With Avatar set fo
r releases this Thursday, we take a look back on what has made James Cameron the movie director he is today and what films have seen him become one of the best in the business.
James was born in 1954, one of five children, in Kapuskasing, a small, mostly French-speaking town in Ontario, Canada, where his father worked at the local paper mill and his mother an artists/nurse.
His love for films was brought to a head when he was just 14, he went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece,.
James then became fascinated by the kind of hyper-realistic visual effects the film pioneered.
From there on he went on to study physics and English at California State University, Fullerton but later went on to drop out.
After many jobs it was working as a truck driving and writing when he had times, that he saw the original Star Wars film in 1977, Cameron quit his job to enter the film industry.
He later went home to try and recreate the movie and its wasn’t until he dreamt about a robot crawling towards a women that his big break came: The Terminator
Wrote and directed by himself in 1984, The Terminator saw the rise James Cameron and made him a household name.
The Terminator is seen as an unstoppable cyborg assassin who has been sent back from the year 2029 by a artificially intelligent computer-controlled machine bent on the extermination of the human race.
His mission was to kill Sarah Connor whose future son, John Connor leads a resistance against the machines.
The film went on to spring Arnold Schwarzenegger into the lime light and the low-budget movie, at roughly $6.5 million, turned out to be a box-office hit.
Earning $38,371,200 domestically, then went on to gross more than $78 million worldwide.
Then came along Aliens in 1986 which Jim directed and wrote, the film was universally acclaimed going on to win 2 Oscars for Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing and Best Effects, Visual Effects.
Aliens was a sequel to the 1979 film Alien and is set fifty-seven years after the first film. The film was regarded as a benchmark for the action and science fiction genres.
This time the budget was raised to approximately $18 million and grossed $86 million in the United States box office during its 1986 theatrical release.
From there on James did a u-turn and went back to the Terminator franchises. Making it the only film in which he has directing and writing a sequel.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day was at the time made with a record breaking budget of $100 million.
The film is set eleven years after the events of The Terminator, follows Sarah Connor, and her 10-year-old son John, accompanied by a reprogrammed Terminator from the future.
They have to defend themselves from a T-1000 and attempt to prevent Judgment Day, a future event in which machines will begin to exterminate 
humanity.
The film made history for being first film to use a natural human motion for a CG character and the first partially computer-generated main character.
This again was a box office smash earning $204.8 million alone in the United States and became the highest grossing films of 1991.
It seems like people couldn’t get enough of James and everything he touched seemed to be two things. One: a big budget move and two: a box office hit.
After all the hype around what he would do next Cameron decided he would direct a love story and take a break from the sci-fi. This little love story then went on to be set on Titanic.
It seems that Cameron struggles to do things low key and was made on a staggering $200 million budget.
The film was said to be a learning curve for Avatar and most of the effects were tried and test on Titanic for a test run.
Leonardo DiCaprio played Jack Dawson and Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater fell in love on the Titanic but where from to different social classes making it hard to be together.
The film went on to generate $1.1 billion worldwide at the box office revenue and became the highest-grossing movie of all time.
Winning 11 Oscars, including best picture and best director, for Cameron. It gave Cameron the achievement that he could now go on and make any film he wanted to, with any budget as studios would supply him with the money.
Cameron then disappeared, and has only just surfaced after putting 14 years in the making of Avatar which is set to change cinema.
Looking back through his history the majority of films he has taken on he has brought something new to the world of film.
Without him we have to question and no doubt think that films would not be the same.
Jim is a natural at film making, his determination, workload and his constant demands for perfection in all his films, makes him one of the most famous, talented writers and directors in the business.
Female First Natalie Broxton
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