It's hard to even begin to count the sheer number of outrageous quotes from the pre-Avatar New Yorker profile on James Cameron. The entire piece is the kind of parody that its subject is completely incapable of grasping. But one of the highlights of the insanity has to be James Cameron talking about the time he taught filmmaking to Stanley Kubrick... using his own movie True Lies.

No. Really.

At fourteen, Cameron saw the movie that made him want to make his own: Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the first cinematically exquisite treatment of what had traditionally been B-movie material. “I saw all these cool spacecraft and I wanted to know how the visual effects were done,” he said. “I started building my own models of spaceships, from the ‘2001’ model kit and the ‘making-of’ book, which was quite thick and well researched.” After he finished making “True Lies,” Cameron called Kubrick, by then a recluse, and invited himself over. They spent a day, in the basement of Kubrick’s house in the English countryside, watching “True Lies” at Kubrick’s flatbed editing station. Cameron went over the shots—Schwarzenegger in a Harrier jet firing a missile, with the villain attached to it, through an office building and into a helicopter: boom!—so that Kubrick could learn how the effects were done.

I think we all know why Stanley Kubrick was known as a recluse. So popular hacks couldn't invite themselves over to screen one of their own movies and then lecture Kubrick on how to make movies by pointing to their digital helicopter explosions.

This story might have been a gram less unforgivable, if Cameron had brought along Alien or Dark Star or even Terminator 2. But no, he brought along True Lies, a bad popcorn movie, that's sexist even by James Cameron standards, and has no artistic validity at all.

Stanley Kubrick who was an innovative director possibly knew something about making movies without James Cameron there, and really wasn't in need of a point by point explanation for how to create special effects involving shooting a terrorist through a building. Especially since his next movie was to be a drama about love, temptation and loss set in New York City... and not involving any missiles.