James Cameron: Academy award-winning director

26:31And here's this and here's that. And here's your swing shift crew list. Here's your day shift crew list. Okay, here's your Black Beauties. Here's your Coke. And he's just putting all this stuff out on the table. I'm like, wait a minute, what do I do with this stuff? I mean, I didn't take drugs. You know, for me, coffee was plenty. And he said, well, you got to give it out to the crew. I'm like, so I just became a dealer, I guess. But that was just how things were done in that super low budget world. We'll work for Coke, basically. And it was pretty nuts. So I just gave it all to my assistant art director.

27:08I said, you deal with that. And he said, well, I know what to do. It's fine. I'll handle it. He probably took it and sold it. I don't know. No, he didn't. He actually distributed fairly and equitably. And apparently in that world, you are judged as a production designer or an art director by how fairly you distributed the drugs. I mean, I didn't want to play that game. It wasn't my thing. You recall once working an 85-hour shift where you slept like an hour in the 85 hours. What was it about you at the time that recognized your ability to kind of succeed in those chaotic environments? That's an interesting question.

27:47I mean, I think I didn't know that I had that ability until I proved it to myself. And it was a chaotic environment. But you could apply logic to chaos. You know, I went out and I scoured junkyards. I went to crashed aircraft parts places. And I was ripping wings and stuff off and using them as set dressing. This is when I figured out how to use McDonald's breakfast trays. you open them out and you can make what looked like these lovely vacuformed panels. And for somebody who loves all living creatures, electrocuted mealworms? No, they all lived. I mean, no creatures were possibly traumatized, but it's hard to get a psychological read from a mealworm.

28:30I'm sure they were not enjoying the day. But yes, I did use electricity to get a good performance from some mealworms. So you wrote the Terminator. The point of that story is that you have to just make up solutions in the moment. And you don't even know what you know that you're going to require until it shows up. And if you don't have the answer, somebody else will. But it's all about problem solving. And it's problem solving under duress. So at that point, you start to realize that maybe later, maybe midway through Terminator, Gail Hurd and I are looking at each other saying, we're not going to survive this.

29:11We're not going to get this movie done. And then she might say, yeah, but we did that, that, and that. So we'll figure it out. When speaking of Terminator, you write the Terminator script. Studios are resistant to you as director. Oh, sure. They wanted the script, but they didn't want me. Right. Tough period. And you have no money at the time. You're, you know, trying to get two for one McDonald's Big Macs coupons. Help my mom, helping out. But how do you pull off figuring out how to direct? I figured the only way to do that is to write it and control it. So I was smart enough to know that you had to control the rights.

29:49And that was the only way I was going to get a job. I mean, after getting fired off Piranha 2, I wasn't at zero. I wasn't at the bottom rung. I was now below where I had been a year earlier. I had to get back to the bottom rung. And the only way I could see clear to do that was to create my own thing. So I wound up writing three scripts at more or less the same time. One was The Terminator, the other one was Rambo First Blood Part II, and the other one was what became Aliens, Alien 2 at the time. Because I'd been out kind of around taking meetings as a writer based on my first draft of The Terminator.

30:23People liked me as a writer. I was like the new, hot, young, techno-thriller writer. And so I had the shooting draft for Terminator and then these two other scripts, and I had to do them all somehow in like three months, which I almost pulled off. But Stallone wanted some rewrites, and I'm not going to blame him. It was a normal process to rewrite a script, but I didn't understand that. I was such a noob that I didn't understand that when you sign a deal for a script, you also sign a deal to write the rewrite, and then the polish, the dialogue polish, and so on. And so what I thought was going to be a four-week gig turned out to be an eight-week gig.

30:57And by the time I got to Aliens, I didn't have time to get it done. and the producer, David Geiler, yelled at me on the phone when I told him I couldn't get the script done. He said, you'll never work in this town again. So if you've ever wondered, people actually say that. Fortunately, his partner, Walter Hill, who was a director, knew what that was like. And he said, all right, kid, just send me the pages. He talked like that. I think he thought he was John Ford, which he kind of was. He was like our generation or that generation's version of John Ford. And so I set the pages over. and I called him up the next day, and he said, all right, we're going to wait for you.

31:35I said, so I could finish the script after I do Terminator? And he said, yeah, we'll wait for you. And I said, all right, well, you're a pretty experienced director. Any advice on shooting my first film? He said, yeah, don't it up. Which is actually really good advice. But to actually go from, you know, writing it to getting one of the studios to give you the opportunity. It was a low budget independent production company called Hemdale, run by a guy named John Daly. That's the Dale of Hemdale. It was David Hemings and John Daly were the two partners, but Hemings was out of the picture at that point.

32:15So John Daly was executive producer and he financed the development. And then he did some kind of a co-pro deal with Orion. And Gail was actually kind of instrumental in triggering some of the financing as well. I think she brought in HBO. So, you know, we had a good producer-director relationship, Gail and I. We willed that film into existence. Took a while, but you made it effort. It took a while, yeah. And then we got delayed because we cast Arnold, but then Arnold was under an option deal with Dino De Laurentiis for another Conan film. So then we got sidelined for about six months. And that's when I did all that writing that I was talking about.

32:57And also creating movie posters to make ends meet. That was a little earlier. When I was, so I would paint a movie poster in a day and sell it to these guys for 1 ,200 or 1 ,500 bucks, which doesn't sound like much. But at the time, that would stake me for about, you know, a month. I was talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger about you, and he's called you a mentor before. But do you remember the debate you guys were having about the Terminator getting drunk and how to say, I'll be back? I don't remember anything about getting drunk because the Terminator couldn't get drunk. Well, he said he came to you with an idea for the Terminator to get drunk.

33:35Oh, I shot that down. I'm sure that sounds pretty lame. But no, Arnold was not one of these guys that was constantly pestering me with ideas. Usually when he brought an idea, it was pretty good. The I'll be back thing, my memory of it is that it was, the line in the treatment or in the script is I'll come back. And when I heard him say it, it didn't ring. So on the set, I just changed it to I'll be back. The be back, the alliteration of that just sounded better. You said, I actually project my personal value system into my movies. And then why do you make all your movies love stories? Well, I don't know.

34:18I'm just a romantic, I guess. You think that's why? Yeah, maybe. Sure. Well, I believe in love as a bond that allows us to function together. And I believe in empathy as our kind of human superpower. And when you're doing these dark films about, you know, dark technological futures or horror stories set out in space or whatever it is, I think you need that. You need that lightness within the darkness. All my films are about that struggle between light and dark, between our worst impulses and the angels of our better nature. And so love plays a big part in that. It's also the strongest bond between people, and the idea of love also leads to ideas of duty and sacrifice.

35:13So that's also a factor in all my films, people who have a sense of duty, who define their love through sacrifice. So Reese sacrifices himself by trying to stop the Terminator so Sarah can get away. Jack sacrifices himself so that Rose can live. These are important things. Ripley is willing to sacrifice herself, willing to go into the depths of hell itself to get the little girl back, even though two days before she didn't even know her. But there was a whole back story on that where her daughter, she'd been adrift in space for so long that her daughter had grown up and died in her 60s of cancer.

35:55And she never saw her again. The last time she saw her, she was 11. So there was a hole in her heart that Newt filled. We took that away, and the story still worked perfectly. Because I think a lot of people have a hole in their heart that can be filled by something they don't expect. It didn't require the symmetry of literally a lost daughter and a found daughter. Found family is another theme. Your little one grew three inches overnight. Adorable. Also, expensive. Sell their pint-sized pieces on Depop and list them in minutes with no selling fees. Because somewhere, a dad refuses to pay full price for the clothes his kids will outgrow tomorrow.

36:32And he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth spurt budget secured. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details. They say you should learn something new every day. Like how you should only drink Jägermeister at zero degrees Fahrenheit. Ice cold. Like those frozen cavemen they find. Which makes you wonder, what would a caveman think of Jägermeister? Well, if you served it warm, he'd probably throw it in your face, say, and storm off, and nobody wants that. So drink it cold or not at all.

37:06Jägermeister. Damn, that's cold. Drink responsibly. Jägermeister liqueur, 35 % alcohol by volume. Imported by Masked Jägermeister, U.S., White Plains, New York. There's some connectivity here to what you were talking about with your own upbringing, but around the second Avatar film, you did an interview with The Hollywood Reporter where you said, I'm going to work out a lot of my stuff artistically that I've gone through as a parent of five kids. The overarching idea is the family is the fortress. It's our greatest weakness and our greatest strength. I thought I can write the hell out of this.

