One night in the mid 1970s a 20 year old James Cameron is sitting around a campfire with his wife and another couple, peaking on LSD, when bullets start to explode from within the fire.
It turns out to build the fire Cameron’s wife had used a bunch of trash from the back of the car, and one of the bags contained a box of 22-caliber shells that Jim had bought for a failed rabbit-hunting expedition.1
In the hallucinogenic daze of the trip it takes Cameron a few moments to figure out what is happening. “...I heard kind of a “Pew!” And in one of those sort of insightful, just instantaneous flashes, I knew what had happened... So I had to put the fire out.”
As the acid is hitting him “like a locomotive” he crawls in the moonlight down to the Colorado river with a bucket to get some water to put out the fire. “The ground is kind of undulating like, I seem to recall an image of it being like a bunch of snakes. Kind of snakes in mud, except it was solid ground.”
He makes it back with the bucket of water, crawling like a commando to avoid the bullets that are spraying out of the fire. Not thinking through the consequences of throwing a bucket of colder water onto a roaring bonfire from two feet away on acid, he describes the ensuing steam explosion as happening in “jump cuts” which “knocked him backward” due to the perceptual intensity. He falls back into the river, and lays there tripping while watching a “big, you know, volcano of steam” coming out of the fire, thankful that the crisis was averted.
It would be easy for me to imagine that, right there, laying in the river, looking up at a volcano of steam rising into the moonlit sky, with the adrenaline of a fire shooting bullets at him and his wife mixing with the acid in his blood, young impressionable, pre-frontal-cortex not yet formed Jim Cameron saw images that struck him so profoundly that they manifested almost 50 years later in Avatar: Fire and Ash. But that is the kind of wild speculation a “serious film critic” should probably avoid.
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