The day James Cameron was asked to deal coke on set

“But I didn’t do drugs! For me, coffee was more than enough!”

Before TitanicBefore Avatarbefore records, Oscars and budgets that look like GDPs… James Cameron knew another school: that of broke B series.

The director’s first big job in Hollywood was that of production designer on Roger Corman’s science fiction film, The Space Mercenaries (Battle Beyond the Stars in original version) released in 1980. Guest this week on the show In Depth with Graham Bensingerthe filmmaker explains that he was promoted after the dismissal of the previous production designer. “He couldn’t design and build the sets in time.” remembers James Cameron. The schedule was hellish, it was like laying tracks in front of a speeding train. They saw that I was someone who wasn’t afraid to stay up late, that I had a good artistic sense and that I knew how to draw. They had no idea I had management skills.”

James Cameron took office two weeks before filming began. “No set was designed or constructed.”he says. “I was like, OK, I’m jumping in the fire. Okay, I’m doing it.” And obviously, we offer it to him at 4 a.m….

Except that the chaos, on the first day, takes a very concrete form: a production manager welcomes him and spreads out the entire filming survival kit on the table.

“He says to me: ‘OK, here’s your cash receipt… here’s this, here’s that… here’s the night shift list… here’s the day shift… OK, here’s your Black Beauties. Here’s your coke…’

Amphetamines, cocaine, placed quietly next to the service sheets, like usual equipment to keep up the pace of a production.

James Cameron doesn’t even understand what he’s supposed to do with this:

“I’m like, ‘Wait… what do I do with this thing?’ I didn’t do drugs. For me, coffee was more than enough.”

Except that the manager reassures him: it’s not for him. It’s for…the team.

“He said to me: ‘Well you have to distribute it to the team.’”

The future filmmaker realizes the total absurdity of his new promotion: “So I just became a drug dealer, I think?”

A completely hallucinated micro-budget logic, where the fuel on the plateau is not called “bonus” or “overtime”, but “white powder”.

“In that world, that’s how it worked“, he summarizes. “Basically: you’ll work for coke! It was nonsense.”

Obviously, if James Cameron says this, it is because he refused to play the drug dealer. He passed the mission on to a subordinate:

“I gave everything to my assistant artistic director. I told him: ‘You manage this!’ And the assistant knew very well what to do. He said to me: ‘I know how it works. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.'”

And obviously, it was better not to miss out on the distribution of coke:

“He distributed in a fairly fair and balanced way… And apparently, in this business, you are judged as an artistic director by how fairly you distribute the drugs…”

A Hollywood of the 1980s that the Canadian hardly liked. He admits today: “I didn’t want to play that game. It wasn’t my thing.”