37:38I know what it is to be the asshole dad. Well, you know, my kids were prompt to tell me exactly when I was, you know, exceeding my parental authority. That's pretty hysterical. So, you know, you think you're this director that people respect and they'll do what you ask them to do, and then you come home and then you've got your kids. They had kind of a heart-to-heart with you after the first Avatar, right? Well, you know, I think we have it in good perspective. They see glimpses of me in some of the characters, and they see glimpses of themselves in some of the kid characters, but they also take it all with a giant grain of salt because they know, one, first of all, when I was writing that, I didn't understand them.

38:23That's a given, of course, as a teenager. My dad does not understand me, who I really am. And there were probably a lot of things I didn't understand that it's taken time. And they also know that it's a snapshot of a moment that's not relevant to them now, to our relationship now. So they think it's all kind of funny. They actually really enjoy the films. So it's not like there's any kind of trauma or resentment around that. And they accept, because they're all artistic, they accept the fact that you've got to write what you know and what you're experiencing. And it seems like you write, you like writing women as protagonists.

39:03You have a strong team of women around you professionally. You've married strong women. I want to talk to you about marriage. I married a producer, I married a director, you know, and yeah. How about the first date you went on back in the day, hot air ballooning? I don't think that was a first date. That was Gail Hurd. You know, she and I were kind of like adventurers. We loved to do stuff, all kinds of things, you know, scuba diving here and there. She was a good diver, probably still is a good diver. Well, I haven't talked to her about diving in years. But yeah, we went on, you know, hot air balloon ride and it all went a ride.

39:45We crashed, got dragged across the desert floor when the winds came up and everything. And then we got out and dusted ourselves off and we hadn't hit any power lines and we're still alive. Did you think that was going to be it at some point? No, no, no. Okay. She was down for all that stuff. No, she was as crazy as I was, you know. We were pretty much adrenaline junkies, I would say. This was in the mid-'80s. Still? Yeah. Still on your end? No, no, no. Much less so, I would say. Married five times. What do you think you learned about yourself going through that? All right, let's contextualize that.

40:22That's a fact. But let's look at the fact that I was also married four times for less than a year, actively married. There was always a little bit of a long sort of decay curve through separation and divorce, but actively married, cohabitating for one year four times. So I wasn't very good at it. And now I've been married happily, and having earned that happiness, which you find out that you have to work at it for 25 years. And going strong and looking forward to the next 25 years. So I think it's a learned art. And I think that we all grew up with a kind of a fairy tale kind of approach to marriage and our culture.

41:06There's a lot of money to be made around weddings. And I think women, probably a little more than men, invest a lot in the idea of the big wedding. And somehow that's going to cement the relationship. when really, you know, you should just go do it in Vegas and, you know, not spend the money and then put all that effort and energy into the work it takes to really be with somebody relationally for a long period of time. Because you're constantly learning about the other person and you have to make a, I think you have to make a pact with yourself to actively want to make them happy. Not your version of what should make them happy, but what actually makes them happy.

41:47And that's a learned thing. Because earlier on, I was very, it was sort of like conditional. As long as you still love me, I'll love you, right? Or as long as this is still worth it for both of us, or even just worth it for me, I'll be in it. But the second that's no longer the case, you know, hasta la vista. And that doesn't work. And, you know, it took me a while to realize that. What was involved on your end with realizing that? Life, you know. just realizing, you know, is it me? You know, I seem to be the common denominator here. And, you know, I could unpack each one individually, and there were all different learning curves, and there were all different experiences.

42:33Linda Hamilton and I hung on for a long time, long, long after we probably should have. We were together for seven years. And we loved each other. We just didn't get along, you know. And when you realize that that's possible, that you can really love somebody but just not get along, not cohabitate, not coexist. You think you were looking for the wrong thing in a match in the earlier days? No, I think I just, I think I'm, you know, I fall in love with people I can learn from. So I fall in love with somebody that I admired greatly. I admired Gail greatly. I admired Catherine greatly. I admired Linda greatly.

43:13But I think I didn't pre-select well enough for people that could stand me, that I could stand them. You know, I mean, everybody's got their habits and their ways, and, you know. How are you challenging to stand? I'm busy. I got s*** to do. You know, the center doesn't hold. I think, you know, I mean, I don't want to unpack each one of these individually, but I would like to say generally, I really admired and loved the women that I, you know, was, and I'm grateful. I'm grateful for that time. you know, because I learned from it. I learned from them. I always feel I came out of it better than when I went into it.

43:54On the busy front, I think that's what... And I'm also still friends with everybody. You know, I mean, Catherine and I are still best friends. You said there was a time when making a film was the most important thing in the world to me. Right. Now it's not. Yes. It's a thing that I love to do, but I know how important my family is. Yeah. What do you think changed? It's just perspective. After Titanic, I got involved in a lot of deep ocean stuff and a lot of space projects. I wound up sitting on the NASA Advisory Council for three years. And those meetings were kind of revelatory to me, because everybody in that room, they were all PhDs.

44:32They were all top engineers, aerospace people. They all felt they were doing something very important in the world, and none of them went to the movies. They just didn't care. I mean, Hollywood almost existed in another dimension from them. And I thought, oh, here are brilliant purpose-driven people that couldn't give a rat's ass about this movie star or that film or this awards season or any of the things that I had been sort of myopically within this bubble reality that we call Hollywood, even though it's global. And that was revelatory to me. It's like, you don't have to care about these things.

45:07You can have a purpose-driven life and not care about any of this stuff. And so I kind of left Hollywood for, let's see, that would have been in early 98. That journey started, and it went through 2005. So we're talking about a seven-year period where I just took a sabbatical. I went exploring. I started doing different things. I was involved in space projects. I was part of a team that built a camera that was on one of the Mars rovers. and we called the MSL Mars Science Laboratory, which became the Curiosity rover, and it was the mast cam on that. Even though the hardware that we designed specifically didn't fly, it flew later on the subsequent rover, science rover, so Spirit.

45:55So anyway, on all the deep ocean expedition stuff, there was a lot of engineering around that, building subs, building robotics, building deep ocean cameras. you know, stereoscopic 3D camera systems and all that. That was a phase of my life that was very satisfying and had nothing to do with movies. In connectivity to just gaining perspective in your mind? Just curiosity. It was curiosity-driven. So people talk about a purpose-driven life. My purpose is driven by curiosity. I just want to go. I want to experience. I want to, you know, all of that sort of daredevil, adrenaline junky stuff got focused into actually doing things that were meaningful.

46:38So, you know, I went back to Titanic because that was easy to finance, then branched out to exploring hydrothermal vents in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, in the East Pacific Rise, in the Guaymas Basin, you know, making, since that time, I've, you know, become a documentary filmmaker, a legitimate one, and have made either directed or just produced 12 documentaries. So I've made more documentaries than I've made theatrical films. I was talking to Maria Wilhelm yesterday. She's been involved in a lot of them. I want to get into some of your expeditions here in a bit, but how much do you sleep? Eight hours.

47:20Eight hours. Oh, yeah. How true is it that some of your best ideas come to you in your sleep? I think there's a liminal processing phase for me that's sort of a not quite asleep, not quite awake, almost a trance state, where I actually do a lot of problem solving. And that can be usually not when I'm going to sleep. It's usually when I'm waking up in the morning and I have an extra few minutes and I'll stay in that liminal state, and answers will come to problems. The dream state, REM sleep in a full on dreaming state, That's very different. That's a very, very, you know, chaotic montage of images and scenarios, and sometimes great stuff happens in a dream.

48:05Avatar, Terminator. Yeah, sure. Those are actual actioned examples. Another one is when, in Aliens, when Ripley runs into the Queen's chamber and realizes that she's completely surrounded by the deadliest things she could imagine. That's straight from a dream. except in the dream I entered a dark room and realized that the walls were completely covered with wasps. Okay, that's just an image, it's just a moment. But I remembered the principle of that feeling of revelation of the threat, and I built a scene around it in Aliens. It's one of the best moments in the film, I think, cinematically, as all sound goes away and you just hear the breathing.

48:50And it became a very stylized moment in the film. We had a lot of fun with the sound design on that. So I think cinematic ideas can come, absolutely can come from dreams. And whether it's a dream or those few minutes before you wake up, when you have that, what's the process for you in terms of documenting it? Oh, I'll just get up, write it down really quickly. And it's really more of almost a court stenographer kind of like quick notes that trigger, because I have a very good memory from my dream states. And with just a couple of quick notations, I can quickly recapture it. Sometimes I'll actually sit and write out the dream because the sequences are so bizarre.

49:34And there might be a long-running narrative that runs for, I couldn't say how long it is in real-world time, but it might be 20, 30, 40 minutes. And I'll get a whole novel playing out. Now, it doesn't mean it makes sense. Yeah. And is this a notepad or is this in your phone? No, just a laptop. Laptop? Yeah, just write it down. You said you don't like yourself when you're working. And I wasn't sure if that was more earlier days when working or still present day, but I was going to ask why. I'd say more, I think I've got things pretty well in balance now, and I'm sure a lot of crazy people say the same thing.

50:09But I think it's true. I think in the early days, you know, where I did put the film first above all things, there were interactions I would have that I'd feel guilty about later. Because I think the most important thing in any human interaction is mirror neuron. You know, you can imagine how the other person might have reacted to something that you said. But it usually doesn't hit me in the moment because at that time I had a righteous sense of having been aggrieved by someone who was supposed to do something and didn't do it, and it was compromising the art. It was compromising the film. And I was the person responsible for getting that film made.

50:47So then that person became, I don't want to say my enemy, but they became a problem, right? And when that's your math, right, any time that the film is going to suffer irrevocably because of a mistake somebody else has made, that would make me mad, right? Now, it's taken a long time to unwind that, and I don't think that way anymore now. I think, okay, if we're a good enough team, we can take up and compensate for any mistake that has happened. And blame doesn't help, you know? And so I've completely rewritten my program of how I interact with everybody on my team. And I think we have a good kind of familial feeling around the team.

51:30People feel good about their work. They feel good that they're feeding into this kind of group effort to tell this story. And I try to make it as inclusive and as much of a group storytelling effort as I can. I try not to be precious about my own ideas. just because it's in the script doesn't mean we have to do it that way. I say that to the actors, find a better way to say it if you can. But be prepared for me to say I like the way I said it in the script as a default. You know, I don't think I'm the greatest screenwriter in the world, so I think, all right, I do something to get us going. And then I work with the actors and then we refine it.

52:07We refine it in the cutting room even farther. You know, so it's a very sort of communal effort. I think that's a fundamental paradigm shift in terms of how you perceive the process. And, I mean, probably speaking to kind of your change of ways, too. I mean, Kate Winslet's obviously worked with you on Avatar back in the Titanic days. She was quoted as, you know, speaking to how, you know, she was genuinely frightened of you. He has a temper like, you know, you wouldn't believe. Well, let's not, let's unpack that a little bit. She gave one interview when she finished the movie, and she threw me under the bus.

52:42But that was not reflective of the actual process of our work for six months, which was very attuned to each other. And we were friends during that period, and we were friends immediately after that, because I called her up and said, what the hell? She said, oh, I'm sorry. I was kind of depressed, and I was letting the character go, and I said stuff I shouldn't have said. And I said, all right, fine. And then we have been friends since then. So we're talking about a week that gets blown up out of proportion and seems to define an era, right? But we've been friends since then. I'm looking for ways to work together since then because we both respect each other so much.

53:22And we did do this kind of seminal work together that was super important in my career, super important in her career. So you're clearly sensitive to that, and perhaps that's because it's been mischaracterized. I was pissed off when I read it. I'm like, Kate, what the hell? Where did this come from? We never talked about any of this stuff. You know? But she was just, she was letting the character go. She was letting the project go. She was under a lot of pressure. The film hadn't made its money yet, right? But there's like Crew... She hadn't gotten nominated yet. The film hadn't been a big success.

53:53Wait, but Crew's worn shirts before that you either shoot it my way or do another f***ing movie. You can't scare me, I work for Jim Cameron. Oh, I got a million of those. I got a million of those. I mean, but that was from that kind of era, right? Eh, you know, it's all good, clean fun right up until the moment that that's the only thing people remember. Your interpretation of it is that's been kind of characterized in a way that that's what people remember. Okay. Caricaturized, I think, is a better way to put it. You know, Michael Biehn would not have worked with me on three films if he, you know, if he thought I was a complete dick, right?

54:27The, you know, I had these longstanding friendships, you know, Bill Paxton, Michael, others, Sigourney, people that knew me, respected me. and that wouldn't have happened, you know. And by the way, Cruz came back as well because they knew they were going to be, in the early days it was, okay, I'm going to go work on a Jim Cameron movie. I know that I'm going to be challenged to do the best work I've ever done in my life. And so they grumble and groan and then they come out of it with this insane sense of pride that they actually accomplished something. And that's part of it too, right? So the question that I faced in the 90s was, can I get that?

55:09without, you know, the heartache and the, you know what I mean, of the moment. To what extent was it a visit to Ron Howard's set that had an impact on you? No, when I was the CEO of Digital Domain, he came over to talk to the folks that, in my outfit, that were working on Apollos 13. He came over to tell everybody what a great job they were doing. And I watched him just say to people, you know, this stuff is amazing. You guys are great. And I thought, well, I probably should have done that a few times, you know, over the years. It's like an attaboy gets you much farther than the crack of a whip.

55:46And that, you know, that was a bit revelatory to me. It's like it's obvious to a lot of people. Just because you're a good artist, good filmmaker, good storyteller, it doesn't mean you're a good manager. It's not like there are classes. Well, there probably are classes in this. But, you know, for me, that's the learned art. Somehow I went right into it knowing what to do. You asked me that question before. How did I know what to do? I just did. I trained myself mentally. I went right into it. I know what to do. I knew how to draw it, knew how to build it, knew how to shoot it, right? Knew how to do all those things.

56:19I don't know exactly why, but I just did. What I didn't know how to do was manage well, and that took time, right? And so now we're 40 years later. If you think the same, you're going to be the same person 40 years later in a process, That would be unfortunate. That would actually be worth writing about. But unfortunately, that's not the story. Or fortunately, that's not the story. Fortunately, right. You mentioned the late actor, Bill Paxton, who said, the words no and that's impossible and phrases like that can't be done, that's the stuff that gives him an erection. Well, I don't know why this is covered.

56:57I've had that quoted to me three times in the last two days. that it must have gotten some weird pickup recently. I just read an article for a while, but you said, I like difficult. That sounds like something Bill would say. Yeah. You know? I mean, you said, I like difficult. I'm attracted by difficult. Difficult is a f***ing magnet for me. Yeah, well, setting aside the syntax and the word choice, I think it's accurate in the sense that I like challenges. I like doing things other people either haven't attempted or have attempted and failed. I don't like to do things I've done before necessarily.

57:32Now that sounds a bit... It's contradictory to just now bringing to market the third Avatar film. But this third film isn't just a sort of retread of movie two, which was a retread of movie one. Each one had its own built-in challenges. And movie three is really the completion of a six-hour story arc. In my mind, it's all one thing. And that's the thing I chose to do, which is to figure out, one, how to tell a story in that world about family. and two, how to deal with the element of water from a standpoint of the newer technologies that are available with performance capture and so on. Because I'd done water with the abyss, I knew what was possible to do with practical photography.

58:19I wanted to see what was possible to do to create this dreamscape using technology that was unproven. So again, that's the challenge. And meeting that challenge was the way to create these two films, which are actually one big story arc. So it's one challenge. Pausing momentarily to kind of go back to you talking about just kind of working with a crew. One kind of element that we didn't touch on that I found was like super interesting was, you know, and the whole host of people that have worked with you over the years have pointed this out. You can do just about any job that exists in film production.

58:59I mean, Jamie Lee Curtis said, not only can you do that, you can do it better than everybody else doing their job. And, like, regardless of if you agree with that characterization, I was talking to... Well, I don't, because people that do their jobs day in and day out, they're gonna be better than I am, having dabbled with it back along the way. But I think the critical thing is I know... I know what they expect and what they need to do their job. So as a director, I can tell... I can give them useful information. The late John Landau's son, Jamie, who you've worked with now for a while. I was talking to...

59:35Ten years. ...the other day, and Jamie was talking about how, look, sometimes you'll put makeup on, you know, the actors yourself. John Landau said, you have the ability to articulate the reason behind anything. The ways that's most useful to you is what? Let me give you an example. So, almost at every step of film production, people want to have a directionality. They can come in with their own creativity, their own, if they're designers, if they're a prop designer or something like that, they'll come in with ideas, but they need a directionality. So I believe in saying, all right, how does this prop, or this moment, or this creature, or this house, in the sense of creating knobby architecture, how does it relate to the story overall?

1:00:27What are we trying to say? And I always say, what's the metaphor? You know, the house is woven by hand. Okay, that tells us something about Nauti culture. This creature looks vaguely horse-like, but it's not a horse, even though they call it a dire horse. What's the metaphor? What are we trying to say? What is familiar to the audience that they can latch onto that gives them a point of purchase, you know, a connection in a scene. So I try to encourage everybody everywhere along the way to be their own storyteller. This applies especially to the DFX people, because there's no sort of mathematically perfect way to finish a shot or to light a shot, even though they deal in a world of math and physics-based simulations.

