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

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Opportunities come along on their fleetote and that door will
open for a moment, and then it'll slide close. When
that door opens, the critical thing is to understand it's
not an example of an opportunity. It is the opportunity.
You either take it or you don't.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hey, everyone, welcome back to on Purpose. Today's guest is
someone I'm deeply excited to interview. His life is truly
movie magic in so many ways, but it is filled
with lessons, insights, and inspiration that you can take into
your own journey to chase your passion, to pursue the
career that you love, to bring your art to life,

(00:37):
to bring your magic to the world and offer it
as a service. I'm sitting down with the one and
only James Cameron, one of the most influential storytellers of
our time, filmmaker, explorer, and visionary who has redefined what's
possible on the screen, from The Terminator and Aliens to
Titanic and Avatar. His films have shaped global culture, push

(01:00):
the boundaries of technology, and spark entire generations of imagination.
James is a deep sea explorer, the pioneer of performance capture,
and a director whose work continues to challenge, innovate, and
expand what storytelling can be. The highly anticipated new chapter, Avatar,
Fire and Ash, that I got to see last week,

(01:21):
comes to theaters December nineteenth. Make sure you book your seat,
go and watch it with the whole family. You won't
regret it. Please welcome to On Purpose, James Cameron. James
it is.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Can you just travel around with me for the rest
of my life and do the introduction? No pressure, by
the way.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Well, you had to build it, you had to live it.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
I gotta live it. I have no choice. There's no
backing out now, right.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Well, you've had to live it for all these years
and create all these iconic films that we all have
fallen in love with and still talk about to this day,
and so many new ones to come in the future.
But I want to take us back to your childhood, okay,
because I feel that so much of who we become
is defined in those early years, as you and I

(02:08):
both know, and I was wondering, do you remember the
first character or world that you ever imagined, even if
it wasn't for a movie or a film or an idea,
but just a world that you lived in when you
were younger.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Well, I was totally enamored as a kid with anything
fantastic or science fiction, anything I saw on television that
was fantasy and science fiction. But I remember one one
I think there's a moment where something inspires you to
take your own action, to do your own art, and

(02:43):
I remember, and this may not have been the first,
but this is what pops to mind. So seeing Mysterious Island,
which was a Ray Harryhausen film, I probably would have
been seven or eight and coming home and wanting to
do my own version of Miss Silence. So I started
to draw essentially a comic book, but it was my

(03:04):
own story. The animals were different. They wound up cast
away on a raft as opposed to in the movie.
It was a balloon, and I just started telling my
own story. So technically that would be the first case
I can remember of world building inspired by something else,
but not copying that thing. And of course Ray Harryhausen

(03:25):
was always inspiring to me as a kid, you know.
I mean the technique that he used of stop motion
animation is considered quite quaint now, you know, and we
can do things that are far more realistic, But at
the time, there was nothing like that in terms of
his art, his craft, and that blew my mind at

(03:46):
the time. And you know, look, it doesn't take much
to inspire. Kids are imaginative, you know. And when you
get something that impacts your imagination and triggers it and
then you start to draw, all of a sudden, my
hands go. You know what I mean, I'm drawing. I'm
choosing colors. What color do I want the giant turtle
to be? I picked green? No big surprise there.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Did you ever get to share that with the director
or anyone in the cast?

Speaker 1 (04:12):
I did talk. I talked to Ray later in his life.
He was pretty retired. He hadn't he hadn't done any
stop motion for some time. But you know, I shared
with him some of these early stories and the impact
he had on me and so many other filmmakers. He
was absolutely the most fantastic of the fantasy filmmakers that
were out there for many, many years.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
I can't imagine what that felt like to him to
hear that something of his that inspired you to go
on to see what you did.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
I think he was just kind of dazzled by where
we were. The next generation and the one after that
had sort of taken it into CG and so on,
and things that he couldn't have imagined the technology, but
he certainly could have imagined the design and the storytelling,
you know, that were possible with those those new tools.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, I think that's the power of art. As I'm
listening to you, I'm thinking just how many young kids
are going to go and watch Fire and Ash and
that becomes their version of that movie that then inspires
them to go and bring their art into the world,
whether it's film and TV or poetry or music or
whatever it may be. And how important it is because
he probably didn't imagine that. You know, James Cameron as

(05:22):
a seven or eight year old was watching his film.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Oh how could he have, you know, I mean, he
was just following his muse and we all do, you know.
But I'd love to think that stuff that I've done
is inspired inspired, you know. I want to say kids,
but you know, it could be anybody that wants to
be an artist at any age. And you know, I
have this art show that's touring around in Europe. It's

(05:45):
actually in istan Ball right now, and it's a lot
of drawings that I did and paintings that I did
when I was in high school and in college. I
didn't know it was going to be a big shot
filmmaker someday. You know, how could you possibly know that?
You know, I was just the ideas of had I
just had to draw them. I mean, I had to
draw them. And I always say artists, artists are the

(06:05):
people that can't not draw or can't not create. It's like,
it's not like you've forced yourself to create. You have
to force yourself not to, you know. And if that's
flowing from you, if it's flowing from your fingertips, or
if it's voice, or if it's music or whatever it is,
if it's flowing from you and you can't stop it,
guess what You're stuck. You're an artist and you feel compelled. Yeah, yeah,

(06:29):
and you don't question it. That's the crazy thing. At
least I never did, you know. I'd sit on the
quad at college and I'd just have my math notebook
or whatever, and I'd be sketching some girls sitting under
a tree, or some guy or my own hand or
you know. It was just always drawing. I couldn't imagine
not drawing.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
Was was there a part of you that fell out
of place? As a kid, but now that same skill
is essential to who you are now or did you
always feel that.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
You think so? Yeah? I mean, look, you can get
very solitary the creative act, especially when you're write, because
you really have to just you know, isolate and you
need to be in your own headspace and be comfortable
there for long periods of time. So it can be isolating.
I remember, and you know, I mean, our memory of

(07:18):
our childhood is always tainted by the stories that we
tell ourselves, and we don't remember the event. We remember
the story, yes, because memory is an interesting thing. We
don't really, we're not video cameras. There isn't enough storage
in this three and a half pound meat computer to
last a lifetime. It'd be a million petabytes of data.
We just don't have room for that, right, So we

(07:39):
don't remember the event like a videotape. We remember the
story we tell ourselves. The story I tell myself is
that I spend a lot of time on my own,
in my imagination in the woods, connecting with nature, finding animals,
finding bugs, collecting butterflies, tadpoles, whatever. It was a lot
of time on my own drawing and just thinking, creating,

(08:01):
and a lot of time with other kids organizing and
doing fun collective projects. You know, the one in the
neighborhood that always said, hey guys, let's build a fort.
You know, hey guys, let's build a go cart. Hey guys,
let's make an airplane out of wood and hang it
from a tree and fly at which we did until
the road broke and you know, it crashed. But you know,

(08:23):
so there was an alpha social component which is now critical,
but there was also a quiet, creative and introspective component
to it. And I think it was if I look
at my life now, it's my comfort in both of
those zones that allows me to do what I do
because a lot of people are good writers, are good creators,

