JAMES CAMERON: Why Titanic Was a HUGE Risk (and What Ended Up Happening…)

Key Takeaway

Artists are people who can't not create. When you feel compelled to draw, write, or make something - when ideas flow from your fingertips and you can't stop them - you don't have a choice. You're stuck. You're an artist. Don't question it, just accept it and prepare your mind. When opportunity knocks, that door opens for just a moment. Fortune favors the prepared mind. It's not an example of an opportunity - it IS the opportunity. Take it or don't, but don't wait for the next one.

Episode Overview

James Cameron shares his creative journey from truck driver to filmmaker, discussing his childhood fascination with Ray Harryhausen films, the role of dreams in creativity, and his writing process for the Avatar sequels. He reveals how Star Wars convinced him there was a market for his imagination, leading him to quit his job and pursue filmmaking without formal training.

Full Transcript

Transcript of JAMES CAMERON: Why Titanic Was a HUGE Risk (and What Ended Up Happening…) from On Purpose. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Do you remember the first character or world that you ever imagined, even if it wasn't for a movie or a film or a idea, but just a world that you lived in when you were younger. Well, I was totally enamored as a kid with anything with anything with anything fantastic or science fiction, anything I saw on television that was fantasy and science fiction. But I remember one one sort I think there's a moment where something inspires you to to take your own action to do your own art and I remember and this may not have been the first but this is what pops to mind.

So seeing mysterious island which was a Ray Harryhausen film I probably would have been seven or eight and coming home and wanting to do my own version of mysterious island. So I started to draw essentially a comic book and but it was my own story. The animals were different. They wound up cast away on a raft as opposed to in the movie it was a balloon and I just started telling my own story. So technically that would be the first case I can remember of world building inspired by something else but not copying that thing.

And of course, Ray Harryhausen was always inspiring to me as a kid, you know. I mean, the technique that he used of stopotion animation is considered quite quaint now, you know, and and we can do things that are far more realistic, but at the time there was nothing like that terms of of his art, his craft. And it that blew my mind uh at the time. And you know, look, it doesn't take much to inspire. Kids are imaginative, you know, and and when you get something that impacts your imagination and and triggers it, and then you start to draw, all of a sudden, my hand's going, you know what I mean?

I'm drawing. I'm I'm choosing colors. What What color do I want the giant turtle to be? I picked green. No big surprise there. Did you ever get to share that with the director or anyone in the cast? I did talk I talked to Ry uh later in his life. He was pretty retired. He hadn't he hadn't done any uh stop motion for some time. But you know, I shared with him some of these early stories and the impact he had on me and so many other filmmakers.

He was absolutely the most fantastic of the fantasy filmmakers that were out there for many, many years. years. years. I can't imagine what that felt like to him to hear that something of his had inspired you to go on to see what you did. I think he was just kind of dazzled by where we where the next generation and the one after that had sort of taken it into CG and so on and things that he couldn't have imagined the technology, but he certainly could have imagined the design and the storytelling, you know, that were possible with those those new tools.

tools. tools. Yeah. No, I think that's the power of art. As I'm listening to you, I'm thinking just how many young kids are going to go and watch Fire and Ash, and that becomes their version of that movie that then inspires them to go and bring their art into the world, whether it's film and TV or poetry or music or whatever it may be. And how how important it is because I he probably didn't imagine that, you know, James Cameron as a seven or eightyear-old was watching his film.

Oh, how could he have, you know? I mean, he was just following his muse and and we all do, you know, but I I'd love to think that stuff that I've done has inspired inspired um you know, I I want to say kids, but you know, it could be anybody that wants to be an artist at at any age. And you know, I have this art show that's touring around in in Europe. It's in actually in Istanbul right now. And it's a lot of drawings that I did and paintings that I did when I was in high school and in college.

I didn't know I was going to be a big shot filmmaker someday. You know, how could you possibly know that? You know, I was just the ideas in my head. I just had to draw them. I mean, I had to draw them. And I always say artists artists are the people that can't not draw or can't not create. It's like it's not like you force yourself to create. You have to force yourself not to, you know? And if it that's flowing from you, if it's flowing from your fingertips or if it's voice or if it's music or whatever it is, if if it's flowing from you and you can't stop it, guess what?

You're stuck. You're an artist and artist and artist and you feel compelled. Yeah. Yeah. And and you don't question it. That's the crazy thing. At least I never did. You know, I' I'd sit on the the quad at at college and I'd just have my math notebook or whatever and I'd be sketching some girl sitting under a tree or some guy or my own hand or, you know, I mean, it was just always drawing. Uh, I couldn't imagine not drawing. Was Was there a part of you that felt out of place as a kid, but now that same skill is essential to who you are now, or did you always feel that you I think so.

Yeah. Uh I mean look it can get very solitary the the creative act especially when you write because you really have to just you know isolate and you need to be in your own headsp space and be comfortable there for long periods of time. So it can be isolating. I I remember and and you know I mean our memory of our childhood is always tainted by the stories that we tell ourselves and we don't remember the event we remember the story. Yes. Right. Very true. Cuz memory is an interesting thing.

We don't really, we're not video cameras. There isn't enough storage in this 3 12 lb meat computer to last a lifetime. It' be million pabytes of data and we just don't have room for that. Right? So, we don't remember the event like a videotape. We remember the story we tell ourselves. ourselves. ourselves. The story I tell myself is that I spent a lot of time on my own in my imagination in the woods connecting with nature, finding animals, finding bugs, collecting butterflies, tadpoles, whatever it was.

a lot of time on my own drawing and just thinking and creating and a lot of time with other kids organizing and doing fun collective projects. You know, the one in the neighborhood that always said, "Hey guys, let's build a fort." You know, "Hey guys, let's build a go-kart. Hey guys, let's make an airplane out of wood and hang it from a tree and fly." And which we did until the rope broke and you know, it crashed. But you know so there was an alpha social component which is now critical but there was also a quiet creative and introspective component to it and I think it was if I look at my life now it's my comfort in both of those zones that allows me to do what I do because a lot of people are good writers are good creators good artists but they don't have the social organizational component to motivate people to do things you know and to leverage their creativity and so that's a big part of it that sort of alpha component if you will.

Yeah, absolutely. It's it's fascinating because you hear about this passion in your childhood, the flow to draw and create and to be fascinated with nature and it almost makes sense but then you become a truck driver. And so walk me through that arc of your life because I feel so many people kind of up until 10 11 years old may even have these passions and dreams and ideas and creatives but then their life takes a different different different I never went to university per se. I went to the Fletcher and Junior College which is part of the junior college system.

I was intensely curious. It was the first time in my life where I was surrounded by people who actually wanted to to be there you know as opposed to high school where people didn't want to be there. just had to be there and you know and and most of them sort of rejected the learning process. I was always hungry to learn not necessarily what they were teaching what they were teaching but but you know lots of new things. I got to college and I was surrounded by people that actually wanted to be there uh and wanted to learn and and there was people were having arguments about philosophy and and and English and storytelling and and art and it was very exciting but it was unsustainable for me.

I couldn't afford to do it continuously or or endlessly. And um so I had to work and I worked various jobs, all blue collar jobs, right? And I didn't mind working. I didn't mind just sort of being, you know, and I I got married at a very early age. I had a little a little pink house with a white picket fence and a dog, you know, and it was kind of, you know, kind of comforting. I was very very limited and and simple but at the same time in my after hours as a truck driver cuz it was a you know 9 to 5 or an 8 to 5 job I was painting I was drawing I was storytelling for myself my wife didn't understand that she was a waitress and she she liked the me that was social and with her but not the me that was off you know creating all these these worlds and so I was still trying to reconcile you know that kind of social facing versus the you know uh landscape of my own imagination But I've always been comfortable in my own head that way.

Uh dreams are a big part of it. Dreams are a big part of my creativity. Source of imagery, source of little um bits and pieces of narrative, you know, because it could be quite chaotic and jumbled, but still within that there could be some interesting ideas and uh so I I think it was all just building up building up a pressure to the point where I had to do something about it. Um, and that was in my my mid20s. And so I was kind of a late starter.

I never went to film school. You know, my film school was the drive-in movie theaters of Orange County, you know, so no formal training in film aesthetics or or film history or or any of that stuff. But it was just kind of building up that all right, you know, it's that urge to when you can't not draw, when you start thinking filmically and in terms of storytelling, it's like, well, you can't not tell a story. you've got to tell somebody the damn story, you know. And I think anybody out there that that hears this that feels that way, you're stuck.

You don't have a choice. You're probably going to be a filmmaker or a writer or whatever it is, you know, just accept it. You know, you might never be rich because, you know, it's it's a difficult task and and uh there's a lot of luck, I think, involved in getting to be a a successful storyteller, but um I just followed it. I didn't I didn't question it, you know. I just quit my job one day. No ranker. Just guys, I got stuff to do. I'll see you to my other the other drivers and they're like, "What?

