Every James Cameron Movie, Explained by James Cameron

Vanity Fair

James Cameron has made 9 feature films over his career, making his name widely known for his distinctive style characterized by his technical innovation and epic scale. From his very first film 'The Terminator' to his recent project 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' James takes a look at all of his films and discusses in detail how they came to life.    Director: Jackie Phillips Director of Photography: Ruby Paiva Editor: Louis Lalire Talent: James Cameron Producer: Emebeit Beyene Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi Associate Production Manager: Elizabeth Hymes Talent Booker: Lauren Mendoza Camera Operator: Osiris Nascimento Gaffer: Nick Massey Audio Engineer: Justin Fox Production Assistant: Abby Devine; Marquis Wooten Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo Additional Editor: Sam DiVito Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow

Transcript

00:00If I do have a general philosophy, you know, looking back across it, I guess it's just taking

00:06people on a journey. It's creating a narrative around imagery that's really powerful and almost

00:11in a way dreamlike. It's really about the, for me, about the sanctity of the theatrical experience,

00:17but the through line is a transportive experience.

00:20Hi, I'm Jim Cameron, and I've directed nine feature films, and we're going to talk about

00:32every one of them. The Terminator. I was probably at a point in my career that I would consider

00:40to be less than zero. You're at zero if you haven't directed a film. I had been hired to

00:45direct a film that I won't name, that I got fired off of after a few days, and so I thought,

00:50OK, I'm blacklisted. You know, I was at less than zero. I thought, I'm going to have to

00:55create something that everybody wants to make, and in fact, the Terminator script was very

01:01well received, and people wanted to buy it, but they wanted to buy it to develop it and

01:04have other filmmakers make the film. Gail Ann Hurd, the producer, and myself made a kind

01:11of a blood oath that we would not be separated, we would not sell the material. You know, she'd

01:16produce it, I'd direct it, or no deal. And Hemdale bought it, you know, to develop with

01:22us, and they promised me that I would be able to direct it.

01:33We got a decent enough budget that we thought was a pretty good budget, but we were coming

01:37out of Roger Corman Film School, where budgets were half a million dollars, or a million dollars

01:43at the most. And, you know, we got $4.3 million below the line to make that film. We thought

01:48we were in nirvana. Of course, you know, everything is relative. And that was an ambitious project

01:55for that kind of money. I was living in a little apartment in Tarzana, and my mom was sending

02:00me coupons so that I could get two Big Macs for the price of one, because she didn't think

02:05I was eating enough, which I wasn't. Well, Terminator is sort of, you know, what you call

02:09a genre bender, I guess. Gail and I looked up to Carpenter and Hill, who'd done Halloween

02:15and these low-budget films, and, you know, I thought, if I'm ever wildly successful, I

02:21might be a John Carpenter. You know what I mean? So we were thinking of it as a low-budget

02:25slasher movie. We felt if we contained it, and we kept that sort of greater backstory well

02:31over the horizon of the present-day events, you know, we could actually do it for a budget.

02:36And so, you know, we went out with a light meter and found the streets that were bright

02:40enough to shoot, you know, where they had mercury vapor lights. Used car lots were great, because

02:45they cast enough light off their floodlights out onto the street, we could shoot there.

02:55It wound up being a science fiction film. I think people don't think of it as a horror film

02:59in a classic sense. Of course, it's based on horror tropes. The killer that can't be killed

03:05that comes back, Michael Myers. But we broke in with this story that had a higher thematic

03:10value, and I think that's why it got more attention. That, and, you know, we cast Arnold.

03:17I'll be back.

03:19Arnold was kind of presented to us by one of the executive producers, but to play Michael

03:24Bean's character, to play the action leading man. I didn't see that at all. But Arnold had

03:29read the script. He really enjoyed the script. He liked the script. And the character he kept

03:33talking about was a Terminator. I don't think he was trying to angle for that part, but he

03:37just talked about set pieces that were more Terminator set pieces. While he's talking, I'm

03:43kind of looking at him, and I'm rapidly readjusting my vision of the movie and the character, because

03:50it's all a no-brainer after the fact. But what I wrote was a character who was an infiltrator.

