James Cameron - 'Avatar: Fire and Ash'

26:48The studio didn't like it. John Landau, who normally supports me 100 percent, he did not like it. And I said, no, we're spitting. I put my foot down. I was like, all right, there's too many people against me on this. I am definitely not going to agree. Well, let's look at this crazy moment where I guess within a three-month period, because Arnold hadn't been ready to start Terminator right away, you write Terminator, Rambo, First Blood Part 2, and the beginning, I guess of Aliens. I was supposed to write all of Aliens but I didn't look at the fine print of my deal on Rambo which was that I had to do a draft and then I had to do a set which is draft revisions and then a polish.

27:27It's like what's this set? What's this polish? I'm like I had allocated exactly four weeks to write Rambo and then I had four weeks to write Aliens. Natural right? Like what you do. I had eight weeks. That was it. Right. Because I had talked to David Geiler when they offered me what they called Alien 2. I had just that morning gotten offered First Blood Part 2. I said, David, Carol Coe, because he knew the Carol Coe guys, Carol Coe offered me First Blood Part 2 and you guys are offering me Alien Part 2. I like them both. I don't know what to do. And he said, don't be an idiot. Just take both of them, take a lot of drugs and write them both.

28:05I said, David, I don't use drugs. He said, well, then you better drink a lot of coffee. So he told me to do it, right? So I write Rambo first, and then I have to do these sets, and now I wind up falling a couple weeks behind schedule. So now I'm writing aliens like crazy, trying to get it done. I get about 65 pages, something like that. And it's going well, but there's only so many hours in the day. There's only so much coffee you could drink, right? And so they pulled forward the start of my prep, and I had to do a shooting draft for Terminator, and I wound up running out of time and I wasn't going to sacrifice my first directing gig, first real directing gig.

28:44So I call up David Goddard and I say, all right, I got 65 pages. He said, what? You're not going to finish the script? I said, no, I got to go shoot this movie. And anyway, I need to shoot that movie for you guys to seriously consider me as a director in any case. And he goes, literally, you'll never work in this town again. Click. I'm like, fuck, people really say that. They really say it. Well, I'm sure when the Terminator, which cost$6 million, made$80 million. No, it was before that. It was before that. I called Walter Hill and I said, Walter, I got 65. I'm stuck. I got to do this other thing.

29:19He said, I get it. Send me the pages. It better be good. He calls me the next day and he says, we will wait. And Walter was as good as his word. They let me finish Terminator, release it, and then finish writing Alien 2, which I called Aliens by then. Can we just establish how you came to call it Aliens? Oh, yeah. It's a funny story. Well, I like the title Aliens, but I had to sell it to the brass at Fox. And it wasn't Larry Gordon. He came in a little—no, it was Larry Gordon. It was Larry Gordon. I went in, and I just happened to have a copy of the script in my hand, and I flipped it over, and I wrote Alien, and then I wrote an S, and then I put two lines through it and turned it into a dollar sign, and it said, that's our movie.

30:03And they all smiled, but we like it. And it turned out to be true. We were ahead, obviously. I guess if we have one thing to zero in on about aliens, it's that that was – I know people said this to you. Like you're kind of signing up for a raw deal no matter what you did, right? It was kind of a no-win scenario. And I'm trying to remember who it was. I had lunch with a producer. Oh, she was Julia and Michael. Pat Phillips. Phillips that produced Close Encounters. And I was having lunch with Julia Phillips. And she said, you shouldn't do this movie. Now she wanted me to do some movie for her. You shouldn't do this movie.

30:42Anything that's good in the film will be attributed to Ridley Scott. And anything that's bad, and if it fails, it's totally your fault. It's just a bad move. And my answer was, yeah, but it's cool. Which is pretty much my answer to everything. If I think it's cool, I'm doing it. It's that simple. There's no big intellectual process involved. Well, you were correct there. Now, the next one, so Aliens was 86, The Abyss was 89. And I want to ask you about that because I know unbelievably grueling shoot on which your actors got impatient, but you had it even harder, of course. And I also, you know, VFX capabilities at the time were pretty limited, but you guys did the pseudopod scene was pretty amazing.

31:25Yeah, we went into new territory with CG. It was the first soft surface character that had been done with CG for a movie. They had done the rigid figure of the stained glass night the year before for young Sherlock Holmes. But while I know that it was a rare movie that wasn't a giant hit for you, at the same time you have said, quote, I didn't quite achieve what I wanted to achieve what was in my mind, But I don't think I could have done Titanic if I hadn't been through the process on the abyss. Yeah, yeah. I think that it's that thing of seeing the lightning strike and knowing what you have. And I saw what I had with Mary Elizabeth and Ed Harris in the scene where she drowns and then gets brought back to life.

32:11And that's such a powerful scene. But I still tried to go beyond it with the spectacular ending where the mothership comes up and all this thematic stuff and with the wave sequence and all that. And if you've ever seen the full film that has the wave, the kind of the day the earth stood still kind of moments in that film. It was very wildly ambitious kind of intellectually and thematically. And I stepped over a dollar to pick up a dime. You know, I missed the heart and soul of the film, which was those characters in that scene. And so the movie never lived up to the promise of that scene subsequently.

32:47Right. So it was a question of learning how to orchestrate and modulate a movie so that it lands at the right time in your heart and hits you really hard. Because I think people got hit by that scene, but then it went on. And it overstayed its welcome. And also the visuals weren't up to what I had in my head. That was another limitation. And so I think Titanic was about, okay, how do I orchestrate this better? How do I make sure I stick the landing with the audience emotionally? And then obviously we did. Going back in time on the Titanic, that stuff was amazing. Well, next up, Terminator 2, Judgment Day in 91.