(08:44):
good artists, but they don't have the social organizational component
to motivate people to do things, you know, and to
leverage their creativity. And so that's a big part of it,
that sort of alpha component, if you will.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah, absolutely, it's fascinating because you hear about this passion
in your childhood, the flow to draw and create and
to be fascinated with nature, and it almost makes sense.
But then you've become a truck driver, and so walk
me through that arc of your life, because I feel
so many people kind of up until ten eleven years
old may even have these passions and dreams and ideas

(09:20):
and creatives, but then their life takes a difference.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
I never went to university, per se. I went to
the Fullerer and Junior College, which is part of the
junior college system. Was intensely curious. It was the first
time in my life where I was surrounded by people
actually wanted to be there, you know, as opposed to
high school, where people didn't want to be there. They
just had to be there, you know, and most of
them sort of rejected the learning process. I was always

(09:44):
hungry to learn, not necessarily what they were teaching, but
you know, lots of new things. I got to college
and I was surrounded by people actually wanted to be
there and wanted to learn, and there was people were
having arguments about philosophy and English storytelling and art, and
it was very exciting. But it was unsustainable for me.

(10:05):
I couldn't afford to do it continuously or endlessly, and
so I had to work. And I worked various jobs,
all blue collar jobs, right, And I didn't mind working.
I didn't mind just sort of being, you know, and
I got married at a very early age. I had
a little pink house with a white picket fence and
a dog, you know, and it was kind of, you know,

(10:27):
kind of comforting. It was very, very limited and simple.
But at the same time, in my after hours as
a truck driver, because it was a you know, nine
to five or eight to five job, I was painting,
I was drawing, I was storytelling for myself. My wife
didn't understand that she was a waitress, and she liked
the me that was social and with her, but not
the me that was off, you know, creating all these worlds.

(10:49):
And so I was still trying to reconcile, you know,
that kind of social facing versus the you know, landscape
of my own imagination. But I've always been comfortable in
my own had that way. Dreams are a big part
of it. Dreams are a big part of my creativity
and source of imagery, source of little bits and pieces
of narrative, you know, because it could be quite chaotic

(11:11):
and jumbled, but still within that there could be some
interesting ideas. And so I think it was all just
building up, building up a pressure to the point where
I had to do something about it. And that was
in my mid twenties, so I was kind of a
late starter. I never went to film school, you know.
My film school was the drive in movie theaters of

(11:33):
Orange County. You know, so no formal training in film
aesthetics or film history or any of that stuff. But
it was just kind of building up that all right.
You know, it's that urge to when you can't not draw,
when you start thinking filmically and in terms of storytelling,
it's like, well, you can't not tell a story. You've
got to tell somebody the damn story, you know. And

(11:55):
I think anybody out there that here's this that feels
that way, you don't have a choice. Yeah, you're probably
going to be a filmmaker or a writer or whatever
it is. You know, just accept it. You know, you
might never be rich because you know it's it's a
difficult task and there's a lot of luck, I think
involved in getting to be a successful storyteller. But I

(12:18):
just followed it, and I didn't I didn't question it, you know,
I just quit my job one day, no rankor just guys,
I got stuff to do. I'll see you to the
other drivers and they're like, what where are you going,
you know.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
I mean it feels like a bold step looking back,
because without film school, without having made a film, yeah,
without any of that background. To watch Star Wars, I
believe in nineteen seventy seven that was and for you
to then go, I need to go and become a filmmaker,
even though you love drawing. And it feels like a
bold step. And I think about all of our listeners
in our community who are all thinking something similar. I

(12:57):
think a lot of people in my generation and the
generations off to me maybe studied something at school that
wasn't the thing they wanted to be. They have a
dream inside of them, they have a story and they
feel a pull, but they're scared to take that final step.
What gave you that conviction? Was it conviction or what
was it? Was it?

Speaker 1 (13:14):
I think it was a conviction. Star Wars helped. And
I've talked to George Lucas about this. I said, untold
people that you've inspired, George, but I'm one of them,
because but in a way, I don't. I don't think
he was quite wanted the answer that I gave, which
was I was already seeing all that stuff in my head,
and when I saw Star Wars. I thought, if that

(13:36):
could be the highest grossing film in history, then the
stuff that I'm seeing in my mind when I listened
to fast electronic music and imagined space battles and all
this crazy stuff, It's like I should be doing that.
You know, there will be there will be a market
for it. There's a market for my imagination. And that's
maybe the boldest step is the step you take internally,

(13:59):
you know, where you give yourself permission to at least
go try it, you know, and and when you make
that commitment, you have to go in wholeheartedly. You can't say, Okay,
I'm going to be a filmmaker part time, but I'm
going to sort of keep a foot in like medical school.
It's not going to work. You got to go. You
just got to jump out of the plane and hope

(14:20):
you're wearing a parachute, you know. So I always tell
people that opportunities come along and they're fleeting, and that
door will open for a moment and then it'll slide closed,
and you've got to be Fortune favors the prepared mind.
If it's really something you love, read as much as
you can prepare your mind ahead of time, be ready

(14:41):
because when that door opens. But the critical thing is
to understand it's not an example of an opportunity. It
is the opportunity. You either take it or you don't.
You don't use it as a time to think about, well,
when the next one comes along, I may or may not,
you know what I mean. That's not how it works.
You go, you launch, you know. And that opportunity for

(15:01):
me was that a guy that I was working with
on learning to sculpt and make molds who was a
little bit ahead of me in the sort of fan
curve of actually knowing how to do rubber armatures for
stop motion, and I was pretty fascinated by that. His
sister was dating a guy who was a carpenter on
a super low budget Roger Corman science fiction film, and

(15:26):
I just said, introduce us, and so she talked to him,
he talked to them. We got an appointment and we
went in and showed our little models and our little
things that we had, and I had this film that
I had made with some friends, and we both got
jobs on a Roger Corman film, and we thought we'd
died and gone to heaven because now we were getting
a paycheck on a real movie. No, it was a

(15:46):
total piece of crap movie. It was a little, tiny movie.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
You know.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
It's actually the biggest movie Roger Carman ever had ever made.
It was like a million dollars or something like that,
which was huge for him. He usually made movies for
like two hundred thousand dollars. But and then all of
a sudden, I'm on a movie, and then the rest
just sort of made sense after this. It's that prepared
mind thing, you know. I had read everything I could

(16:10):
possibly read. I had. I had schooled myself on how
visual effects were done, all for no money, all not
at university, just just you know, over the that sort
of two or three years that I was driving trucks
and working blue collar jobs. So I guess in the
back of my mind, I must have thought I'm going
to do this for real at some point, because I

(16:31):
was clearly preparing myself. But I had no entree. I
didn't know anybody that knew anybody that knew anybody that
worked on a film, even though I was in Orange County.
It's not that far from here, not that far from
the center of the film industry, but it might as
well have been Montana, you know, at that time? Certainly?

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Did you do you record your dreams? How do you
note them down? How do you capture them?

Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah? Sometimes I'll wake up and I'll just write it down,
you know, or I'll type it out on my laptop whatever.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
How long have you recorded them for? Like when did
you start?

