It’s not just film fans who are stuck at home in lockdown right now, passing the time by revisiting familiar favourites and catching up on the movies they’ve missed out on – filmmakers are in exactly the same boat too. When Empire caught up with legendary director James Cameron for the new Celebration Of Cinema issue, he opened up about the movies that have been keeping him and his family going during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has temporarily halted shooting on his upcoming Avatar sequels.
As it turns out, the Terminator 2 and Aliens director has a soft-spot for a not-exactly-beloved video game adaptation, which he’s returned to while social-distancing. “One of my guilty-pleasure films that I actually think is quite beautifully made is Resident Evil,” he told Empire – highlighting the performance of one of his Avatar cast members. “Watching Michelle Rodriguez in that film, moving like this feral creature, is joyful.”
Elsewhere, Cameron has been providing cinematic education for his children. “I’m trying to organise these family movie nights – I’ve got my kids at home and their taste is so different than mine,” he says. “But I try to expand their horizon a little bit. They got a hankering for a Western the other night and I said, ‘What about True Grit with John Wayne?’ They said, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘Alright, we’re watching True Grit.’ They absolutely loved it. My teenage girls are very horse-oriented, and now they know who John Wayne is.”
Read Empire’s full James Cameron story – with the filmmaker talking through four of his most iconic sequences from Aliens, Terminator 2, Titanic and Avatar – in the Celebration Of Cinema issue, on sale from Thursday 14 May. Find it on newsstands, order a copy online, or read the digital edition via the Empire Magazine app on iOS and Android.