James Cameron Says A Promotion Came With A BTS ‘Coke Dealer’ Role

James Cameron has directed some of the biggest box office monsters in movie history, but in a resurfaced interview with Graham Bensinger, he’s reminding everyone his rise didn’t start with billion-dollar budgets and red carpets. Instead, Cameron says his early grind in Roger Corman’s scrappy 1980 sci-fi film “Battle Beyond the Stars” included a jaw-dropping “welcome to the job” moment of being handed drugs and told to distribute them to the crew.

Cameron told Bensinger his workload exploded when the production designer/art director was fired mid-chaos.

“Yeah. Well, so I leveled up within the organization on ‘Battle Beyond the Stars’ when they fired the production designer/art director, because he wasn’t designing and building sets in time,” he explained, describing the pace as brutal. “The schedule was horrific and you’re basically laying tracks in front of a speeding train.”

He said producers saw him as someone who could grind through sleepless nights. “And they saw that I was a guy that didn’t mind staying up all night and I had a good artistic flair and I could draw,” Cameron said, even though he claims the promotion was a total leap of faith. “They had no idea that I had any management skills whatsoever, that I’d never been a production designer before.”

Then came the moment that still sounds unreal today.

“So the next day I show up to get briefed by the production manager,” he recalled. “He says, ‘OK, here’s your petty cash voucher. And here’s this and here’s that. And here’s your swing shift crew list. Here’s your day shift crew list. OK, here’s your black beauties. Here’s your coke.’”

Cameron says he immediately froze. “And he’s putting all this stuff out on the table. I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. What do I do with this stuff?’”

James Cameron insisted he wasn’t even using drugs. “I mean, I didn’t take drugs. For me, coffee was plenty,” he said, but the production manager allegedly made the job expectation crystal clear. “And he said, ‘Well, you gotta give it out to the crew.’” His takeaway? “I’m like, so I just became a dealer, I guess?”

He claimed it was normal in that world. “But that was just how things were done in that super low-budget world. ‘Will work for coke,’ basically,” he said, before adding, “And that was pretty nuts.”

Ultimately, Cameron says he passed the responsibility off. “So I just, I just gave it all to my assistant art director. I said, ‘You deal with that.’” And then he dropped what might be the wildest line of all, saying, “Apparently in that world, you were judged as a production designer or an art director by how fairly you distributed the drugs.”

The interview also veered into a mid-’70s story involving acid, a campfire, and bullets ricocheting off a car. Setting the scene, James Cameron told Bensinger, “So a year before, I was up there with my, my first wife Sharon, driving around in her Camaro. And we decided to go rabbit hunting as you do when you’re really bored and in the town of Needles.”

He said leftover ammo ended up sitting in the car for a year, until the wrong moment. “And then we’re back at the river, Colorado River camping a year later… and I find this ammo and I just shove it in like a hamburger bag.” Then, he admitted, “All right, full disclosure, then we drop acid.”

Cameron says the chaos hit when the campfire was started with trash from the car. “And so we’re all sitting there and we’re on acid and cooking hot dogs and the fire goes, pew!” he recalled. “I go, ‘What’d you start the fire with?’ And they said, ‘Oh, some trash bags that were in the car.’ I’m like, ‘Crap!’”

The result? “And I grabbed everybody and we’d jump behind the car and then bullets start flying out of the campfire and pinging the car, got a couple bullet holes in the car.”

James Cameron summed it up, admitting, “It’s hysterical, although it could have been quite tragic.”