Original Print: April 9, the Edmonton Sun Newspaper.

April 9

Cameron Ponders A Return To TV 
By STEVE TILLEY -- Edmonton Sun

NEW YORK -- James Cameron is - put diplomatically - a wilful man. More often than not, 
what Jim wants, Jim gets. Even if it means raising his voice and cracking the whip, 
figuratively (or not) speaking. 

Which is why it's a little hard to imagine the director of monster blockbusters like 
Titanic, True Lies, the Terminator series and Aliens being taken advantage of by the 
crews he employs for his movies. 

But to hear the Canadian-born Cameron tell it, it happens more often than you might 
think. Which is why he wants to stick to TV-trained crews for his next feature film,
a move Cameron figures will save him as much as 15% on the overall budget. 

"There is no margin for error when making episodic TV," said Cameron, who created 
the short-lived sci-fi series Dark Angel for television. 

"When I do my next feature, I want to work with TV people. Because, quite frankly, 
they understand limitations. And feature (film) people are too used to being the 
fat cats at the top of the food chain." 

During a one-on-one interview with The Sun to discuss his 3-D Imax film Ghosts of the 
Abyss, opening Friday at the SilverCity Imax in West Edmonton Mall, Cameron said 
learning the rigours of doing TV opened his eyes to some of the cost overruns that are 
taken for granted in big-budget feature filmmaking. 

"My films have won a number of technical Oscars over the years, and basically I was 
associated with this level of filmmaking," said Cameron, who hasn't released a feature 
film since 1997's Titanic. "But a lot of people interpret it as permission to pad up 
their department budgets, to put on more people, to build more than they need to 
build, to put a safety system behind a safety system behind a safety system. That's 
not what filmmaking is." 

Cameron acknowledges that his reputation for being a demanding and perfection-obsessed 
director makes people try to second-guess him, usually because they simply want to 
cover their butts. 

"They all imagine they're going to get yelled at because they're not ready, so they'll 
build 10 times more than you really need," he said. "I have to make a contract with 
the department heads. If I say I only need the crane on Tuesday, I only need the crane 
on Tuesday. And I'm not going to cry because it's not there on Wednesday." 

Cameron said he's a little disappointed that Dark Angel, starring Jessica Alba as a 
genetically enhanced uber-babe probing her shrouded past, didn't last longer than two 
seasons before it was cancelled by Fox. But he doesn't regret the experience one iota. 

"We were doing Dark Angel episodes for $2 million US apiece," he said. "We turned out 
44 hours of pretty good television. Some not so great, but some pretty good. 

"For me, it's learning how to compromise and learning how to be clever, picking your 
battles in advance to figure out the things you need and the things you don't need." 

Cameron hasn't yet revealed what his next feature film will be, except to say that he 
plans to shoot it using the same 3-D digital technology he employed in Ghosts of the 
Abyss. (The film will also screen in regular 2-D.) 

He also has high hopes of eventually returning to the Alien franchise as long as he can 
get the go-ahead to make a truly scary (and likely R-rated) film. 

The 1979 original Alien, directed by Ridley Scott, "holds a special classic niche as one 
of the great terrifying experiences," Cameron said. "And the trick (to making a new Alien 
film) is you don't go crazy and make a $150-million movie because you don't want to have 
to compromise, you don't want to try to do a PG-13 Alien that is all things to everyone." 

An Alien flick, Cameron said, ought to put the psychology back into psychological horror. 

"It's got to still maintain its roots in this kind of cinematic id. Ridley did it really 
beautifully. He just kind of put you into this Freudian nightmare space." (