33:26That's seven years after the original Terminator. A lot had changed about Arnold's screen persona. And I know that for the second Terminator, obviously his character is quite different. As you've put it, quote, we basically made the baddest badass killer bad guy into a good guy. Yeah. Close quote. Are those things a coincidence that his screen persona had changed? and so you're going to do something different with the character? Or did you see that as a risk to make such a big change? Everything's a risk. And I think if you're not taking a risk, you're taking the biggest risk, which is to be predictable, right?

33:57So to me the biggest risk in filmmaking and storytelling is to do that which seems less risky. And that's the great paradox, I think, of Hollywood. And, you know, I wanted to work with Arnold, obviously, again. and I actually originally thought of like an Arnold Terminator, a T-800, that had been reprogrammed to be good fighting one that was still, you know, essentially evil or directed against the main characters. And then I thought, well, that's kind of boring. But I had had this idea way earlier of this liquid metal version of a robot from the future. And that was actually my original idea for the Terminator going way back, talking about like 82 when I was first writing it.

34:41and I thought I'll get that guy and we had done the abyss so we knew how to do kind of liquid you know like water so I called up Dennis Mirren at ILM and I said what if there was a guy who was a liquid and could form into what was indistinguishable from a human we'd use the actor for that but he becomes a liquid and I said liquid metal or like he'd look like like mercury and he said maybe how many shots right and i think we ultimately wound up in fact i know we ultimately wound up with 42 shots whoa we had 16 shots of the pseudopod on the abyss we were up to 42 shots a couple years later now cut to now yeah we just delivered you know avatar 3 you know the Fire and Ash, 3 ,500 CG shots, every single one of which was infinitely more complex than the T-1000 scenes.

35:38So, you know, I mean, everything's grown, you know, on a log curve since then. But it was very challenging at the time. And Stan Winston filled in a lot of the shots with cool, very cool, very imaginative foam rubber prosthetic gags that, you know, like whenever the bullets hit the T-1000, those were little things, little mouse trap things that sprung open and he seemed to be getting shot. It was all very cool, very cool stuff. But yeah, so the key there was I had to talk Arnold into this. Arnold read the script, so we're all flying to Cannes to announce various Carolco movies. So Carolco got a jet, packed it with agents and actors and producers and directors, right?

36:22and I'm like rapidly trying to finish the script and I know when the car is coming to pick me up to go to Cannes and I got to get the freaking script done because I got to give it to Arnold and I'm printing it out and my printer jams up and I'm fixing the printer and finally I get the whole thing printed out and it's warm like the whole thing is warm like a newborn baby and I shove it in a bag and I run to the limo and they race to the airport and I'm the last guy on the plane and I walk in And all of Hollywood, because Carol Co. was the number one big bucks studio at the time, paying much more than the majors.

36:59And so all this talent on the plane, all these stars and directors, and they're all like, you know, as the last seat gets filled by this schmuck that everybody's waiting for. And as I walk by Arnold's seat, I had him the script and he reads it on the plane. And we have lunch the next morning in Cannes. and he's like, Jim, this is the script? I'm like, yeah, I love it. It's fantastic. It's going to be, he goes, but I don't kill anybody. I'm like, that's it? See, they'll never see it coming, right? And he's like, I don't know. I don't know about this. He says, I'm the Terminator. I kicked the door in.

37:41I machine gun everybody. It's like, I know. They'll never guess that this is what we're going to do. The other guy's going to do all that. and he's like I don't like it you know I'm like alright and he said okay okay okay alright I trust you but alright before John tells me I can't kill anybody I could kill people then right and I'm like okay you caught me out on a legal loophole there Clarence Darrow that's literally what I said to him I don't know if he knew who Clarence Darrow was but I said no that's the whole point you're the hero you're the hero of the movie you're the baddest ass motherfucker in history and you're the hero right you know but then he started to really like the idea you know and he started to like the idea of the relationship with the with young john and all that you know and i think that at that time ended up being the most expensive movie of all time but also hugely uh successful it became the most successful r-rated film i think ever and it stayed that way for years and years but uh yeah it was definitely because it i think we went off at 85 million, which was certainly up there.

38:46And then we drifted up to, I think, just right around 100 million bucks. It just cost what it cost. I mean, you know, it was not the easiest film in the world to shoot. It's not like we had any big disasters along the way or anybody got sick or couldn't perform or anything like that. It was just, you know, and we did a lot with Second Unit, a lot of stuff that I didn't do directly. But I tried to do as much of the action as I could because I like shooting action and I think I'm fairly good at it and I don't like giving it to second unit if I can avoid it. And I'm more sanguine with that these days if we have good previews.

39:23Well, just three years later, you and Arnold were back with True Lies. And that was risky as hell. That was in a funny way. That was riskier than Terminator 2 because of the tone of the film. I had never done comedy. This was an action comedy. Arnold had done an action comedy right before that that had just come out, Last Action Hero, and it bombed. So we're like not only did we – it's not that we didn't have data that we could do it. We actually had data that it probably wouldn't work, right? But we stuck to our guns and Arnold believed in the story. He brought the story to me. Oh, really? OK.

40:02I didn't create it from scratch. Someone had told him about this little French film about this guy that's a secret agent but his wife doesn't know about it. We screened the film together, and I said, okay, I see what makes sense to you about this, because you lead this extraordinary life as a movie star, as Mr. Universe and all that, and then you come home and you've got kids, and you just have feet of clay as dad coming in the front door. I wasn't a parent yet at that point, but I learned that lesson myself the hard way downstream with five kids. So I said, all right, I get this. I know how to do this.

