Armed with his Titanic Oscar, director James Cameron almost beat up Harvey Weinstein, currently one of the most hated men in Hollywood.
Known for directing The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Aliens, James Cameron won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film Titanic in 1998. In 2009, Cameron directed Avatar, which won three Academy Awards, and was nominated for a total of nine, including Best Director. Cameron has been hailed as the director of two of the highest-grossing films of all-time. Cameron recently returned to the public eye with his criticism of Wonder Woman, calling the film “a step backwards” for Hollywood’s portrayal of heroic women. Despite receiving much backlash for his comments, Cameron has yet to apologize.
In an interview with Vanity Fair on the 20th anniversary of Titanic, Cameron revealed that he almost got into a physical altercation with Weinstein nearly 20 years ago. The incident apparently occurred during a commercial break at the 70th Academy Awards ceremony, the night Cameron received his Oscar. Cameron says he nearly hit Weinstein with his Oscar.
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.
Though the controversies surrounding Weinstein may lead people to think that Cameron’s feud with Weinstein revolved around the media mogul’s treatment of women, Cameron’s frustration was actually aimed at Weinstein’s treatment of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who Cameron says is a friend of his. After Weinstein came up and began “glad-handing” him, Cameron expressed his dissatisfaction with Weinstein over the way Weinstein’s company, Miramax, handled del Toro’s film, Mimic. According to Cameron, if the commercial break had not ended, the verbal exchange would have become physical.
Del Toro called working with Weinstein on Mimic one of the two most horrible things to happen to him in the 1990s, the other being the kidnapping of his father. Del Toro claimed that he clashed with Miramax multiple times over casting and story decisions, and lost many of them. Making the film was so difficult for him that his first American project almost became his last.
