An extra dimension

The director James Cameron creates new worlds for his audience. As the man behind The Terminator and Titanic, two of the most successful films of all time, he has changed the parameters of popular entertainment at least twice during his 30 years behind the camera. And now, at the age of 55, many believe he is about to do it all over again with his new film, Avatar, and its revolutionary 3D technology.

It is 12 years since the Canadian last wowed audiences with his ocean-going blockbuster, Titanic, and there is so much excitement surrounding the new film that the unveiling of its trailer became an event in America, some weeks before the film's release.

This time, the master of special effects takes us into outer space, but Cameron's unorthodox vision delivers a space that is very much his own creation. As ever, his mind is full of strikingly beautiful visual tricks that sear on to the imagination, like the molten metal of the murderous cyborg in Terminator 2 or the spellbinding, watery shape that is encountered by the submariners in The Abyss.

"When you look at the history of film, there have been to date two great revolutions - sound and colour," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the influential head of Dreamworks animation.

Talking to the New Yorker for an almost unprecedentedly prestigious, 12-page profile of the director on the eve of Avatar's release, Katzenberg stakes his reputation on Cameron's ability to persuade the public to clasp 3D cinema to their hearts at last.

"This will be the third great revolution. People are still somewhat sceptical and wonder if it's a gimmick and if it is better suited to cartoons. I don't believe that for a second. I think the day after Jim Cameron's movie comes out, it's a new world," he says.

The director has not been slow to sound a fanfare either. "This film integrates my life's achievements," he insists. It's a typical phrase from a man who simply wants to take the sensory side of the cinematic experience further than anyone else has. Cameron, the son of an engineer, has been working for 10 years on the development of a 3D camera.

Avatar is set 120 years from now on planet Pandora, where humans can't breathe the air. Our hero, Jake, played by Aussie Sam Worthington, lies in a box, while his virtual representative, a nine-foot-tall, electric-blue avatar explores the terrain. The love interest is blue too - an alien covered in luminous spots.

As so often with sci-fi, the mournful story unfolds in a post-apocalyptic future where careless humans have laid waste to their home planet - on this occasion in an obsessive search for a rare but crucial element: the ironically named "unobtanium".

On the set, his key actors had to wear a special head rig which suspended a tiny camera in front of their faces to register every change in their facial expressions. The electronic information was then relayed to a computer system and reinterpreted in the movements of the digital characters.

The danger with all this technical wizardry is that those who experience the real excitement of Avatar are the ones who were standing next to Cameron on the film's sets which stretched from LA to Peter Jackson's Wellington studios. Such groundbreaking gadgetry, after all, is not going to be evident from a cinema seat.

"His films are more like construction projects than movies," says Gavin Smith, editor of New York's Film Comment magazine. "But he is really good with actors and those early films never lose sight of the human element amid the spectacle and mayhem."

Cameron grew up near Niagara Falls. He was the eldest of five children and his old school friend, Chuck Cartmell, remembers the young Jim as constantly conducting chemical experiments. "He was always making things in the kitchen with baking soda. Then he would blow everything up."

When he was 17, the family moved to southern California and Cameron's formal education came to an effective full stop. He dropped out, drove a truck and then married a waitress, the first of his five wives, at the age of 23.

Around this time, he also met the two friends who were to support his first efforts behind a camera. William Wisher and Randall Frakes helped raise money to fund the fledgling director's first short film and the three men are still close.

Cameron then worked for B-movie king Roger Corman, a frequent stop for aspirants, and designed the space ships for his spoofy space outing, Battle Beyond the Stars. Then he hit the big time on his own with The Terminator in 1984.

Made for just US$6 million (NZ$8.3 million), the blockbuster went on to make $80 million and to give the world a monumental, monosyllabic superhero in the shape of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The sequel, Terminator 2, was the first film to cost $100 million, while Titanic was the first with a budget that pushed through the $200 million mark.

But once again, Cameron's backers got lucky. Both films made phenomenal amounts, with Titanic still holding the record for the biggest box office total at $1.8 billion. Its ocean liner-scale success left the director stranded at the top of his industry. He was, as he proclaimed when he won the Oscar in 1998, "the king of the world", but what would he do next?

By this point, Cameron had earned a reputation for upsetting studio accountants and stars in equal measure.

"Hiring you is like firing two good men," he once shouted at an employee; on another occasion he told a technician that watching him light the set was "like watching two monkeys f*** a football".

After the filming of Titanic, its co-star Kate Winslet told the Los Angeles Times that she had chipped her elbow and nearly drowned during filming. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the lead actress in The Abyss, reportedly ran from the set one day, crying out: "We are not animals." (It had apparently been suggested that the cast should urinate inside their wet suits to save time.) But Cameron's old friend, actor Bill Paxton, has also recalled moments of disarming self-knowledge from the director on set. After being seriously abused over the walkie-talkie while he was filming the action comedy True Lies, Paxton remembers hearing a crackle on the line being followed by the deadpan promise: "I'll switch to decaf."

Although Cameron is clearly a hard man to work with, Steven Spielberg has him pegged as a secret softie. "He is a very emotional storyteller," he has said. Cameron, too, acknowledges his own strong romantic impulse. He describes Avatar as a vain attempt to get away from his inner "chick". "I try to do my testosterone movie and it's a chick flick. That's how it is for me."

Five wives down the line, there is certainly evidence of a romantic inclination off-screen too. His last ex was Linda Hamilton, the star of the first two Terminator films. The wife before that was film director Kathryn Bigelow, acclaimed this year for her Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker. Before that came film producer Gale Anne Hurd who worked with Cameron on his first three films.

Nowadays, the director lives in defended seclusion in a Malibu gated community with his fifth wife, Suzy Amis, who runs a school. He still sees himself as a "regular guy", though, and scorns Hollywood hierarchy.

"Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established film-maker. It is a blue-collar sensibility," he said recently.

Entranced by the idea of the deep sea since his childhood love of the films of the underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, Cameron is an accomplished diver and mounted a submarine expedition to the wreck of the Titanic in 2002. What clearly motivates him is the idea of going further than others. "I've seen people looking at Avatar shots, being convinced they are somehow looking at actors in makeup," he enthused during the making of the new film.

Yet early reaction to Avatar suggests any visual restraint the director has shown, in order to let his characters emerge through the action, may have backfired. The obsessive "fanboys" who have been waiting for the film for a decade have been holding out for nothing short of cinematic "eyeball rape".

If some are disappointed, it will be sad for Cameron, who enjoys the struggle because of the reaction he can provoke.

Free diving, without an oxygen tank, he has spoken of the joy of passing amazed scuba divers as he heads for the deep below them. "I like just to see the look on their faces," he has confessed.

Creating shock and awe in strangers is clearly the crucial, rare element, the "unobtanium", for which Cameron is constantly searching.

LOWDOWN

Who: James Cameron, director

Born: August 16 1954, Ontario, Canada

Key films: Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981), Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True Lies (1994), Titanic (1997), Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), Aliens of the Deep (2005)

Latest: Avatar opens at cinemas on December 17

- OBSERVER