Did you know that James Cameron made movie posters? It is true. In his new book, Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron, the director of Aliens talks about his time creating posters for an old movie company, not even watching the movies because they were so bad, and just sending in images he thought were cool. "They're terrible movies," he said. I recommend that nobody ever see the films. I only had five minutes to watch it.
io9 was part of a group of journalists who spoke to CAMERON about Tech Noir, which contains a bunch of these posters, and we asked him about how the experience impacted the posters for his own movies, none of which have been illustrated. Cameron said on the video call that he has never pushed marketing departments to go between photos and illustrations. They show me things. I think they missed it, and we brought in Dylan Cole, who was one of our designers, and he did the one sheets for the movie. We did it in our own design department. I used to believe in the one sheet the same way I used to believe in the book covers of my science fiction books as a kid. I bought the book if it was a good cover.
He perked up when he said there was a funny one sheet story on Aliens. I had a strong opinion on that. He told the story of how the one sheet for Aliens ended up being this.
I met the head of marketing at 20th Century Fox on his last day at the office and his office was all boxed up. He left the job before I met him. He was sitting at the desk and he had a little green plastic frog and he was squeezing a bulb and making it hop around the desk. I asked what the frog was. He said it was his stress frog. I was like, this guy is a casualty.
He said he had a one sheet for you. He showed the one sheet. I think you can get it online, a few of them kind of leaked out. Like me, Roger believed in one sheet. Good one sheets, not good movies. I held it in my hands and said, "Oh, let me tell you exactly what I think of this one sheet." and I crumpled it up and threw it in the ball. The stress frog was being worked on by him. I said if I had a choice between that piece of shit and a black frame, I would go with the black frame. I walked out of the office and he called someone up and said he wanted it all black. He was not hearing what I was saying. If you ever wondered why there was no Aliens on the one sheet, that is why.
We will have more from him in the coming days. Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron, a collection of hundreds of pages of drawings from the life of the director, will be released next week. You can pre-order here.
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