Why The Aliens Crew Made James Cameron's Life Hell While Shooting The Acclaimed Sequel
To have an inkling that the movies of director James Cameron are difficult to make, one only needs to watch them. After all, it's still astonishing that the filmmaker was able to bring to life a liquid metal man in "Terminator 2," to re-enact the sinking of the Titanic with stunning accuracy in "Titanic," and to create an entire alien world from scratch in the "Avatar" series. Compared to these feats, it would seem that his 1986 sequel "Aliens" might've been a walk in the park, relatively. It's the sort of film that someone like Cameron, who graduated from the unofficial school of Roger Corman's genre-focused studio, New World Pictures, was destined to make after working on pictures like "Battle Beyond the Stars" and "Galaxy of Terror." By all accounts, "Aliens" had as trying a production as "The Abyss" or "Titanic," only it wasn't the elements or logistics that made shooting a burden. Instead, it was the extremely tenuous relationship between Cameron, producer Gale Anne Hurd, and the mostly English crew. Although the play-by-play of the issues between Cameron, his then-wife Hurd, and the crew have been litigated over the years in various interviews, books, DVD special features and the like, a recent appearance by star Sigourney Weaver on a panel at New York Comic Con celebrating the film's upcoming 40th anniversary shed a little more light on the matter, at least from her perspective. According to Weaver, a major bone of contention that the crew had against the then-unknown Cameron was that he was making a sequel to a Ridley Scott film (1979's "Alien," naturally) and Scott was not involved (something which also upset the actual man, as well). This made the crew trepidatious toward Cameron, and thus, they made his life hell while shooting an already complex sequel.