- Hey, everyone, this is Adam Ganser
along with my buddy--
- Abe Epperson.
- And we are full time directors for Cracked.com.
This show is gonna be called Director Piece Theater
in which we discuss famous filmmakers
and some of the quirks that make them unique.
- They wanted us to do more work,
so they gave us a show.
So that's why you're here and that's why--
(laughing)
- And now to earn our pay.
(upbeat music)
So the first entry in our series is gonna be
about James Cameron.
We've all seen some James Cameron films.
How do you feel about James Cameron?
- I love this topic so much because today
we're gonna be talking about James Cameron
and his very interesting kind of career with water.
- Yeah, James Cameron has spent his entire
Hollywood career battling a deep, not even subconscious
fear of water and has decided to tackle that fear
by a way of building MEC Suits
and punching it to death.
Starting with his first and little known
directorial debut, the sequel to 1978's Piranha,
Piranha Two, The Spawning.
- For centuries, nature's ferocious killer,
until now.
(chirping)
- Bat, bat, bat.
- Bat.
- I was surprised, number one,
that this was a movie.
- Yeah, we're gonna submerge into the depths,
we're gonna fight these piranhas.
- That's right.
- This came out in 1981.
- So for those of you who
are not familiar with 1978's Piranha,
that was almost a Jaws movie.
It was a B horror film Jaws movie.
And James Cameron took over the sequel and made a couple
of very interesting changes to the story.
Number one, the lead of the film
is a scuba diving instructor.
- Which will become key later
when you realize that that's all James Cameron
ever wants to be.
- That's correct.
Number two the villain is an evil sea monster
which of course he did inherit that concept
because he has to have mutant piranhas.
- Yeah, and they're mutated because of what?
- I'll tell you everything I know.
Now my ass could end up in jail for this, but okay.
We spliced them genes from different species
to create the ultimate killer organism.
(chirping) - Bat.
(upbeat music)
- Military experiments.
So now we're getting to it.
Technology, are we going too far,
have we not gone far enough?
These are the questions James wants us to ask.
- So more interesting than that
is one of the big changes that Cameron made
to this film is that he placed the sea monster's lair
in a sunken ship which is why he needed
a scuba diving lead because they needed
to basically investigate a sunken ship
to defeat the evil mutant piranhas.
- You've gotta be kidding.
- And this becomes really important later
because right in those three examples,
you now have laid the scene of his future career.
- That's right.
- So we're gonna kind of look through
the idea of your lead being water submersible person,
the villain is some kind of human intervention,
or let's just call it the unknown,
some magic monster, some alien or something like that
will be the force that's driving the horror,
or the conflict.
- Up next in his filmography,
we're gonna skip Terminator.
Why, because Terminator doesn't fit with our theory,
so therefore it doesn't matter in cinema history.
- As you know, James Cameron likes
to take breaks sometimes and we're just seeing
Terminator One as just his break from water.
But the big hitter that we're talking about here
is 1986 Aliens, another sequel.
- Interesting how many sequels he did
even after he'd done Terminator.
How does Aliens fit in with this theory, Abe?
- Cameron makes a few key decisions
that build his narrative within an already existing world,
so he's already done this twice.
In particular, Aliens, the colony is where
all the action takes place is abandoned and corroded,
similar to sunken ship.
I think Adam wants to talk about the aliens a little bit.
- That's right, I think a key observation,
silly as it may be, those aliens are always wet.
- They're so wet. - They're really wet.
The aliens are not depicted as slimy and wet
in the original Alien movie.
Cameron slime wetted it up with these aliens,
making them bizarrely moist.
Here's another additional fact about the water
that I thought was interesting.
Ripley is discovered in her abandoned ship
and that ship is coated with condensation.
All kinds of water just floating everywhere
in that spaceship which again I think is interesting,
as though she's being pulled from a watery grave
back to life, right?
She becomes, and this is another key ingredient
to Cameron's ocean fear, she becomes pulled back
from a watery grave to combat the fear,
that's her job.
She literally doesn't have any expertise at all
in this movie.
She just has seen the alien before.
- One could say she's a fish out of water.
(dinging)
- No!
- She's not in her own time anymore.
She doesn't understand the basics of space travel
so she's really as unknown as it gets.