03:57He was covered with skin so that he could blend in with us. Nobody would look at him twice.

04:02Well, Arnold is not that guy. So I'm recalibrating in my mind the whole time he's talking. There

04:08are whole parts of the conversation I don't even remember, because I'm just looking at his

04:12face. I'm thinking, okay, he walks into a room. He looks different. He's bigger. He's wider.

04:16He looks unstoppable. This is a very different story. But it could work. So I'm rewriting the

04:23script in my mind while I'm talking to Arnold. And when I left the meeting, theoretically,

04:27we were still talking about Reese, Michael Biehn's character. And I went to meet with John Daly,

04:31who was the head of Hemdale, executive producer. And he said, how'd it go? I said, he's not Reese.

04:36And he was like, ah, you know. And I said, but he'd make a hell of a Terminator. John didn't miss a

04:43beat, walked over, picked up the phone, dialed up Arnold's agent, and offered him the part.

04:47It got turned down. And then Arnold fired his agent. He hired him back the next day

04:52and said, I want this part. And so then, you know, it all worked out.

04:59When we saw the dailies of how he looked in that kind of greenish light from the dashboard

05:04with no eyebrows, and Stan Winston's makeup guys had glycerined up his face,

05:09so it had an almost plasticky sheen. And I had asked him to do a thing where I want you to look

05:16with your eyes first, then turn your head. So it's a slightly inhuman disconnect, because we tend

05:21to look together, but we uncoupled that motion. A hundred millimeter lens close-up, and we're

05:27sitting in dailies. I said, run that again. And Gail and I looked at each other, and we said,

05:31we've got a movie.

05:32We pulled all of Linda's solo scenes forward, because we didn't get Arnold until day 10 of a

05:5040-day shoot. So a quarter of the film, we had to, so we just shot Linda. Linda broke her ankle

05:56two days before shooting, or seriously sprained it, almost like a break. And she was wearing a

06:02really, really tight sports wrap, so that she could barely limp around the set. And it's

06:08about a girl running for her life. You know, it's like, we pulled out every trick, and some

06:13that no one had ever even imagined, to get that film made at that budget level, and with

06:18all the adversity. But at that moment, when we saw the dailies that day, we said, we've

06:23got a movie. And man, everybody's spirits just kind of lifted. And that gave us the energy

06:29to power through. We had our wrap party halfway through the schedule, because we didn't believe

06:34we would live to the end. Aliens.

06:40Well, things change for me. You know, Terminator made the Time magazine 10 best movies of the year

06:46list. I'm like, are you kidding me? Did I just die or go to another dimension? So everything's kind

06:52of blowing up. But I had already written the script for Aliens before I shot the Terminator.

06:58Actually, I'd written a treatment, and I had started the script. So I kind of was already excited about

07:03this movie. And Walter Hill, who had produced the first Alien, had promised me that they would

07:08wait for me to direct it. So I was on track to do that next. And everybody's advising me

07:12not to do it. You know, literally, the advice I got was, anything good in the movie you make

07:18will be attributed to Ridley Scott. And if it's bad, and it fails, it's all on you. And I said,

07:24yeah, but it's cool. Move! No! Here! Here! Run! But the funny thing was, I'd already gotten into,

07:38now we're in pre-production on Aliens, and nobody's talked to Sigourney. I had gone into it and signed a

07:45deal and everything on the principle that Sigourney was under an option. But there was this thing called

07:51the seven-year rule, and the option was unenforceable. So I drove up to Santa Barbara to meet her. She was

07:58living up there at the time. And we had this great meeting. And she was just so,

08:02so sweet and so intelligent. And we just clicked.

08:05Put it in hard. Right. Are you ready to rock and roll?

08:09What's this? That's the grenade launcher. I don't think you want to mess with that.

08:14So Sigourney shows up on set, and she says, what's all this with me firing machine guns? I'm a gun violence,

08:19anti-gun advocate. And I said, did you actually read the script? She said, well, I read the dialogue.

08:25I said, you might want to go back and read the prose section in act three. So I took her out back

08:30behind the studio in Pinewood in England, and I put a Thompson machine gun in her hands, blank rounds,

08:36and said, try this. And she, and she looks at me and says, oh, that's kind of cool. I said,

08:43that's what you have to do. And she said, all right.

08:53I think Ripley was kind of in the mix in my mind when I was writing Sarah, like,

08:59and, you know, Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, you know, it was a weird metamorphosis out of the last

09:05girl trope, right? That you have the last woman that the killer tries to kill, and she fights back,

09:11and she prevails. And I think it comes from maybe, you know, having a very strong mom, having strong

09:15women in my family. There's probably a whole Freudian interpretation around it. So somehow the,

09:21the last girl trope in horror movies to me was more meaningful. It was about the resilience that a

09:28woman could have, the intelligence, that the things that they, the type of strength that a woman brings

09:33to, to a character, which is not the typical masculine kick in the door, shoot the gun sort of thing.

09:39Although I did give her a little bit of that in Aliens, it's different. And I think that comes from

09:44my life experience before that, and funneled through that kind of horror slasher trope,

09:50and then suddenly taking on its own life. So after the success of the Terminator and Aliens,

09:56I was like, oh, I realize now I'm doing something that Hollywood hasn't done well,

10:01you know, in mainstream movies. And I thought, I'll just keep doing it. People are responding to it.

10:07Last time I checked, women are half the audience. The question is how, how can I, as a, a male

10:12writer, male filmmaker that likes action and adventure, how can I appeal to a male audience

10:18and a female audience simultaneously? And I think that started to come together for me in the abyss

10:23and in the, in the subsequent films, it became a more conscious choice, but it seemed like fertile ground.

10:30Get away from her, you bitch!

10:36She's the final girl, but she's got this little girl that she's protecting, right? So there was so much

10:42more at stake for her than just her own life. When we shot that, you know, we thought, okay,

10:47this is a pretty cool moment. You know, it's one of those moments you know is going to work,

10:51but I had no idea. When we premiered the film, a thousand of our closest friends, all of whom had

10:57their knives ready to pull out and carve it to pieces, and the audience just erupted. It was

11:03spontaneous groundswell of applause, practically a standing ovation for one line. And I thought,

11:09wow, this is what cinema really is. The Abyss. Well, coming off of Aliens, we were two for two on hits.

11:20It was an interesting time in my life because Gail and I had fallen in love toward the end of the

11:25finish of The Terminator. We'd gotten married before we made Aliens. Then we'd separated and we were on

11:31track for divorce after I wrote The Abyss, but before we shot it. So here I had written this thing

11:39about a separated couple, but we weren't separated when I wrote it. I'm writing the script and I need

11:45a producer. Gail, I know we're separated and we're getting divorced, but do you want to produce this

11:51thing because there's nobody that could do it better than you? Long silence, you know. Yes. So we went

11:59into it and we're telling a story about a couple pending divorce, separated. Now in the movie, they get

12:03back together. In real life, Gail and I didn't get back together, but we did have a great experience

12:08working on the film. And we realized that there was a higher thing to our professional relationship

12:14than just kind of being in love and all that. Let's get the hell out of here!

12:24Let's go! Let's go! Hit the door! Hit the door!