1:01:17I say, all right, what are we trying to say? Why is this shot in the movie? Your shot that you're going to work on for several weeks, Why is it in the movie? So what I find is if I can just spew, if I can just do kind of stream of consciousness, people find little things that they can grip onto that help them do their work better, right? And it keeps us all going the same direction. It's not steamrolling their creativity. It's keeping it all parts of an orchestra all trying to hit the same chord at the same time, right? And I find that with the actors. Some actors don't want to be given a lot of notes.

1:01:56They want to process themselves, process their own, what they did on the previous take. Others want notes. You find out after a while who benefits from a lot of chit-chat, you know, a lot of communication. Who benefits from me jumping right in, in the middle of a take, and say, take that again, do this. Try that idea. Just go with that, run with that. Oh, you're, you know, keep that energy. You know, just go again right away. You know, it's like that sort of thing versus stand back and let them do their thing. Just get the hell out of my way, you know. And so a director keys in to everybody. But I find as I go along, the more I talk, the more I react and I can share what's popping into my mind in the moment with them, the better they can be to serve the film.

1:02:48And I don't want to step on people's toes creatively, but it's all ultimately got to kind of boil down to one big thing. You know, I'll be in an effects review and I'll say, you know, and they're asking me, well, what color scheme do you want on Varong's Akron? Because as written, she was just flying on the same type of bird as everybody else was. And I just said, maybe she should have a different creature. And so they got excited and they ran off and they created this creature, that we call the Night Wraith. Actually, for about a year and a half, it was called Ashley, because somebody said Ashley, and it just stuck.

1:03:24We all laughed our asses off, and then it was, and we still refer to her as Ashley. And so there's a creature in the film that came out of just a random conversation. But the designers were so hungry to create a new creature, they ran off and created this amazing thing. And it's now quite featured throughout the film. In fact, I even added a battle between Neytiri and Verong, Nateria on Huracron and Verong on Ashley, and they're spinning around. You've seen the film. You know, a pretty dramatic little action sequence. That wasn't in the script. A lot of things weren't in the script. We just make them up as we go along, but it's that I just feel like the more I'm just a Pez dispenser and I'm just throwing stuff out there, throwing stuff out there, you know, the more it'll trigger ideas, inspire things, and or guide and shape their process when they're off on their own.

1:04:15I'm talking about VFX artists, animators, things like that. How can they interpret that? If I don't say anything and I'm just sitting there judgmentally waiting for them to show me something I like, you know, it doesn't work as well as if, you know, I give them, I think of it as, my wife Susie would call it the grand provocation, you know, which is something that comes from the way her school educates these kids. You create the trigger, you create the spark of interest. and then that provocation, all of their energy will flow through that, to that, and driven by their curiosity and their sense of wanting to share something or create something.

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1:05:34Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work. built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com slash M365 Copilot. I'm going to ask you about avatar momentarily, but I first wanted to talk to you about money. I understand that if you go over time or over budget, your personality just changes. You have said before... I would disagree with that. Because basically we're always over schedule and over budget. When you're doing something, though, for the first time that's never been done before, it's tough to...

1:06:22Which is everything I've ever done. ...figure out a budget for that, you have said. How about the toughest conversation you've ever had to have with a financier? I think probably the toughest ones were on Titanic because there was so much momentum and there was this giant set and there was no way where we're not gonna go forward. The only way out was through. But the costs were spiraling at a rate so fast that if I stopped production that day, a third of the way into the shoot, I'd still end up over budget. So it's like, how do you direct in that scenario? How does any creative decision I make during the day un-fuck that?

1:07:01So there's a fatalism that can come in, that could come into the process at that point. And my interpretation is, all right, well, we're screwed. The only way out of this is to do something good. In my mind, you double down on the artistic principles of what you're there to do, the story you're there to tell. But I want to kind of hone in on that with the Titanic. Why did you decide to forfeit all your fees? I offered that to the studio on a quid pro quo basis with them not doing stupid things to chop out scenes that were critical to the film. At that point, I would rather have had a film that made sense and represented what I imagined it should be than get paid.

1:07:53That was more important. So to me, it's not about the money. It's not about what I get paid. It's about the realization of an idea, a storytelling idea. Right? So I didn't want them to knee jerk and do stupid things like, let's take out the entire engine room. Let's take, you know, we reached a point where we had shot most of the film except the sinking. You kind of have to sink the Titanic. I didn't want them to do something stupid and we're going to dissolve and the ship's gone. You know, I mean, that's an extreme case. But, you know, they were talking about some pretty draconian cuts. And I thought it would have, not only would it significantly harm the movie, but it would have therefore obviated all of the energy that we had put into it up until that point.

1:08:39Thousands of people building these, you know, giant set pieces and so on. And, you know, the thing I wanted to impress upon them was that it wasn't an intentional architecture for me to get them pregnant and then spend all the money in the coffers. It was an honest series of decisions that were to make a great movie that wound up spiraling out of control in terms of physical costs. Things like we grossly underestimated what it would take to light a set that was 700 feet long and 10 stories high. Like the Musco light, the tallest light in Hollywood would not reach above the deck. How are you going to light the damn thing?

1:09:26We built models and we brought in the Musco lights as model Musco lights and we couldn't light the set. So then I came up with this idea that we'll build a track and we'll put a big construction crane on it and we'll hang a big-ass light out on the crane and we can move it up and down the ship and position it and that's ultimately what we did. But that wasn't in the budget. And it was one sort of, you know, one battle after another. What are you thinking when the studio then comes back to you and asks for points on your next films to... You know, I told them to get the f*** out of my house. Because there's a line you don't cross.

1:10:01There's a line of respect you don't cross. They saw what I was up against. They get the production reports. They know I'm trying to do my best to make a film so that we can all make some money. The problem was, their perspective on it was that they didn't believe the film would make any money. Well, yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong, in fairness to them, Fox had calculated if Titanic outperformed the most successful three-hour movie of recent memory at the time, which was an Oscar winner, the studio would have still lost something that would have been like$150 million in today's dollars. Well, in today's dollars, but let's not mix our dollars.

1:10:35You know, I mean,$100 million was real money back then. Right. Today, it's barely a rom-com. It was reported that you were miserable at the time and convinced you had ruined your career. I wasn't that miserable, actually. I was having a great time creatively. I was miserable around. Wait, didn't you keep a razor blade on your desk? That's a joke. You see, there's this perversity that gets lost in translation. It was there to make, because I got a chuckle out of it. But it was also a good reminder. The razor blade had a sign on it that said, use in case film sucks. Meaning, do your best every day, every minute when you're sitting there.

1:11:21Try to make a good movie. Because that was the only thing we had to cling to at that point. Was I unhappy? Was I miserable? No, I don't think so. I got to make this amazing film. The issue was that I did buy into the studio perspective that we wouldn't make any money. that we were basically doomed. You did? Oh, absolutely. I don't think anybody believed in the movie. I believed in the movie. I believed in it internally in terms of its power, much more so than the studio did. But I also sort of bought into the rationale that you couldn't make money off a period, three-hour period movie at the level that we had spent.

1:12:02Because we had gone from a$120 million budget to a$200 million end accounting over basically a one-year period. And it was marginal at best at$120 million. You know, I mean, it's a corset drawing room drama where everybody dies at the end, essentially, was kind of how they looked at it. And it just didn't seem possible. So to close that out, after the numbers started coming in, is there a conversation that's most memorable to you that stands out between you and the studio? I don't think we talked about it very much, because the only thing I had to say was that. And I think they knew it. No, it's, first of all, that's a joke.

1:12:58Secondly, we were all of a sudden best friends again. because in success, all things are forgiven and all things are forgotten. And everybody was just happy. They were over the moon. It's like somehow we got this reprieve from the gallows, you know? And it was kind of crazy because the movie opened to X, which was, you know,$28 million. And then it went up the next weekend, which was a holiday weekend, Christmas, went up to$35 million. I was like, what? That's not possible. Movies don't do that. It was like literally watching somebody levitate off the ground. You know, it defied physics. It defied everything we knew, except that it began to adhere to the principle that I had pitched to Peter Chernin when we pushed out from summer to Christmas.

1:13:51So I said, if we can get a foothold at Christmas, we can stay in the marketplace throughout January and February because we'll be unchallenged. It's just a dead market. And I said, and we need the legs. The only way for a three-hour movie to make money is if people have time to find it and go to it. So we opened relatively modestly. It went up, which was an aberration even I didn't see coming. But then it sustained. It plateaued. and it was like ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, weekend after weekend, 25 million, 25 million, 25 million, 25 million times 16. It was number one for 16 weeks. I don't think that had never been done before.