Not only that, she's in the middle of space.
You brought up the condensation thing again,
that's actually a great point because if we look
at the technological safety of these movies,
coming from the idea that we're in a submersible,
much like James Cameron did in much of his life.
This is a man who already looks at the safety
between the cold terrible depths and him,
is essentially just like a few inches of steel.
You gotta stay on the ship, you can't leave the ship.
Everything out there is terrible and horrifying.
Obviously in Aliens when we get to the colony,
the reason it's so horrifying,
is the alien can kind of just come out of anywhere,
from the ceiling, under you, from the side of the wall.
It's like he's king of the environment.
That's where the horror comes from
is this idea that Ripley is fighting an alien
in which she doesn't know where it is.
It comes from anything.
At one point she fights the aliens with literally fire
which I don't know if you know anything
about the elements but water, fire
have a dualistic relationship.
- That's true, I have played Final Fantasy,
so I do remember that.
- That's how I see the world is like
how is it like Final Fantasy
and then it makes sense to me when it does.
- I think that's a good point.
I think Ripley fighting the alien with fire
is an interesting choice because we've already seen
that it doesn't work.
In the first Alien movie, one of those people
goes up into the ducts and tries to flame throw an alien
and it doesn't work, it doesn't stop the alien at all
and yet in James Cameron's movie, that's basically
how Ripley single handedly takes down the alien queen.
He just makes a break with canon there, why,
because this is how he visualizes fighting
against an ocean type predator.
- Water is evil and fires dries it out.
- There's one last element of this story
that I think bears mentioning and that is Ripley
learns how to use a giant MEC Suit to finish
off this alien queen which is a thing
we're gonna see a lot in his filmography.
There's always a MEC Suit,
there's always a giant technological invention
that must be used to combat the ocean,
otherwise you die.
- Come on! (screeching)
- Let's move on to the next film he did, Abe.
What do you think about 1989's Abyss?
- This is the first film that he takes
on the subject directly.
This is in its own world, he created it
and the whole movie takes place on, you guessed it,
a stranded ship.
Submarine is wrecked in this ocean trench
and the team is not supposed to be here.
The villain is manifest as some kind of telekinetic being
made out of sea water which was crazy
because if you wanna take a side,
this is one of the first like real big
industrial light magic CG characters.
Obviously Terminator had little bits of it
but it's just all over the place.
As we see in the spoilers, when they shot the doors
and the water beast just falls to the ground
and they taste it, they're like, it's just sea water.
It's not actually--
- 'Cause tasting is how you identify your villain.
- Yeah, like hm. - Hm, hm.
- This is the most James Cameron you can get.
The villain, quote, unquote, the unknown,
is literally something that is just made of water
and we learn later that it's this telekinetic jellyfish.
- Yeah, alien jellyfish.
- Alien jellyfish that just can control water at will.
That's just a part of their deal.
Back to the production side of things,
this was like a horrible movie to make.
Not only all the actors and Ed Harris
famously won't talk about James Cameron in interviews
because he just hates the man.
They had a fight, he punched him in his face.
One of the reasons was is that at one point
when they're filming an underwater thing,
they would hide in these little stations
while they were filming Ed Harris going through these tubes,
they would hide these little oxygen tanks,
so that they wouldn't have to call cut,
he would just get more air and he would just
go through the scene.
At one point in the many, many takes
that I'm sure James Cameron did,
James Cameron moved the little oxygen tank
further down the tube to the point
that Ed Harris didn't know where it was.
So he was drowning, and he's like where is this thing?
James Cameron reportedly said that he wanted him
to actually feel fear.
He looked good on camera.
- I guess you get the impression some of it was great,
some of it was hell.
It's trying to understand it.
Which maybe I never will completely.
I have not regretted the experience for a second
even when I was down there,
no matter what was going on.
- Another thing that's interesting
about The Abyss that's on this point
is that in a deleted scene, the jellyfish aliens
actually cause a string of tidal waves
to stand on the brink of almost every earth shore.
They're literally gonna annihilate humanity.
- Massive tidal waves. - That's right.
And then they sort of pose it at Ed Harris.
We're doing this and Ed Harris,
fortunately had texted his bae earlier.
- With the little wrist-ra-doodle.
- Yeah, that's right, with the wrister text.
