James Cameron si appassiona al cinema a seguito del suo interesse per gli effetti speciali. Nel 1982 esordisce alla regia per una produzione italo-americana, Piraña paura (1982). La leggenda narra che, insoddisfatto dai pesci forniti dalla produzione, se ne sia dipinti a mano una cinquantina, rendendoli ovviamente più credibili. Il film, però, è di quelli che non lasciano il segno. Forse è più giusto considerare come film d'esordio Terminator (1984) che ottiene un incredibile successo di pubblico e lancia ad Hollywood Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anche scrittore, sceneggia, si fa per dire, il campione d'incassi Rambo 2 - La vendetta(1986) di George Pan Cosmatos e l'anno dopo gli viene affidata la regia del fortunatissimo sequel Aliens - Scontro finale (1987) dove la violenza e il fantastico prevalgono sulla fantascienza. Tuttavia il confronto con Ridley Scott va a suo vantaggio visto che il ritmo della pellicola ed il divertimento sono decisamente maggiori. I super effetti speciali ritornano in The abyss (1992), ambientato in fondo al mare. Il film ha scarso successo nonostante sia il più visionario ed originale della produzione di Cameron. Il record d'incasso arriva qualche anno dopo con Terminator 2 - Il giorno del giudizio (1996) caratterizzato da effetti strablianti, montaggio serrato e azione adrenalinica. Il successo è planetario. Nel 1997 si cambia registro con la commedia True lies, sempre interpretato da Schwarzenegger: anche se il film non ottiene un grande successo, è un ottimo clone delle pellicole di James Bond che il regista cita a piene mani. Dopo aver prodotto e sceneggiato Strange days (1997), diretto da Kathryn Bigelow (allora sua moglie), nel 1997 l'ambizioso regista realizza un costosissimo film sulla tragedia del Titanic: nonostante le aspettative dei molti che predicono un colossale flop, Titanic frantuma tutti i record d'incasso ed eguaglia il primato di Ben Hur portandosi a casa 11 Oscar, tra i quali ben tre vinti dallo stesso Cameron (film, regia, montaggio). Leonardo diCaprio e Kate Winslet sono i nuovi Rhett Butler e Rossella O'Hara e seicento milioni di dollari vengono rastrellati sul solo suolo americano. Cameron è il re del mondo, come lui stesso afferma durante la notte degli Oscar, forse punzecchiando coloro che lo hanno sempre accusato di essere più un tecnico che un regista e di girare film spettacolari, ma freddi.

As a boy in Chippawa, Ontario, James Cameron once sent some mice over the edge of Niagara Falls in a small submersible made from old mayonnaise jars, an Erector Set and a paint bucket. Another time, he made a hot-air balloon out of a dry-cleaning bag and some candles, floating it down the street until someone reported it as a U.F.O. and called the Fire Department. Together with the young Steven Spielberg's experiments in civic alarum-raising — locking himself in the bathroom until the Phoenix Fire Department was summoned — Cameron's excursions suggest two interlocking propositions: (1) If you want to know who is going to grow up to be a box-office titan, check out the records of your local Fire Department. And (2) nobody should be surprised if Balloon Boy turns into the proud auteur behind "Terminator Resurrection: This Time With Feeling."
As Cameron's latest art-house offering appears in a few select cinemas, Rebecca Keegan's biography, "The Futurist," arrives to shine a spotlight on this most shy and retiring of filmmaking violets. I'm only half-joking. The Cameron who emerges here is a pensive soul, racked by the thought of nuclear apocalypse after he reads a pamphlet on fallout shelters at age 8 — "a life-changing epiphany," according to Keegan, leading to a lifetime of "daydreaming about Armageddon." I'm sorry, but this is James Cameron we're talking about? Mr. I Eat Pressure for Breakfast? The guy who detonated a small thermonuclear device just to backlight Arnold Schwarzenegger while he puckered up for a kiss with Jamie Lee Curtis? To this day, people watching that scene are unsure whether to shield their eyes, crouch under their seats or head for the basement.

To be fair, Cameron's films have long attempted to balance airy calls for world peace with a fierce desire to see Harrier jump jets pass horizontally through tall buildings, but it's disquieting to see that mixture served up so credulously here. Keegan visited Cameron on the set of "Avatar" for Time magazine in 2008 and decided to turn her article into a book, which is less a biography proper than a set visit by someone who got carried away with access to the great and mighty Oz: "Cameron's brain is formidable, fascinating and equally developed on both sides." That's nice to know. Fans will already be familiar with the unusual molecular makeup of the Jim Cameron childhood: three parts science geek to one part rebel, he aced physics and was pounded at school. After the family moved to California, he got a job driving the hot-lunch truck for the Brea Olinda Unified School District and began scribbling plot ideas about blue people and bioluminescent planets while boning up on matte processes at the University of Southern California library. Then, in 1977, he saw "Star Wars" and emerged seething: somebody had made his movie. "That's when I got busy," he said.
Getting a job at Roger Corman's studio, he sculptured spaceships for low-fi "Star Wars" rip-offs and landed his first directing gig on "Piranha II: The Spawning"; after he was fired, he found himself in a hotel room with a fever and dreamed of a steel skeleton clawing its way through a blistering inferno, thus making "The Terminator" the most innovative alternative to filing for unemployment benefits yet devised. That genesis is the stuff of myth; far more revealing is the three-month period Cameron spent in 1983 writing the scripts for "The Terminator," "Rambo" and "Aliens," figuring out how many pages per hour he had to write, then cranking them out to an accompaniment of "Mars, the Bringer of War" from "The Planets." Hasta la vista, Holst!
Genuine revolutions come in two installments, with first the boy wonders — the Dantons, the Trotskys, the Spielbergs — to be followed, a few years later, by a much steelier strategist: a Napoleon, a Lenin, the man who would be king of the world. There are those who lament Cameron's transformation from the scrappy filmmaker who made "The Terminator" for $6.4 million into the man who made "Titanic" for more than $200 million, but in truth he is one of the few directors who understand how to spend money, just as he is one of the few who know how to shoot action — a much smaller band than you'd think. Sigourney Weaver, an opponent of the N.R.A., was worried by all the chunky military hardware in "Aliens," but remember what happens: the Marines descend to the mining colony on LV-426, bristling with guns and grenades, only to get their rear ends handed to them on a plate. Cameron had no need to direct "Rambo": he'd already made his Vietnam movie.
Or think of the T-1000 in "Terminator 2," mercury to Schwarzenegger's might, and realize how powerfully it prefigured the enemy America would face on 9/11. Cameron has an instinctive understanding of asymmetry, in other words; it gives his combat scenes real heft and sinew. Would that the process by which a newly "mellow" Cameron coaxed virtual performances from his "Avatar" actors were anything that splendid: "To help them feel an explosion," Keegan writes, "he boomed a noise over amplifiers, threw foam particles at them and whacked them with a padded jousting pole." It's enough to make you pine for the oxygenated screaming matches that characterized the shoots of "The Abyss" and "Titanic." Cameron may have dragged filmmaking kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but he has helped deal an irrevocable blow to the art of film biography.
Tom Shone is the author of "Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer."
THE FUTURIST
The Life and Films of James Cameron
By Rebecca Keegan
273 pp. Crown Publishers. $24
Da The New York Times, 17 gennaio 2010