JAMES CAMERON: Inside the Mind of One of the Most Iconic Filmmakers in History (Greatest Risks, Biggest Failures, & His KEY Principles to Success)

26:46The look that you all give me is so black. All black people know about the look. On each episode of Welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Thelma and Kelly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old.

27:32And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

28:16Do those creative ideas, do you find a set of systems or rituals or processes that help you access that or is it more organic and i know all every writer's got their own process some you know i'm up at 5 a.m i run i run two miles i have a cup of coffee i sit down i write 18 pages and then i call it a day for me it's a slow boil i noodle around for most of the day i get to the point toward the end of the day maybe four or five o 'clock in the afternoon where i've been playing maybe i've been doing notes and then i'll just say okay time to write some pages and then usually for about three hours, I'll write pages and I'll get four or five pages.

28:55It'll come fast at that point, you know? And that's when you hit your stride in screenwriting. Yeah. You can see that the way you're describing the scene with Quarge's Son, because there's almost like three different storylines kind of connecting in that moment around that one thing that you just pointed out. Yeah, yeah. But there's so many other things going on at the same time. Oh, I usually come up with way more ideas than I could conceivably pack into a movie. And then I'll winnow that down. I'll winnow that down to a big old fat screenplay that's unshootable. And then I'll winnow that down.

29:31And then I'll make a movie that's four hours long. And then I'll winnow that down. And then what you get is the end result is the distillation of the distillation of the best ideas. And then that's what winds up in the lean little tight indie film that I like to call Fire and Ash. it's only three hours and seven minutes long you know but what's incredible about it when I watched it I was so grateful that you allowed me to go see it last week and as I said when I was there the gentleman in the theater who was playing it for me he told me which seat you'd like me to watch it from which I thought was a beautiful experience to have I said yes I want to sit in the exact seat and then well no it's good that you moved back though I did he told me I had that option he said I did that today, actually, for the first time.

30:19I watched from the seat behind. Now, normally that's my working seat when I'm reviewing because you can see that there's a desk there with an Avid and so on. But I thought, well, let me see what it's like from there where it doesn't fill my peripheral field. And I've got a little bit more of that sense of control that you have when it's a proscenium. And I thought, oh, this is actually pretty good. It was spectacular, but more importantly, 3 hours and 7 minutes flew by. There was never a moment. I didn't look at my phone once in 3 hours and 7 minutes. To me, that's the test today of having your engagement, attention, and awareness.

30:56Right. So we passed the most critical test. Yeah. And the most magnificent thing is that so much happens. Yeah. Like you're just on the edge of your seat wondering what's going to happen next, and so much is happening. Right. And to do that for three hours and seven minutes in your indie movie is, it's pretty, it's just an incredible feast for the eyes and ears. And like, I felt like all my senses are engaged all the time, which is such a beautiful experience to have where just every time a new scene opens, you're just totally captivated. And it's so hard to do that for that long, especially with, I consider myself to have good presence and attention.

31:35But even then, I can turn off something in 30 minutes. And so to have your engagement not just on a story level, but on a sensory level and a whole level. I think you're on to something there in describing, as you're saying it, I'm thinking, well, what are my goals creatively? I want to tell a great story with good characters that I care about, and I care about how they interact with each other and how their relationships evolve and how they resolve their own conflicts, you know, in a way that moves me, you know. Because if I can't move myself in a story, how do I expect to move an audience emotionally, right?

32:13But then the layer on top of that is the sensory layer, which is color, composition, all of those artistic things. Because I also started as an artist figuratively, but I could draw, I could paint. I knew the rules of composition. I learned all the art history, Renaissance lighting, composition, all that sort of thing. So there's an aesthetic level to it that I like. There's the world-building level where every plant either looks real and or has a purpose. And we spend an awful lot of time. Fortunately, we're blessed with good budgets and good time to sort of let these ideas marinate and gestate.

32:56And I've got great designers. It doesn't all flow from my consciousness. It comes out very out of focus, if you will. and it's an act of working with other people to bring it more and more into finite detail. I call it my role is to create the grand provocation for the other creative people. And I got that term from my wife, Susie, who's an educator. And she says that the school provides the provocation. The kids provide the investigation and the curiosity and the passion. That's brilliant. Right? And I think it's very good. It's the basis of her school. Well, she can do all that stuff better than I can.

33:36I'm just a bystander to that part of it. But I think about what I do. I come in and I say, guys, we're going to do the coolest woven tropical village, overwater village. Now, what is that? And you'd think that they could create that in a week or two weeks. No, it took a year. And because part of the provocation was, and it all has to be intention. Nothing is built with rigid cut lumber the way we would do it where we create posts that are in compression, right? Everything's in tension. It's like a spider web. It's all woven between these big structures like the mangrove roots. And so they were actually sculpting with pantyhose to get the right degree of elasticity, to put it all in tension.

34:24They sculpted the village with pantyhose. This is absolutely true. And then they wove these little structures that later became the homes and the walkways and all that. And then they developed it from there. And then eventually we started building full-scale, not full-scale, but say quarter-scale models of these woven structures. So when you walk through it, you don't really get a chance. I always want to give a little more than you can fully perceive. Because isn't that what daily life is like? There's always more going by than you can fully perceive. you know and so the brain becomes selective okay what what's a narratively important to me yeah in the moment no and talking about the emotional nature of the characters in the story my wife always says my wife always says i think james cameron and his team have been to other planets that's what she always says whenever she watches one of you she's like he's been to other planets in other lifetimes like that's what she'll say she'll be like how how is it that you know you And you feel that because you feel the depth of the relationship the characters have for each other.

35:28You feel that. You fully believe this is real. It must exist somewhere. Yeah, right. Because how can you feel so deeply for people who look different to you and feel different to you and have different experience? But we feel it. That's a goal, right? So the goal is, all right, these people look different. They're physiologically different. They live in a different place. But doesn't that give us permission to step outside ourselves with our petty little differences between race and culture and religion and politics and all that stuff? Step well outside ourselves and see kind of universals of human behavior and the things we care about, whether that's a sense of duty and love that a parent has for their child.

36:10And that's why these films travel, I think, you know, why they resonate in China and India and Europe and Africa, wherever they go, because I'm trying to deal with universal stuff. But I'm not trying to make stuff up, right? So with the sequels, Way of Water and Fire and Ash, and beyond that, if we get to make some more, I don't know if we will or not. We have to make some money. I mean, it's a business also. But if we do get to make some more, the stories are about a family. And so I couldn't, not only couldn't, but probably wouldn't have even tried to write them if I hadn't been in a large family and gone through all that teen angst and that issue, the father issues and not being seen and all those things.

36:55And then having been a father of teens, we've got, Susie and I have five kids. And so, I mean, artists are just working out their stuff, you know, their lived experience and projecting. But taking that to another world and putting it in another context allows everybody to share in it and or recognize themselves in it, either in an aspirational way, like, wow, I wish I was part of a family like that. My family, not so great. Or maybe I don't have a lot of siblings. Or maybe I wonder what that would be like. Or maybe it's like, I'm in exactly that kind of family. Yeah. And I wish I wasn't sometimes.

37:34Yeah. I've been repeating to my wife. I'm saying this in reaction. in response to what you just said. Now, I've been saying to my wife all week, we need to have, we don't have kids yet, but we plan on having them one day. And I said, when we have kids, we need to have mantras and affirmations as a family. So I keep saying to her, Sully's never quit. Like I'm like, I just keep saying that to her. I'm like, I love that statement. It stuck with me. And I was like to see the little child's like courage in that moment where they're in so much danger and so much pain, but they remember that their dad told them that Sully's never quit.

38:05And then when she says it, when she says it later, she basically saves the world with one thing. She says, you know, come on, we can do this. Sully's never quit. And you're like, go, Tuke. Yeah, exactly. And that's that feeling of, I'm like, to see that courage in a young person and how these simple universal messages are things they hold on to in a child's mind. and then even the storyline with PyCon, like for me that, oh my, I mean, from the second to the third, because when I watched the second movie, for me that fully just made me fall in sea life in a way that I hadn't before. Right. And I was like, wow, this is genius in how you're sharing a message around, you know, water wildlife that we just don't treat well anymore.

38:55We won't protect what we don't love and care about, right? And so I'm working in a very small part of a much bigger project that's being run by a marine biologist named David Gruber. And he's working with people who are in AI and machine learning, kind of more side of AI. But they're using some large language model technology as well to decode whale vocalizations. So they've got thousands of hours of sperm whale vocalizations, and they've got some context footage of what socially they're doing, and they're decoding their clicks, which are called codas, and their click sequences. And they're finding that they have verbs, they have syntax, they have complex language, at least as complex as human language, which is kind of amazing.

39:47Wow. But it all sounds like, if you could actually hear it, it sounds like... That's like a whole paragraph. In sperm whale. Yeah. You know, and it's taken years and years and AI tools. So, yeah, nature is far more complex than we understand. Consciousness is clearly shared by some of the higher mammals, even some birds, you know, that have true consciousness. You know, they recognize themselves in a mirror, and that's one of the key signs that there is a higher form of consciousness. Like a dog doesn't recognize itself as an individual in a mirror. And we think of dogs as conscious, and of course they are, and they're emotive and they're empathetic, and they're very much like us emotionally.

40:31But they don't have a consciousness high enough to recognize their individual selves in a mirror. But an elephant can, a chimpanzee can, and a dolphin can. Wow. And I don't know if they've done that. I think they've proven that a beluga whale can as well, but I don't think they've done it with the great whales. It's just a little difficult to do because you can't put them in a tank and study them like some of the smaller toothed whales like dolphins and belugas. But anyway, there's even a parrot species in New Zealand that is intelligent enough to recognize itself as an individual. Most birds can't.

41:07So, you know, you've got these glimmers of emergent consciousness besides us, you know, and now we're going to have machine consciousness emerging in the next decade or whatever it's going to be. and that's going to be a whole new set of challenges for us as well. We don't even understand consciousness yet in ourselves, and now we're going to have to start relating to this alien consciousness that we create. Yeah, absolutely. And it's almost like I was speaking at a conference about AI and consciousness recently, and someone asked me if I ever believed AI would ever have a soul. And my response was, I'm not qualified to answer whether AI will ever have a soul, but I really hope the people building AI have a soul because it's so much of what we create.

41:52Bingo, or a conscience. Yeah, more conscience. That's what I meant, yeah. I think you can have a, if you believe in some kind of animus or spirit or soul or whatever it is that's persistent beyond the biological framework, I personally don't, just saying that up front. But I also, I won't bet completely against something that just hasn't simply been proven yet. but I also only I believe in believing in things that have been empirically demonstrated and being kind of agnostic or fluid about everything else but if you do believe in that then a machine couldn't possibly have that now could it because we didn't create that in the first place and if we think we can create a machine that can have it then we can't so now you get the sort of the soulless the soulless Frankenstein and kind of mythology around that.

42:45On the other hand, if you believe that consciousness is this kind of field of operations that is almost infinitely complex but can be understood as a real-world thing based in matter, then theoretically a machine intelligence could be as soulful, as empathetic, as emotional as us, although it might be very, very, very different. And then you get into the quantum physics of consciousness where you've got observer effect and things like that where there seems to be some link at a quantum level with consciousness and then all bets are off. You know, and I've had some strange experiences with one practitioner in particular that believed in quantum consciousness and could do things I can't explain to me, to my mind.

43:36What do you mean? And I'm, well, could actually create a state of consciousness in my mind by sitting across from me, just like you are right now. And I am not hypnotizable. Nobody's ever been able to hypnotize me. I'm pretty resistant to any kind of suggestibility. But this particular individual was able to do something I can't explain. What were you experimenting with that you even sat across someone like that? My wife Susie had met this guy and worked with him, workshopped with him a lot. many, many years earlier and said, you really need to meet this guy. His name was Carl Wolf. And I was very skeptical.

44:14Like I said, I'm an empiricist. And I said, all right, I'm skeptical, but I'll do it for you, baby. And something happened, and I can't explain it. Something happened. Now, what was it? I don't know. Carl had hypotheses. I don't know if his own hypotheses were accurate. but I'd love to ask him, but unfortunately, he died tragically in a car accident. Because I wanted to like, can I just spend millions of dollars studying your mind, please? That's fascinating. I mean, what's beautiful about all these worlds you create? And when I was researching your story and learning about just how many failures and moments you've had to quit and give up.

44:58And again, I think about our listeners and I think about them. Sally's never quit. Sally's never quit. There you go. And even what you just mentioned right now about your own experience with your father and then becoming a father and what that looks like, are the worlds you create worlds that you didn't have or did have for you? I think both. But. I mean, the thing that I've tried to do in the Avatar films is create a dynamic range of experience from ecstatic to terrifying to heart-wrenching, from despair to joy, all of those things. I think movies are pretty good at creating a state, maybe a state of dread or something like that.