Where are you going?" going?" going?" You know, it I mean, it feels like a bold step looking back because without film school, without having made a film, without any of that background to watch Star Wars, I believe in 1977, and for you to then go, I need to go and become a filmmaker even though you love drawing. And it it feels like a bold step. And I think about all of our listeners in our community who are all thinking something similar. I think a lot of people in my generation and the generations after me studied something at school that wasn't the thing they wanted to be.

They have a dream inside of them. They have a story and they feel a pull, but they're scared to take that final step. What gave you that conviction? Did was it conviction or what was it? Was it I think it was a conviction. Star Wars helped. And I've talked to George Lucas about this. I said I there untold people that that you've inspired, George, but I'm one of them because but in a way I don't I don't think he was quite wanted the answer that I that I gave, which was I was already seeing all that stuff in my head.

And when I saw Star Wars, I thought if that could be the highest grossing film in history, then the stuff that I'm seeing in my mind when I listen to fast electronic music and imagine space battles and all this crazy stuff, it's like I should be doing that. You know, there will be a know, there will be a market for it. There's a market for my imagination. And that's maybe the boldest step is the step you take internally, internally, internally, you know, where you give yourself permission to at least go try it, you know, and and you and when you make that commitment, you have to go in wholeheartedly.

You can't say, "Okay, I'm going to be a filmmaker part-time, but I'm going to sort of keep a foot in like medical school." It's not going to work. You got to go. You just got to jump out of the plane and and and hope you're wearing a parachute. Um, you know, so I always tell people that opportunities come along and they're fleeting and that door will open for a moment and then it'll slide closed and and you got to be fortune favors the prepared mind. If it's really something you love, read as much as you can.

Prepare your mind ahead of time. Be ready because when that door opens, but the critical thing is to understand it's not an example of an opportunity. It is the opportunity. You either take it or you don't. You don't use it as a as a time to think about well when the next one comes along I may or may not you know what I mean that's not how it works. You go you launch you know and that opportunity for me was that a guy that I was working with on learning to sculpt and make molds who was a little bit ahead of me in the sort of fan curve of actually knowing how to do rubber armatures for stop motion and I was pretty fascinated by that.

his sister was dating a guy who was a carpenter on a super lowbudget Roger Corman science fiction film and and I just said, "Introduce us." And so she talked to him, he talked to them. We got an appointment and we went in and showed our little models and our little things that we had and I had this film that I had made with some friends and we both got jobs on a Roger Corman film and we thought we'd died and gone to heaven cuz now we were getting a paycheck on a real movie.

No, it was a total piece of crap movie. It was a little tiny movie, you know. It was actually the biggest movie Roger Corman had ever had ever made. It was like a million dollars or something like that which was huge for him. He usually made movies for like $200,000. But um and then all of a sudden I'm on a movie movie movie and then the rest just sort of made sense after that. It's it's that prepared mind thing, you know. I had read everything I could possibly read.

I had I had schooled myself on how visual effects were done. All for no money. All not at university. Just u just you know over the that sort of two or three years that I was driving trucks and working blue collar jobs. So, I guess in the back of my mind, I must have thought, I'm going to do this for real at some point point point cuz I was clearly preparing myself. But I had no entree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know anybody that knew anybody that worked on a film.

Even though I was in Orange County, it's not that far from here, not that far from the center of the film industry, but it might as well have been Montana, you know, at that time. Certainly. Yeah. Did you do you record your dreams? How do you note them down? How do you capture them? capture them? capture them? Yeah. Sometimes I'll wake up and I'll just write it down, you know, or I'll I'll I'll type it out on my laptop, whatever. whatever. whatever. How long have you recorded them for?

Like when did you start? It's sporadic. I mean, you know, I mean, it's a constant sort of streaming channel that's running all the time, and I they're not all necessarily worthy of, but every once in a while, I'll get a corker. It's like, oh man, I got to write this one down. You won't believe this. this. this. Did you ever follow the curiosity of where they come from or how they originate or, originate or, originate or, you know, you know, you know, what have you where have you found where do you think you get them from?

I look, I've I've read a lot on the theories of consciousness and and dreams and what purpose they serve and and uh there are some researchers that think they have deep psychological meaning and others that think they're really just the brain just kind of uh resetting itself and and reshuffleling memory and and you know kind of cleaning house and it doesn't really have any meaning. I happen to think that they have they have meaning to you. Now, my wife Susie believes that she has and and I I believe she's right, has received promontory dreams um about events in her life, and she's documented this in a way that I find quite compelling.

I'm not 100% convinced. Sorry, baby. Uh if you're listening, not 100% convinced, but she's given me evidence that gives me pause. And I'm a pretty hardcore empiricist. I'm not a mystic. I don't I don't follow all of the the the various winds of the uh spirituality fads and things like that. That's not how I roll. I'm very scienceoriented. You got to show me. You got to prove it. It's got to be peer reviewed, you know, and that sort of thing. It's got to be the subject of double blind studies and it's got to be falsifiable and all the, you know, empirical stuff.

But I've seen some things I don't I can't explain. and she's demonstrated some things to me that can't be explained. Wow. Wow. Wow. By my know my understanding of science, you know, I mean, I'm not a scientist, but I did study physics. I studied astronomy, and I I keep pretty current in the sciences. So, there's clearly stuff out there that's not well explained or explained at all right now. Doesn't mean it won't be someday using empirical methodology. I don't know quite how I got off on that, but we were talking about dreams and dreams are not well understood well understood well understood um even by neuroscientists and so on.

What what is what is the brain doing, you know? Um I personally think that that we're kind of we're like um large language models, you know. So all the training data of our life, it just goes into a kind of diffusion state, which is how generative AI works. it goes into a kind of a very noisy state and then out of that coaleses new things and I think the brain is just constantly creating in the way that a generative AI works and but who's creating it and who is it being created for so you're simultaneously the creator and the watcher which is kind of amazing I'm creating a simulated experience for myself one part of my brain is and another part of my brain let's call it the ego locus or whatever ever the the the person taking the ride, the kid the the kid in the roller coaster is going on the ride, which is kind of the film making process.

making process. making process. That's fascinating That's fascinating That's fascinating because I'm making a story. I'm making up a story for my kind of simulation of the audience mind, the group mind, right? So part of my brain is making up a story for another part of my brain. that part of my brain is sitting in a movie theater with hundreds of other people and receiving it and judging it like, "Okay, this is cool. I like that." You know, and you know, you try to drill down on the creative process.

I'm a writer. I'm sitting there. I'm looking at a blank screen. Where do you start? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, um, and a lot of writers do it in very different ways. Some start, you know, page one, you know, Bob walks down the street, you know, and then it just goes from there in a linear fashion. For me it coaleses probably almost in a diffusion model kind of way. I start writing notes and little images come to me and I start putting the notes together and for the Avatar sequels for example example example um I wrote over a thousand pages of notes just little fragments.

Oh, dreams and images. And sometimes dreams play a part in that and sometimes just the daydreaming process that that creative engine because I think that same creative engine that runs at night out of control nonlinear chaotic nonlinear chaotic nonlinear chaotic montage style is actually more functional during the day and can be kind of directed to stay on a topic and follow it through. um you know so maybe I'll be thinking about a character and then something will pop into my mind you know and then I'll start writing about that and it does I'm not trying to tell a linear narrative at that point you know I'll and it becomes a bit of a dialogue so I I remember the time I was sitting there in my writing office and I said well what if there was a kid that was you know a kid that was born on the base and what if he was out in the the forest with his Na'vi little kid friends and his mask got messed up And you know, they had to save him.

He was running out of air and it became a of running out of air and it became a whole thing. And so I imagined this whole thing about a race against time to get him get him back to the base. And I thought, okay, that's a pretty good story. Now, what if what if that kid was Cor's son? Cor's son? Cor's son? And then I wrote literally wrote, "Nah, nobody would believe that, you know." And then I'm going on writing more notes and about three or four pages later, it's like, "Yeah, but wait a minute, it would be really cool." Yeah.

you know, and then I just started to riff on that and then it became, all right, well, what if he was Cor's son and the human dies in the first film, now he's orphaned. His mother maybe dies as well if she was part of the military group that, you know, Jake was opposed to to to and now he's an orphan and he's he's being raised on Pandora and he's got Na'vi friends. What if his Na'vi friends were Jake's kids? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What if what if what if?

What if what if what if? Right. That's how the writing process works. And then it just and then all of a sudden ideas just you can't turn away from them. from them. from them. Do those creative ideas do you find a set of systems or rituals or processes that help you access that or is it more organic? And organic? And organic? And I know all every writer's got their own process. Some, you know, I'm up at 5:00 a.m. I run I run two miles. I have a cup of coffee.

