James Cameron is revealing he got into a physical altercation with Harvey Weinstein on one of the biggest nights of the director's careers.
James Cameron is revealing he got into a physical altercation with Harvey Weinstein on one of the biggest nights of the director's careers.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Cameron recalls Titanic winning Best Picture at the 1998 Academy Awards, and says he almost came to blows with the now disgraced studio mogul.
"I remember almost getting in a fight with Harvey Weinstein and hitting him with my Oscar," Cameron says. "[In retrospect there are probably a lot of people] that would’ve preferred I had played through on that one. . . . It was happening on the main floor at the [theater] . . . And the music had started to play to get back in our seats. The people around us were saying, 'Not here! Not here!' Like it was OK to fight in the parking lot, you know, but it was not OK there when the music was playing, and they were about to go live."
Cameron says he was defending his friend, director Gullermo del Toro.
"It’s kind of a long story, but it has to do with Guillermo del Toro and how badly he was dealt with by Miramax on Mimic," he says, referencing del Toro's 1997 film. "Harvey came up glad-handing me, talking about how great they were for the artist, and I just read him chapter and verse about how great I thought he was for the artist based on my friend’s experience, and that led to an altercation."
Cameron, 63, was extremely candid in his Q&A with the magazine, also shutting down fans still griping with the end of Titanic 20 years later. The director still insists that Rose couldn't share the door with Jack in the ocean, and that only she could live.
"And the answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies. Very simple..." he explains bluntly.
"I was in the water with the piece of wood putting people on it for about two days getting it exactly buoyant enough so that it would support one person with full free-board, meaning that she wasn’t immersed at all in the 28 degree water so that she could survive the three hours it took until the rescue ship got there," he adds. "And we very, very finely tuned it to be exactly what you see in the movie because I believed at the time, and still do, that that’s what it would have taken for one person to survive."
ET spoke to Cameron in August, when he discussed the future of his beloved Terminator franchise.
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