12:36Very, very difficult film for all the obvious reasons. Building these giant sets, being able to flood them

12:42so that they appeared to be underwater. Having people be able to work safely in diving helmets

12:47that we made up. They were props in a movie, but they had to really work or the actors died. We had a

12:54really good designer named Ron Cobb who designed the face plate so that you could film the actor from the

12:59side and from the front. And then we had to have the Kirby Morgan guys figure out how to make it

13:07breathable so the actors wouldn't suffocate or get CO2, you know, too much CO2 and all that. It was a

13:13technical nightmare, but it was cool. So I tried to get all the technical challenges out of the way

13:18first so that when I'm working with the actors, I can be there and I can be present for them to do

13:24the dramatic work. The abyss was a real turning point for me in my life, my greater life, because

13:39to solve a lot of the technical challenges and to get it right, and I'm attracted to projects that I

13:44can learn on because I'm highly curious, I went to the experts. I went to the people that build robotic

13:51vehicles, ROVs. I went to the people that are doing the deep ocean exploration. In the course of that,

13:57I met Don Walsh, the world's deepest man, the guy that went to the bottom of the Challenger Deep,

14:03you know, 50-some years before I did. But this is the moment where the deep ocean became very real for me

14:09in personal terms. Woods Hole, Robert Ballard, who found the Titanic, he took me under his wing,

14:15taught me about ROVs. They were just getting into underwater robotics at that time, and I wanted to show

14:21that in the film. That was my version of, like, meeting my heroes. Then after The Abyss, of course,

14:26I applied those connections to my real life, and I became an actual deep ocean explorer as a result of

14:34that. So, you know, there was the challenge of actually making the film and making it look real,

14:38and I had to understand a lot about how the deep ocean worked. In terms of the dramatics of it, you know,

14:45I had to get the actors comfortable being divers. If you're casting a western, every actor will tell you

14:50they can ride a horse. And it turns out that if you ask all your potential cast members if they

14:55get claustrophobic, no one will say that they get claustrophobic, and then you find out later.

15:00And some of them loved it and really leaned into it, and some of them were terrified. But I mean,

15:05you know, we did take some heat on that for putting people into a high-pressure situation,

15:09and we did. We had challenges. I just thought, hey guys, we're all going to understand the challenge,

15:14and we're all going to go into this together. And what you find out is that some people are a little

15:19closer to that line of stress than you would want. I wouldn't do that again. I wouldn't put people

15:24under that kind of pressure, you know, to use a water metaphor. But, you know, I was young and kind of

15:30crazy, and I just assumed everybody else was young and crazy, too.

15:46What the hell? We just lost all the topside feeds!

15:49But it was all done safely. That's the thing I would stress. We never had any incidents. We never

15:54had any accidents. We had safety divers assigned to every single actor. I could account for the

15:59actual fact of them being safe. I can't account for how they felt. And I think I've learned from

16:05that experience to be very careful about the warning signs that are between the lines.

16:11The director has to be very attuned to the psychological state of the actors, because

16:17there's a point where they can use it and use it to play through and to deliver something, and there's

16:24a point where it's actually a little bit too much. And you've got to know where that line is,

16:28and it's different for every single actor. And that's part of the task. It's not about coaxing

16:34somebody to do something. It's about trying to pull somebody back. I've got to do my own stuff.

16:39I've got to do that. It's like, no, it's not safe. It's not safe for you to do it. It's safe for a

16:42trained stunt professional to do it. And that's why we have the system that we have. Our unsung heroes,

16:48obviously, are the stunt players. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had to do a solo scene where she

16:54walks across the bottom of the ocean. She goes out to the edge of this cliff, and this alien machine

16:59arrives that's beautiful. And she had to act this kind of beautific experience, where meanwhile,

17:06she's scared to death. I mean, she did it very well. She was super professional. And then there are scenes

17:12that have a difficulty level dramatically. And I think the scene where they figure out that the

17:18only way for them both to survive is for her to drown and him to swim her back and revive her.

17:25I drown and you tow me back to the rig. No, no. Go into deep hypopermia. My blood will go like ice

17:31water. My body systems will slow down. They won't stop. And those two scenes as a couplet,

17:37the drowning and the revival were definitely the most challenging, dramatic scenes I'd ever done.

