all to dismiss him.
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Well almost… Because if Assonitis takes over the main production, he still authorizes Cameron to film the underwater sequences featuring special effects and piranhas. But here again, nothing is going well for the transalpine producer who is enraged by the rendering of the special effects and who also sees Cameron interfering too much for his taste in the editing phase. “Again, he was experimenting”he laments. “He was spending at my expense, and I had to be tough again. I was like, ‘Jim, you’re not allowed to set foot in the editing room.'”
In the end, Assonitis therefore completed the filming of Piranha 2 alone and supervised the editing. The result is a work which, according to him, “includes a week of footage shot by Cameron and 30% special effects that he is responsible for.”
And Cameron, how did he experience this chaotic production? Obviously quite badly. The filmmaker has long wanted his name not to appear in the credits of Piranha 2, but legal issues prevented him from doing so. “The Italian producer fired me and replaced me, which he wanted as soon as he hired me”he let go, scathingly, in an interview with journalist Kenneth Turan. “It wasn’t until much later that I realized what was happening to me.”
“To sum up, I did a little bit of directing Piranha 2, but I don’t see it as my first film”continues the father of titanic and Avatar. “I credited myself when it could do me good, that is, to get terminator. Afterwards, I dropped it. I think that makes sense.”
For a long time, James Cameron will indeed indicate that Terminator, released in theaters in 1985, is his first film. It was not until much later that he would change his tune and claim that it was Piranha 2 that marked his debut behind the camera. With, however, marked with a red iron by these difficult beginnings, remarks charged with a certain irony when he declares at the microphone of 60 Minutes that it is the “best flying piranha movie ever made.”
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