"We wanted to tell a fictional story within absolutely rigorous, historically accurate terms. If something is known to have taken place, we do not violate it. Likewise, there's nothing we show that could not have happened. Our fictitious characters are woven through the pylons of history in such a way they could have been there. All the accuracy and all the special visual effects are intended for one purpose; to put the viewer on Titanic. It's a very you-are-there kind of experience."

In making Titanic Cameron is doing what all epic artists do -- reinventing for a new age vital histories of the culture. "The tragedy of the Titanic has assumed an almost mythic quality in our collective imagination," he says. "But the passage of time has robbed it of its human face and vitality." In making a love story aboard the fated ship, Cameron has found a way to reconfigure the story. "I hope [protagonists] Rose and Jack's relationship will be a kind of emotional lightning rod, if you will, allowing viewers to invest their minds and hearts to make history come alive again."

James Cameron is his own man, rare as robot tears in a town (Hollywood) and an industry (the movies) where everyone owes everyone else. But thanks to writing and directing such monster hits as The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and True Lies, not to mention co-writing Rambo: First Blood Part IIB with Sylvester Stallone, and rewriting Point Break with director and former wife Kathryn Bigelow, Cameron is not only bankable, he is the bank! Yet Cameron sinks more than his capital into each film. He goes to the bottom of the sea.

Cameron (l.) with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis on the set of True Lies (click to view larger)

Cameron is also our kind of man -- someone who will do more, go further, face his obsessions with hunger and glee -- all to fathom the depths of his curiousity and imagination. To create some thing new and extreme. So it was more than time, we thought, to have a webside conversation with the resuscitator of the , father of the Terminator, begetter of the Abyss -- the mythmaker as time traveler -- as he introduces his latest paradigm-shifting filmic adventure.

I first met James Cameron at the LA press conference announcing the formation of Digital Domain, his visual effects and digital production studio. When asked if he planned to use IBM equipment, Cameron surprised his Big Blue partners by replying from the stage that he'd use the best there was, and if that happened to be IBM, so much the better. My next encounter was early '95, when preparing for the first of these many conversations, I was ensconced on the third floor of Cameron's Lightstorm Productions in Santa Monica, poring over the hours of production interviews, storyboards and extra film footage on the Special Edition laserdiscs of The Abyss and T2. Cameron blew into the office like a spring storm, gave his minions a good-natured tongue-lashing about how things looked messy as his old college dorm room, then blew right back downstairs to resume editing Strange Days, the movie he co-wrote, produced and edited with director Kathryn Bigelow.

The next time, Cameron was like a pharaoh presiding over the construction of a pyramid. He was preparing to go to Mexico to oversee the completion of a model of the Titanic. We spent the lion's share of our time together "20,000 leagues under the sea," talking about the Titanic. Herewith is a record of this series of conversations that in its length and breadth constitutes something of a portrait in progress of the artist/mythmaker/engineer/explorer as director.

-- Bill Moseley & the Omni Staff