I sit down. I write 18 pages and then I call it a day. For me, it's a slow boil. I noodle around for most of the day. get to the point toward the end of the day, maybe 4 or 5:00 in the afternoon, where I've been playing, maybe I've been doing notes, and then I'll just say, "Okay, time to write some pages." And then usually for about 3 hours, I'll write pages. And I'll I'll get four or five pages. It'll it'll come fast at that point, you know, and that's when you hit your stride in screenwriting.

Yeah. You you can see that the way you're describing the scene with Caj's son because there's almost like three different story lines kind of uh connecting in that moment around that one thing that you just pointed out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there's so many other things going on at the same time. Oh, I usually come up with way more ideas than I could conceivably pack into a movie and then I'll I'll winnow that down. I'll winnow that down to a big old fat screenplay that's unshootable.

And then I'll winnow that down. And then I'll make a movie that's four hours long. And then I'll winnow that down. And then what you get is the end result is the distillation of the distillation of the best ideas. And then that's what winds up in the lean little tight indie film that I like to call Fire and Ash. It's only only 3 hours and 7 minutes long. One thing I've been reflecting on lately is how even the smallest choices can create a big impact over time.

Whether it's choosing to spend a quiet night in to recharge or making a decision that brings you closer to a long-term goal, those moments of intention really matter. And when it comes to the choices we make with our money, that same mindset applies. I've learned that saving for the things that truly matter, like your first home or a reliable car, starts with small, thoughtful decisions. That's why I appreciate what State Farm is doing with their personal price plan. It gives you the power to personalize your plan and create an affordable price that works for your life.

You can bundle your home and auto insurance in a way that supports your journey and your goals. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. What's incredible about it when I watched it, and I was so grateful that you allowed me to go see it last week, and as I said, when I was there, the uh gentleman in the theater who was playing it for me, he told me which seat you'd like me to watch it from, which I thought was a beautiful experience to have.

So, I said I said, "Yes, I want to sit in the exact seat." And then well no it's good that you moved back though. though. though. I did that. He told me I had that option. He said I did that to uh uh today actually uh for the first time. I watched from the seat behind. Now normally that's my working seat when I'm reviewing because you can see that there's a desk there with an avid and so on. Um, but I thought, well, let me see.

Let me see what it's like from there where I it doesn't fill my peripheral field and I've got a little bit more of that sense of control that you have when it's a proenium, you know, and I thought, "Oh, this is actually pretty good." It was spectacular, but more importantly, 3 hours and 7 minutes flew by. There was never a moment. I didn't I was I didn't look at my phone once in 3 hours and 7 minutes. To me, that's the test today of having your engagement, attention, and awareness.

Right. So, we passed the most critical test test test and Yeah. And the most magnificent thing is that so much happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're just on the edge of your seat wondering what's going to happen next and so much is happening, right? right? right? And to do that for 3 hours and 7 minutes in your indie movie is uh is pretty it's just an incredible feast for the eyes and ears and like I felt like all my senses are engaged all the time which is such a beautiful experience to have where just every time a new scene opens you just totally captivated and it's well thanks.

It's it's so hard to do that for that long, especially with I I consider myself to have good presence and attention, but even then I can turn off something in 30 minutes when you you know, and so to have your engagement not just on a story level, but on a sensory level and uh I think yeah, I think you're on to something there in describing as you're saying it, I'm thinking, well, what are my goals creatively? I want to tell a great story with good characters that I care about and I I care about how they interact with each other and how their relationships evolve and and how they resolve their own conflicts, you know, in a in a way that moves me, you know, because if I can't move myself in a story, how do I expect to to move move an audience emotionally, right?

But then the layer on top of that is the sensory layer which is color, composition, all of those artistic things, you know, because I also started as a an artist, you know, figuratively, but I I could draw, I could paint, I knew the rules of of composition. I knew all, you know, I I learned all the art history, Renaissance, lighting, composition, all that sort of thing. So, there's a aesthetic level to it that I like. There's the world building level where every plant, every plant, every plant, you know, either looks real and or has a purpose, purpose, purpose, you know, and we spend an awful lot of time, fortunately, you know, we're we're blessed with good budgets and good good time to sort of let these ideas marinate and and justate, right?

And I've got great designers. It doesn't all flow from my consciousness. It comes out very out of focus, if you will. And it's an act of working with other people to bring it more and more into finite detail. Right? I've got the I call I call it uh my role is to create the grand provocation for the other creative people. And I got that term from my wife Susie who's an educator and she says the the school provides the provocation. The kids provide the investigation and the curiosity and the passion to that's brilliant.

brilliant. brilliant. Right. And I think it's very it's very good. It's the basis of her school. She can do all that stuff better than I can. I'm just a bystander to that part of it. But I think about what I do. I come in and I say, "Guys, we're going to do the coolest woven tropical village, overwater village." Now, what is that? And you'd think that they could create that in a week or two weeks. No, it took a year. And because because part of the provocation was, and it all has to be intention.

Nothing is built with rigid cut lumber the way we would do it where we create posts that are that are in um um compression, right? Everything's in tension. It's like a spiderweb. It's all woven between these big structures like the mangrove roots. And so they were actually sculpting with panty hose to get the right degree of elasticity. To put it all in tension, they sculpted the village with panty hose. This is this is absolutely true. And then they they wo these little structures that later became the the homes and the walkways and all that.

And then they developed it from there. And then eventually we started building full scale not full scale but say quarter scale models of these woven structures. And so when you walk through it, you don't really get a chance. I always want to give a little more than you can p fully perceive cuz isn't that what daily life is like? There's always more going by than you can fully perceive, you know? And so the brain becomes selective. Okay. What what's narratively important to me? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

In the moment. No. And the talking about the emotional nature of the characters and the story. My wife always says my wife always says I think James Cameron and his team have been to other planets. That's what she always says whenever she watches one of your she's like he's been to other planets in other lifetimes. Like that's what she'll say. should be like how how is it that you know you could and and you feel that because you feel the depth of the relationship the characters have for each other.

You feel that you you fully believe this is real. It must exist somewhere. exist somewhere. exist somewhere. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Because how can you feel so deeply for people who look different to you and feel different to you and have different experience? But we we feel that's a goal, right? So the goal is all right these people look different. They're physiologically different. They live in a different place. But doesn't that give us permission to step outside ourselves with our petty little differences between race and culture and religion and and politics and all that stuff.

Step well outside ourselves and see kind of universals of human behavior and the things we care about whether that's a sense of uh duty and love that a parent has for their for their child. And that's why these films travel, I think, you know, why they they resonate in in China, in India, in Europe, in Africa, wherever they go, because I'm trying to deal with universal stuff, but but I'm not trying to make stuff up, right? So, with the sequels, um, uh, Way of Water and Fire, Fire and Ash, and beyond that, if we get to make some more, I don't know if we will or not.

We have to make some money, you I mean, it's a business also, but um if we do get to make some more, the stories are about a family and so I couldn't pro not only couldn't but probably wouldn't have even tried to write them if I hadn't been in a large family and gone through all that teen angst and that issue, the father issues and not being seen and all those things and then having been a father of teens. We've got uh Susie and I have five kids and uh so I mean artists are just working out their stuff, you know, their lived experience and project and and but taking that to another world and putting it in another context allows everybody to share in it andor recognize themselves in it either in a aspirational way like wow I wish I was part of a family like that.

my family not so great or maybe I don't have a lot of siblings or maybe I wonder what that would be like or maybe it's like I'm in exactly that kind of family and I wish I wasn't sometimes you know uh I I I've been repeating to my wife I'm saying this in reaction in response to what you just said now I've been saying to my wife all week we need to have we don't have kids yet but we plan on having them one day and I said when we have kids we need to have u mantras and affirmations as a family so I keep saying to her sull's never quit like I'm like like like there you keep saying that to us.

I'm like, I love that statement. It stuck with me. And I was like to see the little child's like courage in that moment moment moment where they're in so much danger, in so much pain, but they remember that their dad told them that Sully's never quit, right? And then when she says it, when she says it later, she basically saves the world with one thing where she says, you know, come on, we can do this. Sully's never quit. And you're like, go to Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, that's that feeling of I'm like to see that courage in a young person and how these simple universal me messages are things they hold on to in a child's mind.

And then even the storyline with Pyon like for me that that that oh my I mean from the second to the third because when I watched um the second movie for me that fully just made me fall in sea life in a way that I hadn't before hadn't before hadn't before right right right and and and got a I was like wow this is genius in how you're sharing a message around you know uh water wildlife that we just don't treat well anymore. we won't protect what we don't love and care about.

