In the course of hyping up audiences’ return to Pandora for additional adventures with Jake Sully and Neytiri, James Cameron has dutifully been making the media rounds as part of the publicity machine to promote his most recent movie, Avatar: The Way of Water. In doing so, he has confirmed a long-running rumour relating to his original pitch for his 1986 movie, 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:
