James Cameron

Dorian, this may surprise you, because it surprised me when I found out, but the single biggest thing that an individual can do to combat climate change is to stop eating animals. Because of the huge, huge carbon footprint of animal agriculture. I was shocked to find out that animal agriculture directly or indirectly accounts for 14.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions, compared to all transportation - every ship, car, truck, plane on the planet only accounts for 13%. Less than animal agriculture. So most people think that buying a Prius is the answer, and it's certainly not wrong, but it's not the biggest agent of climate change.

Well, I have 5 kids and I would never answer the question if someone asked me which one was my favorite. The same with my movies. Each film is a journey, you learn so much from it, and it's a reflection of a different period in your life, a different snapshot of who you were at this time. The one I'm working on is always my favorite. Right now it's Avatar 2, Avatar 3, and Avatar 4.

It's been almost two years. It'll be two years on May 4th since I had a single molecule of anything that came from an animal. This includes meat, eggs, dairy, cheese, fish, etc. I feel great. I feel like I've set the clock back 15 years.

The next best thing, I would say, is to vote responsibly. We really need better leaders, and we need to demand of our leaders the things that they need to be doing, like creating a tax on carbon.

As a film director, the best advice I ever got was from Roger Corman. He said "film directing is hard work, sit down as much as possible."

The funny thing is, I never followed it! I always come in on first day of production, and there's a producer chair with my name on it, and I say "take it away! It won't be used."

And then about 3/4 of the way through a long shoot, I relent, I start following Roger's advice towards the end of a production.

1. When we were making Avatar, when we started it, we naturally assumed it would be somewhat successful because it had the elements people like, you know, fantastic environments and good characters and a love story. But then as we got deeper into the production, and it became one of the highest costing films of all time, there was genuine concern that it would never break even, that it would never make money. And we had a very difficult post production, because the film was too long and I wound up editing the film for over a year, and we took out about 45 minutes of film. And I think at the moment we released the film, we still believed it was too long. Once it came out, it was clear the film for most viewers was too short, they wanted more of that world.

2. Well, that's an interesting question. The physically hardest was the Abyss, because there was a period of 10 weeks where I was literally underwater 10 hours a day, for 6 days a week. And anybody that's a scuba diver knows that that's the experience of 7 or 8 dives a day, and nobody does that. So that was the most physically taxing. I think the most emotionally difficult was Titanic, because the entire film industry was scorning us for our abject stupidity while we were in post-production on that film. Eventually, we prevailed, but it was a difficult time. In terms of craft, Avatar was the most challenging, because of the editorial process on the film.

3. Okay, well this is an easy one. Laura, happy birthday!

I never tweeted casting Jessica Alba for Battle Angel. She was our star of Dark Angel, so there might be some confusion there since we've never gotten to the casting stage for Battle Angel. Currently the project is on hold until I finish the currently planned Avatar sequels, which will be a number of years.

Well, if one believes in a multiverse of an infinite number of parallel universes, or even a large number of them, then there have to be a few where Skynet wins. But you know, I don't know how it's done exactly. And if I did I wouldn't say.

One could argue that the machines have already won. All you have to do is look around at how many people are face-down texting 100% of the time, everywhere they are, and it's hard to imagine the machines haven't won.

I think I was following in the footsteps of the first film ALIEN, which was the classic "10 little indians" model where you start out with X number of beloved characters, and have one that prevails. In ALIENS, three characters prevail at the end. So I would say ALIENS is more about family bonds, even though it's a pseudo-family in the film, and cooperation against an enemy.

So it doesn't exactly follow the slasher model.

Oh, probably Resident Evil, the first one.

I just like that film! You don't have to defend a guilty pleasure.

I wasn't particularly embarrassed because I think that's an unbelievably specific nitpick and if that caused him to not enjoy the film, he may need to reevaluate his priorities. That said, because I'm such a perfectionist, I challenged him to provide me with the correct star fields and incorporated them into the future rereleases of the film. So, if you watch the film now, the stars are correct.

Well, there were a number of challenges leading up to the dive in terms of creating a new submersible from scratch that involved many new technologies, and anybody who has ever built a complex new technological system from scratch knows what I'm talking about. But the biggest challenge on the day of the dive itself was the sea state, we had a 2 and a half meter sea, so talking close to 8-10 foot waves. That was bigger than we were supposed to launch in. And during the launch process, one of our key safety systems got broken on the submersible. And I elected to dive anyway. Then it turned out not to be necessary, it was a backup system, and the dive went fairly well after that.