40:41Just let me write something. So, yeah, so we did that film. And the funniest thing on that film, again, all the big creative tussles I think happened at the beginning. The creative tussle with Arnold on that one was over Jamie Curtis. He said, she's too beautiful. She's too sexy. Nobody will buy her as a housewife. Now, it took me a long time to get that from him because what I got was from his agent. Arnold doesn't want Jamie well why well I don't know but he doesn't want her I'm like that makes no sense I wrote it for her right you know and so I said all right well I'll just look at other actresses and so I auditioned I auditioned everybody who was good at that you know I mean I could I could name the names and you go yeah she'd work perfectly and finally just one night I was I was watching um one of Jamie's films I can never remember which one it was and it just she was so right for the character.

41:37It's exactly what I saw in my head. So finally I just called Arnold up and I said, how much do you trust me? He actually came over. He came over and he sat down and he said, Jim, what is it? And I said, how much do you trust me? He said, well, you know, we've made two movies together and we have this great working relationship and, you know, we're friends, we ride motorcycles, you know, I mean, I know you, you know me. Of course I trust you. I said, no, Arnold, really, for reals. You know, how much do you trust me? And he said, totally. I said, totally? Totally. I said, all right, it's Jamie Lee Curtis.

42:11And oh, man, his eyes frosted over for a split second, a split second. And then he went, okay. That's great. He said, okay. It was a short meeting after that. Yeah, that was it. Because I still hadn't proved my point. But I think a week or 10 days into the shoot, he came up to me. He took me aside and he said, I know I resisted this. but she's amazing. She's perfect. So that was 94. And they became pals and they've been pals ever since. So it all worked out. But trust is a big part of our business from a creative standpoint. Nobody trusts anybody in our business. That's why I have contracts this thick.

42:53But I've always sort of gone on a handshake on my deals. And it's really, really important to have the trust of the actors that you work with. and for them to trust me. That was 94. Around that same time, this is three years before Titanic, you began thinking about and I think doing a treatment, an 80-page treatment of what would become Avatar. Yeah, that was in 95. So it was after I had finished True Lies. So here's the really curious part. True Lies took the place of Titanic. I went to Russia to talk about the subs in 92. and I could have gone either way but I wound up doing True Lies just because there was momentum on that and we had this deal with Arnold and all this so I didn't revisit Titanic until later but in the middle there in between the release of True Lies in 94 I started looking at other projects and I had digital domain at that point and it was going strong and I wrote a treatment for Avatar it was an 80 page treatment very detailed had every species all the culture all that sort of thing and the whole story exactly as it ultimately became.

44:02But it was to feed that engine of R &D at Digital Domain. And then I wound up making Titanic instead of Avatar because Avatar seemed too experimental at that point, too risky. Even, you know, I mean, I love taking risks and I love taking challenges, but you've also got to do it in a very rigidly disciplined way or you will get your ass kicked. And I would have gotten my ass kicked if I'd tried to do Avatar at that point. So I did Titanic, which seemed like a less risky alternative. Are you kidding me? All the women wear corsets and everybody dies at the end. Now, a few days ago, we did a roundtable with other directors, including Catherine Bigelow.

44:48And it was in that same moment, 95, that you guys collaborated with you and Jay Cox wrote and she directed Strange Days. Yeah, I wrote a very elaborate treatment, 80-page or so treatment, and then Jay adapted it into a draft. And then Jay and I worked together on what became the shooting draft, right? Well, the reason I bring it up— For Strange Days. Is that, of course, the thing that that shares in common with Avatar is this idea of vicarious experience that you can— Exactly, exactly. Live as somebody else, basically. Right. Well, social media is basically vicarious experience now. I mean, the technology is very different than what we showed in Strange Days, but that sense of sort of voyeuristically eavesdropping or sharing your life.

45:36Everybody wants to be, you know, they want everybody to follow them and see what they're doing and the whole influencer culture and all that. So Strange Days did anticipate a lot of that stuff. Where does that come from, though? Obviously, it's a great interest of yours. You've spent decades in the world of Avatar and thinking about it even 30 years ago with both Strange Days and Avatar. Can you pinpoint why that would be of interest to you? You know, it just seemed like a natural outgrowth of where media was going to me, you know. And, you know, I mean, I was steeped in science fiction. And the science fiction literature at that time was what was leading the pack was the cyberpunk genre.

46:17So you had Neuromancer and things like that. And so this seemed like it was in that general zone. It wasn't about cyberspace at all. And it got lumped in with some kind of cyberspace movies of that year. And I think it suffered from that because people thought it was like a VR thing. And it wasn't VR at all. It was actually direct recording. So it really had a lot more in common with social media, you know, and how we just we don't have any privacy anymore. We just show everybody everything. You know, I don't. But so many people do. And you've got a whole generation now that's grown up with that sense that privacy optional, you know.

46:50So I think it was anticipatory. It was a little ahead of its time. You know, Catherine related to it. She comes from a strong art background, very intellectual art background. And for her, the semiotics around it were about scopophilia, watching, you know, like and we all made the she and I both made the connection to Peeping Tom, which was a which was a murder mystery, quite graphic film about a guy who films and films the act of killing. and we said, all right, we're going to do Peeping Tom with about a science fiction version of it. And we knew exactly what our reference point was with that.

47:27And we were both kind of enamored of this idea of the long-running sort of POV master and trying to figure out how to do that. So we both got excited about it from a visual perspective and from a storytelling perspective. And she proposed that because we'd been through the riots, like how is there a way to ground us in events as we'd seen them play out in L.A.? We set it in L.A. So it just all came together around creative conversations between me and Catherine. And, you know, we always worked well together. We'd already done Point Break together when we were married. And now, you know, we didn't have any direct relationship other than just creatively, you know, writer-producer with director.