He texted his bae telling her he loved her
and so they were like, oh love, that's cool.
- 'Cause they're showing him images
projected against oh guess what water,
and it's like here's humanity, it's got love, children,
they're all great.
It's just like this iPhone ad essentially
that displays in front of Ed Harris,
and he's like why are you showing me?
- It really is. - And they're like, hold on,
there's more and then shows all of like war in Vietnam
and just like all these terrible things
that humanity does to himself, but Ed Harris is like,
I'm gonna sacrifice myself, I'm okay, it's fine,
I'm just gonna die here.
They're like, no man, it's cool.
- That's a chill DM man. - And you know what,
because of that, you get to save the world.
We're not gonna destroy all of the coastal cities
on the earth.
- It's interesting that thematically
the ocean wants to destroy all of humanity.
They just want to destroy everybody,
but they see that text and then they're like,
it's pretty cool, that's a good DM, man.
- Dude, you used the crying emoji,
that is so key. (laughing)
- Hey, hey, it's Bud!
- That's impossible.
- Okay, let's move on to his next movie
which is 1991's Terminator 2, Judgment Day.
Heard of that, now we didn't talk about the first
Terminator because there wasn't a lot there
that connected with the themes in the rest
of his filmography but this movie
has quite a bit of it actually.
- Two years before he was like,
I made a water monster,
what if I just make a shiny version
and boy oh boy did we eat it up.
- That's right T1000 was essentially
a water based liquid monster, that's what it is.
Also one of the coolest villains in the history of cinema.
- Another sequel in the franchise.
- Yes and once again this villain,
this liquid villain is destroyed be fire
and by freezing, these are the two ways
that you can combat this villain.
So again the themes play out.
- A hero that is out of time,
a fish out of water.
- Alright, so then he makes 1994's True Lies
in which Jamie Lee Curtis wets herself down
before she strips.
- So 1997 Titanic. (laughing)
- So the theme carries on.
- This is the most compelling and obvious example.
Let's just go through the basics.
The insiding incident of the film is Bill Paxton
dressed like a hipster pirate or something.
He's looking for the heart of the ocean.
Everyone dies in the ocean by freezing
or drowning obviously.
Jack has to sneak aboard the Titanic
and further eviscerates his out of placeness
by seducing a rich girl
with his drawing skills and dancing?
- I think that's why she liked him.
- I think that's why.
Isn't she supposed to be like 15 or something?
- I don't know which ages they're supposed to be.
- It's timeless.
It's timeless.
- It's definitely a timeless tale of love,
that's for sure.
Yeah but Titanic, you know, is obviously the movie
that everybody will always remember James Cameron for.
That's his crowning achievement,
but it has the fully formed ocean fear in it, right?
You have an oceanographer looking
for the heart of the ocean, in a submarine,
around the wreck of the Titanic.
Then you go back in time and watch the actual story
where a fish out of water guy
seduces somebody who's basically beyond his pale
in terms of attractiveness I guess.
They both drown together.
One of them survives but the other one drowns
and that's the story.
It's the story of a whole ship going down.
- Pretty cool huh?
- Well then that old lady Rose,
after troubling everyone with her very long story
throws it in the ocean, the five million dollar
heart of the ocean.
She's just like, you can take it, Jack.
Jack's not gonna use it. - No he's not.
- Bill Paxton, the whole reason he brought you
on board is to get this damn diamond.
- Also quick argument, how much do you think
it took, it cost to charter that sub out there anyway?
They spent more than the heart of the ocean's worth
of money in order to get to this heart of the ocean.
- All we've done so far is just kind of
doing this loose metaphors to kind of say
this is a similarity, this is a similarity,
but this is now in his career where things
get really interesting.
It is. - This is where our thesis
begins to take hold because he wanted to make Titanic
like 10 years before, he wrote it,
but the technology wasn't there.
So he waited for it to happen
and once the technology, filming technology was there,
and in 1985 when they actually found the Titanic,
he wasn't a part of that expedition,
but that just, aw man, he loved that.
- That was his favorite.
- He was just like you know what,
I've gotta go down there.
And he did. - I need to see it for myself.
- He just went down to the Titanic
and he funded his own excursion
and so this is now where we see the technology
not only of filmmaking but of like oceanography essentially.
