With production now in full swing for the new Terminator movie (a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day) James Cameron is relentlessly touring the world and doing a lot of talking to try and keep his new projects and himself relevant.
While James Cameron has been busy in the world of Avatar, he has had a lack of presence in Hollywood doing most of his work behind the scenes, hopefully that is all set to change and he will be back to take his fans into new worlds and deliver new exciting movies and stories. We continue to hope he will direct another Terminator movie one day and that he might revisit his roots of film-making and techniques one day.
Recently Mr. Cameron was sparking controversy as a marketing tactic like feminism/wonder woman attacks and even rubbing super hero fan boys the wrong way by dissing comic book/superhero movies, super hero movies aren’t our thing either but each to their own.
The whole controversy tactic kind of fell flat and really was not working; well it was working but not in a positive way for Mr. Cameron. This marketing tactic never ends well for a movie and it is too destructive (you know what movies they were). Of course it is easy to piss people off and to get exposure from it but we want to see a more classy James Cameron style of marketing, we of course love an angry “fuck the system” Jim but he just isn’t that dude anymore- under his slender exterior he’s a giant elite Hollywood fat cat baron but like his original concept for a Terminator he can blend in to any crowd with his jeans and shirt, perhaps unbeknown to the person stood next to him but he is a very very rich man!
It now looks like Jim is changing tactics and now he is doing marketing the right way by just getting out there and talking about film-making, science fiction, the arts and Artificial Intelligence. This is the stuff that his fans like to hear him talk about and he just generally needs to get down with people and reconnect once again and he is doing it.
James Cameron visited Sydney to attend the Vivid festival, a great platform for Mr. Cameron to talk about tech and science fiction. VFXblog covered the event where Jim said the following…
James Cameron on 3D conversions (Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D was a conversion):
That said, I think that Hollywood has done 3D a disservice by embracing post-conversion, which to me is the wrong track. We should do native photography because if we’re ever going to incorporate 3D into broad content production, which most of which is live or near realtime or short turnaround TV production, we have to use the native production tools. Native production technology has basically stalled as of about three or four years ago. We need to re-embrace native production. My hopeful prediction is we’ll get 4K out of our system from a broadcast perspective. When that becomes utterly commonplace and 100 percent saturated, everyone will look around for the next big thing.
Jim on A.I. fighting back..
Now, the other big question in that 2001 raises is about A.I. About the disembodied consciousness of a machine consciousness and that’s the part of 2001 that’s as fresh today as ever. In fact, the film should be watched as cautionary tale. I’ve talked to a lot of A.I. folks over the last year, year and a half because I’m doing these new Terminator films. I’m not directing but I’m co-producing. There are a lot of researchers at the very cutting edge of artificial general A.I. research that will say, ‘We are trying to create a person.’ They mean ‘a person.’ A consciousness and identity, something with an ego, something with its own life, and goals and emotions. I say okay, ‘So, this ‘person’ that you’re creating, how will you control this person?’ ‘Oh, well it’s very easy, we just set out the goals that we want the AI to pursue.’
I say, ‘Okay. So you’re saying that it has ego which means that it has essentially its own sense of self and its own emotions and all that, but, at the same time, you’re putting shackles on it so it can’t do what it wants to do but I can only do what you want it to do. I think we have a name for that, it’s called slavery.’ How long do you think something smarter than you will ever be, is going to want to be your slave? About forty-fifth of seconds.
VFXblog also said that Cameron also made an important promise…
Someone in the audience said they had traveled Malaysia for Cameron’s talk and praised the director for his various insightful DVD commentaries, except, for The Terminator, which the director has not ever recorded. So, would he do one?
James Cameron responded:
OK, fair enough, I’ll do it, how does that sound?
This is now the second Terminator related promise Mr. Cameron has made to fans. The first promise being TheTerminatorFans.com’s question which was asked of him at a Live introduction at the premiere of Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D.
TheTerminatorFans.com; After the experience of converting T2:3D would yourself and Lightstorm Entertainment be interested in remastering the first movie and doing a 3D conversion?
Look, I think it would be great to do all my films; I’d love to see The Abyss, I’d love to see Aliens. It gets down to a matter of economics really, the Titanic release was very successful, we made 440 million dollars re-releasing Titanic in 3D, so if we make some reasonable amount of money with the T2 re-release and we start to feel confident- we can start looking at some of the other films as well, if we think there’s a market there or if we think, you know, if this demonstrates that it sorta becomes a vanity project then I probably wouldn’t do it.
Jim followed up with…
…the first Terminator movie didn’t make that much money, it made a big splash because it was a new fresh idea but it was a low budget film and it did well for a low budget film you know, again we just have to look at the economics of it whether that made sense.
We would hope that “money” would not be the determining factor for him wanting to do a new 4K conversion of The Terminator but it would make big money anyway because people always underestimate the power of the first movie.
Here is what we would like to see happen.
1. 4K The Terminator conversion, however we want the mono gunshot sounds restored, original coloring and grain to stay (our opinion) 3D isn’t a total must for us either but we know some of you will definitely want it.
2. Promised new commentary and new special features. We don’t need some huge expensive T2 style remastering but just a cool definitive home release for the first Terminator movie with 4K love. If Jim keeps those 2 promises the fans will be happy but if Mr. Cameron did pit The Terminator 3D against Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D in terms of a theatrical release he might just be surprised if his underdog Terminator movie destroyed its sequel.
Wasn’t the only reason T2 was a huge financial success because people where pumped to see a sequel to a movie that gathered momentum via the rental market? Regardless, Hollywood in its current climate and political leanings might not want to know the outcome as it does not fit the narrative of the movies and money they want to make today. Only when Terminator totally collapses will fans get the type of movie they actually want but there is always a slim Jim chance of pulling it off T2 style and that will be the goal right now.
Do you disagree with our opinion on what The Terminator conversion should be, or simply have an opinion- please tell us what you want in the comments below.