48:10And I believed in her 100 ,000 percent, you know. And it just seemed like such an exciting experiment, which it was. but it didn't get any love. I think it got lost in the shuffle of three or four other kind of cyberspace films of that year. I think there was Lawnmower Man and there were a couple of others. There was The Nat, 13th Floor. There were a bunch of them right then. The Abyss suffered from a little bit the same syndrome because there was a movie called Deep Star 6 and a movie called Leviathan that preceded the Abyss into the market and it sort of seemed like the third and the least interesting And plus everybody expected it to be a monster movie, which it wasn't.

48:50And they advertised it as from the guy who gave you aliens. And there's no monster in the abyss. So misleading marketing or inaccurate marketing. I thought, by the way, Strange Days had a great trailer. It's really good. It's like watching Clockwork Orange. It's just graphic colors. And Catherine, of course, was the architect of that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like there would not have been Titanic had there not been something called Titanica, an IMAX film that you saw, and also had you not realized that you could potentially do some dives down to the Titanic. That's the piece that Titanica provided, which is they had done something very bold.

49:33They took an IMAX camera down inside a Russian submersible. They essentially used a two-meter steel sphere with humans inside it as a camera housing, right? and they stuck that IMAX camera up to the front port and they flew around Titanic and they made a pretty interesting film. Stephen Lowe, Canadian filmmaker, and I thought, well, these IMAX films aren't that well-funded. They're$2 million to$4 million movies. I thought if they can go to Titanic on that kind of budget and I'm doing$100 million budgets, I can go to the actual shipwreck and I can film it and I can make it part of a movie. And you've said that.

50:09I want to find the exact quote that basically that the reason to make Titanic for you was so a film studio would pay for you to go down to the wreckage. Anything I had to do after that was just part of the deal. I make no bones about that. That's great. Pretty true. Now, that said, along the way, I pretty much fell in love with the story because it's all about story. To most people, it looks like a swerve outside of my science fiction oeuvre and action, action and science fiction. but I'd always been fascinated by history and by real events. I loved sort of Greek, Roman, Egyptian period stuff but I also liked Middle Ages and Renaissance, all that.

50:51Titanic was not something I had obsessed over as a kid. I know it's fascinating to a lot of young kids, especially males for some reason. Now females after the movie. Now women after the movie. But before that it was mostly a male province. But I knew the people who had found it. So when I was doing the Abyss, I wasn't thinking about Titanic. I was just thinking about the Abyss and underwater robotics. And so I went to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. I met Robert Ballard. He took me around. He showed me the robotics that he was developing there. He was quite the pioneer. Somehow it started to congeal around this idea of, well, there's a wreck, and there's this high-tech stuff that I'm fascinated by.

51:31But that can be a portal into 1912 and into a story that took place on the ship. And so it was always about that bookending of that with the present-day story. You know, the abyss, clearly I love the ROVs and the submersibles and all that stuff. And then when I put the two together in my mind, it was like, boom, okay, I'm doing this. It's going to be Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic. But it'll be some type of present-day investigation that sheds some light on that story that took place back then. It all fell into place very quickly in my mind. And my pitch to Peter Turner was very simple. I went in with this big book, this big coffee table book called The Illustrated History of Titanic with these gorgeous paintings by the preeminent artist of Titanic and of that steamship era, Ken Marshall.

52:20And I opened it to this big double truck image in the center. It was like a yard wide with the rockets going off and the lights and the ships sinking going down at an angle and all the lifeboats running away. My pitch that raised$120 million at the time was Romeo and Juliet on that. That's great. Now – Five words. Five words. Insert$120 million here. All done. Now, we drifted a little above that as luck would have it. So bear with me on the windup of this question. I need a minute to get it all out here. But you're making this movie in Mexico, I think, right? You built the ship there. Yeah, Rosarito.

53:01Just over the border, just south of Tijuana. You guys are, you know, you're doing unprecedented things in some cases with just certain aspects of it. It's causing, you know, it was such an ambitious thing. But you have back in Hollywood, Daily Variety putting a thing, a Titanic watch on the front page every day, almost like rooting for the failure. You guys were, you pushed back the opening to make it as strong as you'd like it to be. You've said even you guys assumed that it was going to be a disaster. Quote, we labored the last six months on Titanic in the absolute knowledge that the studio would lose$100 million.

53:41It was a certainty. Close quote. So talk about how sweet it was when this movie opens and each week gets bigger and bigger to the point where it's the biggest movie of all time. And you go to the Oscars. Here's where I'm – again, bear with me on the windup. But Titanic comes in with 14 Oscar nominations tying the record that had been held for 47 years by All About Eve and wins 11 tying the record held for 38 years by Ben-Hur. You take home three personally with the exception of whatever kind of grief you got for the speech on the thing of the world. I mean that night. I should have just gone up there and said nanner nanner.

54:18But other than that. Because it was the biggest nanner nanner in history. But I didn't look at it that way. You know, because I think the more people bet against you, the more they're prepared to be surprised and amazed. And you know what I mean? It's like, isn't that what we all want? I mean, I don't think we want to beat down a movie so that we can celebrate it. That's not what I'm saying. But don't we want to discover something that we didn't expect in a movie, something wondrous? And so I just took it that way. It's like, wow, this is really cool. and I don't think we could even believe that it was happening while it was happening because it was like watching somebody levitate.

55:00I mean almost literally, right? We were defying gravity. The movie opened at$28 million and then over the Christmas holiday weekend it went up to$35 million. I was like, what? I mean movies normally drop by anywhere from 40 % to 60 % in their second weekend. We were not playing by the rules of the laws of physics as we understood them in Hollywood. The only time it had happened previously was on ET that I can find where it actually went up the next weekend. But not only did we go up, but then we just defied gravity. We just sat there. I think we had four or five weeks in a row at$25 million a weekend, just ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.

