James Cameron asserts he's made too much money to care what you think about his dialogue

James Cameron is rare among high-profile filmmakers, not just because of his enormous success, but because of how little it seems to have done to insulate him from an almost overwhelming sense of crankiness about how his films are received. This is a man who, 25 years after the fact, hired actors and scientists to try to prove that Leonardo DiCaprio’s ass would have drowned at the end of Titanic, no matter what your irritating friends on the internet say about how much room was on that goddamn floating door. This is not a man who lacks in pettiness, or the resources to fulfill it.

As a minor example, take an excerpt from an interview Cameron recently gave to Empire, timed to the 40th anniversary of his breakout hit, The Terminator. When asked about whether he still likes the original movie four decades later, Cameron appears to walk himself down the following little road, and it’s a real lesson in the ways the mind can run when you’re sufficiently irritated about something for a sufficiently long time; while acknowledging he wishes the film had better production values, Cameron notes “I don’t cringe on any of the dialogue, but I have a lower cringe factor than, apparently, a lot of people do around the dialogue that I write… You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films — then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness.”

Again: Nobody appears to have brought up Cameron’s dialogue, except for him. (We’re working from interview excerpts, so it’s possible, but unlikely, an interviewer said “By the way, please tell us your response to people who think your dialogue is bad, in ways that also mention your legendary box office track record as loudly as possible.”) None of this is out of character, of course; Cameron has previously been as blunt in his assessment of people who complain his movies are too long—”Give me a fucking break…it’s okay to get up and go pee”—and people who complain that Avatar is kind of generically dull despite its massive success, i.e., “The trolls will have it that nobody gives a shit and they can’t remember the characters’ names or one damn thing that happened in the movie. “Then they see the movie again and go, ‘Oh, okay, excuse me, let me just shut the fuck up right now.’ So I’m not worried about that.” It is, in its own way, charming: There are so many things a guy at Cameron’s tier of success could care about. But he’s still human enough to care way too much about this.