Right? And so this I'm I'm working at a very small part of a much bigger project that's being run by a marine biologist named David Gruber. And he's he's working with people who are are in AI and machine learning kind of more side of AI and but they're using some large language model technology as well to decode um whale whale vocalizations. So, they've got thousands of hours of sperm whale vocalizations, and they've got some context footage of what socially they're doing, and they're decoding their their uh clicks, which are called kodas, and their click sequences.

And they're finding that they have verbs, they have syntax, they have complex language, at least as complex as human language, which is kind of amazing. Wow. But it all sounds like if you could actually hear it, it sounds like that's like a whole paragraph in in sperm whale, sperm whale, sperm whale, you know, and it's taken years and years and AI tools. So, yeah, nature is far more complex than we understand. Consciousness is clearly shared by some of the higher uh mammals, even some birds, you know, um that that have true consciousness, you know, that they recognize themselves in a mirror.

And that's one of the key signs that there is a a higher form of consciousness. Like a dog doesn't recognize itself as an individual in a mirror. And we think of dogs as conscious and of course they are uh and they're they're emotive and they're empathetic and they're very much like us emotionally, but they don't have a consciousness high enough to recognize their individual selves in a mirror. But an elephant can, a chimpanzeee can, and a dolphin can. Wow. Wow. Wow. And uh I don't know if they've done that.

I think they've proven that a beluga whale can as well, but I don't think they've done it with the great whales. It's just a little difficult to do because you can't put them in a tank and study them like some of the smaller tooth whales like dolphins and and belugas. But anyway, there's even a parrot species in New Zealand that is intelligent enough to recognize itself as an individual. Um, most birds can't. So, you know, you've got these glimmers of emergent uh consciousness besides us, you know, and now we're going to have machine consciousness emerging in the next decade or whatever it's going to be.

And that's going to be a whole new set of challenges for us as well. We don't even understand consciousness yet in ourselves. And now we're going to have to to start relating to this alien consciousness that we that we create. Yeah, absolutely. And and it's almost like I was I was speaking at a conference about AI and consciousness recently and someone asked me if I ever believed AI would ever have a soul and my response was I'm not qualified to answer whether AI will ever have a soul but but but I really hope the people building AI have a soul because it's so much of bingo or conscience more that's what I meant.

Yeah. I think you can have a if you if you believe in some kind of animus or spirit or soul or whatever it is that's persistent beyond the biological framework. I personally don't just saying that up front. But if you but I also I I won't u bet completely against something that just hasn't simply been proven yet. Um but but I but I also only I believe in believing in things that have been empirically demonstrated and being kind of agnostic or fluid about everything else. Right.

But but if if you do believe in that, then um a machine couldn't possibly have that, now could it? Because we didn't create that in the first place. And if we think we can create a machine that that can have it, then we can't. So now you get the sort of the soulless uh the soulless Frankenstein kind of mythology around that. On the other hand, if you believe that consciousness is this kind of field of of of operations that is almost infinitely complex but but um can be understood as a real a real world thing based in matter.

Um then theoretically a machine intelligence could be as soulful as empathetic as emotional as us although it might be very very very different. And then you get into the quantum physics of consciousness where you've got observer effect and things like that where there seems to be some link at a quantum level with consciousness and then all bets are off, off, off, you know. And I've had I've had some strange experiences with one one practitioner in particular that believed in quantum consciousness and could do things I can't explain to me to my mind.

What do you mean? And I'm well could actually actually create a state of consciousness in my mind by sitting across from me just like you are right now. right now. right now. And I am not I'm not hypnotizable. Nobody's ever been able to hypnotize me. I'm pretty resistant to any kind of suggestability, suggestability, suggestability, but this particular individual was able to do something. What were you experimenting with that you even sat across someone like that? My wife Susie had met this guy and worked with him and workshopped with him a lot many many years earlier and said, "You really need to meet this guy." His name was Carl Wolf.

And I was very skeptical. Like I said, I'm I'm an empiricist. You got to, you know, and I said, "All right, I'm skeptical, but I'll but I'll I'll do it for you, baby." And something happened, and I can't explain it. explain it. explain it. Wow. Wow. Wow. Something happened. Now, what was it? I don't know. Carl had hypothesis. I don't know if his own hypothesis were accurate. I'd love to ask him, but unfortunately, he he died tragically in a in a car accident. And cuz I wanted to like, can I just spend millions of dollars studying your mind, please?

That's fascinating. I mean, what's beautiful about all these worlds you create and when I was researching your story and learning about just how many failures and moments you've had to quit and give up and again I think about our listeners and I think about them S's never quit. Sy's never quit. There you go. And and even what you just mentioned right now about your own experience with your father and then becoming a father and what that looks like was are the worlds you create worlds that you didn't have or did have for you?

I think both right things. I mean, the thing that I've tried to do in the Avatar films is create a dynamic range of experience from ecstatic to terrifying to heart-wrenching, from despair to to joy, all of those all of those things. I think movies are pretty good at creating a state, maybe a state of dread or something like that, but I don't think they're good at taking you on that roller coaster ride that more is the way our our real existence is. So, I wanted to have amazing moments of beauty.

I think beauty gets forgotten in movies these days. You know, everything is about threat and conflict and all that. Um, but I also wanted to take you on an emotional journey where you get to places that are that are that are either terrifying or or heart-wrenching through loss or or whatever. Um, and that's all dependent on performance, you know, that's all dependent on the actors. The actors are are our our path through this our conduit. We we see it all through through their eyes, you know.

So, for me, the the real act of creation, everybody is quite enamored of the world building because that's what they see. they see the end result. But for me, it's about getting those characters down on the page, bringing it in with my actors, and and the beauty of the of the two sequels is that I was writing for for actors I knew, and I could hear the way they'd say it. And I didn't feel the dialogue is right until I knew that Slang, Steven Lang, who plays Cage, would say it that way, you know, or Sam would say it that way, or or Zoe would say it that way.

And then of course I threw a new element in which is Una Chaplain who you know who plays Vang who's you know pretty pretty terrifying character at times and uh I wasn't making her up out of whole cloth obviously I didn't know who the actor was that was going to going to play her but that's the part where I think that engagement that you were talking about it's not just sensory and visual it's also heartfelt also heartfelt also heartfelt right right right and uh we bring our own human experience to it every time we walk into a movie theater.

And I also think a critical part of the engagement is the theatrical experience. So a lot was made, you know, dur when during the rise of of like DVD and Blu-ray and all that. A lot was made about the fact that, oh well, you don't have a screen that big, your sound isn't that good, the theater is a better experience. But we're at the point now where you're probably your home TV set and your home soundbar and everything is as good as what what you're going to see in a movie theater.

Um, so that goes away. So what's left? What's left is in our day-to-day life, we're very fragmented and scattered and and distracted and and multitasking and we're we're we're scrolling and and you know and we're typing and we're connected and um uh you know multi- channeling all simultaneously. Very rarely do we just sit in a meditative state and just focus. You know, people who practice mindfulness and yoga and things like that, they know how to do that. Um, and they do it to clear their mind.

But what how often do we do it where we focus on a received experience? You know, some people will sit and read a novel for hours and hours. I think they're a dying breed, unfortunately. Um, but the movie theater is one of the last bastions of of a focused entertainment where we make a deal with ourselves before we go there, before we leave our homes. We make a deal with ourselves that for 2 or 3 hours we're going to be undistracted and then all of a sudden it's like the world goes away and you're on that journey and nothing else matters for that brief period of time.

And I think that's the the real magic of the theatrical experience. And it boils down to one simple thing. You don't have a remote. It's that simple. You can't pause it. You can't go order a pizza. You can't pause it, go to the bathroom. You can't be in a room with other family members who are talking and you pause it so you can hear the lame comment. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm kidding. The kids don't make lame comments, but they do comment during the movie and I'll pause it and I'm like, "Yes, you were saying.

That's so funny. Do they Do the kids ever look at the movies and go, "Dad, you just made a character out of me." Like, is there ever that? I think they see that there was a moment in time 10 years ago where who I believed they were influenced the creation of a character. But they but I think for them it's all a big laugh because they say two things. One is that was 10 years ago and two even then you didn't really know who I was.

That's brilliant. I want to come back to depth of character but I wanted to talk about failure because you've told this story before but the part I wanted to ask about was before you made Terminator you actually lost a job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we won't we won't mention the film because I heard you didn't mention it. But but like for anyone who's finally found their way, you went from truck driver, starting to make films, made this small movie, you get fired off a job. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That almost feels like, all right, well, this is the end of the road. You You said you felt that way. It felt that way. And it felt like there was going into my first directing gig that I did get fired off of after I think six or seven days of shooting and not for incompetence, it turns out. It turns out that I was being set up the whole time. And when I found that out later, it sort of put it in perspective. But I believed at the time, I internalized that I was not doing it well, you know, and I thought, "Oh crap, now I'm worse off than if I hadn't taken the job in the first place.

