Scattered below are a few quotes from and facts about James Cameron, as quoted in Dana Goodyear’s profile of the director in the current New Yorker. (“For pleasure, he designs submersibles.”) Interspersed with them are recent tweets from the Twitter account maintained by fake Michael Bay. Can you tell which are the Real Jim Cameron, and which are the Fake Michael Bay? Answers after the jump.
1. “I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt. It saves so much time.”
2. “If you guys have an actual pissing contest, please page me.”
3. “Tell your friend he’s getting fucked in the ass, and if he would stop squirming it wouldn’t hurt so much.”
4. “In my life, every week is shark week.”
5. “I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time.”
6. “We have a big fire problem here. We take the pool water, mix it with Class A foam, and pump it out over the whole property. Everybody else just runs for the hills. ‘Oh, my God!’ We sit and wait. Put on our yellow coats and our breathing gear and wait. And, you know what? It’s impressive. When these hills light up with a hundred-foot-tall wall of flames coming over the top of the hill there, you feel like it’s Armageddon.”
7. “You call that a wildfire?”
8. “This film integrates my life’s achievements. It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.”
9. “The bottom line is that I make better sandwiches than all of you.”
10. “Make me eighteen feet tall.”
11. “Look at the gill-like membrane on the side of the mouth, its transmission of light, all the secondary color saturation on the tongue, and that maxilla bone. I love what you did with the translucence on the teeth, and the way the quadrate bone racks the teeth forward. It’s a sharky thing. As wacky as this creature is, it looks completely real. Maybe I’m getting high on my own supply… The banshee lives! He’s a fierce-looking sonuvabitch.”
12. “Mars is one of your better planets… We should ultimately have colonies on Mars… We’ve become cowards, basically. As a society, we’re just fat and happy and comfortable and we’ve lost the edge.”
Answer key: 2, 4, 7 and 9 are Fake Michael Bay; the rest are Real James Cameron. Also, Strange Days, a movie about a riot-torn Los Angeles as experienced through hyperimmersive virtual reality, is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron Wife Number Three (of Five); Avatar, about a war-torn planet experienced as hyperimmersive virtual reality, is directed by James Cameron.
I prefer both the fake AND the real Michael Bay to James Cameron.