5 True Lies about James Cameron

James Cameron knew something was wrong. It was July 7, and inside Westwood's Mann Festival Theater, the L.A. press preview of True Lies didn't sound quite right. The voices of stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis were pitched too low, while the usually frenetic Tom Arnold was talking at normal speed. ''Nobody else noticed because they don't know the film the way I do,'' the director said the next day, a week before True Lies opened on 2,368 screens. ''They all thought I was hallucinating. I had to leave the theater.''

After technicians checked the projector, the distraught director was vindicated: Film was running at 23.2 frames per second instead of the standard 24. And Cameron had demonstrated yet again that, though his budgets rise off the scale, he may be the most finely calibrated moviemaking instrument in Hollywood. Ask about reports that True Lies is the most expensive movie ever made — $120 million is the price tag bandied about — and he'll argue that, in adjusted dollars, Spartacus or Cleopatra probably cost more. ''I'm not afraid of taking a risk with an awful lot of money,'' he says. ''Let them speculate. The more successful Terminator 2 was, the less it cost. The less successful Last Action Hero was, the more it cost.''

True Lies made $25.9 million on its opening weekend and should easily top the traditional golden box office mark of $100 million. But James Cameron has never been traditional, and after spending more than most movies ever hope to earn in order to create a fitting successor to 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, he knows the stakes are higher for both his reputation and the film's profitability. True Lies, a 2-hour-and-21-minute, computer-enhanced action comedy, isn't just designed to wow viewers and thump the competition; it's also meant to cement Cameron's identity as a fearless and free-spending ultra-macho perfectionist. But if the film doesn't get close to the $200 million mark, his cover is blown. Like Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker, the secret-agent hero who poses as a computer sales rep, Cameron isn't letting on that...

1. He's on a mission to save the world — from bad movies. In April, Cameron had Twentieth Century Fox delay True Lies' planned July 1 opening by two weeks. Recalling how other studios then scrambled to reshuffle their release dates, he chortles: ''It was like we switched a light on in the kitchen and all the roaches scattered.''

As usual, the 39-year-old director, whose heavy-metal visions have ranged from Aliens to The Abyss, had spent more time shooting than he had expected (a staggering 140 days, at an estimated cost of $400,000 for every day Lies went over schedule) and wanted time to test the picture. After two previews, he trimmed 10 minutes. ''I don't think the film was compromised in any way,'' he says of the still-longer-than-average result, ''and it would have been if we'd tried to do it any faster.

''People are being conditioned to expect less and accept less from a movie these days,'' he adds. ''I'd rather push the other way. If I make a movie once every two years, I want it to be the best. More is more.''

But it's been three years since T2, and as it turns out, more was more than his innovative 1992 deal with Twentieth Century Fox could support. True Lies was to have been the first of some 12 films Cameron would direct or produce under a reported five-year, $500 million deal with Fox that gave his Lightstorm Entertainment total creative control and a large share of the profits. But the plan faltered when it became clear that making the movie Cameron had written (based on the 1991 French farce La Totale!) was going to be expensive — not the originally announced budget of $40 million, and not $70 million, which sources say was Fox's mandated limit. ''This was one of the two or three most complicated movies I've ever been involved with,'' says Jon Landau, a Fox senior vice president, who supervised Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans.

''Jim likes to set the bar so high that he's wondering, can I get over it?'' says Lies' director of photography, Russell Carpenter. ''He's a gambler.''

To retain creative control of True Lies, Cameron renegotiated with Fox so the studio would increase its funding of the pictures. ''Now the deal involves three pictures and works on a film-by-film basis,'' explains Lightstorm president Rae Sanchini. ''Fox is entitled to invade the proceeds to recoup their investment.''

''It did cost me personally to spend more money on ['True Lies'],'' Cameron says. ''For me, the desire to create the best possible film always wins out. I just can't do it less than the way I think it should be. I can't hack it. It's a curse. And that mentality is instilled in everyone working on every aspect of the film. So everybody spends more to make it better.''

''What it boils down to is Jim is making the film for the audience, which is spending $7.50 for something they've never seen before,'' says T2 effects wizard Stan Winston, one of Cameron's partners in Digital Domain, the IBM-backed visual-effects company that was started in 1993 to compete in Hollywood's burgeoning effects industry. ''The audience should bow down and thank the stars that Jim pushed to spend every penny to entertain them.''