It's constantly trying to catch up to James Cameron.
He's ahead of the curve.
He has all these things he knows
he wants to accomplish.
- What's interesting is there's so much
self filming going on during Titanic.
There's all kinds of behind the scenes things
that are being made.
Basically James Cameron is really interested
in capturing himself making this movie.
- He's literally the hero of his own life story.
- That's right, this is when he starts
to actually invade his own narrative
as a protagonist overtly.
For the next 12 years after Titanic,
he just makes deep sea documentaries
where he and or just other people that he hires
go down and film sunken ships and stuff.
- He produced and directed over nine documentaries
about the ocean after he had already made Titanic.
He's like I'm not done ocean,
I need to still know your secrets.
- That's right.
- I think he thinks that he's gonna find
some mer-people down there.
That's his main thing and he'll be the king
of the mer-people.
(laughing)
- He spends 12 years after Titanic
making deep sea documentaries and then comes back
with his first major motion picture
and that motion picture is Avatar.
We all know he's gonna make Avatars
for the rest of his life.
If you look at IMDB, he's got five slated
to go now apparently, but what's interesting is
Avatar is where the narrative starts to actually change.
Instead of the sea creatures being this threatening
destructive thing, now the sea creatures
are of the subject of empathy.
- They're like land sea creatures.
- That's right, 'cause if you look
at the Na'vi, they're basically which by the way Na'vi
navy, come on, they're basically sea cats.
Their world is essentially an underwater
bio luminescent and on land land.
- Then they have like strange angular
type appendages, they're literally the color of the ocean.
The world itself is bioluminescent which is how
things survive in the deep.
It looks as much as an underwater aquarium
as you can on land.
- That's right, and the villain this time,
instead of being, normally it would be the human
beings trying to combat these creatures,
this time the villain is the evil military
wearing MEC Suits who are trying
to steal their resources.
What's interesting though is the Na'vi
are not capable of destroying this military on their own.
What do we need, we need a hero who dawns
a MEC Suit to become a Na'vi
and fight as a Na'vi back against the military
so Cameron's gone full Cameron here.
He's made a MEC Suit that makes you a Na'vi
so you can fight a MEC Suit.
This represents a pretty significant turn
narratively for Cameron because after having spent
12 years in the ocean, now suddenly he has
a different take on it.
Suddenly now he feels more at peace with it,
he can defend it.
He feels there's value there that's worth preserving, right?
- I mean he's this wealthy essentially
titan of industry.
He's not an Elon Musk, but he's pretty (mumbles)
as far as it goes. - That's right.
- He's building an industry
of the most winningest movies of all time.
Putting that money into actual exploration
on the earth.
This is kind of important for Avatar
because his views have changed yes,
and he's building these MEC Suits
to find this quote unquote unobtanium.
- Yeah, the wonderfully named unobtanium.
- Yeah, yeah, which has been in like
five different movies, it's also in The Core.
It's just like when people don't want
to be a screen writer, just go to--
- Unobtanium is the equivalent
of the MacGuffin Project.
The unobtanium though I think,
the only reason you can justify it as a choice
with this narrative of Cameron fighting the ocean,
there's something down there that you can never get.
This evil corporation is trying to get
this thing you can never get
and Cameron, seeing the man he was,
afraid of the ocean, having now come to peace with it
after 12 years of documentary making,
decides I'm gonna out-MEC the MEC maker
I'm going to make a man go through a MEC Suit
become a blue seat cat and fight back
against the evil Cameron that used to be.
This is his redemption story Avatar
or maybe it's just Dances with Wolves in 3D, I'm not sure.
My favorite thing about Cameron,
about this narrative and this is how it resolves,
is in 2012, Cameron decided to level up
by manning the deepest solo dive in history.
And made a film of himself doing it.
He literally built a giant submersible MEC Suit,
went in it himself down to the deepest place
that human beings have ever gone,
and made a film about it.
That is the ultimate Cameron move.
- He's the deepest man. - That's right.
He will never more conquer his fears than this moment.
- It's surprising because when he came back up,
and they're like you did it, James.
Hey, where'd you get that trident?
He must've met Na'vi people down there
or something, or maybe it was the jellyfish,
maybe it was the jellyfish.
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