Now I'm at -10. I could have just been at zero. Now I have to dig out of a hole to get to zero, zero, zero, you know. Um, and so then I knew I had to do something extraordinary or something different. I couldn't wait for a directing gig to come to me. I had to create it for myself. And that's when I wrote The Terminator. I thought, I have to write something original, something that I could plausibly make that wouldn't have an enormous budget. And it was scaled to, you know, conventional locations, present day city streets, that sort of thing, so that we could do it relatively cheaply.

But I but I also thought, all right, but I've got to inject into it. It can't just be, you know, uh, a simple drama. I've got to inject into it something that I bring my as expertise. So my expertise was in design and in visual effects. I thought all right so I've got to create a careful balance here. The visual effects have to be very limited but they have to be powerful so that there so that it's not a ridiculous budget like a Star Wars movie that I knew we couldn't afford or nobody would hire me for.

So then I came up with the idea of a futuristic technology that gets injected into the present day time travel, right? So there was a a logic to the the story elements that I was playing with that was based entirely on being practical and trying to get a gig. So would I have come up with that story if I didn't have those constraints? I don't know. Maybe not, you know, but it all worked out. Um, so I thought, all right, I want this extraordinary thing that requires, you know, animation and and design, this Terminator, but I'll have it come from the future, which I don't have to see, and I'll just see present day.

You know, we could just use available light, street lighting, and and that that sort of thing, which is kind of how we did it. it. it. That that's such a fascinating point you just made though, that constraints actually led actually led actually led to brilliant creativity. It wasn't the other way around. And often we get lost in the trap of when I have resources, right? I'll make a masterpiece and you made something that's timeless. Yeah, that's really good. I mean, you know, the resources will come eventually and that brings its own curse because now you can do anything.

And when you have infinite choice, you could get paralyzed, right? And and an Avatar movie is an exercise in limiting choice because when you work with performance capture, I get a great performance, but then I can put the camera anywhere I want. I could cut it anywhere I want. I'm not constrained by just the footage that we were able to grab that day before the sun set. It becomes a kind of a problem of infinite choice. I think it makes makes you a better filmmaker cuz now why is the camera going right here?

Not because that's the farthest back I can move before my ass hits the wall and that's the widest shot I can do. Why is it here and not back there or not over there, you know? And so you it it forces you to become quite rigorous about your aesthetic. You know, that's a separate problem from getting great performance, by the way. And the weird thing about an Avatar movie, it's a little weird, is we separate performance from cinematography. We do all the cinematography later. cinematography later.

cinematography later. I don't even think about it. I don't think about the camera angles when I'm working with the actors. I know I'll be able to shoot it. I don't know exactly how I'll shoot it, but I'm just I just care about the heart and soul and the authenticity of the moment with the actors. Now I'm done with them. Now they're all working on another movie. Now it's like, okay, am I on a wide shot, close shot? Am I on a long lens, short lens? Is the camera moving?

Is it still? Is it raining? Is it not? You know, is it night? Is it day? You can make all those decisions later with that nucleus, that sort of beating heart of the performance, but you can interpret it many many different ways. So that that idea of, you know, infinite choice, it can be paralyzing or it can make you more rigorous and and it forces you to define to yourself and to the others you're working with, other editors, other designers, um, why you're doing it that way.

And sometimes I just I just talk. It's like, "Okay, good." You know, it's like I'll talk while I'm working. It's like, "Okay, I can be here. I can be there. I can put the camera here. What do you guys think?" You know, and they're like, "Well, I like the water shot." It's like, "Okay, let's do the water shot." It gets more inclusive in a way. Not that I'm doubting myself, but it's like, why not? Why wouldn't you be inclusive? Yeah, absolutely. And and you were so committed to that that you sold it for $1 and rejected all of these amazing studio budgets because they wouldn't let you direct it.

This is going back to the Terminator and you're talking about the fact that I I made a right deal with Gail Anne Herurd who was another upandcomer in the same super low tier as I was. And uh you know she had the eye of the tiger and I recognized in her the same thing she recognized in me, which is that we could we could get this done. We could make something happen together. And so I sold her the rights for a dollar in exchange for a promise.

And that promise was worth a lot more than a dollar to me, which was you will never proceed with this movie. I mean, I could have written a 20page contract to do it. Uh, but it was like a blood oath almost literally. I don't think we actually cut our hands, but it was pretty much that. And uh, and this is before we were romantically involved. This was just us, you know, a nent producer and a nent director. I said, 'You will never make this movie without me as a director, and I will never make this movie without you as the producer.

And man, they tried to split that team. They tried to get her in the rights and and not and get another director, you know, and there were times when when Gail was beating them up so much on the budget, they took me aside and said, "Look, we'll make the movie with you, but we got to get rid of her." And I'm like, "Nope, that ain't going to happen." And she said, "Nope, that ain't going to happen." So, in a way, everything else flowed from that that first film.

And so that was, you know, that was a dollar well spent. Yeah, that's that's I love that story. It just every time I hear you tell it from when I was doing research and listening to you tell it and even hearing it now, I'm just like there's such a today there's such a fixation on getting what you deserve. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And demanding what you deserve. And I think sometimes it sets you up for failure because you could be waiting a long time for someone to give you what you deserve.

your career is this constant, well, I'll build what I deserve or I'll I'll take it myself. The simple answer is you don't deserve anything. It's just a question of what you can negotiate for yourself and what you can prove prove to the world, you know, that you're you're capable of, right? And then and then all then the money will flow from that and the you know, all of those things will flow from that. I never was in it for the money in a sense. I'm still not, you know, uh it's a consequence of doing the job well and reaching people and communicating, you know.

Um I am a commercial filmmaker. I don't try to do something that's intentionally obscure or intentionally so kind of uh intellectual that you know that it doesn't connect for the majority of the audience. I'm a bell curve guy. You know, it's like I want to hit that sweet spot in want to I want to hit that sweet spot in the middle of the bell curve where the where I'm communicating with the greatest number of people. And there will be some people for whom it is it is beneath them to even consider enjoying an an Avatar movie.

And there are some people that just don't get it on the on the other end. You know what I mean? But I'm I'm I'm looking at that bell curve. And I think there are some filmmakers that that want to indicate that they're smarter than the audience and challenge them to try to keep up and piouette their intelligence. Um, not to say they're not intelligent, but come on guys, that's entertainment. You know, it can have deeper meaning. I mean, I I like to have thematic layering, you know, and I like to have things that mean something to me, and if people pick up on it, great.

But I won't make the story hinge on that, you know. Um, so I don't know. I may maybe it's that drive-in movie, you know, college of cinematic knowledge that the drive-in movie theaters of Orange County paying off, you know. I I feel like everyone looks at you and even these examples you're talking about, there's such a people would say, you know, James Cameron's a risk taker. He takes big risks and but do you see yourself that way? How do how do you I feel like it's something more than that.

Well, I think I think it's not a question of taking risk for risk's sake, but I do think the biggest risk as an artist is to not take risks because then you're just doing what you've done and what you know and andor what other people have done, which is even worse, you know, just in being in a in a kind of a comfort zone of mediocrity. Um, so yeah, I think I think you do take risks, but having taken that risk, you then do everything within your power to make sure that you are communicating that it is working.

Um, that you're not jeopardizing large amounts of other people's money by doing something foolish. You know, Titanic was a risk. you know, it was a uh very very expensive film in which basically everybody dies, you know, and it was a period piece and it was three hours long. The only successful film previously that had been 3 hours long that was a commercial film was uh a best picture winner which was Dances with Wolves. Wolves. Wolves. I always pronounce it Dances with Wolves because it was a name, you know.

So yeah, I always imagine it hyphenated, not Dances with Wolves, which is what most people say. Um but um and I don't know if that's accurate. I I you know I never asked anybody but probably is. Uh but um and so we were in uncharted territory. I mean we went in knowing it was going to be a long film and that it's a tragic film and that it's a tragic love story. Um pretty risky in a sense. You know it certainly didn't follow any of the commercial paradigms of the time.

And we reached a point after we went over budget. Even though the film was looking pretty good in the dailies and in the rough cuts, we reached a point where the studio was utterly convinced it was only a question of whether they were going to lose $50 million or $150 million. And they were so dead set on an outcome. They almost manifested the outcome they dreaded because of their lack of faith in the film. I even almost in a way lost faith in the film being commercial, but I never lost faith in it being artistically correct.

artistically correct. artistically correct. And that's when I it's the story's been told, but it's actually true. I literally had a razor blade taped to my Avid screen with a little sign that said, "Use in case film sucks." Cuz I knew that the only way out of this was through. And the only way through was to make the best possible movie you could make. Even if I didn't make a dime off it, even if it failed commercially, it had to be good and it had to deliver on on those artistic principles that we went in with.