Speaker 1 (17:02):
It's sporadic, I mean, you know, I mean it's a
constant sort of streaming channel that's running all the time.
And they're not all necessarily worthy of But every once
in a while I'll get a corker. It's like, oh man,
I got to write this one down. You won't believe this.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
Did you ever follow the curiosity of where they come from?
Or how they originate?

Speaker 1 (17:19):
Or you know, what have you?

Speaker 2 (17:20):
Where have you found? Where do you think you get
them from?

Speaker 1 (17:22):
I look, I've read a lot on the theories of
consciousness and dreams and what purpose they serve, and and
there are some researchers that think they have deep psychological
meaning and others that think they're really just the brain
just kind of resetting itself and reshuffling memory and you know,
kind of cleaning house and it doesn't really have any meaning.

(17:44):
I happen to think that they have meaning to you. Now,
my wife, Susie believes that she has, and I believe
she's right, has received promontory dreams about events in her life,
and she's documented this in a way that I find
quite compelled. I'm not one hundred percent convinced. Sorry, baby,
if you're listening, not one hundred percent convinced, but she's

(18:06):
given me evidence. It gives me pause. And I'm a
pretty hardcore empiricist. I'm not a mystic. I don't I
don't follow all of the various winds of the spirituality
fads and things like that. That's not how I roll.
I'm very science oriented. You've got to show me. You've
got to prove it. It's got to be pure reviewed,
you know, and that sort of thing. It's got to

(18:27):
be the subject of double blind studies, and it's got
to be falsifiable and all the you know, empirical stuff.
But I've seen some things I don't I can't explain,
and she's demonstrated some things to me that can't be
explained by my not my understanding of science, you know.
I mean, I'm not a scientist, but I did study physically,
I studied astronomy, and I keep pretty current in the sciences.

(18:50):
So there's clearly stuff out there that's not well explained
or explained at all right now, doesn't mean it won't
be someday using empirical methodology. I don't know quite how
I got off on that, but we were talking about dreams,
and dreams are not well understood even by neuroscientists, and
so on. What what is what is the brain doing?

Speaker 2 (19:10):
You know?

Speaker 1 (19:12):
I personally think that that we're kind of we're like
large language models, you know, so all the training data
of our life, it just goes into a kind of
diffusion state, which is how generative AI works. It goes
into a kind of a very noisy state, and then
out of that coalesces new things. And I think the

(19:33):
brain is just constantly creating in the way that a
generative AI works. And but who's creating it and who's
it being created for, So you're simultaneously the creator and
the watcher, which is kind of amazing. I'm creating a
simulated experience for myself one part of my brain is
and another part of my brain, let's call it the

(19:55):
ego locusts or whatever. The person taking the ride, the kid,
the kid in the rollercoaster, is going on the ride,
which is kind of the filmmaking process. Because I'm making
a story. I'm making up a story for my kind
of simulation of the audience mind, the group mind. Right,

(20:16):
So part of my brain is making up a story
for another part of my brain. That part of my
brain is sitting in a movie theater with hundreds of
other people and receiving it and judging it like, Okay,
this is cool. I like that, you know, And you know,
you try to drill down on the creative process. I'm
a writer. I'm sitting there, I'm looking at a blank screen.
Where do you start? You know? And a lot of

(20:38):
writers do it in very different ways. Some start, you know,
page one, you know, Bob walks down the street, you know,
and then it just goes from there in a linear fashion.
For me, it coalesces, probably almost in a diffusion model
kind of way. I start writing notes, and little images
come to me, and I start putting the notes together.
And for the Avatar sequels, for example, I wrote over

(21:01):
a thousand pages of notes, just little fragments. Oh and
sometimes dreams play a part in that, and sometimes just
the daydreaming process that creative engine. Because I think that
same creative engine that runs at night out of control,
nonlinear chaotic montage style is actually more functional during the

(21:22):
day and can be kind of directed to stay on
a topic and follow it through, you know. So maybe
I'll be thinking about a character and then something will
pop into my mind, you know, and then I'll start
writing about that, and it does I'm not trying to
tell a linear narrative at that point, you know, and
it becomes a bit of a dialogue. So I remember

(21:43):
the time I was sitting there in my writing office
and I said, well, what if there was a kid
that was you know, a kid that was born on
the base, And what if he was out in the
forest with his novvi little kid friends and his mask
got messed up and you know, they had to save him.
He was running out of running out of air, and
it became a whole thing. And so I imagine this

(22:03):
whole thing about a race against time to get them
back to the base. And I thought, Okay, that's a
pretty good story. Now what if what if that kid
was Gorge's son? And then I wrote, literally wrote, nah,
nobody would believe that, you know, And then I'm going
on writing more notes than about three or four pages later,
it's like, yeah, but wait a minute, it would be

(22:24):
really cool, you know. And then I just started a
riff on that. And then it became all right, well,
what if he was gorgeous son and the human coorage
dies in the first film? Now he's orphaned. His mother
maybe dies as well, if she was part of the
military group that you know, Jake was opposed to. And
now he's an orphan and he's being raised on Pandora
and he's got Navi friends. What if his Novi friends

(22:47):
were Jake's kids? What if? What if? What if? What if?

Speaker 2 (22:51):
What if? Right?

Speaker 1 (22:52):
That's how the writing process works, and then it just
and then all of a sudden, ideas just you can't
turn away from them.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Do those creative ideas? Do you find a set of
systems or rituals or processes that help you access that
or is it more organic?

Speaker 1 (23:22):
And I know all every writer's got their own process
some you know. I'm up at five am. I run
two miles, I have a cup of coffee, I sit down,
I write eighteen 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

(23:44):
doing notes, and then I'll just say okay, ty to
write some pages. And then usually for about three hours,
I'll write pages and I'll get four or five pages.
It'll come fast at that point, you know, And that's
when you hit your stride in screenwriting.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, you can see that the way you're describing this
scene with Kharija'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.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
I usually come up with way more ideas than I
could conceivably pack into a movie, and then I'll winnow
that down or window that down to a big old
screenplay that's unshootable, and then I'll winnow that down, and
then I'll make a movie that's four hours long, and
then I'll winnow that down, and then what you get
is the end result is the distillation of the distillation
of the best ideas, and then that's what winds up

(24:39):
in the lean, little tight indie film that I like
to call fire and Ash. Only three hours and seven
minutes long, you know, But.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
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. I said, yes, I want to sit in
the exact seat.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
And then, well, it's good that you moved back, though
I did.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
He told me I had that option, he said, I.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Did that to today. Actually, for the first time, I
watched from the seat behind. Now normally that's my working
seat when I'm reviewing, because you could see that there's
a desk there with an abbot and so on. But
I thought, well, let me see, let me see what
it's like from there where I it doesn't fill my
peripheral field, and I've got a little bit more of

(25:33):
that sense of control that you have when it's a proscenium,
you know, And I thought, oh, this is actually pretty good.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
It was spectacular, but more importantly, three housand and seven
minutes flew by. There was never a moment I didn't
I was I didn't look at my phone once in
three thousand and seven minutes. To me, that's the test, right,
the day of having your engagement, attention and awareness.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Right, So we passed the most critical test.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, and the most magnificent thing is that so much
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. And to do that for threeosand 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, which

(26:17):
is such a beautiful experience to have where just every
time a new scene opens, you just totally captivated. It's
it's so hard to do that for that long, especially
with I consider myself to have good presence and attention,
but even then I can turn off something in thirty
minutes when you know, and so to have your engagement

(26:38):
not just on a story level, but on a sensory level, and.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
I think, yeah, I think you're onto something there and
describing as you're saying and 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

(27:04):
I can't move myself in a story, how do I
expect to move an audience emotionally?