45:39But I don't think they're good at taking you on that roller coaster ride that more is the way our real existence is. So I wanted to have amazing moments of beauty. I think beauty gets forgotten in movies these days. You know, everything is about threat and conflict and all that. But I also wanted to take you on an emotional journey where you get to places that are either terrifying or heart-wrenching through loss or whatever. And that's all dependent on performance. That's all dependent on the actors. The actors are our path through this, our conduit. We see it all through their eyes. So for me, the real act of creation, everybody is quite enamored of the world building because that's what they see.

46:24They see the end result. But for me, it's about getting those characters down on the page, bringing it in with my actors. And the beauty of the two sequels is that I was writing for actors I knew. And I could hear the way they'd say it. And I didn't feel the dialogue was right until I knew that Slang, Stephen Lang, who plays Corage, would say it that way, you know, or Sam would say it that way or Zoe would say it that way. And then, of course, I threw a new element in, which is Una Chaplin, who, you know, who plays Varong, who is, you know, pretty terrifying character at times. And I was making her up out of whole cloth, obviously.

47:06I didn't know who the actor was that was going to play her. but that's the part where I think that engagement that you were talking about, it's not just sensory and visual. It's also heartfelt, right? Yeah, I would have to agree. And we bring our own human experience to it every time we walk into a movie theater. And I also think a critical part of the engagement is the theatrical experience. So a lot was made, you know, during the rise of like DVD and Blu-ray and all that. a lot was made about the fact oh well you don't have a screen that big your sound isn't that good the theater is a better experience but we're at the point now where probably your home TV set and your home sound bar and everything is as good as what you're going to see in a movie theater so that goes away so what's left?

47:56what's left is in our day to day life we're very fragmented and scattered and distracted and multitasking and we're scrolling and we're typing and we're connected and multi-channeling all simultaneously, very rarely do we just sit in a meditative state and just focus. People who practice mindfulness and yoga and things like that, they know how to do that, and they do it to clear their mind. But how often do we do it where we focus on a received experience? You know, some people will sit and read a novel for hours and hours. I think they're a dying breed, unfortunately. But the movie theater is one of the last bastions of a focused entertainment where we make a deal with ourselves before we go there, before we leave our homes.

48:52We make a deal with ourselves that for two or three hours we're going to be undistracted. And then all of a sudden it's like the world goes away and you're on that journey and nothing else matters for that brief period of time. And I think that's the real magic of the theatrical experience. And it boils down to one simple thing. You don't have a remote. It's that simple. You can't pause it. You can't go order a pizza. You can't pause it, go to the bathroom. You can't be in a room with other family members who are talking, and you pause it so you can hear the lame comment.

49:30Absolutely. I'm kidding. No, no, no. The kids don't make lame comments. but they do comment during the movie and I'll pause it and I'm like, yes, you were saying. That's so funny.

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53:17Do the kids ever look at the movies and go, Dad, you just made a character out of me? Like, is there ever that? I think they see that there was a moment in time 10 years ago where who I believed they were influenced the creation of a character. But I think for them it's all a big laugh because they say two things. One is, that was 10 years ago. And two, even then, you didn't really know who I was. That's brilliant. I want to come back to depth of character. but I wanted to talk about failure because you've told this story before, but the part I wanted to ask about was before you made Terminator, you actually lost a job.

53:56Yeah. And we won't, we won't mention the film because I heard you didn't mention it, but, but like for anyone who's finally found their way, you went from truck driver, starting to make films, made the small movie, you get fired off a job. Yeah. That almost feels like, all right, well, this is the end of the road. You, you said you felt that way. It felt that way. And it felt like there was going into my first directing gig that I did get fired off of after I think six or seven days of shooting. And not for incompetence, it turns out. It turns out that I was being set up the whole time. And when I found that out later, it sort of put it in perspective.

54:32But I believed at the time I internalized that I was not doing it well. And I thought, oh, crap. Now I'm worse off than if I hadn't taken the job in the first place. Now I'm at negative 10. And I could have just been at zero. Now I have to dig out of a hole to get to zero. Yeah. You know, and so then I knew I had to do something extraordinary or something different. I couldn't wait for a directing gig to come to me. I had to create it for myself. And that's when I wrote The Terminator. I thought I have to write something original, something that I could plausibly make that wouldn't have an enormous budget.

55:07and it was scaled to conventional locations, present day, city streets, that sort of thing, so that we could do it relatively cheaply. But I also thought, all right, but I've got to inject into it. It can't just be a simple drama. I've got to inject into it something that I bring as expertise. So my expertise was in design and in visual effects. I thought, all right, so I've got to create a careful balance here. The visual effects have to be very limited, but they have to be powerful so that it's not a ridiculous budget like a Star Wars movie that I knew we couldn't afford or nobody would hire me for.

55:46So then I came up with the idea of a futuristic technology that gets injected into the present day, time travel, right? So there was a logic to the story elements that I was playing with that was based entirely on being practical and trying to get a gig. So would I have come up with that story if I didn't have those constraints? I don't know. Maybe not. But it all worked out. So I thought, all right, I want this extraordinary thing that requires animation and design, this Terminator. But I'll have it come from the future, which I don't have to see. And I'll just see present day. We could just use available light, street lighting, and that sort of thing, which is kind of how we did it.

56:27That's such a fascinating point you just made, though, that constraints actually led to brilliant creativity. Right. It wasn't the other way around. And often we get lost in the trap of when I have resources, I'll make a masterpiece. Yeah. And you made something that's timeless. Yeah, that's really good. I mean, you know, the resources will come eventually, and that brings its own curse because now you can do anything. And when you have infinite choice, you could get paralyzed, right? And an avatar movie is an exercise in limiting choice because when you work with performance capture, I get a great performance.

57:00But then I can put the camera anywhere I want. I can cut it anywhere I want. I'm not constrained by just the footage that we were able to grab that day before the sun set. It becomes a kind of a problem of infinite choice. I think it makes you a better filmmaker because now why is the camera going right here? not because that's the farthest back I can move before my ass hits the wall and that's the widest shot I can do. Why is it here and not back there or not over there? And so it forces you to become quite rigorous about your aesthetic. That's a separate problem from getting great performance, by the way.

57:37And the weird thing about an Avatar movie, it's a little weird, is we separate performance from cinematography. We do all the cinematography later. I don't even think about it. I don't think about the camera angles when I'm working with the actors. I know I'll be able to shoot it. I don't know exactly how I'll shoot it. But I just care about the heart and the soul and the authenticity of the moment with the actors. Now I'm done with them. Now they're all working on another movie. Now it's like, okay, am I on a wide shot, close shot? Am I on a long lens, short lens? Is the camera moving? Is it still?

