James Cameron spent a night critiquing Kubrick’s movies with him
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James Cameron may be the most successful film director of all-time, but even he must bow at the altar of Stanley Kubrick.
When it comes to financial success, there’s never been a filmmaker like Cameron, whose films, over the course of his career, have grossed over $10billion at the global box office, and the only director to have a higher overall total is Steven Spielberg, but it’s important to note the difference within their output. Spielberg has directed 33 films that were theatrically released (34 if The Twilight Zone: The Movie is included), whereas Cameron has only ten, so clearly, he is someone who consistently delivers what audiences want.
Although the films that make the most money aren’t always the most well-received, Cameron has been hailed as both a brilliant storyteller and someone who cares about the future of the theatrical model.
Despite having earned a reputation for being somewhat difficult to work with in his younger days, Cameron is responsible for revolutionising blockbuster cinema and inspiring people to go out to theatres during an era of streaming.
His legacy might be intact, but there’s no other director in Hollywood history as beloved as Stanley Kubrick, and while any discussion about who the greatest filmmaker of all time is might include names like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Akira Kurosawa, Kubrick has the distinction of making a masterpiece in nearly every genre.
Cameron and Kubrick were never involved in any projects together, as their careers weren’t actively going at the same time, with the former only releasing two films, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, made once Cameron had started directing, but the latter said that he had befriended the legendary director and even got to spend an evening analysing Full Metal Jacket with him, going frame-by-frame.
Cameron isn’t often seen as humble, but it’s hard to not be blown away by the enormity of what Kubrick did to change the industry. Although the former’s work has frequently been praised for his brilliant use of special effects, many of the most groundbreaking visuals in cinematic history originated from what Kubrick did to create the outer space sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He certainly had experience making the type of epics that Cameron would be best known for, as Spartacus and Barry Lyndon were regarded as some of the most ambiguous films ever made.
Full Metal Jacket is unique because it was a film that lined up thematically with some of the work that Cameron had done. Although there had been many films about the Vietnam War by 1987, Full Metal Jacket was a haunting examination of the brutality involved in the training process, and the extreme effects that the American invasion had on the Vietnamese people, and was released only a year after Cameron’s Aliens, which can be interpreted as a metaphor for the Vietnam War.
The psychological terror, dark humour, and action in Full Metal Jacket were certainly major influences on Cameron, suggesting that Kubrick’s one-on-one session had a tremendous impact on his career, wherein he would adopt much of the anti-military rhetoric from Kubrick into his work on the Avatar trilogy, so in many ways, this meeting felt like a passing of the torch moment from one genius filmmaker to the best of the next generation.
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