I swear, sometimes I think James Cameron is just screwing with us all. Every once in a while he’ll surface from his subaquatic empire and hurl hints at some new secret project or 3-D technology or another Aliens, and then he submerges again and still leaves us with Titanic as his last feature film. I mean, he officially announced his Battle Angel plans at Comic Con about four years ago, and yet the closest we’ve seen to new material is him pretending to make an Aquaman movie.
Anyway, the amphibious filmmaker is still dogpaddling along with yet another pet project called The Dive. The Fox feature will tell the true tale of “freedivers” (who basically hold their breath for a really long time and descend as deep as they can into the ocean) Francisco Ferreras and his wife Audrey Mestre, who perished while trying to break her own depth record. Cameron first expressed interest in the waterlogged Big Blue-ish love story back in early 2003 (at which time Salma Hayek was rumored to be filling her impressive Latino lungs with air to play the ill-fated leading lady), but even though he actually shot footage of Ferreras besting his late spouse’s depth record some time ago to use in the eventual movie, he’s just now assigned scripting duty to his Battle Angel co-writer Laeta Kalogridis.
Kalogridis is one of those screenwriters with a somewhat rubbishy filmography on the surface (unless you’re a fan of Alexander and Birds of Prey), but she’s also done lots of uncredited doctor work or early drafts of everything from Wonder Woman to X-Men to Modesty Blaise (and, unfortunately, Tomb Raider and Catwoman) and more recently penned the upcoming Viking story Pathfinder and the translation of the Russian flick Night Watch. You have to assume she’s doing something right to get a second shot with the notoriously finicky King of the World.
In the meantime, the lightning-paced Cameron is busying himself with the apparently-not-that-top-secret Project 880 (aka Avatar?), which he’ll purportedly be making before Battle Angel. It just makes me a little sad that I’ll probably be in my 40s before I see a new Cameron movie.