James Cameron has made some of the biggest movies in Hollywood between The Terminator, Titanic and the Avatar trilogy, but everyone has to start somewhere. The filmmaker just shared a wild story about one of his early projects where he was apparently handed cocaine to give to the crew like it was no big deal.
In a recent conversation with Graham Bensinger, Cameron recalled one of his early jobs, working on 1980’s Battle Beyond The Stars. James Cameron was originally hired as a model maker for the science fiction flick, but when the original production designer was fired for not getting his work done in time, Cameron was promoted two weeks before filming was set to begin. The Terminator filmmaker recalled what the production managed told him on the first day of his new position:
He says, 'Okay, here's your petty cash voucher. You put your receipts in that. You take the cash, you put the receipts, you replace it, we square up every few days, blah, blah, blah.’ And here's this and here's that, and here's your swing shift crew list. Here's your day shift crew list. Okay, here's your black beauties. Here's your coke.' And he's just putting all this stuff out on the table. I'm like, 'Wait a minute, what do I do with this stuff?' I mean, I didn't take drugs. You know, for me, coffee was plenty.
Cameron said he’d never even been a production designer at that point, but they saw that he didn’t mind staying up all night working on the project and took a chance on him. But what’s up with cocaine being involved? As he continued:
He said, 'Well, you got to give it out to the crew.’ I'm like, so I just became a dealer, I guess? You know, but that was just how things were done in that super low-budget world. You know, 'will work for coke,' basically. And that was pretty nuts. So, I just gave it all to my assistant art director. I said, 'You deal with that.’ He said, 'Well, I know what to do. It's fine. I'll handle it.'
Cameron gave away his coke to someone else he worked with to “deal it” to the other crew members because he didn’t want to deal or take it himself. In his words:
He actually distributed fairly and equitably. And apparently, in that world, you are judged as a production designer or an art director by how fairly you distributed the drugs. I mean, I didn't want to play that game. It wasn't my thing.
Wow, that definitely shows a different side of the movie production world we don’t often hear about. Sure, cocaine could certainly in theory increase alertness and energy on set for those taking it, but it’s also a very illegal and dangerous narcotic that is both highly addictive and can cause all sorts of health complications with both short-term and long-term use.
James Cameron has plenty of other crazy stories about being a filmmaker (like the time he saved a rat with CPR while making The Abyss), but when he was fairly new to the industry back in 1980, he must have been pretty shocked over the whole thing. Just two years later, he graduated to starting running his own set with his feature directorial debut on Piranha II: The Spawning before making the likes of The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss in the same decade.
In recent years, Cameron’s primary projects have been in the world of Pandora for Avatar, where he’s grown very fond of spending a lot of production in New Zealand. His most recent movie, Avatar: Fire And Ash has been a success despite some criticisms about the story.
Avatar: Fire and Ash has made $1.38 billion dollars globally, which is obviously a success, but Cameron has said before that it cost “one metric fuckton of money” and will have to make “two metric fucktons of money” for him to move on to his plans for Avatar 4 and 5. The movie is playing in theaters now.