Your ears don't pop, because the submersible is designed to withstand the pressure. What you feel is the cold, and the confinement. Now your MIND is very aware of the pressure, because if the submersible were to fail, you'd cease to exist in a microsecond. I call it "being chummed into a meat cloud." Needless to say, that didn't happen, unless we're in one of those parallel universes we were talking about before.

On that dive, we discovered a number of new species, they were very small, including a new sea cucumber, it was very small, I referred to one of them as a "little sea pig" because they look like little pink piglets. They're about as big as your thumb, or maybe smaller. Technically, they're called Holothurian. And we also discovered a large number of new bacterial species that live in the bottom sediment down there. But the impression is of a very desolate landscape, like the moon. You have to look very closely to find life down there.

Yes. We shot the whole expedition and I shot the the dives in the 3D. There's a 3D film called Deepsea Challenge that is from National Geographic that will be released theatrically.

No, I've never had nightmares about Terminators after I made the film. I had nightmares that inspired the film. But I always feel that making the film is the catharsis that stops the nightmares, if you will.

For example, I used to always have nightmares about giant waves, tsunamis essentially. And when I made the Abyss, which had a giant wave scene in it, those stopped.

Filmmaking is therapy.

Depends on my mood. If I'm feeling aggressive, it's Ride of the Valkyries, though it might just as easily be a Bruce Springsteen song.

No, I can't hit those high notes like Celine.

I think he still gets to be called Governor? I think he's still officially addressed as Governor? Well Arnold and I are good friends, and we look for opportunities to work together and to support each other's causes, and I think that's one of the reasons he got involved in Years of Living Dangerously. Because one, I asked him, and two, as a leader, he made huge strides in clean energy himself, so he's a believer.

The title was a riff based off of a 1980's movie starring Sigourney Weaver, called The Year of Living Dangerously, which I believe was based on a novel.

Well, different actors have a different tolerance for green screen work. usually theater trained actors have the confidence to work alone, or work in the absence of props and scenery and so on, because they are used to sort of black box theater and/or one person shows, and they know that part of an actor's power and the magic is their ability to create when nothing's there. Other actors simply just don't like it. So it's always good, if you're making a green screen heavy film, to talk to the actors before you cast them about that issue. Because you don't want to have to be buying someone's talent, certainly actors are well-paid, but you also want them to want to be doing that.

I think that's from South Park! It literally is, it's the song from the South Park episode where they parodied my dive to the Mariana Trench.

It's funny. It's like they were actually on the expedition, except I didn't actually make the crew sing a song about me.

I personally love the close work with the actors when we're trying to break a scene, when we're trying to figure out the heart of a scene. I may have written it a year earlier, but the real creative work is that day, when you're going to shoot that scene. I love that we find that magic that was not obvious on the page.

Well, I'll work out or do yoga. Sometimes I'll read or watch something that is in the same area code to the project I'm working on. If I'm in the midst of a project, I'll go back and read what I wrote the day before. I also have an extensive file of images- photographs and art- that I like to consult.

This year, 2014, I haven't seen that much that inspired me yet. My favorite film of last year, hands down, was Gravity, and I was hoping it would win best picture, but certainly happy that my friend Alfonso Cuaron won best director. I did think that this new Captain America was an interesting film for its genre, in that it tackled this idea of digital surveillance and the kind of dark side of our hyperconnected society.

Haha! Entourage, for me, consisted of half a day's work, during which they filmed segments for five different episodes. So it looked like I was on that show a lot more than I was. It might have been a full day's work, come to think of it.

As of right now, he and I have not discussed it, and I don't see a role as the scripts are coming together that would be appropriate for him, so I would say probably not.

The second, third and fourth films all go into production simultaneously. They're essentially all in preproduction now, because we are designing creatures, settings, and characters that span all three films. And we should be finished with all three scripts within the next, I would say, six weeks.

There's always pressure, whether it's a new film or whether it's a sequel, to entertain and amaze an audience. I've felt that pressure my entire career, so there's nothing new there. The biggest pressure I feel right now is cutting out things I love to get the film down to a length that is affordable. There hasn't been a problem finding new and wonderful things to include in the movie.

I believe that human history and the history of evolution on this planet indicates that our first contact with alien species might not be as benign as Steven thinks. The history on our planet is whenever a superior technology society encounters a society with lesser technology, the superior technology supplants the lesser society. There has never been an exception. So if the aliens come to us, it probably won't go well for us. A thousand years from now, if we're the ones going to where the aliens are (like the story told in Avatar) it won't go so well for the aliens.

