The Germinator

"Neither film was especially gory, but they are intense and that's exactly what doing my craft successfully is all about!"

"Alien is a classic, a milestone in horror/science-fiction. Ridley's personal vision of claustrophobia and terror influenced films from Das Boot on."

"In T-1, T-2 and The Abyss, I've tried to make people think about the unthinkable - Nuclear War. We have to. If we don't, we're screwed."

[Regarding the nuclear nightmare scene in T2] "That scene was the reason I made the film," Cameron says, ironically, "but when Carolco read the script, their first reaction was that it was extraneous!" His obsession with nuclear dreams dates back to his childhood. "When I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old," he says, "I got a book on warfare... and the image of the Atomic bomb has stayed with me all these years, especially in my dreams."

”The Abyss is, in some ways, a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still in the sense that there are higher powers at work that we know nothing about, coexisting with us in the universe. Both films are essentially about non-violence but where Day had one death and resurrection, The Abyss has two."

"I was contractually obligated to deliver a completed print in time for a major summer release," Cameron says. "The only way to do that was to [compromise] my original ending and I've always planned to finish the film the way it was intended to be seen. I don't care if anyone else is interested or not. Ideally, I'd love to strike a couple of 35mm prints and get some interesting critical discussions going. Hopefully, that will help; although a lot of people may say it was better the way it was. The original ending, where the N.T.I.'s use their water-controlling abilities to remind us of our place had an eloquence and an emotional power that the released film didn't quite match. To get The Abyss down to a reasonable running time, I was forced to take out 20 to 25 minutes. The conventional studio wisdom would have been to take out some of the character development and leave in all the action stuff. Now this was before Costner had a 17 million dollar negative and he could afford to fool around and include things that the studio would normally insist be removed just to keep a reasonable running time. But when you've got a 45 million dollar negative, you've got to make very careful decisions about how much action to include when you're really making a film about ideas and people."

Referring to the upcoming widescreen laser release of The Abyss and its new-old ending, Cameron says, "The really great thing about this kind of revision is that, after a film is completed, there's still a refinement process. So it's not as if you can take whole segments that were deleted and just drop them back into the movie and expect them to blend seamlessly. When you have time constraints, you go back and look at places where you made a trim and maybe part of compressing a scene was going for a shorter take or a take that allows you to make a transition more easily. And you start to ask yourself where you draw the line... but basically, this is the film that I would have put out then if I hadn't had to make it shorter."

"Mary Elizabeth's drowning scene is probably the scene I'm proudest of in my career, It's so powerful, in fact, that the movie peaked early for most people. Nothing that followed in the theatrical version - the special effects, the action, the suspense – could measure up to that level of drama and power. Hopefully, the new ending will help to balance out the film with the kind of emotional payoff I was going for originally."

During the production of The Abyss, he had said, "in a way, it's kind of the bright side of what we did in Aliens... where you go on a dark journey (that) gets more intense and more difficult and more dangerous and more lethal with every step. In The Abyss, you go into a dark place but you emerge into a bright one... into a world of wonder."