February 20, 2005
By Marie Moore
Sure, James Cameron is best known for his billion-dollar money maker
Titanic. And yes, Titanic went on to win 11 Academy
Awards. Lest we not forget his other blockbusters Aliens and
Terminator. But, my favorite James Cameron film is the 1988 sci
fi gem The Abyss, which “many in the film industry still
consider to be the toughest shoot in history.”
Needless to say, Cameron was no stranger to the deep when he tackled the
Titanic. In 1995, he made 12 dives to the Titanic wreck to gather shots
for his feature film. In recent years, Cameron’s desire to bring
profound experiences of deep-ocean exploration to audiences around the
world motivated him to turn to documentary filmmaking and the development
of a 3-D Reality Camera System, which he co developed with Pace Technologies
and Sony. Cameron worked with his brother Mike to design and build underwater
housings that enable the cameras to be taken to depths of up to 20,000
feet and two ROVs with the capability to explore anywhere inside deep
shipwrecks. The expedition was the subject of his 3-D IMAX movie, Ghosts
of the Abyss.
In 2002, Cameron guided his robotic cameras inside the wreck of the battleship
“Bismarck,” which resulted in groundbreaking discoveries about
the sinking of the legendary German battleship and the Discovery Channel
documentary, James Cameron’s Expedition: Bismarck. Cameron
has made a total 49 dives in the MIR submersibles and currently co-owns
the two Deep Rover submersibles.
For Cameron’s latest documentary, Aliens of the Deep,
currently at IMAXs across the country, he co-directed topside scenes and
directed underwater scenes, as well as operated the deep-ocean camera
system. His Earthship Productions documentary company is planning future
ocean expeditions to be interspersed with feature films, which he will
produce and direct under his Lightstorm Entertainment banner. He serves
on the NASA Advisory Council and is involved in space policy and exploration,
as well as ocean exploration and conservation. I asked Cameron what was
his fascination with the deep and he turned the tables, asking me, “Did
you see the film?” My answer was, “Yes.” “Was
it fascinating?” Again I say, “Yes” and he says, “That’s
your answer.”
Curious as to what drives him to do these documentaries, “Well,
it’s not the money,” he laughs heartily. “If we do our
job really, really well,” he continues, “we don’t lose
money. That’s the best I can say for it from that perspective.
“It’s a deep personal satisfaction that I’m getting
to see things that are wondrous. That I’m getting to bear witness
to some of the most amazing places in the world that very, very few people
have the opportunity to see and that. As a filmmaker I get to bring that
back and share it with millions of people. I think that’s cool.
I don’t think it takes the place of making fiction entertainment,
which I will continue to do, but I enjoy this.
“I like the challenge of it too. I lost 15 pounds on this expedition
just from you know, no sleep, working in the hot sun, doing deck riggings—things
were always breaking, and it’s not like you have a big crew. You
don’t get to sit in your motor home sipping cappuccino while somebody
else it out there doing the work. Everybody is part of the team and there’s
the satisfaction in that sort of team energy that you don’t get
working on a big Hollywood movie, where you’ve got a crew of 100
and you don’t even know their names half the time. This is a small
tight family, literally and figuratively.”
Nevertheless it is a big Hollywood film Cameron is current churning out.
“We're taking the 3D technology that we've been developing for the
documentaries and I'm now gonna come full circle and apply it back to
a Hollywood type movie which we'll shoot in 3D. It’s called Battle
Angel and it’s a science fiction film. So, you know, it's all
part of a master plan.”
Joining Cameron on his expedition is Dijanna Figueroa, a PhD candidate
in Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She
appears in the IMAX 3-D documentary, Aliens of the Deep.
Figueroa explored harsh undersea environments as part of her research
to understand life and its relationship to the environment. These dives
occurred months before the tsunami. Although Figueroa says they went down
“3,600 meters—over 4,000 pounds per square inch of pressure
pushing on us,” fear of the known dangers and perils of the unknown
didn’t put a damper on her excitement. “On every dive, I saw
something I’ve never seen before,” she exclaimed.
