James Cameron, the director behind some of cinema’s biggest films like Terminator, Aliens and Titanic, regrets making a few of his movies so violent. In a new interview with Esquire Middle East, the Oscar winner explained how gun violence in America impacted creating the new Avatar sequel.
“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” Cameron revealed. “I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark.”
Cameron added, “You have to have conflict, of course. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”
The True Lies director noted that he doesn’t know if he’d make some if his iconic films the same way.
“I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30 plus years ago, in our current world,” Cameron shared. “What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”
The Canadian filmmaker resided in the U.S. for years. In 2012, he bought 2,500 acres of farmland in New Zealand where he now lives full time.
“I’m happy to be living in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago,” Cameron said referencing the 2019 mass shooting.
If Cameron does return to the Terminator franchise, as he hinted about earlier this month, the flick will likely look different than the Arnold Schwarzenegger era.
“If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try to launch that franchise again, which is in discussion, but nothing has been decided, I would make it much more about the AI side of it than bad robots gone crazy,” he teased on the Smartness podcast.
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