James Cameron sold The Terminator script for one dollar to keep directing
In the early 1980s no studio wanted an unknown to direct his robot-assassin script, so James Cameron sold it to producer Gale Anne Hurd for a single dollar, on condition he direct. The film earned over 78 million dollars and launched a career that later reached the floor of the Mariana Trench.
Kapuskasing, a town in Ontario, is where Cameron arrived on August 16, 1954, the eldest of five children of an electrical engineer and an artist who also worked as a nurse. Classmates remembered a boy who ignored sport and built contraptions meant to fly or dive. At 17 his family moved to Brea, California. He began physics at Fullerton College in 1973, switched to English and dropped out at the end of 1974, then drove trucks and cleaned a high school while teaching himself special effects from student papers in a university library. Seeing Star Wars in 1977 persuaded him to quit trucking for film.
Money from a group of dentists funded his first short, Xenogenesis, in 1978. He built miniatures at Roger Corman's studio, handled effects on Escape from New York and got his first feature job directing Piranha II: The Spawning, a troubled shoot that critics mocked. A nightmare about an unstoppable robot killer from the future, plus the influence of Halloween, became The Terminator, with Arnold Schwarzenegger cast as the cyborg.
Hits followed, including Aliens, Terminator 2 and Titanic, which brought him Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film Editing. Titanic, Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water rank among the five highest-grossing films ever. He made the first film to pass one billion dollars and remains the only director with three films above two billion each. His films together have grossed more than 10 billion dollars, second among directors.
Beneath the box office sits a parallel life at sea. A National Geographic explorer-in-residence, Cameron has made deep-ocean documentaries such as Ghosts of the Abyss, developed underwater filming and remotely operated vehicle technology, and helped build the 3D Fusion Camera System. In 2012, piloting the Deepsea Challenger, he became the first person to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench alone.
Source: James Cameron