Among a crew of about 100, Figueroa gushes, “I guess I’m
the only scientist in this expedition that has dove to the bottom before
the expedition. The first time I went to the bottom of the ocean I was
so excited to have the opportunity to go somewhere where nobody else has
really gotten to go. But I feel a responsibility because I have a job
to do. I’m not down there as a tourist. I’m down there as
a scientist and I have to bring back information for everybody.”
What fascinated me most in the documentary was the huge underwater chimney
like volcanoes spewing black smoke. Figueroa concurred: “I mean
I have never been to a site like that. I only studied in the pacific so
I hadn’t seen these huge amounts of black smoke everywhere and the
biology living so close to the heated fluid. So that kind of took me aback.
I didn’t know how to respond right way. I went out of science mode
momentarily and then I had to come back to it; but that was a spectacular
sight.”
Curious as to how the daughter of an art therapist and minister found
herself studying marine biology, she says: “When I was a child,
I grew up in Long Beach, California. I live on the beach side somewhat
[she giggles] and I had neighbors that had a beach house in New Port and
I would go with them to the ocean all the time. I was just always interested
in the ocean. I was this little kid always picking up stuff on the beach,
you know. “I didn’t know how to swim but I wanted to just
jump into the ocean. It’s always been with me the sense of wonder
about the ocean and as I got older and in high school I took a marine
biology class. I had an amazing teacher. He really got me excited and
he’s the one that said, ‘Well, you could be a marine biologist
if you want to.’ I was like, ‘Marine biologist, they don’t
make any money. How am I gonna pay rent?’ He’s like, ‘You
can do whatever you want. Don’t worry about the money. It will work
out.’ Also my parents were very supportive.”
Things have worked out for Figueroa in ways she least expected. Not only
did her rent get paid, but she got to work with James Cameron. She did
not know, however, her path would cross with Cameron when she agreed to
do the project: “This was a big surprise. I mean I knew we were
going to do an expedition and that a film crew was going to be onboard.
I didn’t know James was involved or it was a James Cameron production.”
And she also wasn’t aware of the fact she would one of the stars
of the documentary. “Yeah, I guess that’s how it worked out
in the editing,” she laughed. “I mean I had no idea. It’s
film magic.” Working in a serious discipline and appearing with
a renowned movie mogul in a film could spell trouble with colleagues.
“I did worry about that initially before the film came out,”
Figueroa admitted, “because I am a scientist in training. I don’t
have my PhD yet and I was featured in the film. My advisor was onboard
with me he’s been doing this for 25 years.
“The science community did have a screening of the film was and
it was well received so that kind of ebbed my fears there. I think everybody
realizes we do hard science and somebody has to tell the public what we’re
doing because you guys are funding us, believe it or not.” But would
she do it again if the opportunity arose? “I would love to have
another opportunity to do stuff similar to what I did with James,”
Figueroa enthused. “It was an amazing experience and as a PhD student,
I’m going to write a thesis. I’m going to publish papers in
scientific journals that may be circulated to 4,000 to 5,000 subscriptions.
But as a scientist, the opportunity to educate people in a film, that
reaches so many more people on a general level that I think I’ll
have a greater impact that way than if I discovered a new protein and
an animal that nobody ever heard of. So I definitely wanna continue to
do stuff like that.”
Cameron, who picked the crew, explained, “We were looking for good
scientists as well as good communicators. Good scientists are not always
good communicators. That shouldn't surprise anybody…Some of them
were still students; you know Dijanna is a PhD student. “We also
wanted scientists that were still fresh because the audience needed to
see the film through their eyes. But they had to be knowledgeable enough
so that they could speak with authority because the audience also needed
to respect them. Dijanna became the person who spoke for all the biology
even though her part of it was a more specialized field.”
There were scientists from the astrobiology community that took part in
the “Aliens of the Deep” expedition. According to the NASA
Astrobiology Institute, “astrobiologists seek to answer several
important questions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.”
If the opportunity arose where Figueroa could study marine biology on
another planet, would she suit up? “Oh, most definitely!”
was her exuberant response.
Marie Moore can be reached at thefilmstrip@hotmail.com.
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