58:09Is it raining? Is it not? Is it night? Is it day? and you can make all those decisions later with that nucleus, that sort of beating heart of the performance, but you can interpret it many, many different ways. So that idea of, you know, infinite choice, it can be paralyzing or it can make you more rigorous and it forces you to define to yourself and to the others you're working with, other editors, other designers, why you're doing it that way. And sometimes I just talk. I was like, okay, I'll talk while I'm working. It's like, okay, I can be here. I can be there. I can put the camera here. What do you guys think?

58:48And they're like, well, I like the water shot. It's like, okay, let's do the water shot. It gets more inclusive in a way. Not that I'm doubting myself, but it's like, why not? Why wouldn't you be inclusive? Yeah, absolutely. And you were so committed to that that you sold it for$1 and rejected all of these amazing studio budgets because they wouldn't let you direct it. This is going back to the Terminator, and you're talking about the fact that I made a rights deal with Gail Ann Hurd, who was another up-and-comer in the same super low tier as I was. And, you know, she had the eye of the tiger, and I recognized in her the same thing she recognized in me, which is that we could get this done.

59:30We could make something happen together. And so I sold her the rights for a dollar in exchange for a promise, and that promise was worth a lot more than a dollar. to me, which was, you will never proceed with this movie. I mean, I could have written a 20-page contract to do it, but it was like a blood oath, almost literally. I don't think we actually cut our hands, but it was pretty much that. And this is before we were romantically involved. This was just us, you know, a nascent producer and a nascent director. I said, you will never make this movie without me as a director, and I will never make this movie without you as the producer.

1:00:06and man they tried to split that team they tried to get her in the rights and and not and get another director you know and there were times when when gail was beating them up so much on the budget they took me aside and said look we'll make the movie with you but we got to get rid of her and i'm like nope that ain't gonna happen and she said nope that ain't gonna happen so in a way everything else flowed from that that first film and so that was you know that was a dollar well spent. Yeah, I love that story. Every time I hear you tell it from when I was doing research and listening to you tell it, and even hearing it now, I'm just like, today there's such a fixation on getting what you deserve and demanding what you deserve.

1:00:48And I think sometimes it sets you up for failure because you could be waiting a long time for someone to give you what you deserve. And your career is this constant, well, I'll build what I deserve or I'll take it myself. The simple answer is you don't deserve anything. It's just a question of what you can negotiate for yourself and what you can prove to the world, you know, that you're capable of, right? And then the money will flow from that and the, you know, all of those things will flow from that. I never was in it for the money in a sense. I'm still not, you know. It's a consequence of doing the job well and reaching people and communicating, you know.

1:01:27I am a commercial filmmaker. I don't try to do something that's intentionally obscure or intentionally so kind of intellectual that, you know, that it doesn't connect for the majority of the audience. I'm a bell curve guy, you know, it's like, I want to, I want to hit that sweet spot in the middle of the bell curve where the, where I'm communicating with the greatest number of people. And there'll be some people for whom it is, it is beneath them to even consider enjoying an avatar movie. And On the other end, you know what I mean? But I'm looking at that bell curve. And I think there are some filmmakers that want to indicate that they're smarter than the audience and challenge them to try to keep up and pirouette their intelligence.

1:02:13Not to say they're not intelligent, but. Come on, guys. It's entertainment. Yeah, absolutely. It can have deeper meaning. I mean, I like to have thematic layering, you know, and I like to have things that mean something to me, and if people pick up on it, great. But I won't make the story hinge on that, you know. So I don't know. Maybe it's that drive-in movie, you know, College of Cinematic Knowledge, the drive-in movie theaters of Orange County paying off. I feel like everyone looks at you, and even these examples you're talking about, There's such a, people would say, you know, James Cameron's a risk taker.

1:02:52He takes big risks. But do you see yourself that way? I feel like it's something more than that. Well, I think it's not a question of taking risks for risk's sake. But I do think the biggest risk as an artist is to not take risks. Because then you're just doing what you've done and what you know and or what other people have done, which is even worse. You know, just being in a kind of a comfort zone of mediocrity. so yeah I think you do take risks but having taken that risk you then do everything within your power to make sure that you are communicating that it is working that you're not jeopardizing large amounts of other people's money by doing something foolish you know Titanic was a risk you know it was a very very expensive film in which basically everybody dies you know and it was a period piece and it was three hours long.

1:03:46The only successful film previously that had been three hours long that was a commercial film was a Best Picture winner, which was Dances with Wolves. I always pronounce it Dances with Wolves because it was a name. So I always imagine it hyphenated, not Dances with Wolves, which is what most people say. But I don't know if that's accurate. I never asked anybody, but it probably is. but and so we were in uncharted territory I mean we went in knowing it was going to be a long film and that it's a tragic film and that it's a tragic love story pretty risky in a sense you know it certainly didn't follow any of the commercial paradigms of the time and we reached a point after we went over budget even though the film was looking pretty good in the dailies and in the rough cuts we reached a point where the studio was utterly convinced it was only a question of whether they were going to lose$50 million or$150 million.

1:04:47And they were so dead set on an outcome, they almost manifested the outcome they dreaded because of their lack of faith in the film. I even almost in a way lost faith in the film being commercial, but I never lost faith in it being artistically correct. And that's when I, the story's been told, but it's actually true. I literally had a razor blade taped to my Avid screen with a little sign that said, use in case film sucks. Because I knew that the only way out of this was through, and the only way through was to make the best possible movie you could make. Even if I didn't make a dime off it, even if it failed commercially, it had to be good.

1:05:30And it had to deliver on those artistic principles that we went in with. I knew I had a great cast. I had great performances. And it turned out from the moment James Horner played the first, he wrote three themes and just reiterated them throughout the score. He wrote three themes and he played them for me on his piano in March of 1997. And that's when I knew I had a movie because I cried on all three themes. First one, it was just like, holy shit, dude. It's amazing. you know and i said we've got a score he said i haven't written the score yet i said we've got a score and i wasn't wrong i knew from that moment that it was going to be great and yeah sure he he he wrote it he orchestrated it he went out he recorded it with a hundred piece orchestra but i knew from that simple piano melody that we were good and uh and i think at that point i started to have some faith that the movie itself would deliver on what i intended it to deliver you know there's a funny point in movies it's okay if i just kind of i love it please that's my favorite bit of podcast okay please there's a certain point in making a movie where it's not your movie anymore i think it's my movie when i write it i think the second i cast it it's not my movie anymore and the second i'm working with designers and we're building sets and all that now it's got its own momentum it's got its own life and there's a point in post-production where it's being received and i don't mean that necessarily in a mystical way although it might be i don't know but it's being received from the group's creative energy, what the actors did, what the designers did, what the camera operator did, you know, what the DP did.