I think that there was a moment of magic-- pure magic--, of coming together with the lens, when we shot the kiss at the bow of the ship during Titanic. The way the sun set, we were all inspired to run to get the shot and we had seconds to do it. There was no rehearsal, we didn't have time, but the actors did beautifully. We did two takes, one that was out of focus and one that was half out of focus, and the one that was used was the one that was half out of focus. And it was beautiful.

I was diving a site called Lost City, which is an enormous hydrothermal structure, and I saw a creature which we believe to be a new species, it hadn't been seen before, which was a seven foot diameter jellyfish, very diaphanous, very thin and elegant and otherworldly. And this was at a depth of 850 meters. I photographed it for 20 minutes in 3-D high definition, and it's in a film that we put out called Aliens of the Deep.

It looks to be related to a species that is known in the Pacific called Deepstaria Enigmata but we didn't capture ours, so we can't claim a new species without a specimen. He looked happy, we didn't want to grab him and tear him to the surface. We just called it the "space bagel" because it was kind of donut shaped.

Both! I'm an all of the above kind of guy, I'm inclusive. I like cats and I like dogs, I just don't like them at the same time. I don't love the cat we have right NOW, but I love cats and dogs equally. I'm the cat whisperer! It's true.

Aw, it's just a family joke. It actually used to be Gloria Stewart's cat, and when she died at the age of 100, she willed the cat to us, and it's kind of this old maid cat, but I think it loves me more than I love it. But I do take good care of it.

Interesting. I thought it was an interesting film. I thought it was thought provoking and beautifully, visually mounted, but at the end of the day it didn't add up logically. But I enjoyed it, and I'm glad it was made. I liked it better than the previous two Alien sequels.

And it was done in native 3D and I'm a big fan of Native 3D done by directors who embrace it as an art form, like Ridley, Scorsese, Ang Lee.

Well, it must have begun in early childhood, because most of my childhood memories involve being outside, in the woods, hiking in summer, winter and spring. Collecting bugs and butterflies and snakes, there wasn't anything that crawled, swam or flew in our little area of Canada that I didn't want to grab and study.

I also spent a lot of time with my microscope studying little creatures in the ponds and streams as well.

We abandoned True Lies 2 after 9/11, because we didn't think a comedy about fundamentalist terrorists was so funny anymore. And then we never picked it up again.

Just hanging out with the family, with the kids, that's my #1 thing. And my sort of private time thing I like to do the most is scuba dive or free dive.

I think Leonardo, when I cast him in Titanic, he was well on his way. I think I helped him skip a rung or two on the ladder maybe, but he certainly would have gotten there on his own because he's one of the most talented actors of his generation. Do I still talk to him? Yes, occasionally. We're friendly but we're not close friends.

I think that what inspires me when I'm on set is working with people I enjoy working with, whether it's the actors, or the visual artists, or even the engineers and technical people, I enjoy the feeling of a group solving problems together and feeling a sense of accomplishment together. That's why to me the expeditions aren't that different from the feature film projects.

I just read a number of good books on similar subjects. One is called Just Food, and it looks at a lot of the myths around food and sustainability. Another is called the Sixth Extinction, which looks at the one we're in right now. There have been five major extinctions in paleo-history, and we're in the middle of the one we're causing. The book I would recommend to everybody is The China Study, which shows definitively that we can not only survive but thrive without meat or dairy, which I see as the key to solving the climate crisis.

Mythbusters did an episode about this and proved that two people could have floated on the door in such a way that both could have survived, but it involved using both of their floatation vests rigged under the door in such a way that they wouldn't detach. What they neglected to incorporate was the amount of time that they would have had to spend submerged in 28 degree water to attach them that way. Also, Jack is a 19 year old guy processing a problem in real time, in water, at night, and already hypothermic, so that's a lot to ask of him.

I personally would be very interested to find a way to incorporate VR and a narrative filmmaking experience. So a narrative directed experience that has individuated pathways where you have choices that you make in real-time, I think that would be a lot of fun. I think it would be very technically daunting and expensive, to do it as the same quality level as a typical feature, but it would be fun to experiment with. It sounds like a lot of fun. I don't think it would take over the feature film market though. I'm very familiar with VR, but I haven't seen the specific Oculus Rift device. I'm interested in it, I'm meant to see it sometime in the next month or so, but I've been familiar with VR since its inception. In fact, virtual reality is a way of describing the way we work on Avatar, we work in a virtual workspace all day long. We use a "virtual camera" which is how I create all the shots that are CG in the film, a window into a virtual reality that completely surrounds me.

