“Hey, baby, come over here,” a tall, thin woman, dressed all in white, standing at the mouth of a shipping container, called out. “Come check this thing out. This is the Wunderkammer. This is our natural-history museum.” The woman was Suzy Amis Cameron, a former actress who is now an environmental activist married to the director James Cameron. He was “baby.” It was late afternoon, and they were visiting the campus of MUSE, a school in Malibu Canyon, California, that Amis Cameron founded with her sister, Rebecca, in 2006. That evening was the school fund-raiser.
A rusted-metal skeleton of a triceratops sat on the roof of the museum; out front was a submersible orange robot that appeared in Cameron’s “Titanic.” Inside the narrow space, Cameron inspected shelves full of artifacts the students had found and made: Día de los Muertos skulls, fossilized trilobites. Amis Cameron picked up a tiny mandible with forbidding teeth. “A sabre-tooth kitten?” her husband asked. “Me-ow.”
MUSE, which has a hundred and forty-six students from Pre-K to twelfth grade, is a radically sustainable school devoted to hands-on learning. The lower-school campus has organic garden beds and a large “maker’s space.” The middle and upper schools occupy a building whose previous tenant was a school started by the actor Will Smith. “They said it wasn’t a Scientology school, but we think it was,” Rebecca Amis said.
Jeff King, the head of the school and the husband of Rebecca Amis, says the goal is to nurture autonomous and innovative students. All students follow their “passions”: Grow eighty pounds of lettuce! Make a scale model of a tennis court! Build a pinball machine! “If I had a young Jim Cameron at our school, we would be keeping up with him,” King said.
MUSE does, in fact, have three young Camerons: Rose, Quinn, and Claire. Quinn, who is eleven, built a motorcycle as a school project. “There’s no better way to learn about a broad range of subjects than to build a vehicle,” Cameron said. “At culmination, he rode the motorcycle around here and did a couple of jumps.” Several years ago, Cameron, who is also an explorer, designed a submarine, equipped it with 3-D cameras, and, in 2012, took it to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench.
Cameron had come to MUSE to unveil his latest innovation: five thirty-three-foot-tall sculptural sunflowers, with sun-tracking heads made from solar panels, which will supply approximately ninety per cent of the school’s energy. Everyone trudged up a hill to a bar in the shade of an oak tree. Below, in a clearing, a solar sunflower gazed toward the west. Amis Cameron said that Jim had presented her with the plans three years ago, as a fiftieth-birthday present. “Most girls like to get jewelry, most girls like to go to the spa,” she said. “My husband—my incredible husband—really, really knows how to give a girl a bouquet of flowers.” (For Christmas, he gave her a Tesla.)
Amis Cameron also said that by the fall the school’s cafeteria would be completely plant-based, thereby significantly reducing its water footprint. Cameron, who gave up animal products three years ago, said, “We consider meat and dairy to be basically toxic.” He held up a glass of wine. “Alcohol is toxic, too, but I give that an exemption!”
One of Cameron’s agents, Adam Devejian, of C.A.A.—buzz-cut and buff—came up to say hello. “You look like you’re weight-training,” Cameron said.
Devejian said, “I go to a guy who says I need two hundred grams of protein a day, but I can’t get that from vegetables.”
“Of course you can!” Cameron said. “You don’t eat a fuckin’ calf brain and think it’s going straight to your brain! When you eat muscle, it doesn’t go straight to your muscle. There is more protein per calorie in broccoli than in steak.” He enumerated the élite athletes who eat only plants.
Later, at a silent auction—a basket full of Kardashian Kids clothes, a signed Bret Michaels guitar—Devejian said, “When I met Jim, he was on the set of ‘Avatar,’ eating meatball sandwiches and cold cuts. He looked a little heavy. One day, he said, ‘We’re going vegan,’ and we went through the office fridge and threw everything away. Then we get the Cameron Christmas gift. Vegan delights—vegan cookbooks, hemp clothes. I use it all—it’s just I still eat meat.” Cameron, Devejian said, “sees things in terms of good and evil.” He went on, “I’m going to try vegan for a week and see if I get small. If I get weak, then I’m going to go back.” ♦
