Dino V. Chopper

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There's a loooong article on and interview with James Cameron over at The New Yorker (via Sean) that goes through pretty much his entire career and is very much worth reading if you're at all interested in the king of the world. It's to the brim with good stuff. I liked this bit from the set of Avatar while a big-deal action scene's being shot:

"Cameron looked around excitedly as the machine guns started to rattle and shells popped off in every direction. He snapped his fingers nervously. The acrid smell of gun smoke filled the air. Pointing to his left forearm, he said, “I have a piece of shrapnel right here from ‘Terminator 2’ that never came out.” Tiny, tight smile. “We made up the three barrel guns,” he said. “The two waist guns are .30-calibre machine guns modified for the movie. It’s an older model, a Vietnam-era M60. The idea is that Pandora has such a hot, humid climate, with incredibly powerful magnetic fields, that they can’t use sophisticated energy weapons. A lot of the equipment is retrofitted, from their perspective, because it works on Pandora. So you’ve got vehicles that are more consistent with twentieth-century warfare.” His face was flushed and happy. “It’s all just an excuse to do helicopters versus pterodactyls,” he said."

It all really does just come down to helicopters versus pterodactyls in the end, and bless the man for knowing that.
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