1:14:35I doubt if it'll where the theatrical market is going now. I don't care how brilliant and wonderful a movie is. I don't think that'll ever happen again. And it was like watching something levitate. And it was like a miracle. And everybody was just too happy for all the recrimination. So what did I do next? I promptly did not do another movie for seven years. I was like, I don't want to go through that again. Are you kidding me? I want to do stuff that, you know, when I go into the ocean with a piece of technology, it's not some random opinion of some reviewer someplace, whether that thing works or not.

1:15:12The second law of thermodynamics is not an opinion. It's a law. I want to play by rules that I understand, not capricious rules of, you know, criticism, opinion, awards. I mean, we came out of the awards great that time, but I also know what it would have felt like to not, you know, I mean, until they actually say your name, you assume you're going to lose, basically. And it's like, I never want to go through that again. Of course, I wound up going through it again with Avatar. but I was, you know, I had some perspective on it by then. So I want to talk about your first movie back being Avatar, and then after that, I'd like to get into technology and some of your expeditions that you've done, but obviously screened the third Avatar here at your office last night, thoroughly entertaining.

1:16:04My embarrassingly first time ever watching a 3-D film. How did that work for you? How did 3-D work for you? Oh, it was so cool. And independent of that, I mean, you just have to be in awe of the technology and innovation that's incorporated into your film. You know, I wonder, I was talking to somebody close to you, and, you know, back in the day, you had, I guess, kind of a barter-type relationship with Microsoft, where the gist of it was they gave you kind of a peek behind the scenes there in exchange for kind of having a peek behind the scenes in your operation. This was the early days of Silicon Valley trying to understand Hollywood and how it worked and how we thought and how we innovated.

1:16:52In what ways did that play into Avatar? Very little. I mean, I don't think I learned much or much came from the Microsoft relationship that had anything to do with how we solved problems on Avatar. I think that my time at Digital Domain and founding Digital Domain at a critical point in history when CG was a new thing and just taking off, and all of the iterative steps in between had a lot more to do with that. We went into Avatar in 2005 with a general idea of how to do it, and a lot of specifics that had to be worked out. You know, literally years of R &D. and the best way to describe it is we took a prototype weapon to a war, you know, and it was glitchy, it was difficult, but it was a very steep learning curve and it was a great learning curve.

1:17:44And the second we finished Avatar and it came out, and I had asked... Can I pause there real fast just to back up on something you said, just kind of going into that first Avatar even? I mean, you hired a chair of a plant and botany science department to come up with scientific descriptions for plants that you had made up. You hired a linguist for this made up language. And you guys are discussing points of grammar. Like, why was that important to you? Well, there's the world building part of it, which is basically fiction and fantasy taken to the extreme. and down to creating Latin names for plants that are made up, animals that are made up, right?

1:18:35Because it's the kind of detail that fans like. They like to think that that world has some true existence someplace, and it's a place they can go, right? But it doesn't matter if you make up a plant with a cool fancy Latin name. You have to make that plant look real, and there has to be a full forest full of them and you have to be able to travel through it and brush against it and move it and it has to light up in a certain way and so the interactions between the characters and the environment become part of it and to me that goes beyond world building into actual technique, actual execution and we were dealing with brand new ideas.

1:19:15We were very much doing what I set out to do in 95 when I wrote it. It just seemed like it was too big to handle back then. and there were too many new things that had to be created. In 2005, when we started, we felt we were within striking distance, but we had to create a lot of new tools. Which is what you enjoyed. I enjoy the hell out of it. I mean, creating the creatures, designing them, creating the plants, designing them, designing, creating the language, all those things, and then figuring out how to execute it. The fact that it was all new and nobody else was doing it was kind of intoxicating and kind of scary.

1:19:49but if I'm not doing something that scares me a little bit, I don't feel I'm using my full potential. How does scary come out in you or affect you? I don't know. It's just exciting. It's just fun. You know, it's challenging. So it's knowing the ways it could all fall apart and fail. I'm talking about a business proposition, a movie. You put money in, you try to get some money out by doing something that people are interested in. And the way you fail is your technology doesn't work or it's too cumbersome or you can't make your deadlines. The best innovation happens in a production environment because you've got a deadline.

1:20:35So you're going to stride faster. You're going to take more risks. You're going to be more intuitive. You're going to be maybe less methodical. Now, building a sub to go to the deepest point on the planet, you don't get to do that. You've got to be very, very methodical. But when you're working in a creative art form, you can take some risks. Nobody's life is at stake. And you learn from where you fail or where you don't achieve all your goals. This is all very general stuff. It applies to any major project, right? Why after the first Avatar for about a year and a half did you not know if you wanted to make another one?

1:21:14It was about a two-year period. Well, first of all, when I finished the first Avatar, I got very busy in indigenous rights and a lot of traveling around the world and going to the Amazon and things like that and sort of in a way giving back to the indigenous communities that we had sort of hypothetically shown. And so many reached out to you. Oh, yeah. We got a tremendous inpouring of requests from indigenous leadership all over the world to assist them in some way. Because they saw their plight writ large in the Avatar movie. And I'm talking about people that some of them had never seen a movie before.

1:21:55There were people in Ecuador, tribal people from Deep in the Rainforest that were bussed to an IMAX theater in town in the nearest city to see their first movie, which was Avatar in 3D IMAX. And they just thought that's what movies were. But they still said, that's us. This is what's happening to us. And at that point, I think it was a gold mine that was contaminating their watershed and poisoning them. and they were resisting, and the mining company had hired men with guns to shoot them, and, you know, it turned into a hole. But they were peaceful resistors. They said, we really, really like this movie, and we think it says something really important, but we wouldn't do it that way.

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1:23:30You know, so I learned a lot from that whole interaction. But that took time. And in the background of that, I'd been building the sub. And then that was coming to fruition. So in late 2011, I was living in Australia, finishing the sub. And then we took it to sea in 2012. And then there was a long tail on that expedition because there was a lot of opportunities to move the sub around the world and do educational stuff. And so somewhere around mid-12, I sequestered myself at my ranch and just started writing notes for the Avatar sequels. But there was a period of time in there, let's call it a year and a half to two years, where I didn't know if I wanted to even try to make a sequel to Avatar.

1:24:14You make the highest grossing film in history, and you don't necessarily want to have to, you know, sort of hit that bar again, you know, because that's the expectation. But then I thought, yeah, but it can be cool. How did Susie... That's usually what gets me is, yeah, but it can be cool. How did Susie's reaction impact you when you screened the third avatar for her the first time? Oh, okay. So, you know, you stay married by learning from your mistakes. So I'm not going to talk about Susie's reaction to the film again. Oh, because she... Well, because that's private. If she wants to tell you how she reacted, she...

1:24:55Well, she cried. You're talking about the first time she saw her. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But that had to be special. She's a very emotional film watcher, which is good, because it's good for me to screen it and have us talk about it. And I get, you know, she's a very good kind of test audience, in a way. And, you know, we do test screenings, and I read all the cards. I spend about two days after a test screening spreading all the cards out and sort of collating the data in a way that makes sense to me, and reading through of the tea leaves of how they express themselves for what's working and what's not working and where they're confused and all that.

1:25:37And I think it's a very important part of the process. But I also like to just have friends and people that are close to me kind of see the film. And to the extent that they're willing to be honest, that can be helpful. But they also are sometimes reticent to say anything, unless they're a filmmaker. Like Guillermo or Catherine, I would always share a film in its early stages of editing with them and get their feedback, as they do with me. I mean, I saw Frankenstein at a kind of, I would say, a middle stage. He and I workshopped the script for a couple days, way back before he started. He showed me all his designs.

1:26:17It's just a, I really value those relationships. Steven Spielberg saw it when it was still early days in the editing. He had some great notes, very helpful. You know, the filmmakers, I think, have to work together. You know, everybody wants, I think, their friend filmmakers to succeed. Technology and AI. John Landau once said, I think what he has is the skill as a writer to write stories without regard to what's possible technologically. He understands the tech side and how to push people. He doesn't always necessarily have the answer himself, but he can say, I think you could figure this out.

1:26:58Yeah, it's a question of knowing how to bridge the gap from where you're standing to where you need to be. Now, you threw AI into that, and it's probably not well understood. We actually don't use AI on Avatar to date. Generative AI does not play a role at all. Some machine learning algorithms have been used over the years, but machine learning is different. It's not prompt-based. It's not text-to-video based. It doesn't generate a finished image. ML has been used for 30 years to generate algorithms for flocking behavior of bats and things like that. And so that's just been around. But in terms of AI that all the kind of uproar is about now, we have not historically used that on the Avatar films.