1:07:17And it's just up to me to see it and see it emerging and then help assist, you know, clear the debris out of the way, get it to kind of emerge. emerge and I felt that more so especially on these last two Avatar films that I've ever felt before. We got a long film, it's half an hour longer than it could be, you've got to take stuff out. So you're paring away and themes are emerging and getting stronger. And it even got quite snaky on this last one because I felt the themes emerging so strongly that I actually wrote new scenes and ask the actors to come back and reshape the whole thing. For example, there was a scene in the script, which we captured, where Jake teaches all the Navi how to fire machine guns.

1:08:06I was wrong. That's not what the movie was supposed to be saying. And so the power, the dark, grim power that comes from when Korach arms the Ash people and you see them lift those weapons up and you say, oh my God, this whole thing's going wrong. I can't have Jake be doing the same thing, but somehow I didn't see that in the writing. but I saw it as it was unveiling itself to me. And I called everybody back in. I said, guys, you got to come back. And the beauty of performance capture is you can recreate the set almost instantly in like an hour. So we just were able to go back into it. And I did something else instead, which is I had Jake go get the Toruk, which was also not in the script.

1:08:45But when you see it, you think, how could that not have been there? That's one of the most epic moments of the whole. Exactly. Well, I had put that in movie four, but I realized I was playing too long a game. You know, the scene with him and Spider, which I won't go into the details of. But after that, you know, when Neytiri says, then we will find another way, that's the only way he's got left, is to do the thing that he dreads the most. Yes, yes. That he absolutely knows will take something out of his soul, but he has to do it. That's the only other way. And so, you know, sacrifice is a theme that I deal with a lot.

1:09:23Duty, because you can't have love without the fear of death, the fear of loss, without the need for sacrifice, without a sense of duty. What will you do to prove yourself in a loving relationship? You know, I played with that on Titanic, played with that on Aliens, you know, played with that on Terminator 2, right? And so these last two Avatar films are the same thing. What would Jake and Neitiri do for their children? What would they do for their people? And what happens when what is right for the children is not right for the people? If the right thing is to go to war, and I know that you're all about peace and purpose and all of that, and I agree with all of those things because I think empathy is our great human superpower, which will get us through this somehow.

1:10:19But I do believe there are times when you do have to fight. I'm not a total pacifist. And I think in my lifetime, there has not been a righteous war that the U.S. has been involved in. But World War II, when you have a predator that's destroying everything that is of value to people, yeah, you have to fight. You have to fight for your survival. So we could have a whole conversation just about this. I know. No, I was just about to say that the, well, I was about to say that. I'm flipping the script here, by the way, in case you didn't notice. No, I was about to say that the spiritual text that I practice and teach and follow is based on a battlefield.

1:10:54Yeah. And it's God or the divine telling the greatest archer of his time to pick up his bow and fight for righteousness and duty. For righteousness and duty. It makes a lot of, it definitely resonates what you're saying that there is a need. Yeah, so I'm an action filmmaker. So, you know, action, I mean, if you think about it, action is just a candy-coated term for violence, right? When it's righteous violence practiced by the good guy in defense of good people and so on, you know, we spend a lot of time justifying it to ourselves. And I think a lot of the classic cinematic justifications aren't really sufficient, which is why I went down the road of having the tulkun be utter pacifists, where they have rejected any kind of violent confrontation up to and almost including their own final destruction.

1:11:50But they, at the very brink, they decide that there is something that they have to rise up for. And when they see the horror of what's happened to Tanok and Payakan's clan and all that, which I think is quite a heart-wrenching scene. Oh, that's like, yeah. When you make me feel for Pyakon, I'm like, that's like, you know, because now you're not even feeling for something that looks remotely human. Right, exactly. But we're able to see consciousness in others, in the eyes, you know, in dogs, in the great apes, you know. I think it's a little harder in birds, even though they're pretty damn smart.

1:12:27Whales, though, have a soulfulness. Maybe to some extent we project it onto them, but I don't think so. There's something very calm about whales. They've been greatly injured on our planet. So I think what I was trying to express there is, look what we've done to them. And they don't seem to hate us as much as we would if that was done to us. Although there are pods of orcas near Gibraltar and off the Azores that are attacking sailboats now and ripping the rudders off and leaving them adrift. Wow. So it's like, are they learning? Are they learning that we're actually not so great for them? Trying to get their own back.

1:13:10Yeah. Workers have a matriarchal society, and the mothers teach the sons behaviors. And so the question is, is this being handed down? Because it's been happening a lot in the last few years, and it's the same group, the territorial group. All of this you're talking about, you spent around 10 years just studying the ocean, right? Yeah. While you weren't making films at that time, you literally went deep into everything that you're sharing right now. I went as deep as you can go. Mind blown. Did you just put everything else away? Not really. I kind of kept my hand in. So after Titanic was a big hit and I was questioning, you know, is this even important?

1:13:50Is Hollywood even important? It seems like such a glitzy game and it seems kind of quite fatuous. And at about that time, I wound up on the NASA Advisory Council, believe it or not. And I looked around a room full of people who were very intelligent, most of them, all of them really, better educated than me, with a strong sense of purpose, right? That they were doing something extraordinary. They were exploring space. And none of them cared about Hollywood. They didn't even know what was happening. Oh, the Oscars, what's that? Oh, yeah. And I could name a movie star they wouldn't even recognize.

1:14:27I mean, sure, there's always little movie fans here and there, but it just mattered to them. It didn't matter to them at all. They were doing something far more important. And that was a real bucket of cold water. It's like, oh, all these things, we live in this little self-referential bubble that we think is so important, and it just isn't. And so I thought, you know, maybe I'll just explore around a little bit just in life, you know. And because I had gotten to do an expedition to the wreck site where I was really now becoming conversant with real deep ocean technology, I thought, why don't I just go down that road?

1:15:04I know everybody. I know all the scientists and researchers and submersible people and everything. So I just started creating expeditions and building new tactical systems, cameras and lighting systems and exploratory vehicles. And the other thing I liked about it is the ocean is unforgiving. Either your math is right or your equipment fails. It'll implode or the electronics will flood and it won't work and you'll come back with nothing. And that's not a critic's opinion. I came up with this idea, this principle that the second law of thermodynamics is not an opinion. It's a law. It's not some critic's opinion.

1:15:44It's not some journalist's opinion. It's not even a fickle audience member's opinion or some blogger's trolling opinion. It either works or it doesn't. And I really enjoyed immersing myself in a world of hard rules. You succeed or you fail not based on your art or your creativity or somebody else's subjective opinion of your art. Because the two don't exist without each other. That's the crazy thing. So as an artist, you bury your soul and you can be utterly rejected. But ultimately, the point of art is to communicate with other humans. They may hate it. So you put yourself at risk. I thought, you know what, I'm just going to go into an empirical world, a Cartesian world, where it either works or it doesn't, based on good engineering.

