
Recently, Insight Editions released the book
Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron to display the journey of the artist’s evolution by giving a look into his personal art archives, including rare never-before-seen works from his private collection. The book showcases many of the ideas that lead to aesthetics of some of his most successful films, such as
The Terminator,
Aliens,
Titanic, and
Avatar, as well as work from unrealized projects and everything in between.
During a recent roundtable interview promoting the book, Cameron talked to Jamie Ruby of SciFi Vision about the feeling of getting to see his designs on screen for the first time in a succesful film such as
The Terminator and how it gave him confidence to do even more. “I think that gave me the confidence to then go and hunt much, much bigger prey,” said Cameron. “I moved up to going after mammoths after that. So, I went from
The Terminator to
Aliens, a sequel to a beloved film that had a huge global impact.”
The director continued that because the director of the original film
Alien, Ridley Scott, was largely popular at that point, many people tried to talk him out of it, but he didn’t listen, and he did it in his own way. “They said, ‘[I]f you make a good film, everybody's going to credit Ridley, and if you make a stinker, it's because you're not Ridley.’ I literally had serious producers, knowledgeable people, try to talk me out of it, but I just stuck to my guns and said, ‘Yeah, but I like it. I'm just just a fanboy.’...I just wanted to do my version of it, but the cheekiness is,
my version of it, not slavishly doing just a continuation of Ridley’s style and story.”