1:27:48Before even asking you about AI, I mean, you've been involved in so much creation of technology and innovation over the years. I could give a ton of examples, but, you know, the camera that was used on Mars, on the Mars rover, was modeled after, you know, when you were involved with designing. Unrelated, the, you know, take me to kind of Tokyo. You're in front of Sony executives having a conversation about 3D cameras. We've had a great relationship with Sony for now going on 25 years. They've worked with us on certain requests that we've made around building cameras that we could incorporate into 3D rigs.

1:28:33But what's an example of a moment where you fly to Tokyo and you're like, take me into the room presenting the folks with a problem you're trying to solve? Very little is done with big Japanese companies one-on-one. It's mostly done at a level of their team. They'll come in with their engineering team, and we'll make a presentation and say, these are the requirements we'd like for you to modify an existing camera product so that we can incorporate it into a 3D system. And then they would either say, we can't do that, or for the most part, they always tried to meet our requirement. And we created some longstanding partnerships several times over the years.

1:29:18The most recent one was taking the Sony Venice camera and spinning out what they productized as Rialto, which was used on Top Gun 2. But we had requested that they separate the sensor head of the camera from the electronics body of the camera and give it to us as a separate part so that we could integrate that into our 3D rigs and keep all the electronics in the backfield. And that actually allowed us to create a lightweight handheld system that I could use. Because I operate the camera myself, except for Steadicam. And it goes back to that thing of somebody that does something every single day, I operate handheld every single day.

1:29:56So I'm as good as anybody else out there. Steadicam, not so much. so I'll get the best Steadicam operators in the world. But I usually operate anything that's with wheels, like a remote head type system or any kind of handheld system. I'll operate that myself. And I love to operate. It gets me close to the actors. It puts me in the game instead of sitting over at Video Village, which I don't like to do if I don't have to. Okay, so I mentioned AI. In your opinion, the impact of generative AI on filmmaking will be what? I think we have to be very cautious about AI. We have to put some hard and fast rules in place around its use.

1:30:41And it also has the potential to lower costs and improve workflows in VFX. I'm not interested in putting in a text prompt and getting a final image. A lot of people are doing that. I think it's the wrong way to approach the matter because it should all start with performance. The second you take the actors out of the loop, in my mind, you're not really making a film anymore. Do you think it will happen on the biggest scale? I don't think you can get to something that would be commercially successful that way. Because what you're going to get is mediocrity. You're not going to get the unique experience of an actor, the unique experience of a writer, that particular quirkiness or idiosyncratic thing.

1:31:24approach to a moment the way a line is said, you know, because you're taking everything that's ever been done, putting it in those trading data, and then blending it, and then getting a result that is distilled from that, it's by nature going to be mediocre, not unique. So I think that the actors process, in my mind, and certainly what I intend to do, is to always make it performance-based. See, people don't understand performance capture is not, is not technical from an acting perspective. It gets all of the technical aspects of filmmaking out of the way for the actor, and for me as the director.

1:32:03At that phase, I take everything that has to do with cinematography, all the coverage, all the lens selection, all the lighting angles, all the cranes and dolly moves and steadicams and all that, takes it all right out of the acting process and sticks it as a downstream, call it post-production process. so that when I'm there with the actors, we're just doing acting. We're just doing pure performance. And they've got 100 % of my attention instead of on live action set. They've got 50 % at best. Well, I'm worrying about the sun moving across the sky, running out of time, get that dolly track down, get the musk go over there.

1:32:40We've got to turn the lighting around. Okay, I did my master. Now I've got to do my reverse lighting. How long is it going to take? Actors go to the trailer for an hour. We'll call you back when we need you. It's a very fragmented approach to acting. It's just the way we've done it for 125 years, so everybody thinks it's the way it's supposed to be done. My position is kind of radically opposite. It's not the best way to capture acting for cinema. It just happens to be the way we've done it because we didn't have another way to do it. Now we have another way to do it, but people dismiss it as a sort of a second-class thing, like it's like a voice part in an acting, I mean, in an animation film.

1:33:18It's exactly the opposite. You met Mark Zuckerberg recently at MetaConnect. Yeah. But in what ways is the meta partnership important to you? Well, the meta partnership is in a whole different area than what I was just talking about with performance capture because, you know, I've also for 25 years worked at the kind of the leading edge of stereoscopic 3D photography, right? Used it on the movies. We used it on, we did sports for television, for ESPN. and it never really caught on in television and it's sort of been stuck in movies. But the Meta Partnership is about opening up stereoscopic content via their head-mounted displays, which people call AR, VR, you know, whatever, glasses, goggles, whatever you want to call it.

1:34:07They call them HMDs, head-mounted displays. They've got a new generation coming out that I can't say much about, but it's pretty spectacular. and we're looking at that becoming a potential entirely new streaming business model, if you will, in stereo. Because anything that goes on as a pair of glasses, as a head-mounted display, is innately a stereoscopic display. It doesn't mean that it has to be VR where you can look all around or VR where you're gaming. It can just be passive entertainment, like in your wall-mounted display, your big 75-inch TV, whatever. That's how you're consuming streaming now.

1:34:47That's how you're consuming your sports. What if it was in 3D? And what if it had cinema-grade quality 3D? And what if it was with you wherever you went? So these are questions that will only get answered by market forces once the stuff drops and once the content starts to flow into it. But I'm taking a bet with Meta that that's going to be a new market for 3D. And maybe that will inspire theater owners to step up because now there will be a flood of 3D content. And so then that will flow into the theaters first in some cases. Now they need to step up because the thing that's really been dampening the acceptance of 3D really since its inception is light levels in the theaters.

1:35:34The technology exists, Dolby Vision and IMAX 3D, the technology exists to have bright 3D, but it's not widespread. And so when the average person goes to see a 3D movie, it's darker than it should be. It's up to the theater owners to spend, to make the capital investment, to get these light levels up using laser projection. So if 3D is going to be the key to bringing people back to the theaters because you can't get it in the home, then they've got to step up. Because right now they're on 15-year-old, 17-year-old technology. It's like what industry can survive on 15-year-old technology? Automobiles can't.

1:36:17Televisions can't. There's no consumer products business. There's no technology company that can survive on 15-year-old tech. What makes the exhibitors think they can? So anyway, obviously we're in a slump in ticket sales right now. We've got to reboost the theatrical marketplace. Maybe the occasional film like Avatar can help, but that's not the answer. I can't make these damn things fast enough. Nobody can. We need a flood of stereoscopic content and we need premium display. and the premium display requires laser projection. Exploration and expeditions. Switching subjects. I know I am jumping around a lot.

1:37:03I could keep you all day with topics, so I apologize. My wife calls that lily padding. You're lily padding around. By the way, how did you make it into the paper once as a kid for a UFO sighting? Yeah, my brother Mike and I took a dry cleaner bag and we made a hoop out of soda straws, plastic straws, and made a cross of straws in the middle and put about six birthday candles on that, lit them all, inflated that dry cleaner bag with hot air from the birthday candles and let it go. And as it drifted across town, it was rotating. So people saw these rotating lights flickering in the sky. And I remember one guy was driving down the road, hanging out the side of his car with the door open while he's driving, watching this thing and trying to track it around town.

1:37:53And we're on our little stingray bikes hauling ass after it, because then we're thinking, well, what if it lands in somebody's yard and sets our house on fire? You know, it's like all of those things that occur after you've already released the thing. And now we thought it was going to go the other way, and it drifted over the town, and we chased it, and finally it went into the river. So it was okay. Everybody was... The town was saved. But it went into the paper the next day. as a UFO sighting, which is why I've always been pretty skeptical about UFO sightings. Joc Cousteau was your hero growing up.

1:38:27You were obsessed with scuba, learned to scuba at the Buffalo YMCA. Yeah, that's a true story. How did you almost die, though, on the abyss? Oh, well, I had asked for them to build a system where they would bring a high-pressure manifold down to the bottom of the tank so that we could go over and refill our scuba bottles while we were on the bottom without having to surface. Because I was in a helmet, and it took me a long time to get the helmet off and get all the gear off and then recharge the bottle and then go back in the water. So I said, why can't I just fill up down below? And then some of the other divers that were working down there, they wanted to be able to do that as well.

1:39:07So we're actually charging scuba tanks on our backs, which is not the smartest thing in the world to do. But the day we instituted that, I had been on a system of, okay, I'd sort of set my watch and I'd know and I'd have to go up and I'd get a new tank every hour or so. And the day we instituted that, I said, all right, I'm going to lose track of time because I won't be surfacing. And I charged my first AD with the job of setting his digital watch to remind me when I needed to go refill. and sure enough he lost track of it and I was in the middle of setting up a scene and I ran out of air and at first and it was his fault because I had set a mechanism in place where he was supposed to tell me after a certain amount of time because I knew I'd be totally absorbed in the process when you're rhythmically changing your scuba tank you're used to it but when you stop that rhythm and you use another system that I knew I would lose track of time I I warned him, I asked him to safety me, he didn't do it, and I wound up running out of air in a diving helmet, wearing no fins, heavily weighted at the waist, heavily weighted at the ankles, because you push the camera around, you walk around on the bottom.