55:41And then it just kept going. and there was a point where it was clear it was going to become the highest grossing film in history and at Paramount because they had been quite negative about the film. Not quite as negative as Fox I'll have to say but they sent me I don't know like I think a thousand bottles of wine or something. No it was like some crazy thing some huge gestural gift you know and then I realized all is forgiven in success. That's it. That's it. Well, you know, but no, they were betting against us. They had the knives out and, and, and, you know, I've never studied Aikido, but I have studied other martial arts forms.

56:19And my pitch to Peter Turnham was they're gunning for us. And we're, we're literally driving right into the crosshairs of their barrage of artillery. that's going to land on us on a crap date in late July or early August. We're not going to have enough time before the end of the summer is a slack period. We're not going to have enough time. There won't be enough time for repeat viewing. We're not going to make our money back. And we're walking right to the trajectory where the shells are going to land. I said, or we can take a lesson from Aikido. we can sidestep the furious energy of our opponent and let them fall right on their ass and then come back later you know and i said could be thanksgiving could be christmas i like christmas i proposed christmas and i said and they'll have run out of that story they can't that story will have run its course and now they're going to need a new story and the new story just might be hey hang on people this thing's actually kind of good that's great and you know what it all came true everything i said in that phone call to peter came true and he to give him credit, and I know I've been a bit harsh on him at times, to give him credit, he said, let me think about it.

57:36Give me 24 hours. And he called me back the next day, almost to the minute, and said, we're going with your plan. So I got to give him credit. Sure. No, it's amazing. And the thing that's, I guess, the most amazing is that you could do this twice. That first of all, it's 12 years between Titanic and Avatar. I think some people assume you were on vacation. It's not the case. I was painting my toenails on a beach in Spain. No, I took eight years out to personally lead and build the technology for six deep ocean expeditions. I'd already done one for the movie. I did six more over that period and I made documentary films from those.

58:19I also did a TV series, Dark Angel, for two years. And I wrote some other scripts and I did a bunch of other stuff. You know, I came back and got serious about Avatar in 2005, right as I was coming off my last expedition to Titanic, which was in May, June of 2005. In July of 2005, we said, all right, we're doing Avatar. That was also not coincidentally right after The Lord of the Rings. It's not a coincidence because what they had proved with The Lord of the Rings, with the excellent performance capture facial animation that they had done for Gollum, And they did it in a way that was a little bit cruder than the way we did it.

58:58We pushed the technology farther. But I got a glimpse of the fact that it could be done. And I didn't know anybody over at Weta at that time. That was Joel Oteri's group. And I said, if they can do that and give me some money and some time and we'll take it to the next level, we can do it. Can you just put it in as plain English as possible, what it is? And I have a – I think I have a concept of it, but I want everybody to be able to understand. I was just over at Lightstorm and by the airport where you guys do this. And some of your collaborators showed me some of the behind-the-scenes photos and explained for dummies how – what the technological revolutionary stuff is that you guys have done on these films.

59:44But can you just break it down? Yeah, there were two things. All right. So there's 3D photography. Keep that word in mind, photography. So we built cameras. We used them on the expeditions so that we could photograph the movie in 3D. That's one part of it. Yep. The other part of it is performance capture. So here we're creating the Na 'vi characters, Jake's avatar, you know, some of the other avatars using performance capture. So that's motion capture to get the body and what we called image-based facial performance capture, where we have a head rig and we're videoing the actor's face. And you put the data together from the body capture and from the facial capture, and that's the performance, right?

1:00:30There's very rudimentary sets, very little. We're not using photography, okay? So set aside the whole 3D thing for a second. Over here, we're doing performance capture. and they go together ultimately they blend together because sometimes we have performance capture characters in the live action sets and sometimes it's completely cg generated out in the jungle right so it's a merge of two completely separate realms so realm number one performance capture no camera no cinematography no lighting no nothing we just capture the performance the raw performance of the actor as a writer director i love that i love that process to this day i love it I love it more than live-action and live-action shooting you got a set you got actors you got costumes you got wigs you've got you know lighting dolly track steady cam all the normal things and you're making an image on a on a in that case it was a digital sensor right because we'd already moved to digital cameras this was in 2007 all right two separate things now it just so happens that with performance capture, when you're creating your world and your characters in CG, it's dead easy to make it a 3D image for stereoscopic 3D.

1:01:48You just do a second render from two inches away, the distance between our two eyes. And it's more complicated than that, a lot more complicated, but that's the basic idea. So now you're taking these two worlds, performance capture and live action photography, and you're putting them together. Some scenes were 100 % CG. Some were 50-50. Some were pure live action. right and that's what was in front of us on avatar so we had two big hurdles one is to crack the code on on the cg characters and make them look photo real so that they could go into a movie that also

1:02:21James Cameron:had photo real photography because it was real right of sets and actress sigourney weaver her character was 100 you know human in that so we just shot sigourney yeah right so we had to meet in the middle we had to get our quality level up on the cg side to be photo real well i'd already done that. I did that on The Abyss. I did it on T2. But I'd done little bits of it and I had inserted a character into an otherwise live action world. With Avatar, we were going miles beyond that. We were creating a world. So the world had to look real. Every blade of grass had to look real. The way in which the characters interacted with the foliage and ran through the jungle and lit it up with the bioluminescence, we had to figure all that out.

1:03:03And that's why that movie took four years when all of Titanic and all of its scale and thousands of extras and everything took 18 months. And is the reason that - I think that's a pretty succinct - Well, thank you. It's amazing and it really helps and I appreciate it. Now, you had obviously tremendous success with the first one where again, I mean, you broke your own record from Titanic with the highest grossing ever. Incredible. Well, if you've got to lose, better to lose to yourself. Between 2009, when the first one comes out, and then 2022, when the second Avatar Way of Water comes out, that's a long gap of 13 years, but only three years between the second and this third that we're getting now, Avatar Firehash.