1:16:35And that was good. And I learned some really important human lessons in that world as well. Because when you're offshore with a small team, it's all about respect and cohesion and that bond. And when you come back to shore, you can't even explain to people how hard it was or why it worked or what it took. But that bond exists between those people. And then I realized, okay, we're only as good as our team. And after Titanic, I put together a team to do The Impossible, which was Avatar. Nobody had ever made a film like that. It was a new form of cinema. And I remember we fell on our ass. Some of the first things we tried, we were face down on the ground.

1:17:14And we'd stop in the middle of a production day and pull out a table and sit around it. And there'd be a bunch of glum faces because it wasn't working. And I'd say, guys, this may seem like the hardest day of the production. This is going to be the day you remember. Because this is the day we write page 38 of the manual that tells the rest of the world how this stuff works. And we're going to do it, and we're going to figure it out. It was like, you know, Sully's never quit, right? And then we did, and we figured it out. And then there's such a feeling of pride and cohesiveness in the group after that.

1:17:47And you start to feel like, okay, bring the next challenge. We'll figure it out. And the team spirit and the team morale is so high now. This was 19 years ago in 2006. The team spirit and the cohesiveness is so high now. People really, they hated when it all came to an end here a few months ago as people dropped off one by one as the project was winding down. And everybody just can't wait to get back to the next one. Now, I don't know artistically as a director if that's something I want to do right away, next. There's a pretty strong, I feel a strong pressure on my shoulders to do it, to bring that team back together.

1:18:27Because it's so important for them, you know. And that's not a bad reason to do something. at all, you know, to make other people happy is not a bad reason to do something or to make other people feel fulfilled. Um, but I also have other things I want to do as well. So it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of going off a cliff. I, I've, I've told Susie, my wife, that, um, I feel like I'm Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon and I just ran off the cliff and I haven't hit the ground yet. There's that moment where my legs are pinwheeling in the air, you know, but that's okay. That's okay. The scariest moments are always the moments of the greatest opportunity, I think.

1:19:15Hi, friends. Sophia Bush here, host of Work in Progress. This week, we had such a special guest on the podcast. My forever flotus, a mentor, a friend, a wife, a mother, an author, attorney, advocate, television producer, and now she adds podcast host to the list herself. Friends, Michelle Obama is here. Sophia, I'm beyond thrilled to be able to sit down and chat with you. We talk about it all. Life, love, motherhood, martinis. Vodka martini, dry, straight up, olives. Ooh, olives. Very cold. My girl. Barely any vermouth. What's next? What she's watching on TV. I am a white lotuser. I am a real housewives person.

1:20:02I love the dating shows. And tennis. I just find that to be a bit meditative. You do not want to miss this. Listen to Work in Progress on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A combat surgeon with secrets, a world built on power and privilege, and the most unexpected creative duo of the year. As an actor for so many years, I would always walk into other people's stories. And I thought, well, why don't I give it a shot, you know, and try to write up my thought. This week, Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club goes live from Apple Soho in New York City with Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, the powerhouse team behind Gone Before Goodbye, now a New York Times bestseller.

1:20:46I think we both knew right away that this was going to happen. It's a conversation about fear, ambition, and what happens when two master storytellers collide. I'd never seen a woman in kind of a James Bond world. Come for the chills and stay for the surprises. And find out why readers can't put it down. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, Nicholas Sparks is here. I would imagine that you've gotten a lot of feedback about setting a standard of love and romance that a lot of men probably can't measure up to.

1:21:29I have heard such stories at my book signings, right? Where's my Noah or where's my John from Dear John? And at the same time, in the course of my career, I've had seven marriage proposals in lines to sign my book. Oh, really? I get up to the table, the dude will drop to his knees, and I feel so bad for him. I'm like, dude, you're in a Walmart in Birmingham, Alabama. you know, but it's happened. And, you know, you get a lot more of those kinds of stories than people coming up and say, I've ruined, I've ruined men for them, for the rest, which I'm glad I would feel bad if that was more common, actually.

1:22:07No, that's what you come to Dear Chelsea for. Yeah. To get upbraided. Listen to Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:22:26When you're building a universe with people, you're building lives and hearts and worlds that connect on such a deep level. I feel like when I'm listening to you, I'm like, everything you do is highly emotional and emotive and heartfelt and deep. And you can't help but cry when you're watching your work. You know, maybe not Terminator, but what follows, or maybe, maybe, maybe. No, Terminator 2. when the Terminator goes, come on, when he goes down into the steel and his POV goes to nothing. Come on. People tear up. Yes. Yes. No. And so you see that and I'm like, it feels like the emotion of creating it, whatever we're getting out of it is because the emotion that's creating it is going into it.

1:23:11And this team that you are curating is bringing all of that emotion, as you said, whether it was the pantheos that are building the, you know, the physical buildings in the movie, or whether it's the emotion that the characters are feeling and Tuca's feeling and et cetera. How do you even start to detach from that as a team when you've been immersed in it for decades at this point? Maybe you don't. Maybe just keep going. I don't know. Well, look, I mean, there are a number of milestones here that have to be met. First of all, the film has to succeed financially, and that's not a given. Everybody just assumes it's a no-brainer, but the theatrical marketplace has been dwindling and collapsing about 35%.

1:23:56It hasn't rebounded, and people's habit patterns have changed. And so the thing that I grew up and love and feel such a strong sense of passion for may be becoming obsolete. Maybe, and the cost of making movies is continuously going up and the demand is falling. So that's a little bit of a death spiral right there. And so maybe it's going to be okay. We were sort of successful. If we can do the next one cheaper, we can continue, right? And then there's also that wild card. There are other projects that I have that I've been sort of sitting on in the background. And there's a thing that I want to do about Hiroshima.

1:24:37I bought a book recently, but it's a story I've been following and excavating and researching for really my whole adult life. It's something that I really feel strongly I need to do at some point. It's not a big film. It sounds like it would be, but it's not a big film in the sense of an Avatar film. It's not a four-year commitment. It might be a one-year commitment. So I need to do that. Why is that so meaningful to you? What about it? I just think that we live in this world. I mean, I think Catherine Bigelow's film title is kind of growing on me, The House of Dynamite. It's like we live in a house.

