James Cameron, whose “Avatar: The Way of the Water” is a hit in theaters, perhaps owes his incredible career to a little improvisation when he presented the scenario for “Aliens le retour” to the film’s producers.
With the huge success of Avatar: The Way of the Water in theaters, James Cameron is, even more than he already was, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. But if the Canadian, who placed three films in the top 10 of the world box office, is today an essential personality of the seventh art, it is perhaps thanks to a daring improvisation dating from the mid-1990s. 80.
In the mid-80s, therefore, James Cameron, who had just been revealed with Terminator, was responsible for directing the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien. While he finds himself in front of three producers and the boss of the studio to present the pitch to them, he first proposes an idea for a title by writing it.
“It’s something that just popped into my mind in the moment. I did this stuff on the back of the script, or a pitch document, maybe the treatment, I don’t know anymore”says Cameron at the microphone of Cinemablend. “I told the people in front of me that I had an idea for the title of the film. I wrote Alien in big letters. And I added an S at the end.”
“I showed them this and told them that I wanted to call the movie Aliens because we are not dealing with a single creature”he continues. “Now we’re dealing with an army, and that’s the big difference. Adding an S is very simple and very graphic.”
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It was there, after adding an S to the title, that Cameron did a little something extra that maybe, who knows, launched his career for good. “I told them, ‘This is how this is all going to translate.’ And I drew two lines on the S so that it was a dollar”he reveals. “There, that was my pitch. And apparently it worked!” They were okay with the title, they never had any reservations.”
“There is a point in a career where you have to be cheeky. Technically, in Hollywood, it’s all the time”adds James Cameron. “But there’s a time when you have to be incredibly cheeky, when they don’t know who you are yet.”
Recently, James Cameron again evoked this funny anecdote by answering a question from his colleague Edgar Wright for the Empireonline site. “Maybe it was a Pavlovian reflex in front of the dollar symbol closely linked to the word ‘Alien’, maybe it was the confidence I exuded. But they said yes”, he declared. A few months after this “yes”, he staged Aliens the return, considered a classic of science fiction.
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