1:03:52Any rhyme or reason for that? Yeah, there's a lot of rhyme or reason. So once again, I took a little sabbatical from Hollywood for a couple of years to finish building a sub that I had been working on for already five years when Avatar was released. I'd been working on it in Australia in the background of having done Avatar. We completed that sub and then we took it out for sea trials and we did an expedition where I dove to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, deepest place in the world. And that was just tremendously fulfilling and had nothing to do with Hollywood whatsoever. Not a bit. It was just for fun and for the challenge, you know, and for the exploration and to create a new set of science tools that could be used by academia and so on.

1:04:36And we ultimately donated all that technology to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that I had a good relationship with. And then I sort of came back to work in 2013. I said, all right, if we're going to do another Avatar film, let's not do one more film. Let's develop a whole new workflow and a whole new set of tools and amortize it across two or three films. Eventually it became four in my mind during the writing process because movie two just became unmanageable. It became unmanageable because there was so much backstory to tell, not just of the events of the first movie, but of the intervening events, which turned out to be sort of 15 years.

1:05:15And the Sully's have these kids that are teenagers. I wanted to do a story about them becoming parents and having teenage kids. And once it became that, then there was a lot of I had to fill in that 15 years. So I had to remind everybody of what had happened in the first movie. And then I had to tell them a new story about that 15 years. And then I had to start my new news story, which was the actual events of The Way of Water. So it was a huge burden going into the first act. And ultimately, I could never really crack the code. And so I said, there's only one way to do this, which is to unzip it apart into two films.

1:05:51And that's what we did. And so Fire and Ash is really the completion of that story. And when Fire and Ash ends, it ends that whole story cycle. So it's played out really across two films. So now we're into a writing process, starts in 13, I think. So I worked with a writing team. We broke story in a room together, four other screenwriters. And then we separated out to do our individual drafts. And I got them in. And they did great work. But I ultimately was a bit unsatisfied with the sound of the characters because I knew the actors so well. This is something they didn't have access to. You know, they could see the movie, but they didn't know the actors.

1:06:32And, you know, I kept thinking to myself, Slank's not going to like this, you know. So I went back through. And also this is when I decided to split two into two and three. And then three became four and four became five. And so I basically just went through and rewrote all four of the films myself. So that took about a year and a half, right? And meanwhile, in parallel, we're not wasting time. We're developing all these new tools, our entirely new facial pipeline. You can see. You've seen the film. So you know how real the characters feel. They're people. You don't even question it, right? And that was our goal.

1:07:11And it took a lot of money and a lot of R &D time to solve that. And that was happening in parallel and all our design work was happening in parallel. So we've ultimately convened to start production for real in September of 17. And so we capped everything. That took 18 months for movie two and movie three and for even part of movie four. We're overlapping. Yeah. Well, what it was is I had to get up to the point where there's a big time jump because the kids would – I need to get those kids while they were still kids. Sure. So we banked that. Do we ever make the movie? Who knows? But it's banked.

1:07:47First 20 pages or so, something like that, of 150-page script. So still got the vast majority, 90 percent of that movie to still make. And we may not. Who knows? That will be decided by market forces above my pay grade at this point. I wrapped out in white light and I let that go. And we'll see over the next couple months what happens. Well, I will say because you gave me the opportunity, which I so appreciate to see this, not just see it, but see it in the theater and in the seat that you watch in the front center. My seat. I've learned that's the way to do it now that I've done it with you. But this Fire and Ash, for whatever my opinion counts, I think it's as great as any of them.

1:08:25I really was – I think this idea of fellow Navi who are in some ways corrupted by things that have been done to them I guess you could say. Yeah, right. And not even by the humans, just by natural forces. Right. The volcano erupting. This leads to the Ash people and this great character played by Una Chaplin. She's phenomenal. And, you know, we've got the grieving, you know, family and how they just are now juggling both humans and Na 'vi that they have to deal with. I wonder for you just what this represents. Here we are now 16 years into your – well, a lot more than – you've been 30 years into thinking about Avatar.

1:09:08Twenty years since I wrote it, 20 years of really focused energy on the films other than a couple of years off for good behavior to go do a deep expedition. So it's a big chunk. Look, all I can say is we'll see what happens when the film comes out and we'll see what our appetite is to jump right back into that world or to maybe give it a rest for a couple of years. What would define success for you enough to keep going? Well, we know what our break-even point is. And so anything beyond that, I would say. Okay. I mean, Disney has a different kind of investment in it than I do in that they've spent a lot of money on the parks attractions in Florida, and now they're doing a whole new project in Anaheim around Avatar.

1:09:50It's going to be spectacular, by the way. I've seen the models and the entire proposal. It's going to be amazing. And they're even looking at other potential places to do Avatar-themed stuff. They really see it as a perennial and something that's worth investing in for them that goes beyond the films. The films, in a way, are almost a loss leader. Well, no, I mean they want the whole thing to be vigorous and active in the public imagination obviously for a long, long time. And I think it stands the potential to do that. But it's also a question of how long I want to be. I don't think of it as being in a rut.

1:10:28I get to do and explore all kinds of cool things. But there are other things I want to do. We've talked about Hiroshima. I've got a couple of other books that I've bought. I've got some things that have been gestating in the backfield for a long time that I haven't announced yet. And there was this Billie Eilish project, right? Well, the Billie Eilish project just popped up like a mushroom in the backyard popping up overnight. I was talking to Billie's mom, Maggie, who's really into a lot of the same food choice and sustainability issues that my wife Susie and I are. That's why we're vegan, and Maggie's vegan, and she does food programs around Billy's Tour.

