James Cameron Once Almost Physically Assaulted Harvey Weinstein With His Oscar Award For This Reason (Photo Credit – Instagram/Wikimedia)
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James Cameron created history after he and his Titanic team took home eleven Oscars, resulting in an exceptional night. It was memorable for another different reason to the director: he almost got into a fistfight with the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. The Avatar filmmaker had nearly hit Weinstein with his Oscar statuette. Scroll below to get the deets.
Titanic was released in 1997 and featured Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in leading roles. It is a cult classic and holds the record for most Academy Awards won by a film. The 1997 movie is reportedly also the first film to cross the one-billion mark. On the other hand, Harvey was a former film producer and convicted sex offender. Several people came out and claimed to be sexually assaulted by Weinstein.
However, James Cameron’s beef with Harvey Weinstein was because of his good friend, Guillermo Del Toro, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, the Titanic maker almost got into a physical fight with Harvey. Cameron revealed that Weinstein’s Miramax fired Guillermo during the latter’s first American commercial movie, Mimic. The actors revolted against this move by Miramax, and then, when the film was successful, Weinstein allegedly jumped up to take all the praise for the film. It pissed off Cameron.
After James Cameron won his Oscar in the category of editing for Titanic, he came across Harvey Weinstein. The Avatar director revealed, “And so I’m on my way back to my seat with my editing Oscar, and this guy’s jumping up to introduce himself, saying, ‘If you want to come to work at a place that’s a friend of the artist, a friend of the filmmaker’ — he’s holding his hand out, and I just blew him off.”
He continued, “It was just an ugly little moment. But, yeah, I did defend Guillermo, and I called Harvey on his bulls***, and then he got very loud and verbally abusive and almost potentially physically violent.”
James Cameron added, “And he was about to get clocked by an Oscar — which would’ve been highly appropriate, I think. But I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms; it was just the weapon at hand. The hysterical thing about the whole moment was people around us were saying, ‘Not here! Not here!’ It was kind of like, ‘It’s OK if you boys fight out in the alley, but don’t do it here at the Academy Awards!'”
On the professional front, James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third installment in his blockbuster franchise, is in the pipeline. The movie is set to be released in the latter half of 2025.