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Right?

Speaker 1 (27:11):
But then the layer on top of that is the
sensory layer, which is color, composition, all of those artistic things,
you know, because I also started as an artist, you know, figuratively,
but I could draw a paint. I knew the rules
of composition, I knew you know, I learned all the
art history, Renaissance, lighting, composition, all that sort of thing.

(27:33):
So there's aesthetic level to it that I like. There's
the world building level where every plant, you know, either
looks real and or has a purpose, you know. And
we spend an awful lot of time, fortunately, you know,
we're blessed with good budgets and good time to sort
of let these ideas marinate and state, right, and I've

(27:55):
got great designers. It doesn't all flow from my consciousness
comes out, very out of focus, if you will. And
it's an act of working with other people to bring
it more and more into finite detail. Right, I've got
the I call it. My role is to create the
grand provocation for the other creative people. And I got

(28:17):
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, right,
And I think it's very it's very good. It's the
basis of her school. She can do all that stuff
better than I can. I'm just a bystander to that
part of it. But I think about what I do.

(28:37):
I come in and I say, guys, we're going to
do the coolest woven tropical village overwater village. Now what
is that? And you'd think that they could create that
in a week or two weeks. No, it took a year,
and because because part of the provocation was and it
all has to be intention. Nothing is built with rigid

(28:59):
cut lumber the way we would do it, where we
create posts that are that are in compression. Right, everything's intention.
It's like a spiderweb. 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

(29:20):
to put it all intention they sculpted the village with pantehose,
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. And
so when you walk through it, you don't really get

(29:42):
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's narratively important to me in the moment?

Speaker 2 (30:01):
No, And talking about the emotional nature of the characters
and the story, my wife always says. My wife always says,
I think James Cameron as 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'd be like, how how
is it that you know you could? And you feel
that because you feel the depth of the relationship the

(30:24):
characters have for each other. You 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.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
But we feel that's a goal, right, So the goal is,
all right, these people look different, they're physiologically different, they
live in a different place. But doesn't it 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

(30:59):
universe versals of human behavior and the things we care about.
Whether that's a sense of duty and love that a
parent has for their for their child. And that's why
these films travel. I think you know why they They
resonate in 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

(31:22):
with the sequels way of water and fire, fire and
ash and beyond that, if we get to make some more.
I don't know if we will or not. We have
to make some money, you know, 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
probably not only couldn't, but probably wouldn't have even tried

(31:44):
to write them if I hadn't been in a large
family and gone through all that teen X and that issue,
the father issues and not being seen in all those things,
and 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

(32:08):
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,

(32:29):
and I wish I wasn't. Sometimes.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Yeah, 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 for a 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 montras and affirmations
as a family. So I keep saying to Sally's never quit, like,
I'm like, hey, you just keep saying that to him.
I'm like, okay, I love that statement. It stuck with me,

(32:53):
and I was like to see the little child's like
courage in that moment right where they're in so much danger,
in so much but they remember that their dad told
him that Sally's never quit.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
And 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, Sally's never quit.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
And you're like, go to 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 the things
they hold on to in a child's mind. And then
even the storyline with Python like for me that oh,
I mean from the second to the third, because when
I watched the second movie, for me that fully just

(33:39):
made me fall in sea life in a way that
I had n't before, right, and and God, 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.

Speaker 1 (33:53):
We won't protect what we don't love and care about. Right,
And so this 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

(34:14):
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 code is, and their

(34:35):
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. But it
all sounds like if you could actually hear it, it
sounds like that's like a whole paragraph in sperm whale,

(34:55):
you know, And it's taken years and years and AI tools.
So yeah, nature's far more complex that we understand. Consciousness
is clearly shared by some of the higher mammals. Even
some birds you know that have true consciousness. You know
that they recognize themselves in a mirror, and that's one
of the key signs that there is a higher form

(35:17):
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 a motive and
they're empathetic, and they're very much like us emotionally, but
they don't have a consciousness high enough to recognize their
individual cells in a mirror. But an elephant can, a
chimpanzee can, and a dolphin can. And I don't know

(35:40):
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. So you know,

(36:05):
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 that we create.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's almost like I was. I was
beaking at a conference about AI and consciousness recently and
someone asked me if I haven't believed AI would ever
have a soul, And my response is, I'm not qualified
to answer whether AI will ever have a soul, but
I really hope the people building AI have a soul
the case it's so.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
Much of Bengo or weren't conscious. Yeah, yeah, I think
you're can have if you if you believe in some
kind of animus or spirit or soul or whatever it
is that's persistent beyond the biologue framework. I personally don't
just stay in that upfront, but if you, but I
also I I won't bet completely against something that just

(37:09):
hasn't simply been proven yet. But but I, but I
also only I believe in believing in things that have
been empirically demonstrated and being kind of agnostic or fluid
about everything else. Right. But but if if you do
believe in that, then a machine couldn't possibly have that, now,
could it, Because we didn't create that in the first place.

(37:32):
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 uh, the Sollis Frankenstein kind
of mythology around that. On the other hand, if you
believe that consciousness is this kind of field of of
of operations that is almost infinitely complex, but but it

(37:53):
can be understood as real, 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

(38:13):
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 I've had some strange experiences
with one one practitioner in particular that believed in quantum
consciousness and could do things I can't explain to me
to my mind, what do you mean? And I'm well,

(38:35):
could actually actually create a state of consciousness in my
mind by sitting across from me, just like you are
right now, and I am I'm 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.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
You kill you experimenting with that, you even sat across
someone like that.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
My wife Susie had met this guy and worked with
him and workshopped with him a lot, many many years earlier,
and said, you really need to meet this guy. His
name was Carl Wolf. And I was very skeptical, like
I said, I'm an empiricist. You got to you know.
And I said, all right, I'm skeptical, but I'll do
it for you, baby, And something happened and I can't

(39:24):
explain it. Wow, something happened. Now, what was it? I
don't know. Carl had hypotheses. I don't know if his
own hypotheses were accurate. I'd love to ask him, but
unfortunately he died tragically in a car accident. And because
I wanted to, like, can I just spend millions of
dollars study in your mind?

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Please? It's fascinating. I mean, what's beautiful about all these
worlds you create? And when I was researching your story
and learning about just how many failures and moments you've
had to quit and give up, and again, I think
about our listeners and I think about.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
That, well, he's never quit, that he's never quick.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
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 was are
the worlds you create? Worlds that you didn't have or
did have for you?

