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Yet all this splendid craftsmanship, popular moviemaking at its best, is in the service of building rooting interest in the story of a woman who keeps finding ways to transcend the limits that unexamined custom often imposes on her sex. In action pictures, women are supposed to swoon or retreat to a safe corner (or, at best, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition) while the male lead protects them and defends Western civilization as we know it. In Aliens, it is the guys who are all out of action at the climax and Ripley who is in a death duel with evil. As Director Cameron says, the endless "remulching" of ( the masculine hero by the "male-dominated industry" is, if nothing else, commercially shortsighted. "They choose to ignore that 50% of the audience is female. And I've been told that it has been proved demographically that 80% of the time, it's women who decide which film to see."
Credit for this accomplishment belongs primarily to just two people, Cameron, who will turn 32 in August, and his wife Gale Anne Hurd, a year younger, who produced the picture and had an editorial say in the script ("Jim does most of the writing; I do most of the deleting"). It was their passion for the project, very much the result of adolescent years spent watching movies and reading science fiction, that rescued Aliens from being one of those tempting ideas that Hollywood loves to lunch over and hates to launch.
In fact, Cameron and the idea, then known as Alien II, met when both were more or less unloved orphans in the industry. The 1979 Alien had turned a good profit for 20th Century-Fox, but not enough to create a compelling desire among the studio's management for a sequel. In any event, various alien life- forms kept coming and going in the executive suite. Some loved the "concept" while others deplored it, citing declining grosses for horror films.
Enter Cameron, a college dropout but a graduate of Roger Corman's famous schlock shop, where directors as divergent as Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese had done their early professional work. There he also met his future wife, who was Corman's executive assistant. Cameron left in 1982 to direct his first feature, Piranha II. By 1983 Cameron and Hurd had written an original script called The Terminator, and Alien's proprietors were impressed with it. They called Cameron in to discuss another project, about which they could not reach agreement. Before he left, however, Producer David Giler threw out the possibility of working on a new Alien. "I felt like he was digging out an old bone in the backyard," Cameron recalls, "dragging out something no one had been thinking much about."
Nobody but Cameron, that is. He thought Alien was the best science-fiction horror film ever made, "a high-water mark in the genre . . . There was a total philosophy in that film -- the way the actors were cast, the costumes, the way the sets looked functional and used and a bit grungy, the sounds of clinking chains, dripping water . . . People really believed while they were watching it that it was a true experience."