I knew I had a great cast. I had great performances, you know, and it turned out uh from from the moment James her played the first he had he wrote three themes and just reiterated them throughout the score. He wrote three themes and he played them for me on his piano in March of 1997. And that's when I knew I had a movie because I cried on all three themes. First one, it was just like, "Holy [ __ ] dude. It's amazing." You know, and I said, "We've got a score." He said, "I haven't written the score yet." I said, "We've got a score." And I wasn't wrong.

Uh I knew from that moment that it was going to be great. And yeah, sure. He he he wrote it. He orchestrated it. He went out, he recorded it with a 100 piece orchestra. But I knew from that simple piano melody that we were good. And uh and I think at that point I started to have some faith that the movie itself would deliver on what I intended it to deliver. You know, there's a funny point in movies. It's okay if I just kind of I love it.

Please. That's my favorite bit of podcast. There's a certain point in making a movie where it's not your movie anymore. I think it's my movie when I write it. I think the second I cast it, it's not my movie anymore. And the second I'm working with designers and we're building sets and all that, now it's got its own momentum. It's got its own life. And there's a point in post-prouction where it's being received. And I don't mean that necessarily in a mystical way, although it might be.

I don't know. Um but um it's being received from the group's creative energy, what the actors did, what the designers did, what the camera operator did, um you know, what the DP did. And it's just up to me to to to see it and see it emerging and then help assist, you know, clear clear the debris out of the way, get it to to kind of emerge. And and I felt that more so, especially on these last two Avatar films, than I've ever felt before. You got a long film, it's half an hour longer than it could be.

You've got to take stuff out. So, you're pairing away and and themes are emerging and getting stronger. And it even got quite snaky on this last one because I felt the themes emerging so strongly that I actually wrote new scenes and asked the actress to come back and reshaped the whole thing. For example, there was a scene in the script which we captured where Jake teaches all the Na'vi how to fire machine guns. I was wrong. I didn't want that's not what the movie was supposed to be saying.

And so the power, the dark grim power that comes from when Coror arms the Ash people and you see them lift those weapons up and you say, "Oh my god, this whole thing's going wrong." I can't have Jake be doing the same thing. But I somehow I didn't see that in the writing, but I saw it as it was unveiling itself to me. And I called everybody back in. I said, "Guys, you got to come back." Um, and the beauty of performance capture is you can recreate the set almost instantly in like an hour.

hour. hour. So, we just were able to go back into it. And I did something else instead, which is I had Jake go get the the touk, which was also not in the script. Ah, Ah, Ah, but when you see it, you think, how could that not that's one of the most epic moments of the whole the whole the whole Exactly. Well, I had put that in movie four, but I realized I was playing too long a game, you know, and you know, the scene with with him and Spider, which I won't go into the details of, but after that, that, that, you know, when Nikki says, "Then we will find another way." That's the only way he's got left is to do the thing that he dreads the most.

Yes. Yes. Yes. That he absolutely knows will take something out of his soul. Uh but he has to do it. It's the only other way. And so, you know, sacrifice is a theme that I deal with a lot. Duty, cuz you can't have love without the fear of death, the fear of loss, uh without the need for sacrifice, without a sense of duty. What will you do to to prove yourself in a loving relationship, you know, played with that on Titanic, played with that on Aliens, you know, played with that on Terminator 2, right?

And so these the these last two Avatar films are the the same thing. What would Jake and Niri do for their children? Uh what would they do for their people? And what happens when what is right for the children is not right for the people? If you're if the right thing is to go to war and I know that you you're you're all about peace and and purpose and all of that. And I agree with all of those things cuz I think empathy is our great human superpower which will get us through this somehow.

Um but I do believe there are times when you do have to fight. I'm not a total pacifist. And I think I think I think uh in my lifetime there has not been a righteous war that the US has been involved in. But World War II when you have a predator that's destroying everything that that is of value to people. Yeah. You have to fight. You have to fight for your survival. So, and we could have a whole conversation just about this. about this. about this.

I know. I was just about to say that the uh Well, I was about to say that I'm flipping the script here, by the way, in case you didn't notice. No, I was about to say that the spiritual text that I practice and teach and follow is based on a battlefield. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's God or the divine telling the greatest archer of his time to pick up his bow and fight. Yeah. For righteousness and duty. It's it makes a lot of it it definitely resonates what you're saying that there is a need.

Yeah. So I'm an action filmmaker. So I'm you know action I mean if you think about it action is just a candycoded term for violence right when it's righteous violence practiced by the good guy in in defense of good people and so on. You know we spend a lot of time justifying it to ourselves. And I think a lot of the classic cinematic justifications aren't really sufficient. Um, which is why I went down the road of having the Tulkun be utter pacifists where they have rejected any kind of violent um confrontation up to and almost including their own final destruction.

Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. But they at the very brink they decide that there are there is something that they that they have to rise up for. And when they see the horror of what's what's happened to Tanuk and Pyakon's clan and all that, which I think is quite a heart-wrenching scene, even though though though Oh, that's like Yeah. When you make me feel for Pyon, I'm like, that's like, you know, because now you're not even feeling for something that looks remotely human, remotely human, remotely human, right?

Exactly. But but we're able to see consciousness in in others, in the eyes, you know, in dogs and in in the great apes, you know. I think it's a little harder in birds, even though they're pretty damn smart. M um whales though have a soulfulness and maybe maybe to some extent we project it on to them but I don't think so there's something very calm about whales you know and they they've they've been greatly injured on our planet so I think you know what I was trying to express there is look what we've done to them and they don't seem to hate us as much as we would if that was done to us.

Um although there are pods of orcas near Gibralar and off the Azorus that are attacking sailboats now and ripping the rudders off and leaving them a drift. drift. drift. Um Um Um Wow. Wow. Wow. So it's like are they learning are they learning that we're actually not so great for them. Yeah. Workers have a matriarchal society and the mothers teach the sons behaviors and so the question is is this being handed down? because it's been happening a lot in the last few years and it's the same group, the territorial territorial group.

So maybe all of this you're talking about you spent around 10 years just studying the ocean, right? Like if while you weren't making films at that time, you literally went deep into literally literally literally everything that you're sharing right now. It's now. It's now. It's I went as deep as you can go. Mind blown. Like you did you just put everything else away like Not really. I kind of kept my hand in. So, so after Titanic was a big hit and I was questioning, you know, is this even important?

Is Hollywood even important? It seems like such a glitzy game and it and and it seems kind of quite fatuous and and at about that time I I wound up on the NASA advisory council, believe it or not. And I looked around a room full of people who were very uh intelligent, most of them, all of them really, better educated than me, with a strong sense of purpose, right? that they were doing something extraordinary. They were exploring space and none of them cared about Hollywood. They didn't even know what was happening.

They Oh, the Oscars. What's that? Oh, yeah. You know, it's what they And I could name a movie star they wouldn't even recognize. I mean, sure, there's always little, you know, movie fans here and there, but it just mattered to them. It didn't matter to them at all. They were doing something far more important. And that was a real bucket of cold water. It's like, oh, all these things we live in this little self-reerential bubble that we think is so important and it just isn't. And uh so I thought, you know, maybe I'll just explore around a little bit um just in life, you know, and and because I had gotten to do an expedition to the rec site where I was really now becoming conversant with real deep ocean technology, I thought, why don't I just go down that road?

I know everybody, you know, I know all the scientists and researchers and submersible people and everything. So, I just started creating expeditions and building new technical systems, cameras, and lighting systems and exploratory vehicles. And and the other thing I liked about it is the ocean is unforgiving. Either your math is right or your equipment fails. It'll implode or or the electronics will flood and it won't work and you'll come back with nothing. And that's not a critic's opinion. You know, that's one I I came up with this idea, this principle that, you know, the second law of thermodynamics is not an opinion.

It's a law. It's not some critic's opinion. It's not some journalist's opinion. It's not even a fickle audience member's opinion or some some, you know, uh some blogger's trolling opinion, you know. Um it either works or it doesn't. And I I really enjoyed immersing myself in a world of hard rules. You succeed or you fail, not based on on your art or your creativity or somebody else's subjective opinion of your art because the two don't exist without each other. That's the crazy thing. So as an artist, you bury your soul and you can be utterly rejected, you know, but ultimately the point of art is to communicate with other humans.

They may hate it, you know, so you you you put yourself at risk. I thought, you know what? I'm just going to go into an empirical world, a cartisian world where it either works or it doesn't based on good engineering. And that was good. And I learned some really important human lessons in that world as well. Cuz when you're offshore with a small team, it's all about respect and cohesion and and that bond. And when you come back to shore, you can't even explain to people how hard it was or why it worked or what it took, you know, but that bond exists between those people.