Speaker 1 (40:13):
I think both? But right thing, 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,
All of those things, I think movies are pretty good
at creating us state, maybe a state of dread or

(40:36):
something like that. But I don't think they're good at
taking you on that roller coaster ride that more is
the way our 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

(40:56):
places that are that are that are either terrifying or
or heart wrenching through loss or whatever. And that's all
dependent on performance, you know, that's all dependent on the actress.
The actors are our path through this, our conduit. We
see it all through through their eyes, you know. So

(41:17):
for me the real act of creation. Everybody is quite
an amorate of the world building because that's what they see.
They see the end result. But for me, it's about
getting those characters down on the page, bringing it in
with my actors. And 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

(41:39):
didn't feel the dialogue was right until I knew that slang.
Stephen Lang, who plays Coors, would say it that way,
you know, or Sam would say it that way, or
or Zoe would say it that way. And then of course,
I threw a new element in which is Unna chaplain
who you know? Who plays wrong? Who is you know,
pretty pretty terrifying character times, and I was making her

(42:02):
up out of whole cloth. Obviously I 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, And we'd have to and we
bring our own human experience to it every time we
walk into a movie theater. And I also think a

(42:24):
critical part of the engagement is the theatrical experience. So
a lot was made, you know, when during the rise
of like DVD and Blu ray and all that, a
lot was made about the fact that, oh, well, you
don't have a screen that big, your sound isn't that good.
The theater is a better experience. But we're at the
point now where you're probably your home TV set and

(42:46):
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. What's left is in
our day to day life, we're very fragmented and scattered
and multitasking and we're we're scrolling and you know, and
we're typing, and we're connected and you know, multi channeling

(43:12):
all simultaneously. Very rarely do we just sit in a
meditative state and just focus. You know, people who practice
mindfulness and yoga and things like that, they know how
to do that, 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

(43:35):
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, we 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

(43:56):
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 pose it,
you can't go order Repeazza. You can't posit, go to

(44:18):
the bathroom, you can't be in a room with other
family members who are talking and you pose it so
you can hear the lame comment. Absolutely, I'm kidding, No, no, no,
the kids don't make lame comments, but they do comment
during the movie and I'll posit and I'm like, yes,
you were saying.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
That's so funny. Do the kids ever look at the
movies and go, Dad, you just made a character of me? Like,

(44:58):
is there ever that.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
I think see that there was a moment in time
ten years ago where who I believed they were influenced
the creation of a character. But they But I think
for them it's all a big laugh because they say
two things. One is that was ten years ago, and
two even then you didn't really know who I was.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
That's brilliant. I want to come back to depth of character.
But I wanted to talk about failure because you've told
this story before. But the part I wanted to ask
about was before you made Terminator, you actually lost a job. Yeah,
and we won't mention the film because I heard you
didn't mention it. But like for anyone who's finally found

(45:41):
their way, you went from truck drivers starting to make films,
made this small movie. You get fired off a job. Yeah,
that almost feels like, all right, well, this is the
end of the road. You said you felt way.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
It felt that way, and it felt like there was
going into my first directing gig that I did get
fired off of after I think six or seven days
of shooting, and not for incompetence. It turns out, it
turns out that I was being set up the whole time,
And when I found that out later, it sort of
put it in perspective. But I believed at the time,
I internalized that I was not doing it well, you know,

(46:14):
and I thought, oh crap, Now I'm worse off than
if I hadn't taken a job in the first place.
Now I'm at negative ten. I could have just been
at zero. Now I have to dig out of a
hole to get to zero, 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.

(46:34):
I had to create it for myself. And that's when
I wrote The Terminator. I thought, I have to write
something original, something that I could plausibly make that wouldn't
have an enormous budget, and it was scaled to you know,
conventional locations, present day city streets, that sort of thing,
so that we could do it relatively cheaply. But I
also thought, all right, but I've got to inject into it.

(46:56):
It can't just be you know, a simple drama. 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

(47:18):
budget like a Star Wars movie that I knew we
couldn't afford or nobody would hire me for. So then
I came up with the idea of a futuristic technology
that coulds 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

(47:39):
have come up with that story if I didn't have
those constraints, I don't know, maybe not, you know, but
it all worked out. So I thought, all right, I
want this extraordinary thing that requires you know, 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. You know, we could just use a

(48:00):
helb light, street lighting and that sort of thing, which
is kind of how we did it.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
That's such a fascinating point. You just made that constraints
actually lead brilliant creativity. 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.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
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, but then I
can put the camera anywhere I want, I could cut

(48:40):
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. That's the widest shot I can do.

(49:01):
Why is it here? Not back there or not over there?

Speaker 2 (49:05):
You know?

Speaker 1 (49:05):
And so it forces you to become quite rigorous about
your esthetic. You know. It's a separate problem from getting
great performance. By the way, and the weird thing about
an Avatar movie, it's a little weird is we separate
performance from cinematography. We do all the cinematography later. I
don't even think about it. I don't think about the
camera angles when I'm working with the actors. I know

(49:26):
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
on a wide shot, close shot, amount a long lens,
short lens? Is the camera moving, is it still? Is
it raining? Is it not? You know, is it night?

Speaker 2 (49:48):
Is it day?

Speaker 1 (49:50):
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,

(50:10):
other editors, other designers, why you're doing it that way?
And sometimes I just I just talk. It's like okay,
you know, it's just like I'll talk while I'm working.
It's like, okay, I can be here, I can be there,
I can put the camera here. What do you guys think?

Speaker 2 (50:25):
You know?

Speaker 1 (50:25):
And they're like, well, I like the water shot. It's like, okay,
let's do the water shot. It gets more inclusive in
a way, not that I'm doubting myself, but it's like
why not. Why wouldn't you be inclusive?

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Yeah? Absolutely, And you were so committed to that that
you sold it for one dollar and rejected all of
these amazing studio budges because they wouldn't let you direct it.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
This is going back to the terminator, and you're talking
about the fact that I made a rights deal with
Gail Anne 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 we could get this done, we

(51:06):
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 twenty
page contract to do it, but it was like a
blood oath, almost literally.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
I don't think we actually.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
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. And man, they tried to split that team.
They tried to get her in the rights and and

(51:48):
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

(52:08):
a dollar well spent.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah, that's that's I love that story. It just every
time I hear you tell it, from when I was
in research and listening to you tell it and even
hearing it now, I'm just like, there's such a today,
there's such a fixation on getting what you deserve, yeah,
and demanding what you deserve, and I think sometimes it
sets you up for failure because you'd be waiting a
long time for someone to give you what you deserve.

