| The director James Cameron doesn’t work cheap. “His movies are among the most expensive ever made,” the New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear once observed. “ ‘Terminator 2’ was the first film to cost a hundred million dollars, ‘Titanic’ the first to exceed two hundred million.” On Friday, Cameron released “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which came with a price tag of three hundred and fifty million. The reason that studios keep giving Cameron record-setting budgets is simple: his movies keep setting box-office records. In 2009, Goodyear profiled Cameron as he neared the completion of the first “Avatar” movie, which premièred later that year and remains the highest-grossing film in history. (“Titanic” ranks third.) By then, “Avatar” was already in its fourth year of production; Goodyear’s piece details the technological innovations that required such investments of time and money, and how Cameron, who never completed college, managed to accumulate so much faith and financial backing from the film industry. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Roger Corman, and Peter Jackson weigh in. So do Kathryn Bigelow, later the first woman director to win an Oscar, and Linda Hamilton, the star of the first “Terminator” movies—who, in addition to serving among Cameron’s key professional partners, had also been among his five wives. If Cameron’s career and personal life seem to take place entirely on an epic scale, Goodyear’s article helps explain why. “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure,” the filmmaker tells her, “you will fail above everyone else’s success.” | 
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