1:11:03And she's coming in as an executive producer on our sequel to The Game Changers, which is about plant-based athletes, right? And she was looking, and we're going to do that in 3D, and she was looking at a 3D demo that I was doing, and I said, Maggie, why aren't we shooting Billy's Tour in 3D? It would be amazing. And she said, well, I'll ask her. And one thing led to another. And Billy and I, we have a good vibe together. We really communicate well for some reason. And she thought it was a cool idea. And so I offered her co-directing with me because she's the architect of that show. If you see that show, I mean, it is astonishing.

1:11:45It is so beautiful. And it's such a great platform for her. And I wanted to shoot it, you know, in 3D. I just thought it would be a fun. And so I snuck out back in August and did that for a couple weeks. And in England we did four shows. And then we just shot two more shows a few days ago. That's awesome. And then I hurry up and get the film done so I can go to Phoenix to shoot some more Billie Eilish stuff. That's awesome. And it's fun. It's good to have something that distracts you from the main project. Well, you've been so generous. Plus it's 3D, right? Yeah, you can keep developing. Our tour is called the Hit Me Hard and Soft tour.

1:12:24And so the film will be Hit Me Hard and Soft in 3D or the tour of Billie Eilish. I'm not sure exactly something like that. And it will be coming out in mid-March, which we should segue right out of theaters with Avatar right into Billie Eilish coming in. Because I'm really trying to push this idea of 3D as a way to hopefully rejuvenate the cinematic experience. But it has to be done right. And the theater owners need to step up and make the investment in light levels, in laser projection or big LED screens or whatever it is to get those light levels up in 3D. Super, super important. And it's not going to happen if they don't make that investment.

1:13:02But I keep telling these theater chain CEOs, you know, you've got to – the only way out is through. You're going to have to spend to reinvigorate this business. And this is the technology that you've got to invest in. And then filmmakers like myself, we can make these movies and know that they'll have this great life out there. And it doesn't have to be just on the few premium screens like Dolby Vision and IMAX. It can be on every screen, you know, and you can't have it at home. So it's going to do something streaming won't do, right? I think it's a very valid case. What else are you going to do?

1:13:37Have plush your seats and serve, you know, chicken burgers at the seat and champagne? It's like, come on, guys. You've tried every freaking trick there is. You've tried all the loyalty stuff, programs. It's like, no, you have to offer something you can't get at home. Well, if anyone has the track record that they should listen to, I think it's you. They should fucking listen to me. That's what I'm saying. Last minute of our time, if it's okay. You've been so generous with your time here. I would love to just do a quick rapid fire, really like just a sentence or two if you can. Okay. This is like a speed dating round.

1:14:11That's it. Speed round. Exactly. I got it. Okay. What is – do you see a thread that runs through all or at least most of your work? And if so, in a sentence or two, what is it? I think there are two threads. One is love and empathy mixed with a sense of duty. You don't abandon people. You stay with them. Ripley didn't abandon Newt at the possible expense of her life. And you look – Jack didn't abandon Rose. You know what I mean? It's like it's right there. It's in all the films, Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth in the abyss. And the other thread is our love-hate relationship with technology. Yes. Which I think is the more obvious one.

1:14:55But that even applies to Titanic. Yeah. You know, Titanic's a metaphor for what? Nuclear war, climate change, whatever that existential threat is that's in front of you that you can see coming, but you can't turn in time. And then you hit it. Yes. That's climate change, right? Right. Which other or or artificial super intelligence or whatever it is that's in front of us. You were way ahead on that. Which other filmmaker working today most reminds you of yourself? You know, the filmmakers that I admire, I'm going to be a little evasive here. I love Stephen for what he does. And he and I really feel a kind of soul brother thing because he loves the technology, but he's always a humanist.

1:15:35you know and i i feel a little awkward comparing myself to him because he's the master he's the he's the sensei right you know guillermo and i have a great vibe but he doesn't make movies that that i would make and i don't make movies that he would make you know robert rodriguez and i have a have a great working relationship but he's got his own way of doing things and i've got my own way of doing things i don't know maybe steven yeah you know even though his style is very signature him and my style is probably much less signature. No, well, it's just different. More mutable, probably. In the years since Titanic, the Oscars have become much more like the Spirit Awards, fairly consistently rewarding, arthouse films over films with wider commercial appeal.

1:16:18The exceptions are Lord of the Rings, Return of the King, and Oppenheimer. Avatar did not get recognized with Best Picture, nor number two. Well, we came, look, we never know, did we lose by one vote or 500, you know? But we were there. We were in play. you know we weren't in play at all on avatar 2 and i consider that to be in in many ways the most beautiful film that i've ever made you know and i won't say i wasn't disappointed but i will say that my analysis of it after the fact and seeing what happened with the writer's strike and how everybody went to the mat over their fear of ai i think that that that was our community our filmmaking community not understanding how I make these films and thinking oh it's all made by computer and they're probably using Gen AI and it's probably a complete perversion of the acting process and blah blah blah you can kind of write the script for that and I think we got hit by an anti anti AI backlash on that even though we don't use this stuff no we don't well your explanation here is gonna help people to know that yeah we don't we we've never used generative AI.

1:17:28There's not one image in the new film that was created by generative AI. And I think we just got painted by a very broad brush and a backlash at that moment. Now, that said, people may have legitimately just not thought the movie was good. I happen to think it was fucking good enough. It was good enough, guys. At least for production design, for, you know, I mean, costumes, whatever. What's the project that got away? I believe this also may connect back to Stephen? Ah, Jurassic Park. You know, I was very disappointed. Stephen bought the book out from under me by hours, except in retrospect, I now know two things.