48 fps to me is not a format, it's a tool, like music it's good to use sparingly and in the right spot. I believe all movies should be made in 3D, forever, but the projection needs to be better, and brighter. I want people to see in the movie theaters what I am seeing in my perfectly calibrated screening room, and people aren't seeing that. Larger formats. I'd love to see screens get bigger. In terms of storytelling, I'd like to see Hollywood embrace the caliber of writing in feature films that we're currently seeing in the series on television - more emphasis on character, and less on explosions and pyrotechnics. And I'm talking the big tentpole movies, I think they're obnoxiously loud and fast.

Not that I don't like loud fast scenes, I just don't like whole movies that are that way!

Well, I know how it will be done. If these pings that they're receiving are confirmed as being from the flight recorders, then they'll triangulate the acoustic data that they have so far, and they'll generate what's called a search box. I don't know how big that will be, but it might be 25-30 miles on a side, it might be a very large piece of ocean. Then there are a suite of tools that can operate at the kind of depth we're talking about, I believe between 4000-5000 meters. My ultra-deep submersible would not be required at those levels, that's half of the level it's designed for.

The next step would be to use an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle, and have it run at 400 or 500 feet above the bottom and do a sonar profile of the bottom, it does that by running a search pattern, kind of like mowing the lawn. That takes days or weeks to do. Then you analyze any signatures that are anomalous, that don't look like flat bottom, and you say are those rocks, is that geology or does that look like the piece of an aircraft? And then once you have those targets, you know where they are on the bottom, then you go back, either with that type of vehicle or an ROV (a remotely operated vehicle) that would be hanging down from a ship on a cable. And you'd take a look essentially with a videocamera. And then you'd be able to identify whether that target was in fact the aircraft you are looking for.

So that's how it would be done. But it all hinges on whether or not those pings are actually from the black box, and not from something else, like a scientific instrument that's drifted off course or whatever.

Wow, I think that's pretty easy, I think you'd rather go with the little duck sized horses. Ducks can be aggressive, geese are worse, but ducks can fuck you up. I have a hard time imagining duck-sized horses fucking me up, what are they going to do, rear up and kick me in the ankle? Then you could just kick them!

There have been the equivalent of horse-sized ducks in the past, and they were called horrible predators. Deinonychus.

My intention when I made Avatar was to do Battle Angel next. However, the positive feedback for Avatar and the support of the message of Avatar, encouraged me to do more of those films.

For me, the success was a factor because I was encouraged by the fact that an environmental film, or a film about nature, could be successful. It's certainly not just about money. I'm considering success to mean the measure of the ability of the film to communicate. Every director wants their film to communicate. The biggest factor, however, is the drive to continue developing the world-- more characters, more creatures with unfettered creativity.

For me personally, Star Wars. It had a lot of meaning in my life. The way I view the world, even if I were starting them together, I would like Star Wars better because I like hard science fiction more than I like fantasy. Which is not to say I don't enjoy watching Harry Potter.

Well, I can point directly to the film that had the biggest early influence on me, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even though it's not necessarily my favorite film right now, it has a very special place for me developmentally, because when I saw it, I went from someone who enjoyed watching movies to wanting to make movies myself. So I started to experiment with creating that imagery.

Well, it's actually next door to an 80 acre sustainable organic produce farm, which is what I was primarily interested in, and then I thought that if i wanted to enter the relatively small regional market there for organic produce, it would be good to have the winery as well, because you deal with all the local restaurants and foodies and so on, it's not as simple as just going to the farmer's market. Plus it was literally next door, and it was an award-winning boutique winery, and it seemed like those two businesses would compliment each other.

It's a beautiful place and I'm happy to be returning to my Canadian roots by having a home and a farm business there!

Sure! There's not much acting required, although the plants on Pandora are a little bit more active than the ones on earth, and every once in a while they do grab people and mess 'em up. But you might have to learn how to stick your tongue out about 14 feet.

The birth of one's children.

Personally, there are places under the antarctic ice that I'd like to look at, there's some interesting biomes there. In terms of cities, there are many cities that I would love to see. I haven't spent as much time in Asia and the Middle East as I would like to. Europa, would love to see Europa, or Titan. I would settle for Mars.