(52:31):
Your career is this constant well I'll build what I
deserve or I'll take it myself.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
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 proof to the world you know
that you're you're capable of, right, and then and then
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 of
still not, you know, uh, it's a consequence of doing

(53:00):
the job well and reaching people and communicating. You know,
I 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

(53:22):
I'm communicating with the greatest number of people. And there
will be some people for whom it is it is
beneath them to even consider enjoying an Avatar movie. And
there are some people that just don't get it 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

(53:43):
the audience and that challenge them to try to keep
up and purouet their intelligence. Not to say they're not intelligent,
but come on, guys, it's entertainment. Yeah, 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,

(54:05):
But I won't make the story hinge on that, you know, So,
I don't know. Maybe maybe it's that drive in movie
you know, College of Cinematic acknowledge the drive in movie
theaters of Orange County paying off.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
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 Cummon's a risk take he takes big risks.
But do you see yourself that way? How do you?
How do you? I feel like it's something more than that.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
Well, I think 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 in being in a
kind of a comfort zone of mediocrity. So yeah, I

(54:54):
think I think you do take risks, but having taken
that risk, you then do every 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

(55:17):
which basically everybody dies, you know, And it was a
period piece, and it was three hours long. The only
successful film previously that had been three hours long that
was a commercial film was a Best Picture winner, which
was Dances with Wolves. I always pronounced it Dances with
Wolves because it was a name, you know, So yeah,
I always imagine that hyphenated, not Dances with Wolves, which

(55:41):
is what most people say. But I don't know if
that's accurate. And you know, I never asked anybody, but
probably is. But and so we were uncharted territory. I mean,
we went in knowing it was going to be a
long film and that it's a film, and that it's
a tragic love story, pretty risky in a sense, you know.

(56:06):
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
fifty million dollars or one hundred and fifty million dollars.
And they were so dead set on an outcome. They

(56:28):
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 has been told, but it's actually true.
I literally had a razor blade taped to my avid

(56:50):
screen with a little sign that said, using 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 and it had to deliver
on those artistic principles that we went in with. I

(57:13):
knew I had a great cast, I had great performances,
you know. And it turned out from the moment James
Horner played the first he wrote the 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 nineteen ninety seven, and that's when I knew
I had a movie, because I cried on all three themes.

(57:37):
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 story 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 wrote it, he orchestrated it, he went out, he
recorded it with one hundred piece orchestra. But I knew
from that simple piano melody that we were good. And

(58:01):
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 love it.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
That's my favorite bit of podcast.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
Okay, 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,

(58:39):
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, and it's just up to me
to see it and see it emerging and then help assist,

(59:01):
you know, clear the debris out of the way, get
it to kind of emerge. And I felt that more so,
especially on these last two Avatar films, that I've ever
felt before. We had a long film. It's half an
hour longer than it could be. You've got to take
stuff out, so you're pairing away and themes are emerging

(59:21):
and getting stronger. And it even got quite snaky on
this last one because I felt the themes emerging so
strongly that I actually wrote new scenes and asked the
actress to come back and reshape the whole thing. For example,
there was a scene in the script which we captured
where Jake teaches all the Nave how to fire machine guns.

(59:43):
I was wrong. I didn't want That's not what the
movie was supposed to be saying. And so the power,
the dark grim power that comes from when korch 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 help Jake be doing the same thing. But
I didn't see that in the writing, but I saw
it as it was unveiling itself to me, and I

(01:00:05):
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, but when you see it, you think.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
How could that. That's one of the most epic moments
of the.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Home exactly Well. I had put that in movie four,
but I realized I was playing too long a game,
you know, and you know the scene with him and Spider,
which I won't go into the details of, but after that,
you know when Natitty 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, that he absolutely

(01:00:49):
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 the theme that I deal
with a lot duty 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

(01:01:10):
you do to prove yourself in a loving relationship? You know,
played with that on Titanic, played with that on Aliens.
You know, played with that. And Terminator too, right, And
so these these last two Avatar films are the same thing.
What would Jacob Nate Diery do for their children? What
would they do for their people? And what happens when

(01:01:33):
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 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. But

(01:01:56):
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 US has been involved in, but World War Two.
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

(01:02:18):
a whole conversation just about this.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
I know, I was just about to say that the well,
I was about to say that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
I'm flipping the scripture.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
No, I was about to say that the spiritual text
that I practice and teach him follow is based on
a battlefield, 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 righteous. It makes a
lot of it definitely resonates what you're saying, that there
is a need.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
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 so of
good people, and so on it. 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,

(01:03:11):
which is why I went down the road of having
the tulkuon be utter pacifists, where they have rejected any
kind of violet confrontation up to and almost including their
own final destruction, but they at the very brink, they
decide that there is something that they have to rise

(01:03:33):
up for, and when they see the horror of what's
happened to Tonok and Pya Kon's clan and all that,
which I think is quite a heart wrenching scene, even.

Speaker 2 (01:03:41):
Though that's like, yeah, when you make me feel for PyCon,
that's like right, you know, because now you're not even
feeling for something that looks remotely human.

Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
Right exactly. But we're able to see consciousness in others,
in the eyes, you know, and dogs in the great apes,
you know. I think it's a little harder in birds,
even though they're pretty damn smart. Whales, though, I have
a soulfulness and maybe to some extent we projected onto them,
but I don't think so. There's something very calm about whales.

(01:04:15):
You know, they've they've been greatly injured on our planet.
So I think, you know, what I was trying to
express there is, look what we've done to them, and
they don't seem to hate us as much as we
would if that was done to us. Although there are
pods of orcas near Gibraltar and off the Azorus that

(01:04:36):
are attacking sailboats now and ripping the rudders off and
leaving them adrift. So it's like, are they learning, are
they learning that we're actually not so great for them?
Workers have a matriarchal society and the mothers teach the
son's behaviors, and so the question is is this being
handed down because it's been happening a lot in the

(01:04:57):
last few years, and it's the same group, the territorial
territorial group.

Speaker 2 (01:05:03):
All of this you're talking about, you spent around ten
years just studying the ocean, right Like, yeah, well, you
weren't making films at that time. You literally went deep.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
Into literally on anything that you're sharing right now is
as deep as you can go?

Speaker 2 (01:05:17):
Did you just put everything else away?

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
Like? Not really? I kind of kept my hand in
so so after Titanic was a big hit and I
was questioning, you know, is this even important? Is Hollywood
even important? It seems like such a glitzy game and
it 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

(01:05:40):
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 they ask us,
what's that? Oh yeah, you know, it's where they and

(01:06:01):
I could name a movie star they wouldn't even recognize.
I 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.

(01:06:22):
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
rec site where I was really now becoming conversant with
real deep otion technology, I thought, why don't I just
go down that road. I know everybody, you know, I

(01:06:43):
know all the scientists and researchers and submersible people and everything.
So I just started creating expeditions and building new tectical 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,

(01:07:03):
or the electronics flood and it won't work and you'll
come back with nothing. And that's not a critics opinion,
you know. That's when I came up with this idea,
this principle that you know, the second law of thermodynamics
is not an opinion, it's a law. It's not some
critics opinion. It's not some journalist's opinion. It's not even

(01:07:24):
a fickle audience member's opinion or some some you know,
some bloggers trolling opinion.

Speaker 2 (01:07:32):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
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

(01:07:54):
can be utterly rejected, you know, But ultimately the point
of art is to communicate with other humans. They may
hate it, you know, so you 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. And that
was good and I learned some really important human lessons

(01:08:15):
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, you know, but
that bond exists between those people. And then I realized, Okay,
we're only as good as our team. And when I

(01:08:36):
after Titanic, I put together a team to do the impossible,
which was Avatar. Nobody'd 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 and
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.

