This is a list of the movies that made we want to work in this business and the sets I wished I had worked on. Now at last we come to a film I actually DID work on. Obviously, this means I can’t go into specific detail, but there’s still information I can share. When I worked on the film it was still very early into the production. Cameron had found his Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), but the studio wanted him to screen test someone else to see if they could change his mind with someone more bankable. That’s how I got to meet a future MCU star, who was nice and visibly a little nervous.
I watched Cameron work on two different sets. The main room was all green, like greenscreen but it was on the floor, and the ground had various elevations. The cameras were mounted in housings that looked like steering wheels, and in front of the set was a large television. The image was blurry because you needed 3D glasses to really see how it all looked with the computer work roughly sketched in. Surrounding the stage were technicians at computers able to move the topography of Pandora around at Jim’s command. The trees and plants all had numbers and by now Cameron could say “let’s move 239 back about 12 feet and put XG16 on the right foreground” and they knew exactly what that meant.
On sets, James Cameron has a reputation for having a temper, and I wondered if I would witness it at any point or if the years since Titanic had mellowed him out. It was on the 2nd set that I saw something quite different from the legend. The other set was more familiar to me. It was a lab built by construction with all the set dressing and lit by Mauro Fiore and his crew. They were filming a dialogue scene on Dolly Track, and Cameron didn’t like the speed of the Dolly Grip. He said ‘Cut” mid-take and his head snapped to the Grip. In a calm voice he explained how slow he wanted the Dolly to move ending with, “we’re going to get this right. Let’s go again.” I saw that Cameron was an exacting perfectionist, and he was demanding but not mean. He had surrounded his project with the best crew, and he was not going to move on until he got their best work.
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