Then I realized, okay, we're only as good as our team. And when I after Titanic, I put together a team to do The Impossible, which was Avatar. Nobody had ever made a film like that. It was a new form of cinema. And I remember we we we fell on our ass. Some of the first things we tried, we were face down on the ground, and I we'd stop in the middle of a production day and pull out a table and sit around it, and there'd be a bunch of glum faces because it wasn't working.

And I say, "Guys, this may seem like the hardest day of the production. This is going to be the day you remember because this is the day we write page 38 of the manual that tells the rest of the world how this stuff works and we're going to do it and we're going to figure it out." It was like, you know, Sully's never quit, right? But and then we did and we figured it out. And then there's such a feeling of pride and cohesiveness in the group after that and you start to feel like, "Okay, bring the next challenge.

we'll figure it out. And the team spirit and the team morale is so high now. This was 19 years ago in 2006. The team spirit and the and the cohesiveness is so high now. People really they they hated when it all came to an end here a few months ago as people dropped off one by one as the project was winding down and everybody just can't wait to get back to the next one. Now, I don't know artistically as a director if that's something I want to do right away next.

there's a pretty strong I feel a strong pressure on my shoulders shoulders shoulders to do it to bring that team back together because it's so important for them, you know, and that's not a bad reason to do something at all, you know, to make other people happy is not a bad reason to do something or to make other people feel fulfilled. Um, but I also have other things I want to do as well. So, it's a little bit of a it's a little bit of going off a cliff.

I I I've I've told Susie, my wife, that um I feel like I'm Wy Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon and I just ran off the cliff and I haven't hit the ground yet. There's that moment where my legs are pinwheeling in the air, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's okay. That's okay. The scariest moments are always the moments of the greatest opportunity, I think. How how do you like when you're building a universe with people, you're building lives and hearts and worlds that connect on such a deep level?

You I feel like when I'm listening to you, I'm like everything you do is highly emotional and emotive and heartfelt and deep and you can't help but cry when you're watching your work, you know. Maybe not Terminator, but but what follows. Or maybe maybe maybe Terminator 2 when the Terminator go on. when he goes down into when he goes down into the steel and his POV goes to nothing. Come on. People People tear up. Yes. Yes. No. And so you see that and I'm like it feels like the emotion of creating it, creating it, creating it, whatever we're getting out of it is because the emotion that's creating it is going into it.

And this team that you are are are curating is bringing all of that emotion. as you said, whether it was the pantios that are building the physical buildings in the movie or whether it's the emotion that the characters are feeling and Tuk is feeling and etc. How do you even start to detach from that as a team when you've been immersed in it for decades at this point? Maybe you don't, maybe you just keep going. I don't know. Well, look, I mean, there are there are a number of milestones here that have to be met.

First of all, the film has to succeed financially, and that's not a given. Everybody just assumes it's a no-brainer, but the theatrical marketplace has been dwindling and and collapsing about 35%. It hasn't rebounded, and people's habit patterns have changed. And so, the thing that I grew up and and and love and and feel such um uh strong sense of passion for may be becoming obsolete. maybe and the cost of making movies is continuously going up and this and the demand is falling. So that's a little bit of a death spiral right there, you know, and so maybe it's maybe it's going to be okay.

We were sort of successful if we can do the next one cheaper, we can continue, right? And then there's also that wild card. You know, there are other projects that I have that I've been sort of sitting on in the in the background. And there's a thing that I want to do about Hiroshima. I bought a book recently, but it's a story I've been following and and you know, excavating and researching for really my whole adult life. It's something that I really feel strongly I need to do at some point.

It's not a big film. Sounds like it would be, but it's not a big film in the sense of an Avatar film. It's not a four-year commitment. It might be a one-year commitment. Um, so I need to do that. And so, you know, why why is that so meaningful to you? What about it? I just think that we live in this world. I mean, I think Katherine Bigalow's film title is it's kind of growing on me. The House of Dynamite. It's like we live in a house.

Imagine you live in a house and you feel perfectly normal and you go about your business and you're chopping onions for the guacamole and you're going to watch your favorite show, but the basement is filled with dynamite and it could go off at any moment. That's the world that we live in, you know, and that it hits that metaphor. And so, uh, it's not a metaphor. It's it's our world. So I I I feel that we have a a kind of a systematic forgetting of history, you know, just at at that remove.

And we're enough removed from the event of of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think people need to be reminded what these weapons really are and what they really do. Of course, the the punchline of the movie is going to be the card at the end that says there are 12,000 nuclear warheads deployed in the world today. Each one is 100 to 500 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. And you're going to witness it and you're going to go through it with the main characters and it's not gonna be pretty.

It might be a hard film to watch. In fact, it might be my least successful film. But I just feel it's it's that that's that thing of duty. You know, you're all about purpose. We define our own purpose. You know, we choose purpose for ourselves. And it doesn't all have to be, you know, obviously uh benevolent like, you know, maybe helping out a soup kitchen and and and easing the pain of others. It might be something that's more of a warning that helps helps guide us away from the rocks of of destruction of civilization.

As an artist, I think it's important to consider these things, you know, and not feel powerless, powerless, powerless, cuz it's easy in a in a world of 8 billion people to feel powerless. And yet empirically I can look at it, oh I'm reaching millions of people. I'm reaching hundreds of millions of people with a movie like Avatar, you know, maybe I won't reach as many people with a movie like Ghost of Hiroshima, but I'll reach some, you know, and you never know. You you never know the the causal chain that that puts a person at a moment where they've been influenced by something.

But you have it even in Fire and Ash. I mean that that scene that you were referencing without giving too much away of Quaridge actually arming you know and there all of a sudden you see the becoming of terrorists like that idea of the government you know all these messages are just I I feel like there are so many deep layers to the movie you could keep going whether it's family whether it's racism whether it's equality whether it's equity whether it's you know whether it goes down all the way through to absolutely governmental politics that we're seeing today I mean the the movie is filled with so many powerful messages and just seeing each other, you know, it all ultimately it all goes back to connection and connection and connection and is that the root?

Yeah, I think so. You know, there are two moments in the film where people say they see each other and they understand each other and one gives you this feeling of vast dread when when Verog says she sees Cage and she sees this vision of destruction and for herself, you know, she's she's like uh you know, Kie. Kie. Kie. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. Uh and then when Nati sees spider, you know, um finally finally finally and there's a bridge across the two species, across that divide, across that because she becomes quite a racist in the film and that's by design.

Uh it's like we take our most beloved character and we challenge you to really walk in her shoes and go the hard yards of what loss and grief can do. And I think about all these people and everything that they've lost in the world, whether it's in Gaza or Sudan or Ukraine or wherever. And how does that not generate just a hatred that will span generations? Well, that's the cycle that we have to break, right? You know, Lo Lok says something at the beginning and it's kind of like a little cheeky to actually say your theme out loud, you know, in the voice over here.

I'm going to tell you what the movie's about. Okay. Okay. Okay. uh you know and he says the the fire of ash leaves uh the fire of hate bring leaves only the ash of grief but he doesn't complete it which is from that ash of grief comes that fire of hate again and the cycle perpetuates indefinitely so how do you break it right that's the challenge I think that's presented in the movie you know how do you break it and how you how do you know when it's not about about hatred and revenge and when you fight defensively for the things that you value, you know, as opposed to offensively going out after somebody to punish them for revenge, to take what's theirs, you know.

Um, and you see all of that happening in in the world right now all over the place. And, uh, you know, you wonder this is I'm going to circle this back to AI for a second. The thing that will the thing that the the the proponents of artificial super intelligence always say is, well, we'll we'll manage the alignment problem. will align AI to our common good as human beings. But we can't agree on a damn thing. We can't agree on what's right and wrong, what's ethical, what's moral.

You know, Republicans's idea of that is very different from a Democrats, uh, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu, you know, a Shintoist, whatever it is, everybody's got a different opinion and we can't agree on anything. So, how are we going to suddenly form this wonderful moral consensus so we can teach it to something smarter than us that we can't control? I mean, if that's not the the the biggest recipe for disaster I've ever heard in my life, what is, you know, now I am a science fiction fan and it always goes into the darkest possible, you know, scenario because that's where science fiction goes because it's meant to be a warning to us about possible futures.

But, okay, I we're living in a science fiction world right now, you know. So I look I look at you. I look into your eyes. I see your kind of soulfulness and your enlightenment and what all the things that you do and why you do it. And I think all right that's why we're going to make it because there are people who are practitioners of empathy and connection and they're out there and they are legion. They just don't ever seem to get into positions of power and and and you know that where it really makes a big difference.