1:40:24And I was, I don't know, 50 pounds negative, not including the helmet. The second you take the helmet off and it loses its air bubble, that adds 30 pounds. So there was a moment in time where I'm standing on the bottom, holding my breath, or what remained of my breath, with a helmet in my hand. And at that point, I would have been 80 pounds negative, 40 feet down, you know. So the only, and blind, because the second you take the helmet off, you can't see a damn thing. It was a dark set. There were some lights over there. I was standing in a dark area. Nobody saw me, because I had safety divers on everybody, on all the actors.

1:41:05I didn't have one on me because I'm a, you know, like a 2 ,000-hour underwater guy, right? And on a normal tank with a normal second stage, you get a couple of hard breaths and you start to realize that you're running out. This was a piston servo regulator, so it literally just went click. That was it. So I'm mid-breath. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast, Smart Move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan.

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1:42:29So I look at my gauge, pinned. I thought it was maybe a failure of the regulator. I look at my gauge, no, I'm out. And I have no backup air supply. Because I was going to go to my backup regulator, if I still had air, I didn't still have air. I was like, that's never happened. I'm like, OK, I got a bailout. Well, the first thing I did was try to contact my DP, who was about 30 feet away on a ladder sky. screwing around with the camera. I'm like, Al. Al. Al. He didn't hear me because he had blown both his eardrums diving the Andrea Doria in a diving bell accident, he couldn't hear a thing. So now I'm really screwed because I've used up half my air trying to call Al what I had left.

1:43:16Now we've got to get out of this thing. The only thing that saved me was that I had told them to use my regular BC that I use. because we had promoted a bunch of stuff from Decor, all good gear, but all different fasteners. And I didn't know, I didn't have the sense memory of it. So I used my, I made them, I forced them to attach my helmet system to my old BC that I normally dove. So now I'm doing a bailout. You pull a cotter pin here, you pull this knurled knob out, you drop the neck ring down, you push it back and it unseats off the back, drops down onto your neck, take the helmet off. Now I'm blind and out of air, in the dark, 80 pounds negative, 70 pounds negative.

1:43:59I drop the helmet. I reach down. I know where my BC clasp is. I know where my cummerbund is. I drop the BC. I drop the waist weights. I can't do anything about the ankle weights in the dark. I just start swimming. I'm swimming like a mother, right? Because I don't have fins on. But I have done free ascent. I've been trained on free ascent. I know how to do it. It's called blow and go. So you're going like that because you don't want to hold your breath. If you really hold your breath, you'll die. You'll hemorrhage. Do you think you're dead in this point? No, I actually thought I was going to be OK.

1:44:32I mean, if you panic, you're screwed. So you got to just be really cold-blooded. And so I'm blowing and going, and I know that I'm under control. Now, a safety diver sees me free ascending, having dropped my gear. His training is don't let somebody free ascend because they don't know what they're doing. And they'll have what's called a spontaneous pneumothorax. You'll rupture your lungs and you'll bleed out and you'll die. So he catches me about eight feet from the surface and stops me and shoves a regulator in my mouth. He didn't test the regulator. He should have given me his primary and gone on his backup.

1:45:12His backup had been banging around the bottom of the tank for weeks on an octopus, long line, and it was completely screwed. It had a ruptured or a split diaphragm. So I purge it, and I go to inhale, I get water. I purge again, I go to inhale, I get water. And so I throw it back at him, and I try to break free to get to the surface, and he holds onto me because that's how he's trained, to not let somebody free us in. But I knew how to free us in. So I punched him as hard as I could in the face, broke his mask, and pre-ascended. Now it was very, very close. And I was whiting out as I reached the surface.

1:45:55In a couple of breaths, I was fine. I was bad. So I fired that guy, and I fired the first AD. And those are the only two people I've ever fired in anger. Really? Yeah. And my first instruction was, OK, dry out my helmet, dry out, put in a new microphone, get it ready, and I'll go back down as soon as you're ready. So I was back down on the bottom in 10 minutes and finished the day. But I remember Mary Elizabeth, Master Antonio, watched the whole thing happen. And I had been assuring her the entire time that it was perfectly safe. We have safety divers everywhere. You're not going to be in trouble.

1:46:28And then she sees me, you know. So you've been to the lowest point of the ocean, the first person in history to achieve that solo? I would technically argue that I actually was the first person to the deepest place in the ocean because the guys that went in 1960 dove in a different spot. And it's been pretty much scientifically shown that the place I went was like 30 feet deeper, 40 feet deeper, not that big a deal. And because the guy that went in 1960, Don Walsh, one of them, there was Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, was a pal of mine while he was still alive. I never, you know, sort of made a point out of it.

1:47:12But I was the first person to the deep. He was there for the expedition. He went to the other spot, which was almost as deep. I mean, he was there and watched. And he was there with me. So I didn't want to, you know, make a deal out of it. So, you know. But yeah, so technically I was the first person to the deepest place on the planet. Why do it? Oh, because it's a great technical challenge. It had intrigued me since we were out on Bismarck in 2002, and we were down 15 ,000 feet. That's pretty damn deep, right? Except it's really not that deep, because the ocean's over twice that deep. So, and this was the deepest that any submersible in the world could go at that time.

1:47:54The Russian Mirrors, deepest rated subs. And we were in them, and we were very close to their depth record. I think they were OK to 18 ,000 feet, I think, something like that. So we were at 15 ,000. And I said, well, this is almost as deep as a mirror can go, and these are the deepest diving submersibles in the world. What would it take to go twice that deep? And then I had some JPL scientists on board, coincidentally, because we had been doing some hydrothermal work with a laser spectrometer. And I said, well, we'll have to re-engineer the flotation system. We'll need new syntactic foam. We'll need this.

1:48:32We'll need that. What kind of hull material would you use? We just started thinking. And so from 2002 to 2005, we just talked about it. And in 2005, about the time I started on Avatar, I actually started spending money on designing a vehicle. And then so we completed that in the background while I was making Avatar. The most memorable part of it for you is what? The most dangerous part to me is always the launch and recovery. That's the part at the surface. If you've done your engineering right, the dive itself should be relatively calm, and it was. You know, I mean, obviously the most memorable part was reaching the bottom.

1:49:12And there's just a quiet, and there's a stillness, and I'm looking at the bottom sounder, the echo sounder, and seeing it counting down. And I pointed all my lights straight down, and I turned them up to full brightness. And that moment when you first see the bottom, there's nothing, there's nothing, and then there's a milkiness. And that sort of goes through green into a kind of a beige-y brown as you descend. And textbook landing, I've got a good shot, so that's important. And then I called the surface. And there was this Navy comms guy that was working with us. And I said, you know, I'm on the bottom.

1:49:54I gave him the depth. And he said, copy. That was it. No, you know, eagle has landed. Whoop, whoop. Now the guys in the control room were overhearing that. And so they were cheering. And the next voice I hear after that is Susie. Says, hey, baby. How you doing? At one point, I know you were interested in, you know, a documentary in space, didn't work out. But, like, what would you still like to do? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't mind doing a 3-D film about, you know, circumnavigating the moon or landing on the moon. That'd be cool. I'd want to go, of course. Got to stay healthy for a while for that one.

1:50:34No, in terms of, you know, ocean exploration, I'm actually developing a new project right now, which is top secret, but there are a lot of deep investigations that could be done, you know, because the trenches are not well understood at all. So you've got an area about the size of, let's call it continental United States, on this planet where nobody's looked. Now, it's not all in one place. It's all distributed around. There are trenches all around the world, but there could be all kinds of amazing new species down there, you know. I'd like to go back to very near where I dove, to a place called the Sirena Deep, which is about 75 miles away, and investigate further the bacterial mats that we found there, that we had predicted might be there.

1:51:26And we found the world's deepest bacterial mats in the Sirena Deep. And so there are geological forces that allow that to happen. It's a process called serpentinization, where the rock gets compressed through subduction. and squeezes out low-temperature hydrothermal fluids, which support methanophile bacteria colonies. And so, you know, we wound up publishing a paper on that, but I'd like to go back and investigate that more, see how widespread it was. And then there's a really interesting place in the Tonga Trench where there's a thing called the Gaio seamount chain where it's subducting a mountain chain.