1:25:11Imagine you live in a house and you feel perfectly normal and you go about your business and you're chopping onions for the guacamole and you're going to watch your favorite show. But the basement is filled with dynamite and it could go off at any moment. That's the world that we live in, you know, and it hits that metaphor. And so it's not a metaphor. It's our world. So I feel that we have a kind of a systematic forgetting of history just at that remove. And we're enough removed from the event of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think people need to be reminded what these weapons really are and what they really do.

1:25:46Of course, the punchline of the movie is going to be the card at the end that says, there are 12 ,000 nuclear warheads deployed in the world today. each one is 100 to 500 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. And you're going to witness it and you're going to go through it with the main characters and it's not going to be pretty. It might be a hard film to watch. In fact, it might be my least successful film, but I just feel it's that thing of duty. You're all about purpose. We define our own purpose. We choose purpose for ourselves. And it doesn't all have to be, you know, obviously benevolent, like, you know, maybe helping out a soup kitchen and easing the pain of others.

1:26:31It might be something that's more of a warning that helps guide us away from the rocks of destruction, of civilization. As an artist, I think it's important to consider these things, you know, and not feel powerless. Because it's easy in a world of 8 billion people to feel powerless. And yet empirically, I can look at it, oh, I'm reaching millions of people. I'm reaching hundreds of millions of people with a movie like Avatar. Maybe I won't reach as many people with a movie like Ghosts of Hiroshima, but I'll reach some. And you never know the causal chain that puts a person out a moment where they've been influenced by something.

1:27:10But you have it even in Fire and Ash. I mean, that scene that you were referencing, without giving too much away, of Quarage actually arming. you know and there all of a sudden you see the becoming of terrorists like that idea of the government you know all these messages are just i i feel like there are so many deep layers to the movie you could keep going whether it's family whether it's racism whether it's equality whether it's equity whether it's you know whether it goes down all the way through to governmental politics that we're seeing today i mean the the movie is filled with so many powerful messages.

1:27:45And just seeing each other. You know, ultimately it all goes back to connection. Is that the root? Yeah, I think so. You know, there are two moments in the film where people say they see each other and they understand each other. And one gives you this feeling of vast dread when Varong says she sees Korich and she sees this vision of destruction for herself. You know, she's like, you know, Kali. Yes. Right? And then when Neytiri sees Spider, you know. Finally. And there's a bridge across the two species, across that divide, across that, because she becomes quite a racist in the film. And that's by design.

1:28:28it's like we take our most beloved character and we challenge you to really walk in her shoes and go the hard yards of what loss and grief can do and i think about all these people and everything that they've lost in the world whether it's in gaza or sudan or ukraine or wherever and how does that not generate just a hatred that will span generations well that's the cycle that we have to break right you know loak says something at the beginning and it's kind of like a little cheeky to actually say your theme out loud, you know, in the voice over here. I'm going to tell you what the movie's about, okay?

1:29:03You know, and he says the fire of ash leaves, the fire of hate leaves only the ash of grief. But he doesn't complete it, which is from that ash of grief comes that fire of hate again, and the cycle perpetuates indefinitely. So how do you break it, right? That's the challenge, I think, that's presented in the movie. You know, how do you break it? And how do you know when it's not about hatred and revenge and when you fight defensively for the things that you value, you know, as opposed to offensively going out after somebody to punish them for revenge, to take what's theirs, you know. And you see all of that happening in the world right now, all over the place.

1:29:46And, you know, you wonder, this is, I'm going to circle this back to AI for a second. The thing that the proponents of artificial superintelligence always say is, well, we'll manage the alignment problem. We'll align AI to our common good as human beings. But we can't agree on a damn thing. We can't agree on what's right and wrong, what's ethical, what's moral. A Republican's idea of that is very different from a Democrat's, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu, a Shintoist. Whatever it is, everybody's got a different opinion. And we can't agree on anything. So how are we going to suddenly form this wonderful moral consensus so we can teach it to something smarter than us that we can't control?

1:30:35I mean, if that's not the biggest recipe for disaster I've ever heard in my life, what is? Now I am a science fiction fan, and it always goes into the darkest possible scenario because that's where science fiction goes. because it's meant to be a warning to us about possible futures. But okay, we're living in a science fiction world right now. So I look at you, I look into your eyes, I see your kind of soulfulness and your enlightenment and all the things that you do and why you do it. And I think, all right, that's why we're going to make it because there are people who are practitioners of empathy and connection and they're out there and they are legion.

1:31:19they just don't ever seem to get into positions of power and and and you know the where it really makes a big makes a big difference it just seems like all the wrong people elevate i don't know how you feel about that and i don't know if that keeps you up at night yeah well i i think that's partly why i try and do what i do because i think i saw that for a long time and of course what i love about the way you build character which is true of me or anyone is that no one's perfect Everyone's flawed and has multiple, you know, when you look at all of the characters in Fire and Ash, like they're not just good and bad.

1:31:55Like that would be, and hence the scene we were just talking about with Spider, like that moment is so, I mean, I can't believe you went there. I was like, wow, this is like really testing, you know, everything that I believe to be true about this family. And I'm not giving it away, hence speaking in broad terms. But so to be really clear, there's no one who's perfect or flawless or, And of course, I have all of those challenges myself. But I find that what I try and do by having this platform and by having these types of conversations with people like yourself and allow for these. Like my vision, and I think you'll relate to this based on what you were saying, I love the bell curve too.

1:32:35So when I started this, my vision was to make wisdom go viral. I said, I wanted to find a way that hundreds of millions or billions of people would engage with themes that were at one point saved for the elite or niche. Yeah, yeah, right, right. And we do that. We do 750 million views a month about conversations like this, which is proof to me that people want this. And so I think we may, I agree with you. I don't think we'll do it through the traditional means. Yeah. but art and creativity and now the microphone belongs to everyone, there is an opportunity to galvanize community and connect to these higher parts.

1:33:17We have to do what we can do. Our voice may carry not very far or it may ripple outward very far. We have to do what we can do. And for me, what drives me is being a parent, you know, and knowing that there is a legacy that's being handed to my kids by my generation. and I just want it to be the best that it can be. It's not going to be perfect. It might not even be that great, but everything that people like yourself and hopefully I do can improve it incrementally.

1:33:52And so anyway, you just keep banging away at it, right? Yeah, well, I think the stories you tell do that in the most profound way And I do think that art transcends so many things in the world, as you said, and anyone can sit in that room, forget their designation or their seat or their status, and watch a movie about humanity and connection. Well, you're using the term connection, and I think of that as an extension of our impulse to empathy. We have a natural human impulse toward empathy. I think we all have it, unless you're a psychopath, and that's 1 % of the population. So 99 % of the population has an impulse toward empathy.