It makes a big difference. It just seems like all the wrong people elevate. I don't know how you feel about that and I don't know if that keeps you up at night. Yeah. Well, I I think that's partly why I try and do what I do because I think I saw that for a long time. And of course, what I love about the way you build character, which is true of me or anyone, is that no one's perfect. Everyone's flawed and has multiple, you know, when you look at all of the characters in Fire and Ash, like they're not just good and bad.

Like that would be and the hence the scene we were just talking about with spider like that moment is so I mean I can't believe you went there. I was like wow this is like really testing. Yeah, you know, everything that I believe to be true about this family, and I'm not giving it away, hence speaking in broad terms, but so, so to be really clear, there's no one who's perfect or flawless or, you know, and and of course, I have all of those challenges myself, but I find that what I try and do by having this platform and by having these types of conversations with people like yourself and allow for these we've like my vision and I think you'll relate to this based on what you were saying, I love the bell curve, too.

So when I started this, my vision was to make wisdom go viral. I said I wanted to find a way that hundreds of millions or billions of people would engage with themes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That were at one point saved for the elite or niches. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. And we do that. We use 750 million views a month. a month. a month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. About conversations like this, which is proof to me that people want this. And so I think we may I agree with you.

I don't think we'll do it through the traditional means. means. means. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But art and creativity and now the microphone belongs to everyone. There is an opportunity to to galvanize community and connect to these higher parts. We we have to do what we can do. Our voice may carry not very far or it may ripple outward very very far. We have to do what we can do. And for me, what drives me is being a parent, you know, and knowing that there's there's a a legacy that's being handed to my kids by my generation.

And I just want it to be the best that it can be. It's not going to be perfect. It's not even might not even be that great, but everything that people like yourself and and hopefully I do can improve it incrementally, you know. Um, and so anyway, you just you just keep banging away at it, right? Yeah. Well, I think I think the stories you tell do that in the most profound way. And I think I do think that art transcends so many things in the world as you said and anyone can sit in that room, forget their designation or their seat or their status and watch a movie about humanity and connection.

But well, you you're using the term connection and I think of that as an extension of our our impulse to empathy. We have a natural human impulse toward empathy. empathy. empathy. Yeah. I think we all have it unless you're a psychopath and that's 1% of the population. So 99% of the population has an impulse toward empathy. I think where empathy goes ary is that it it's narrow and powerful as opposed to diff more diffuse. Right? So when we have uh an empathy for our family, for our children, for our friends, then everybody else starts to look like an enemy.

Mhm. enemy. Mhm. enemy. Mhm. And I think it's that narrow spotlight of empathy where where it breaks down. On the other hand, we can hear a story about somebody in another state or another country and all of a sudden we're weeping for that person because our mirror on allows us to feel their pain. pain. pain. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. But we can't feel the pain of the world. And but we have to we have to be able to expand it. Not where it crushes us, but to where we don't see the the other as an enemy.

Yes. But somebody who's maybe an equal victim with us of you know a a kind of um a world that uh can go can go against you and you know medically and any any kind of moment you know things can go against you and there are people that are less fortunate people that are more fortunate. Um but never people never feel like they have enough. That's the problem. They never it's not that they're greedy. It's that they never have enough to feel completely secure and safe for their family.

So there's a certain point where you have to be willing to risk your own family and risk your own comfort for the good of a of a greater group. And that's a very very hard place for for most people to go. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, but there's an image that I always wanted in one of the Avatar movies, which is seeing that world from orbit at night where you see everything connected. you know that those little glowing, glowing, glowing, you know, you you basically see the mind or the heart of Awa of that connected connectedness.

And so I managed to squeeze it in. I managed to squeeze it into this this film and hopefully people will resonate, you know, for what it what it means, what it's meant to mean. Anyway, Anyway, Anyway, James, uh I have a warning from your team because you have to get after. So I want to uh end with a final five that we do with every guest. Uh I could talk to you for hours and I hope we do get to talk more offline but uh we end every interview with these final five.

They have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. sentence maximum. sentence maximum. Okay. Okay. Okay. So James Cameron I can do a six paragraph long sentence but but but Okay. So we asked these to every guest. James Cameron these are your final five. Question one. What is the best advice you've ever heard or received? I had a teacher that said you have unlimited potential. and he meant it and it it changed a lot for me. It's a great answer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

Roger Corman told me to always sit down on set. on set. on set. You stand up a lot. I never sit down. That's a great answer. Uh question number three. What's the hardest thing you've learned about yourself that shaped your art? The movie is not more important than the process of working with people to make the movie. the movie. the movie. Wow. Wow. Wow. That took 40 years. No, maybe 30. The people are more important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's beautiful. Uh, question number four. number four.

number four. Tell us the real reason why Jack couldn't fit on the door. Ah, you went there. I had to Okay, this interview's over. Um Um Um because his chivalry demanded it. It's a great answer. He loved her and he would not take a chance that they could both survive if they could both die. That's a great answer. Yeah. And by the way, Romeo and Juliet had to die. But there sacrifice, duty in your themes. Just there's so love, love, death, sacrifice, duty. They're all related and they're all thematic in all of my films.

Why do you think that is? I don't know. You still discovering that? Still curious about that where that comes from. from. from. Can I speak in longer? Yeah, please. Yeah. Yeah, that's a big question. I don't know because I these are things that I'm finding later in life I actually am confronting and having to deal with but in but in early life they just made sense to me. You know uh I always say all my movies are love stories but they're not necessarily conventional love stories.

Duty and sacrifice are things that I I don't even know if it's incultterated. It might even be just biological. It might just be innate. I don't know or some combination. I think Canadians in general tend to be less selfish. Um, but you know, you can't generalize about an entire population and there were some real [ __ ] in the town I grew up in. So, you know, you know, you know, um, I don't know where that comes from, but it's a belief system. Definitely a belief system. belief system.

belief system. I'm glad I asked you that question now because we got a got an answer that just Yeah. show shares so much more of your heart and and where it all comes from. Uh, fifth and final question. And we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? A law. A law. Wow. Legislating morality. That's a hard thing. See the person in front of you. I don't know how you'd enforce that.

Just see them. them. them. What does it mean to see? Uh see who they are. See see see who they are on the inside. You know in in the avatar universe I see you can mean I understand you. It can mean very simply I see you. You're here. Hello. It's like hello. It can be I see something about you I never saw before. I understand you. It can mean I love you. meaning that fullness of understanding another person that goes to a to a higher level.

It's got many layers of meaning in in Na'vi lore. It's it's very deceptively simple, you know, but it goes back to that empathy thing. It goes back to the mirror neuron. It goes back to projecting yourself into their situation. I also find that there's a little thing I do where it doesn't matter where I am, especially if I'm in a car or I'm just meeting some driver that's driving me from the airport or I'm on the street or I'm killing time someplace. I just start talking to people and I want to hear their story, you know, people that people that the average person would think that a person like me would never talk to.

you know, the the janitor, the the the guy at selling the churro, the you know, I just want to talk to them. Maybe it's a writer's instinct, you know, to want to hear stories because I think everybody is a universe. And you know, that sort of Trump idea that they're all a bunch of losers and they're not worth worth anything drives me insane, me insane, me insane, you know, cuz it's not about social standing or status or having a PhD or or the argument from authority.

Oh, his argument may, you know, his opinion is more important than than that person. You know, I just want to hear everybody's stories. I find them all fascinating because we all are on this unique path and we're all our camera is viewing the world from a unique position. position. position. I felt that most in uh watching Sully and Courage's relationship through fire and ash. and ash. and ash. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. There's a lot of seeing each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In different moments which in moments you don't expect it.

Yeah. And you it it the story definitely teases to to a potential. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know. You know. You know. Yeah. Well, we can't give everything away. away. away. Well, I can't wait to watch it again. I'm going to take my family when I get back to London for Christmas. I'm so excited. James, I hope we do see four and five happen. I can't wait to watch them. them. them. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see them. But uh such a pleasure sitting with you. Thank you for your energy, your presence, your connection with me today and uh I hope for many more.

So, thank you so much. Well, thanks. Thanks, Jay. Uh really really a wonderful interview, you know, and I'm glad we got to go to important meaningful things instead of all the stupid stuff I normally get asked. I only asked you one. You did. You You definitely went there on that one. But you know what? At this point, it's like there are worse problems to have than people still arguing about the demise of a character from 28 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, as a filmmaker, it's kind of like, great, thank you.

Thank you for that. that. that. Well, thank you. If you love this episode, I need you to listen to one of my favorite conversations ever. It's with the one and only Tom Holland on how to overcome your social anxiety, especially in situations where you're not drinking and everyone else is. We talk about his sobriety journey and so much more. He gets really personal. I can't wait for you to hear it. It's going to blow your mind. The quote is, "If you have a problem with me, text me.

And if you don't have my number, you don't know me well enough to have a problem with