James Cameron comments on Galaxy of Terror

Excerpt from "Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman, King of the B Movie":

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9641880/james-cameron-origins-term inator

JAMES CAMERON: "I hit Roger up in the hall one day and said, 'We're falling behind on Galaxy of Terror and you're not getting coverage, so why don't you let me direct second unit?' He said OK. And I kind of also became an alternate first-unit director because they fell so far behind that I had to do actual scenes with the actors. That was my first experience directing. I sort of thought maybe I should think about directing because I keep building these cool sets and these guys keep shooting them like idiots. I knew how it should be done, and I was watching these boneheads, thinking I can do better than this! So yeah, I was looking for an opportunity to direct. I wrote a couple of scenes where this guy cuts his arm off with a crystal and the crystal attacks him. But I didn't write the infamous scene with the giant maggot raping that woman. Roger always had to have a rape scene in all of his films — it came from his biker films and women-in-prison films. I didn't approve of it at all, but I wasn't judgmental about it. Anyway, the whole maggot rape scene starts with this severed arm with these maggots on it, and one of them grows. I had to do a POV shot of the arm lying on the floor with maggots on it. So they bring me the arm, and they bring me the worms. I look in this container that they got from this pet store, and they're mealworms that you use to feed lizards. And they didn't do anything! So I sprinkled the worms on the arm and I stared at them and thought, Well, this doesn't work. What are we going to do? So I said, 'All right, get me some methylcellulose.' I poured that over the arm, I poured the worms in the methylcellulose, I took a piece of zip cord and split it and stripped the ends, and I ran the zip cord around behind the set and I buried it under the dirt, and I put the leads in the methylcellulose, and I had a guy behind the set who was going to plug it into a junction box. I set up the camera, and I pointed it down at the arm. And meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, two guys have wandered up behind me, one of them I know who's a sleazeball producer named Jeff Schechtman, and the other one is another sleazeball producer named Ovidio Assonitis who was going to produce Piranha II. So these guys are watching me, and what they see is me pointing a camera at an arm with a bunch of inert worms on it, and then I say, 'Action,' which is the cue for the guy to plug the zip cord in, and all the worms come to life! They're writhing around trying to get out of this electrified methylcellulose, and then I'm shooting it. And then I say, 'Cut,' and the guy unplugs the zip cord, but you don't see him because he's behind the set wall. So what these two producers are seeing is that I say, 'Action,' and all of these worms start squirming around and I say, 'Cut,' and they stop. They can't figure it out. And what I hear back later is they go off and talk and say, 'If he's that good with worms, I wonder what he can do with actors!' And that's how I got to direct Piranha II: The Spawning. Here I was, I'd gone through the Corman system like crap through a goose, and all of a sudden I was directing a movie and everyone hated me again."