1:34:38I think where empathy goes awry is that it's narrow and powerful as opposed to more diffuse, right? So when we have an empathy for our family, for our children, for our friends, then everybody else starts to look like an enemy. And I think it's that narrow spotlight of empathy where it breaks down. On the other hand, we can hear a story about somebody in another state or another country, and all of a sudden we're weeping for that person because our mirror neuron allows us to feel their pain. Yes. Right? But we can't feel the pain of the world. But we have to. We have to. We have to be able to expand it, not where it crushes us, but to where we don't see the other as an enemy.

1:35:26Yes. But somebody who's maybe an equal victim with us of, you know, a kind of a world that can go against you. And, you know, medically and any kind of moment, you know, things can go against you. And there are people that are less fortunate, people that are more fortunate. But people never feel like they have enough. That's the problem. It's not that they're greedy. and so they never have enough to feel completely secure and safe for their family. So there's a certain point where you have to be willing to risk your own family and risk your own comfort for the good of a greater group, and that's a very, very hard place for most people to go.

1:36:08Absolutely. But there's an image that I always wanted in one of the Avatar movies, which is seeing that world from orbit at night where you see everything connected, You know, that those little glowing, you know, you basically see the mind or the heart of Ewa, of that connectedness. And so I managed to squeeze it in. I managed to squeeze it into this film. And hopefully people will resonate, you know, for what it means, what it's meant to mean anyway. James, I have a warning from your team because you have to get off to the event. So I want to end with a final five that we do with every guest.

1:36:46I could talk to you for hours and I hope we do get to talk more offline. but we end every interview with these final five. They have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. Okay. So James Cameron - I can do a six paragraph long sentence. Okay. So we ask each to every guest, James Cameron, these are your final five. Question one, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received? I had a teacher that said, you have unlimited potential. And he meant it. And it changed a lot for me. That's a great answer. Yeah. Question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

1:37:29Roger Corman told me to always sit down on set. You stand up a lot. I never sit down. That's a great answer. Question number three, what's the hardest thing you've learned about yourself that shaped your art? the movie is not more important than the process of working with people to make the movie wow that took 40 years no maybe 30 the people are more important yeah well it's beautiful uh question number four tell us the real reason why jack couldn't fit on the door ah you went there I had to okay this interview is over

1:38:17because his chivalry demanded it that's a great answer he loved her and he would not take a chance that they could both survive if they could both die that's a great answer yeah and by the way Romeo and Juliet had to die but it sacrificed duty in your themes just there's so love Love, death, sacrifice, duty, they're all related, and they're all thematic in all of my films. Why do you think that is? I don't know. You're still discovering that, still curious about that, where that comes from? Can I speak in longer? Yeah, please. Yeah, yeah, that's a big question. I don't know because these are things that I'm finding later in life I actually am confronting and having to deal with, but in early life they just made sense to me.

1:39:07you know I always say all my movies are love stories but they're not necessarily conventional love stories duty and sacrifice are things that I I don't even know if it's enculturated it might even be just biological it might just be innate I don't know or some combination I think Canadians in general tend to be less selfish but you know you can't generalize about an entire population and there were some real assholes in the town I grew up in so you know I don't know where that comes from but it's a belief system definitely a belief system I'm glad I asked you that question now because we got an answer that just yeah shares so much more of your heart and where it all comes from fifth and final question we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be?

1:40:03a law Wow. Legislating morality, that's a hard thing.

1:40:14See the person in front of you. I don't know how you'd enforce that. Just see them. What does it mean to see? see who they are see see who they are on the inside you know in the avatar universe I see you can mean I understand you it can mean very simply I see you you're here hello it's like hello it can be I see something about you I never saw before I understand you it can mean I love you meaning that fullness of understanding another person that goes to a higher level. It's got many layers of meaning in Navi lore. It's very deceptively simple, you know. But it goes back to that empathy thing.

1:41:03It goes back to the mirror neuron. It goes back to projecting yourself into their situation. I also find that there's a little thing I do where it doesn't matter where I am, especially if I'm in a car or I'm just meeting some driver that's driving me from the airport or I'm on the street or I'm killing time someplace. I just start talking to people, and I want to hear their story. You know, people that the average person would think that a person like me would never talk to. You know, the janitor, the guy selling the churro. You know, I just want to talk to them. Maybe it's a writer's instinct, you know, to want to hear stories.

1:41:43Because I think everybody is a universe. and that sort of Trump idea that they're all a bunch of losers and they're not worth anything drives me insane. Because it's not about social standing or status or having a PhD or the argument from authority. Oh, his argument, his opinion is more important than that person. I just want to hear everybody's stories and find them all fascinating because we all are on this unique path and we're all, our camera is viewing the world from a unique position. I felt that most in watching Sully and Quarage's relationship through fire and ash. There's a lot of seeing each other in different moments, which in moments you don't expect it.

1:42:31Yeah. And the story definitely teases to a potential. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Well, we can't give our thing away. Well, I can't wait to watch it again. I'm going to take my family when I get back to London for Christmas. I'm so excited. James, I hope we do see four and five happen. I can't wait to watch them. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see where it goes. But it's such a pleasure sitting with you. Thank you for your energy, your presence, your connection with me today. And I hope for many more. So thank you so much. Well, thanks. Thanks, Jay. Really, really a wonderful interview. And I'm glad we got to go to important, meaningful things instead of all the stupid stuff I normally get asked.

1:43:11I only asked you one. You did. You definitely went there on that one. But you know what? At this point, it's like there are worse problems to have than people still arguing about the demise of a character from 28 years ago. Yeah. You know, as a filmmaker, it's kind of like, great. Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you. If you love this episode, I need you to listen to one of my favorite conversations ever. It's with the one and only Tom Holland on how to overcome your social anxiety, especially in situations where you're not drinking and everyone else is. We talk about his sobriety journey and so much more.

1:43:50He gets really personal. I can't wait for you to hear it. It's going to blow your mind. The quote is, if you have a problem with me, text me. And if you don't have my number, you don't know me well enough to have a problem with me. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood, a Cuban musician with a dream, and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time? You get Desi Arnaz. On the podcast starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama, I'll take you on a journey to Desi's life. How he redefined American television and what that meant for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like ours on screen.

1:44:23Listen to Starrin, Desi Arnaz, and Wilmer Valderrama on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:44:53jargon and get your real answers to the stuff you actually wonder about. So check out the mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. What are the cycles fathers pass down that sons are left to heal? What if being a man wasn't about holding it all together, but learning how to let go? This is a space where men speak truth and find the power to heal and transform. I'm Mike Della Rocha. Welcome to Sacred Lessons. Listen to Sacred Lessons on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.