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They needle each other constantly, using, as they do in the film, humor to relieve the pressures of a life that revolves obsessively around their work. Their professional style is based on the belief that the producer-director team that works harder than anyone else and knows in detail every aspect of the production is bound to command respect. Cameron can be demanding on the set. Recalls Reiser: "Working with him wasn't like a frolic." Says Henriksen, who has completed three locations with Cameron: "He is the bride in every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." Most of the couple's decisions are mutual, except when he is staging a scene or working with his designers (she acknowledges that his visual sense is stronger than hers), or when she is working through the details of the business side of a movie (where he knows he would be more indulgent).
But something more delicate and interesting than their style of conducting their joint careers may be emerging from the Cameron-Hurd collaboration. It is something that, if their success achieves exemplary status, could influence the immediate future of the movies. It is the restoration of something like an adult sensibility to the action movie, a belief, shared by such classicists of the genre as John Ford and Howard Hawks, that besides telling a rattling good yarn at a nerve-busting pace, pictures of this kind can carry a theme, even -- shocking word these days -- a moral.
This sensibility begins, perhaps, with Cameron's willingness to let his wife "delete" what she calls his "truck driver" language and their desire to make their action films "intense, uncompromising, but with the amount of gore restrained and deaths inferred offstage -- even those of people you'd like to see torn limb from limb," as he puts it. It proceeds through the fact that in both The Terminator and Aliens, evil is symbolized by nonhuman characters; it continues with the demonstration, in both pictures, that "it's more interesting to see a normal person in abnormal circumstances than a highly trained person like Superman or James Bond." People who try to act like superheroes in Aliens all end up dead because, finally, "the movie is about finding personal resources: will, courage, whatever." Or, as Weaver puts it, "I like to think the real message is love."
Sounds odd, doesn't it? But that is only because the movies have lately forgotten a fact that never used to escape them, which is that love can turn up in the strangest places. And is never more welcome, as a sign of human grace, than when the pressure of deadly events is at its height.