James Cameron Worked His Career Around His Fear Of Water

Ever heard of James Cameron, director of 'Piranha 2'? Apparently something traumatic happened to him during its filming, because he's had a weird thing for water ever since.Show more

We all know and love the visionary that is James Cameron. He did give us The Abyss, The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, then The Avatar...his list of accomplishments seems to be unending. But one particular movie made the visionary feel slightly queasy of the broad mass of water that is the ocean. Cameron has spent most of his career battling this deep and highly conscious fear of water.

To those of you who might not be familiar with it, Piranha 2: The Spawning, it is Cameron’s first and little knows directorial debut. The first movie came out in 1978 and it was almost a Jaws movie, but with multiple of those and very small. The mutant piranhas were created by splicing genes from different species of the flesh-eating fish to create the ultimate killer organism. Or a military experiment to you and I.

We skip the Terminator, which takes places above water and go to 1989’s The Abyss. If you haven’t seen it (shame on you!), the movie takes place in a submarine that is, you guessed it, completely submerged in the deep blue sea. The team is in an ocean trench, where they are not supposed to be. This movie features the first product of CGI magic, a villain made out of sea water that turns out to not be a villain at all. That turns out to be so James Cameron, as the ocean has been his nemesis his entire life.

The Titanic had many of Cameron’s fears implemented in the story, like the oceanographer looking for The Heart of the Ocean, in a submarine, through the wreck of the Titanic that is underwater, after reaching its untimely end some 80 years prior.

Now that we have learned all of this, there is but only conclusion to be made - James Cameron’s career revolved around him overcoming his fear of the ocean. Pretty cool, huh?