(01:08:58):
And I say, guys, 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 thirty eight
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, silly's never quit, right, And then we did
and we figured it out. And then there's such a

(01:09:19):
feeling of pride and cohesiveness in the group after that,
and you start to feel like, Okay, bring the next challenge.
We'll figure it out. And the team spirit and the
team morale is so high now. This was nineteen years
ago in two thousand and six. The team spirit and
the cohesiveness is so high now. People really they hated

(01:09:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:09:51):
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 shoulder to
do it, to bring that team back together because it's
so important for them, you know, and that's not a
bad reason to do something at all, you know, to

(01:10:11):
make other people happy is not a bad reason to
do something or to make other people feel fulfilled. 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've told Susie, my wife,
that I feel like I'm Wiley Coyote and a Roadrunner
cartoon and I just ran off the cliff. I haven't

(01:10:32):
hit the ground yet. There's that moment where my legs
are pin wheeling 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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
When 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 him, 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

(01:11:22):
maybe Eminator too.

Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
When the terminator going, come on, when he when he
goes down into the steel and goes to nothing, come on? Yes,
people tear up.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
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, and 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

(01:11:56):
whether it's the emotion that the characters are feeling and
two kids feel 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.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
Point, Maybe it don't. Maybe you 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 thirty five percent

(01:12:31):
and hasn't rebounded, And people's habit patterns have changed, and
so the thing that I grew up and love and
feel such strong sense of passion for maybe becoming obsolete. Maybe,
And the cost of making movies is continuously going up.
And and the demand is falling. So that's a little

(01:12:52):
bit of a death spiral right there, you know, And
so it's maybe it's going to be okay, we were
sort of successful. If we can do the next one cheaper,
we can continue, right And then there's also that wild card,
you know. There are other projects that I have that
I've been sort of sitting on in the background. And
there's a thing that I want to do about Hiroshima.
I bought a book recently, but it's a story I've

(01:13:14):
been following and you know, excavating and researching for really
my whole adult life. It's something that I really feel
strongly I need to do at some point. It's not
a big film. Sounds like it would be, but it's
not a big film in the sense of an Avatar film.
It's not a four year commitment. It might be a
one year commitment. So I need to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
And so why is that so meaningful to you? What
about it?

Speaker 1 (01:13:36):
I just think that we live in this world. I mean,
I think Catherine Bigelow's film title is it's kind of
growing on me, The House of Dynamite. It's like we
live in a house. Imagine you live in a house
and you feel perfectly normal, and you go about your
business and you're chopping onions for the guacamalle 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

(01:13:58):
that 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, you know, 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.

(01:14:20):
Of course, the punchline of the movie is going to
be the card at the end that says there are
twelve thousand nuclear warheads deployed in the world today. Each
one is one hundred to five hundred 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,

(01:14:42):
it might be my least successful film. But I just
feel that's that thing of duty. You know, You're all
about purpose. We define our own purpose, you know, we
choose purpose for ourselves, and it doesn't all have to
be you know, obviously benevolent, like you know, maybe helping
out a soup kitchen and easing the pain of others.

(01:15:05):
It might be something that's more of a warning that
helps 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 eight billion people to
feel powerless, and yet empirically I can look at it. Oh,

(01:15:25):
I'm reaching millions of people. I'm reaching hundreds of millions
of people with a movie like Avatar. You know, maybe
I won't reach as many people with a movie like
Ghosts of Hiroshima, but I'll reach some, you know, And
you never know, you know, you never know that the
causal chain that puts a person out a moment where
they've been influenced by something.

Speaker 2 (01:15:45):
But you have it even in fire and Ash. I
mean that that scene that you are referencing without giving
too much away of quarriage actually arming, you know, and
all of a sudden you see the becoming of terrorists,
like that idea of the government. You know, all these
messages are just 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,

(01:16:10):
whether it's you know, whether it goes down all the
way through to the governmental politics that we're seeing today.
I mean, the movie is filled with so many powerful messages.

Speaker 1 (01:16:19):
And just seeing each other, you know it all Ultimately
it all goes back to connection. Had the route, yeah,
I think so. You know, there are two moments in
the film where people say they see each other and
they understand each other, and one gives you this feeling
of vast dread, when when varrogs she sees Quora and
she sees this vision of destruction and for herself, you know,

(01:16:42):
she's she's like, you know Collie, yes, right, And then
when the TV 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. It's like, we take our most

(01:17:04):
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,

(01:17:26):
you know. La says something at the beginning, and it's
kind of like a little cheeky to actually say your
theme out loud, you know, and the voice over here,
I'm going to tell you what the movie's about, okay,
you know, And he says that 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

(01:17:47):
of grief comes that fire of hate again, and the
cycle perpetuates indefinitely. So how do you break it?

Speaker 2 (01:17:54):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:17:55):
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 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,

(01:18:16):
and you see all of that happening in the world
right now, all over the place, and you know, you
wonder this is I'm going to circle us back to
AI for a second. The thing that will the thing
that the proponents of artificial superintelligence always says, well, well,
we'll manage the alignment problem, will align AI to our

(01:18:39):
common good as human beings. But we can't agree on
a damn thing. We can't agree on what's right and wrong,
what's ethical, what's moral? You know, A Republican's idea of
that is very different from a Democrats, a Muslim, a Christian,
a Hindu, you know, a Shintoist, whatever it is. Everybody's
got a different opinion. And we can't agree on anything.

(01:18:59):
So how are we going to suddenly form this wonderful
moral consensus so we can teach it to something smarter
than us that we can't control. I mean, if that's
not the biggest recipe for disaster I've ever heard in
my life, what is?

Speaker 2 (01:19:16):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:19:17):
Now? I am a science fiction fan, and it always
goes into the darkest possible, you know, scenario, because that's
where science fiction goes because it's meant to be a
warning to us about possible futures. But okay, I when
we're living in a science fiction world right now, you know,
so I look, I look at you, I look into

(01:19:37):
your eyes. I see your kind of soulfulness and your
enlightenment and what all the things that you do and
why you do it. And I think, all right, that's
why we're going to make it. Because there are people
who are practitioners of empathy and connection and they're out
there and they are legion. They just don't ever seem
to get into positions of power and and and you

(01:19:58):
know where 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.

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
Yeah, well, I think that's partly why I try and
do what I do, because I think I saw that
for a long time. And of course, what I love
about the way you build character, which is true of
me or anyone, is that no one's perfect. Everyone's flawed
and has multiple You know, when you look at all
of the characters in Fire and Ash, like, they're not
just good and bad like that would be, and hence

(01:20:30):
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 you know,

(01:20:51):
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 conversation
with people like yourself and allow for these we've like
my vision, and I think you'll relate to this based
on what you were saying. I love the Bell curve too.
So when I started this, my vision was to make

(01:21:12):
Wisdom go viral. I said, I wanted to find a
way that hundreds of millions or billions of people would
engage with themes yes that were at one point saved.

Speaker 1 (01:21:22):
For the elite or yeah, yeah, right right.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
And we do that. We do seven hundred and fifty
million views a month about conversations like this 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. But art and creativity
and now the microphone belongs to everyone. There is an

(01:21:46):
opportunity to galvanize community and connect to these higher point.

