The Filminator

James Cameron’s massive ego is probably what it takes to pull off a Terminator 2/3, Titanic, or Avatar – his latest, a creative, massively expensive 3D CGI experiment that could be a nuclear boxoffice bomb (what they said about Titanic, though). Cameron has succeeded over and over because he sinks his teeth into a project and won’t let go, regardless the level of difficulty. As he started work on The Abyss (my particular Cameron favorite), he told Fox president Leonard Goldberg “I want you to know one thing—once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you’ll be able to stop me is to kill me.” Read Dana Goodyear’s great New Yorker profile of Cameron, “Man of Extremes.”