(6 of 7)
All of this was beginning to take promising shape on paper in late 1983. But paper is not celluloid. And Cameron and Hurd needed a track record to support their developing vision. Luckily, it came in a rush. First, casting and finance finally came together for The Terminator script, which he directed and she produced. (It was during postproduction that their professional relationship turned into a romance that led to marriage ten months later.) In the meantime, he finished the script on which Sylvester Stallone did his usual devastating rewrite -- and turned into Rambo. The Terminator was a low-budget ($6.5 million) job, perhaps the most original movie of 1984 and a surprise critical and commercial hit. Rambo, of course, was Rambo, the movie phenomenon of the following year. ("I recognize parts of it," Cameron says manfully, but adds, "I was trying to create a semirealistic, haunted character, the quintessential Viet Nam returnee, not a political statement.")
The back-to-back suc- cesses made the pair a force to be reckoned with and probably led the studio to let them produce and direct Aliens. Certainly the film would not have been so effective without the experience they gained on The Terminator. Cameron developed his directorial manner in that film -- the low-angled camera, always moving with the action, never allowing the viewers to draw back into objectivity; the quick cutting that never lets them draw a deep breath. Says an admiring Scorsese: "What makes him interesting is his sense of surprise. Every scene builds on the last, then tops it."
A slight, soft-spoken woman, Hurd gained practice in the frugality and tough-mindedness that brought Aliens in on its relatively modest $18 million budget. She is capable of denying her husband the time or the equipment he needs for one of his on-set brainstorms. When he insisted on a laser scanner for the picture's first sequence, she made him pay for it himself. All her grit was needed to cope with ten months of Aliens production in unenlightened England. "The British view of female producers proved to be a big problem for Gale," says her husband. "They didn't know such a creature existed. She was like a unicorn . . ." "Except that they like unicorns," she cuts in.
It could perhaps be said that one of the themes of their film, "bonding under pressure," as Cameron puts it, is one of the themes of their lives, their love affair having developed out of their high-velocity work on The Terminator. And, in fact, they do not have much in common in their backgrounds. The daughter of a well-to-do private investor, she was raised mainly in Palm Springs, Calif. A confessed academic overachiever, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford. He was born in Canada, the son of an electrical engineer, and ended up in Brea, Calif., where he spent five semesters at local colleges, dropping out and eventually drifting into Corman's orbit. As adolescents, she was a reader, while he was a drawer, often of fantastic sci-fi visions. She liked "film," as he put it, while he was drawn to the "movies." And he has been heard to wonder if, in her Palm Springs days, she would have dated a boy from across the tracks, as he was. "There are no tracks in Palm Springs," she replies airily.