1:52:06So you've got a subduction plate, and then you've got a mountain chain. and the mountain chains going underneath the overriding plate. And theoretically, you should be able to see the rock to rock of two continental plates interacting, which would be very cool. You should see different rock interacting, going under. Because in most of these trenches, it sort of forms a V-shape like that, and then the bottom fills it with sediment. And so where the rubber meets the road of the two plates is buried several hundred meters down under the... Anyway, I geek out on the science. To make a long story short, there's an endless amount of stuff you'd like to explore, and you're only limited by time.

1:52:47I'm limited by mortality and by technology and capability and by money, you know. Maybe we'll make some money with this movie, and then I can continue my research. And we've profiled Ray Dalio for an episode before as well, who I know is super into ocean exploration, who you've crossed paths with. We've worked together. I mean, you know, I was involved in the design of Ray's ship, not the technological design of the ship itself, but the finished work inside the ship, turning it into a kind of laboratory-slash-studio so that we could have public engagement and educational engagement and so on. I know I'm jumping around a ton.

1:53:28You're a lily pad. In the remaining moments I have, I'm going to try and get to New Zealand in veganism because both are near and dear to your heart, New Zealand, mine as well. You know, for the longest time you lived in Malibu and then north of Santa Barbara, I think. But in fairness to you, dating back to your earliest days with your wife Susie, you said, I'm moving to New Zealand at some point. Why was it during COVID that you decided to pull the trigger? I went to New Zealand for the first time in 94. I was on my way to the South Pole and we wound up getting stuck there because the flights were grounded because of ice conditions.

1:54:04And I wound up exploring around the Christchurch area and just really falling in love with the country, the scenery, the people, just the kind of the way of life there. And I made myself a promise. I'm going to come live here someday. And when Susie and I were first getting serious, she said, fine, no problem. She was game. Now, later, we have children, we have a family, we've got roots in Malibu and Santa Barbara, you know, that conversation, you know, had to be amended slightly. But we did say, you know, after Avatar, let's make this happen. We bought our farm in 2011. And we were spending a lot of time in New Zealand going back and forth.

1:54:48And I was doing all my live-action photography there, which is a commitment I'd made. And we were doing a lot of our VFX there with Weta Digital at the time was the name of the company. And, but still, you know... Peter Jackson's company. Yeah, and the kids were based in LA and going to school in LA. So we were back and forth. I was back and forth a lot. And then we were shooting in New Zealand. We came back for Christmas and then COVID hit and we didn't get back down there. So then I had to move mountains to get our production unit back up and running in New Zealand. And we just decided at that point in time that it was time to make the move as a family.

1:55:26And so, you know, everybody came down and joined me that August. So that would have been five or six months after the pandemic hit. And New Zealand was, they had eliminated the virus completely. And everybody was all on permanent visas, so they could all already get in. So it was like, yeah, let's go to the place in the world where you could still live a normal life. And you could go out to restaurants, you could go to the cinema, all that. Right up until the virus made it back into New Zealand, then they eliminated it again. It took about, I don't know, three or four weeks, five weeks. They actually eliminated the virus twice.

1:56:01The third time when it showed up in a mutated form, it broke through. But fortunately, they already had a 98 % vaccination rate. This is why I love New Zealand. People there are, for the most part, sane, as opposed to the United States, where you had a 62 % vaccination rate, and that's going down, going the wrong direction. Are you kidding me? Although I will say, having spent a lot of time in New Zealand myself, people were not thrilled by how long they locked down for and the impact it had on the economy. But they didn't die. I was going to say another story for another day. 21 people died of COVID in New Zealand.

1:56:4321 people versus, what, a million in the United States or three quarters of a million, whatever it was. So where would you rather live? Oh, right. A place that actually believes in science and is sane and where people can work together cohesively to a common goal or a place where everybody's at each other's throats, extremely polarized, turning its back on science and basically would be in utter disarray if another pandemic appears. Well, I mean, the United States is a fantastic place to live, but New Zealand is just stunningly beautiful. I'm not there for the scenery. I'm there for the sanity.

1:57:27So you have this 12 ,000-acre farm. Sorry. What do you grow on it? I'm Canadian, so I can have a little bit of an aloofness around the whole thing. What do you grow on the farm? We specialize in organic vegetables, primarily brassicas, so broccoli, cauliflower, Romanescu, kale, things like that. And largest in New Zealand. We're the largest provider of organic brassicas, which is a very niche thing. We're certainly not the largest vegetable producer in New Zealand. They have big industrial farms that are not organic in New Zealand, are much larger than us. But in our niche, I think we're significant.

1:58:07We supply supermarkets and restaurants and that sort of thing, farm-to-table restaurants, that sort of thing. Explain the change to regenerative agriculture. Well, industrial agriculture does a lot of things that are harmful to the soil and to health and the use of Roundup and Roundup Ready GMO crops and things like that. I don't personally have a problem with GMO per se, other than when you start to couple it with these chemical pesticides and herbicides into an integrated system, it's actually opening the door to a lot of chemistry that shouldn't be in our bodies. The GMO part of it doesn't trouble me that much.

1:58:44Genetic engineering is with us. It can do a lot of good. It's being used a lot in medicine in good ways. I really try to discipline myself to not be a Luddite around certain technologies or get on bandwagons of panic over things, which makes me, you know, I'm pretty empirical. I'll look at the data, I'll read the papers, I'll look at the peer-reviewed research. And, you know, if something's carcinogenic but it's being enabled by a GMO crop, meaning the Roundup, then, yeah, I'm going to be negative on that. So yeah, we approach it pretty scientifically. So like our choice to be 100 % plant-based in diet, for me, is from a sustainability perspective.

1:59:31The amount of land use that's misused to grow animals instead of plant crops, we could rewild about a third of our agricultural land on the planet. It's a thought experiment. If everybody went 100 % plant-based, we could live with a much smaller carbon footprint and much less impact on the environment, on indigenous habitat, on wildlife habitat. It would just be a way ton better for the natural world. And part of your goal with what you're doing at your farm is to show farmers that there's another way to do this and have success. I got the two-minute sign, so I want to connect. So just on that point, we set down the road to try to be a bit experimental with our agronomy.

2:00:25We also have a farm about the same size, about 5 ,000 acres in Canada, and we're very successful there, improving our points in terms of organic farming and less inputs required, more carbon sequestered, all that sort of thing. We're less successful in New Zealand because of tax rates, labor rates, things like that, a slightly different climate, and we're still working on that. That's a work in progress. We don't have any resounding results yet that we want to publish and show other farmers what to do. But people have to dedicate resources to try to figure this stuff out. And lastly, I mean, there's through lines with everything you do in terms of sustainability, science, exploration.

2:01:12You know, I know the movie Forks Over Knives, which I watched for the first time the other day, had a really big impact on you. just explain how veganism has changed your life? Susie showed me forks over knives. She basically said, honey, I need 90 minutes of your time. I'm like, baby, is that a trick question? Of course, whatever. So we went and watched the film. I already knew all the sustainability reasons why we should eat plant-based, but I had sort of rejected it. It was like, I'm a man, I need my meat. Damn it. We need animal protein. We are indoctrinated with that since the time we're born essentially.

2:01:52It turns out you don't, and in fact, it's unhealthy. So, you know, when I saw a force over knives, I went, wow, this is crazy, I need to do more research. So very quickly, within a few days, we said, all right, we're going 100 % plant-based, and we did. And then I found this amazing surge of energy and healthfulness, that was in 2011, so it's been 14 years. And aside from getting COVID, I really just never get sick. I mean, I literally went for 10 years with nothing after having gone vegan. And then I was back running, and then I was running five miles on the beach barefoot, and all of a sudden I had this huge surge of energy.

2:02:33And that surge has lasted until now. You know, I still have tons of energy. And, you know, I love shooting, I love operating, all that stuff, so it's very physical. The way I approach production is not sitting back in Video Village. I'm out there. I'm moving set pieces around. I'm helping move the crane. I'm, you know, to me, it's a contact sport. Making a movie is a contact sport. So, you know, and you've got to bring the energy to inspire the crew to, you know, you set a pace for everybody. So I can't flag, you know. I can't show up out of breath. So how did it do? Hmm? I said, so how did I do?

2:03:15Oh, good, good, good. We were all over the place. We were all over the place. It was great. I mean, a lot of, I mean, you've obviously done your research, which was great. It's always nice when an interviewer is put in the time. Long time coming. Yeah, yeah, no good. Very appreciate you making the time. Glad we could do this. I appreciate your, I appreciate your perseverance. Thanks for listening to this week's podcast. Don't forget to leave a rating and review. And for more in-depth interviews, visit GrahamBensinger.com. you At Blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you.

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