We never talked about Alien 3. I don't remember the timing exactly, but I might have been making the Abyss at that time, also for Fox. What came up was the idea of doing Alien 5, and at one point I pitched that I would write it and produce it, and Ridley would direct it, and we had lunch talking about this, and we were in violent agreement, then nothing happened. What happened was Fox went ahead with Aliens Vs Predator, and I said "I really don't recommend that, you'll ruin the franchise, it's like Universal doing Dracula versus the Werewolf," and then I lost interest in doing an Alien film. But Prometheus is seen as the A-level alien, as opposed to rather, the derivative. I don't think I have anything to offer on the Prometheus sequels, that's Ridley's, I think I'll stick to the Avatar universe.

Yes-- George took out a full page color ad in one of the trades, Variety or Hollywood Reporter, I can't remember which, and it was an extremely gracious gesture. I sent him a thank you note after.

Well, as a vegan, you know, it's not going to be chicken or ham. I would say probably something with a lot of tomatoes and avocados in it. Maybe some grilled vegetables. Mushrooms are good.

No cucumbers! Despise them! Won't touch them!

How is it possible to hate vinegar, and hate cucumbers, but still love pickles? It's an enigma to me. And yet here I am.

Well, Disney are doing a first-rate job designing it. It's going to be completely spectacular. It will be like being on Pandora. You will see real floating mountains. It's going to be a very magical experience just to be there and walk around. And the two rides will be absolute state of the art. But I don't how much they want to say about what those rides specifically will be, so I probably shouldn't say anymore than that. But from what I've seen so far, it will be amazing. I will be sad it's in Florida, because I won't be able to go a lot to it.

Is the T-800 armed or not armed?

An Armed T-800 with a plasma rifle will clean house, all it has to do is shoot the Alien Queen, and have it bleed on the Na'vi. I would think that all three of them unarmed. Queen beats Na'vi. Queen beats T-800, because the T-800 would tear the arm off a queen, which would dissolve the mantel and shut down the cyborg.

Now a Na'vi riding a leonopteryx, or a Na'vi riding a thanataur, that would be a different story.

I would say yes, that moment exists on every one of my films. I don't think about quitting, but I always think there might be a high probability that I will die trying. So far we've always figured it out, but Avatar felt the most hopeless. We were 3 years into a 4 year project before we saw the first usable shot.

In terms of the turn off factor of climate change, I understand it. So what's going to change a 16 year old's mind about climate change? The purpose of our show was to change people's minds about climate change as something that's happening right now and hurting people right now. Not in some foreign country, but right here, right now. When I was 16, people were protesting the Vietnam war because people were dying. If you think of it that way you're going to become engaged, because it's something that's happening right now and to people like you.

I think it's possible, but I can't think of a situation in which it would be necessary or economically feasible. But it's certainly possible with human technology right now. I've even heard of a proposal from a company in Norway that would develop a deep-sea habitat that would operate under the deep sea ice to maintain oil production infrastructure, not dissimilar to what we show in the Abyss, but I don't know if they're actually going to do it. But living deep underwater in a closed system is almost as hard as living in the moon or on Mars.

I'd like to see sensor technology, image capture sensor technology, increase so that we could do some fun things like higher resolution, larger format, adding more XY camera movement on after the image has been taken, as part of the editorial process. There are some things I'd like to do that technology doesn't allow me to do right now but i think the technology will happen in a few years.

Well, I have to be objective, or as objective as possible about that. I'm not big fans of the films, I think that the big ideas of the first movies - I didn't make the second film until I had an idea as big as the first film, and it had to do with the moral complexity of the story, and asking the audience by the end of the film to cry for a Terminator. I don't think that the 3rd or 4th film lived up to that potential. Sarah Connor Chronicles I never really watched much of it, so I never gave it a chance I get to get hooked, like you have to with a TV series. I'm hopeful that the new films, which are being made right now as a reboot, but still involving Arnold, will be good. From what I've seen from afar, it looks like they will be quite good.

You gotta remember, for Arnold, a tank is a recreational vehicle, I wouldn't read too much into it. He just wants the biggest thing he can get to drive. He was the first boy on his block to have a Humvee.

The best five presents I've ever gotten were my five beautiful children.

Oh, it must just be the way I talk! In fact i just wrote a scene yesterday where a character says "Go Go Go!" The page is open on my computer right now.

First of all, people do that in the military. The reason for it, especially over radio comm, is that people can inadvertently stop a transmission, so if something is really important, you say it three times. Which is why when I do my deep dives, I would always say "Release, release, release" so there was no doubt in case the communications got stepped on by another transmission or interference.

I'm going to go change that scene now. Nobody wants to be predictable.