Speaker 1 (01:21:51):
We have to do what we can do. Our voice
may carry not very far, or it may ripple outward
very very far. We have to do what we can do.
And from me, what drives me is being a parent,
you know, and knowing that there's there's a legacy that's
being handed to my kids by my generation, and I

(01:22:11):
just want it to be the best that it can be.
It's not gonna be perfect, it's not even might not
even be that great, but everything that people like yourself
and hopefully I do can improve it incrementally, you know.
And so anyway, you just you just keep banging away
at it, right.

Speaker 2 (01:22:29):
Yeah, Well, I think I think the stories you tell
do that in the most profound way. And I think
I do think that art transcends so many things in
the world, as you said, And anyone can sit in
that room, forget their designation or their seat or their
status and watch a movie about humanity and connection.

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
But 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
one percent of the population, So ninety nine percent of
the population has an impulse toward empathy. I think where
empathy goes awry is that it's narrow and powerful as

(01:23:18):
opposed to more diffuse. Right, So when we have an
empathy for our family, for our children, for friends, then
everybody else starts to look like an enemy. And I
think it's that narrow spotlight of empathy word breaks down.
On the other hand, we can hear a story about
somebody in another state or another country, and all of

(01:23:40):
a sudden, we're weeping for that person because our mirroron
allows us to feel their pain. 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, but somebody who's maybe

(01:24:02):
an equal victim with us of you know, a kind
of a world that can go against you, and you know,
medically and any any kind of moment. You know, things
can go against you, and there are people that are
less fortunate, people that are more fortunate. But never people
never feel like they have enough. That's the problem. They

(01:24:23):
never It's not that they're greedy, it's that they never
have enough to feel completely secure and safe for their family.
So there's a certain point where you have to be
willing to risk your own family and risk your own
comfort for the good of a greater group. And that's
a very very hard place for most people to go,
you know. But there's an image that I always wanted

(01:24:45):
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 a of that
connected connectedness. And so I managed to squeeze it in.
I managed to squeeze it into this this film, and

(01:25:06):
hopefully people will resonate, you know, for what it what
it means, what it's meant to me in any way.

Speaker 2 (01:25:12):
James, I have a warning from your team is you
have to get whoop. I want to end with a
final five that we do with every guest. I could
talk to you for hours and I hope we do
get to talk more offline, but we end every interviewed
these final five. They have to be answered in one
word to one sentence maximum. Okay, So James Cameron, we.

Speaker 1 (01:25:30):
Can do a six paragraph.

Speaker 2 (01:25:33):
Okay, So we asked these every guests, James Cameron, these
are your final five. Question one, what is the best
advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:25:41):
I had a teacher that said you have unlimited potential,
and he meant it and it changed a lot for me.

Speaker 2 (01:25:54):
It's a great answer. Yeah. Question number two, what is
the worst advice you've ever heard her receive?

Speaker 1 (01:26:03):
Roger Corman told me to always sit down on set?

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):
Do you stand up the lies?

Speaker 1 (01:26:10):
I never sit down.

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
That's a great answer. Question number three, what's the hardest
thing you've learned about yourself that shaped your art?

Speaker 1 (01:26:20):
The movie is not more important than the process of
working with people to make the movie? Wow, that took
forty years. No, maybe thirty.

Speaker 2 (01:26:33):
The people are more important. Yeah, well it's beautiful. Question
number four, tell us the real reason why Jack couldn't
fit on the door?

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
Yeah? You went there. Okay, there's some interviews over because
his chivalry demanded it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:55):
It's a great answer.

Speaker 1 (01:26:57):
He loved her, and he would not take a chance
that they could both survive if they could both die.

Speaker 2 (01:27:04):
That's a great answer.

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
Yeah, by the way, Romeo and Juliet had to die.

Speaker 2 (01:27:08):
But they sacrifice duty in your scenes.

Speaker 1 (01:27:12):
Just their self love, death, sacrifice, duty, they're all related,
and they're all thematic in all of my films.

Speaker 2 (01:27:21):
Why do you think that is?

Speaker 1 (01:27:23):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:27:24):
You're still discovering that, still curious about that?

Speaker 1 (01:27:26):
Where from can I speak in longer?

Speaker 2 (01:27:29):
Yeah? Yeah, that's a big question.

Speaker 1 (01:27:31):
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. You 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 don't even know

(01:27:51):
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

(01:28:12):
that comes from. But it's a belief system, definitely a
belief system.

Speaker 2 (01:28:17):
I'm glad I asked you that question now because we've
got to get an answer that just Yeah, show shares
so much more of your heart and where it comes from.
Fifth and final question. We asked 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.

Speaker 1 (01:28:37):
A law? Wow, legislative morality. That's a hard thing. See
the person in front of you. I don't know how
you enforced that. Just see them.

Speaker 2 (01:28:55):
What does it mean to see?

Speaker 1 (01:28:57):
See who they are? See see who they are on
the inside?

Speaker 2 (01:29:03):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:29:04):
In the Avatary universe, I see you can mean I
understand you. It can means 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

(01:29:28):
got many layers of meaning. In Navi Lord, It's it's
very deceptively simple, you know, but it goes back to
that empathy, then 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

(01:29:51):
from the airport, or I'm on the street, or I'm
killing time someplace. I start talking to people and I
want to hear their story. People that the average person
would think that a person like me would never talk to,
you know, the janitor, the guy selling the truro, the
you know, I just want to talk to them. And

(01:30:12):
maybe it's a writer's instinct, you know, to want to
hear stories because I think everybody is a universe, and
you know, that sort of Trump idea that they're all
a bunch of losers and they're not worth worth anything
drives me insane, you know, because it's not about social
standing or status, or having a PhD, or or the

(01:30:34):
argument from authority. Oh his argument, may you know, his
opinion is more important than that person.

Speaker 2 (01:30:41):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:30:42):
I just want to hear everybody's stories. 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.

Speaker 2 (01:30:53):
I felt that most in watching Sully encourages relationship through
fire and ash. There's a lot of each other in
different moments, which in moments you don't expect it.

Speaker 1 (01:31:05):
Yeah, and the story definitely teases to a potential, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):
Yeah, we can't give over. Well, I can't wait to
watch it again. I'm gonna take my family when I
get back to lending for Christmas. I'm okay, So, James,
I hope we do see four and five half then.
I can't wait to watch them.

Speaker 1 (01:31:24):
We'll see, We'll see that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:31:34):
Well, Thanks, thanks Jay, really really a wonderful interview, you know,
and I'm glad we got to go to important, meaningful
things instead of all the stupid stuff I normally get asked.
I only asked you what you did you you definitely
went there on that one. But you know what, at
this point, it's like there are worse problems that have

(01:31:54):
than people still arguing about the demise of a character
from twenty eight years ago. You know, as a filmmaker.
It's kind of like, great, thank you, thank you for that.

Speaker 2 (01:32:04):
Thank you. If you love this episode, I need you
to listen to one of my favorite conversations ever. It's
with the one and only Tom Holland on how to
overcome your social anxiety, especially in situations where you're not
drinking and everyone else is. We talk about his sobriety
journey and so much more. He gets really personal. I

(01:32:25):
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.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Jay Shetty

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

The Burden

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}JAMES CAMERON: Inside the Mind of One of the Most Iconic Filmmakers in History (Greatest Risks, Biggest Failures, & His KEY Principles to Success)