1:18:05One, it was a setup. I never had a shot. I was being used as a stocking horse to get him to close the deal. He's never confirmed that. I've never asked him, but, you know, it can't, the timing can't have been that close. Oh, Stephen just closed? What did he get the book two hours before me? Shit, I got it last night. Guys, this is bullshit. But the other thing I realized once I saw the movie is that he made the movie that should have been made and I would not have. I would have made Aliens with Dinosaurs and I'm not joking. It would have been the scariest motherfucker you ever saw. And I have no problem scaring little kids.

1:18:45You know, you see Newt in Aliens, an R-rated film, you know, but that's not the movie that I would have loved when I was eight years old and thought dinosaurs were the coolest things in the world. And so Stephen got it and he should have gotten it. It was the right thing. That's very nice. Last three of these rapid fire. Would you like to personally go to space? Well, I was planning on it. I was doing a big project. I had spent millions on a deal with the Russians back in – see, this would have been in 2000. And then I expanded that to include NASA, and I was going to go up on a Soyuz and go to the space station.

1:19:17And then the Columbia was destroyed. And that put the kibosh on everything for a while. And by then I had moved on, and by the time everything sort of recovered enough, I was already on track to make Avatar. I have a theory. I know the answer to this one. But what's the question you'd most love to never be asked again? anything to do with either my my king of the world comment at the oscars or anything to do with piranha 2 i think you can i prompt you for i think there might be one other possibly could jack have fit on the raft oh my god yeah i think maybe we put that one number one don't ask me about the fucking raft people you know look we even went to the lengths of doing an experiment to see if Jack could have in any way survived or if they could have both survived.

1:20:12And people didn't even hear the answer. When I told them the answer, the answer is, if you were an expert in hypothermia and if Jack somehow was an expert in hypothermia and somehow knew what science now knows back in 1912, it is theoretically possible with a lot of luck that he might have survived. So therefore the answer is no. He could not have survived. There's no way because he didn't, the conditions were not met. He couldn't have known those things, right? Because we had to jump through hoops. It took us multiple runs of the experiment to get these poor young stunt people who were, you know, their lips were blue and they were chapped.

1:20:55I mean, I would have thought they were ready to go to the hospital, but the hypothermia expert said, no, they're fine. Their core temperatures only come down two degrees. They still stand a good chance of living. I said, get them out of the water. No, it was actually pretty – it was actually pretty – these poor kids. I mean they were 19 or 20. We got them to sort of match Jack and Rose's stature and kind of body mechanics. And she was fine, by the way. Yeah. She would have made it. But Jack didn't know that. Hey, you know. It's his chivalry, right? Its character is destiny. Jack had to go in the water because of his character, because of his sense of duty, because of his love for her.

1:21:34It's like, guys, you know, could Juliet not have stabbed herself with the dagger? Yes, of course she could not have done that. And then it wouldn't have been, you know, Romeo and Juliet is based on Antony and Cleopatra. Antony heard that she was dead and he killed himself. She heard that he had killed himself. She killed herself. It's like that's where Romeo and Juliet comes from. The beauty, the grandeur of the emotions is the answer. It's not about science, guys. And you all think you're so smart, but you're missing the point. Lastly, that was great. If you had not become a filmmaker and had this, I mean, we're talking about some insane stats.

1:22:12Three of the four highest grossing movies of all time. First movie to gross just, I mean, you know these stats. I'm going to save them for the intro. It's unbelievable. If you had not – there are a few things along the way that we talked about that it could have not happened. You don't meet the person who introduces you to Corman. You don't – I think I would have overcome that one. I would have kept nibbling away at that until I got – But I mean just again, I can't hammer home enough to people from what I've read and again, correct me if I'm wrong. You're literally driving a truck delivering hot lunches to schools.

1:22:44Yeah. If this – if filmmaking had not worked out, what would you be doing today? I don't see myself still delivering hot lunches to schools. Well, it probably would have been something in technology and engineering or it might have been something in the sciences. My math wasn't really good enough to have made any major bones in physics and astronomy, I don't think. And you make your bones early, like in filmmaking, usually before you're 30. It might have been something in storytelling. It might have been something else in film. It might have been, I don't know, I'm an artist, so I might have drawn graphic novels.

1:23:20Who knows? I mean, I could have perfected that craft. I think I was just barely good enough that if I had worked on it day in, day out, I could have gotten pretty good. But it's sliding doors, right? But the one takeaway for me from all of that, looking back at these critical moments, is first of all, fortune favors the prepared mind. You have to pre-visualize what it is you want to do. And when that opportunity comes up, the critical thing, and I think this is true a lot more now maybe, or maybe it was just me in those circumstances, but I would say the critical thing is don't think of an opportunity as an example of an opportunity that you're going to maybe reject this time, but when you're ready later, you'll take it.

1:24:06It's not an example. It is the opportunity. You either take it or you don't. You jump now or that door closes. and that's why I say fortune favors the prepared mind. You jump through that door, you land on the other side, you better be ready. That's great. Right? And those are the two pieces of advice. I would say study the crap out of it. Understand it as best as you possibly can from where you're standing at that moment and then when that door opens a crack, push it open from there and go. That's great. Don't wait around. It's not an example. It's the thing itself. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

1:24:45It's great. You're terrific. It's good talking to you, man. I mean, this is like two big brainstorming sessions in less than a week. I know. How lucky am I? That's awesome. Well, that was fun.

1:25:12and to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where our handle is at Awards Chatter. On those platforms, we announce upcoming guests and provide details about special live recordings of the podcast that you can attend. Until next time, thanks again for tuning in.

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