While promoting his latest film, Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron has been dutifully making the media rounds as part of the publicity machine, and in the process of hyping up audiences' return to Pandora for further adventures with Jake Sully and Neytiri, he has confirmed a long-running rumor relating to his original pitch for his 1986 film, Aliens.
Cameron had recently come off The Terminator, released in 1983 with a wave of buzz and critical success, and as such, found himself in the room with executives from 20th Century Fox, faced with the idea of pitching a story idea for a sequel to Ridley Scott's silent, thoughtful and legendary sci-fi horror, Alien. The story that made the rounds was that Cameron, bold and confident as ever, stood in front of the suits and wrote the word 'ALIEN' and then added an 'S' before drawing two lines down the letter 'S' to make a dollar symbol. His confidence is made even funnier by the revelation that he had been warned off of the project in the first place by another producer, who predicted he would either receive no credit for its success, or all of the blame should it fail.
As part of a feature by Empire, the film magazine sat Cameron with a list of questions from fellow A-listers, including the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Rian Johnson, Harrison Ford and Edgar Wright. It was Wright who brought forth the question of what was assumed to be an urban legend in Hollywood, asking if the story was true, to which Cameron responded:
I had lunch with a bigshot producer when I was about to start Aliens who said, “This is a no-win for you. If your movie’s good, Ridley will get the credit. If it’s bad, it’s all you. It’s a career ender.” I said, “Yeah, buuuuuut... I like it.” I was maybe a dumbass fanboy, but I could see it so clearly in my head that I just had to go make it. And yes, it’s true. I was in a meeting with the studio head and the executive producers, and I turned my script over and on the blank side of the last page I wrote ALIEN. Then I drew an S on the end. Then I drew two vertical lines through the S and held it up to show them. Maybe it was just Pavlovian conditioning when they saw the $ sign connected closely to the word ‘Alien’. Or maybe it was the confidence I projected. But they said yes.
Cameron's prediction for his film proved fruitful — it would go on to be regarded as one of the greatest sequels ever made (a feat he would repeat with Terminator 2: Judgment Day), and made almost 10x its budget back, with $18.5 million becoming $180 million worldwide. The special effects in the film still hold up now and Cameron continues working with his leading lady, Sigourney Weaver, to this day; Weaver appears in both Avatar and The Way of Water.
You can catch our interview with Cameron down below. The Way of Water is in theaters now.