James Cameron, famed director of numerous hit movies including Titanic, Avatar, and The Terminator, originally disowned his very first movie, Piranha II: The Spawning. The 1982 independent horror film, written by Charles H. Eglee, was a sequel to 1978’s Piranha. Cameron, who was a special effects artist prior to his directorial debut, was put on the project after executive producer Ovidio G. Assonitis fired the original director, Miller Drake.
Piranha II centers around a scuba instructor, her scientist boyfriend, and her police chief ex-husband who link a series of unusual deaths to a mutant strain of piranhas living in a sunken freighter ship off of a Caribbean resort. The three characters battle for their lives as the genetically modified—and flying—piranhas are let loose on the resort.
Cameron came to disown the film for several years. As is stated in the book, A Critical Companion to James Cameron, this was due to the strange history of the movie’s production. “The film’s troubled production, which saw Cameron fired and forced to break into a studio to edit the movie that still bore his name, led him to later disavow the flying fish movie as his first directorial credit,” the book states. Indeed, Cameron was passionate about his first directing project, but was largely abandoned by the producers and crew. He’d be “making rubber fish while everybody else was out partying,” actor Lance Henriksen stated in an interview with Film Comment.
Why James Cameron Originally Disowned His Very First Movie
Cameron did end up getting fired from the project, and ended up attempting to get his name removed from the movie’s credits, but was legally unable to do so. Once Cameron made The Terminator, which became massively successful upon its release in 1984, he started referring to that as his feature film debut. It makes sense that he’d want the successful Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie to mark the start of his legendary career rather than the Piranha sequel that was so marred by a tumultuous production and a random firing. As Cameron went on to become a major movie director—even breaking boundaries in film technology during the creation of Avatar, which won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction, Best Visual Effects, and Best Cinematography—his affiliation with the Piranha sequel was largely forgotten.
Despite Cameron disowning the film for a long time, it ended up gaining a type of cult following over the years, even spawning sequels, including Piranha 3D. As it turns out, the director has since changed his mind on Piranha II, giving it credit as his first feature-length directing job. As James Cameron told Morley Safer during a 60 Minutes interview in 2010, the movie is “the best flying piranha film ever made.” The visionary director’s work on the movie gives ample proof that even the smallest or humblest projects can lead to renowned careers.