17:47I'd safely say for those two actors, probably the most challenging thing they'd had to work through.

17:53Terminator 2, Judgment Day. Well, set the Wayback Machine to 1990. So now I've gone through,

18:00you know, Terminator film almost seven years earlier created that. I get a call

18:07from the guys at Carol Coe that have bought the rights. And do you want to make the film? And I

18:13said, well, you know, I don't know. And they said, we'll give you $6 million. I said, you have my

18:17attention. What do you want? I said, I really want Linda in the film. And I said, have you approached

18:28her? No. I said, all right, well, let me, let me approach her because I need to know if she's in

18:32or out before I can even write a script. I don't want to write a script for her and have a repeat

18:36of the Sigourney experience where I've got this great script ready to go and the actress is not

18:40not signed. So I went to Linda. I think I flew someplace. She would make a film in North Carolina

18:47or something. We had dinner. She was pregnant at the time. I said, all right, we're we're going to

18:52make a Terminator movie. She said, I have one thing that I want. And I said, okay, I want to be crazy.

18:59I just sat here and told you that your son is missing, that the foster parents have been murdered.

19:06We know this guy's involved. Doesn't that mean anything to you? Don't you care?

19:13Her hypothesis was that what she had been through traumatically and her vision of the future

19:18had basically driven her nuts. We eventually modified that so that she wasn't, she was on the edge,

19:24but she wasn't really crazy. But we don't know until partway through the film where she goes to shoot

19:28the guy and try to unwind the future. And she can't do it. So her moral compass is still intact,

19:35no matter that in that moment, she knows she might be consigning four billion people to their deaths.

19:40So, you know, we worked together collaboratively to put her in a mental institution because of things

19:45she had done. But I wanted to see that even though she definitely was a victim of trauma,

19:51she actually was rather coldly calculating and only cared about one thing,

19:55which was protecting her son. And also the burden that she bears of knowing what the future will be,

20:01if she can't do anything to prevent it, and what that drives her to. We sort of feel for her son,

20:07John, when she's so mission focused that she forgets to actually love him in a way that he can

20:14process. And she's a very different character when she's introduced. And we have to fill in that arc

20:20in our minds. You know, how could a person change that much? And we see, we can sort of almost off

20:25camera, feel all the forces and all the trauma that were on her to produce that result. And I got to

20:32give Linda credit for that. That's what she wanted. You know, she wanted to do something different.

20:37And we played with all that stuff. We knew what we were doing. Because in my mind, the Terminator movies

20:41were always about our dehumanization of ourself. It's not about robots from the future. It's about how we

20:47dehumanize ourselves, how we lose our empathy, how a psychologist or a policeman or a soldier

20:53can lose their humanity. You know, and she becomes the Terminator of that movie. The Terminator,

21:00Arnold's character, humanizes. She has become an inhuman killing machine. Except at that brink,

21:08she steps back. And from then, she begins to kind of her journey back to humanization and to being able

21:14to feel and express love and all that. So there's a whole other subtext going on underneath this kind

21:19of rapid fire roller coaster ride of an action film. The fact that that fired on all those different

21:26cylinders, it was about family in a crazy way. But somehow, all my movies are love stories. And

21:33sometimes it's a parent-child love. In that case, it was mother-son. It was surrogate father-son.

21:45I had done a lot of research on nuclear weapon effects and what would happen if you actually

21:50set one off over a city or what the experience of that would be like, however briefly. And it's very

21:55accurate. In fact, I got a letter from what they call the blast gurus. It was actually Sandia lab,

22:04which had emerged out of Los Alamos as one of the main nuclear centers in the U.S. And they were

22:09highly complimentary about how I got it exactly right. Yes, it will flash burn all your flesh to

22:15ash and then the blast wave will knock all the ash off your bones. Wow, that's great, guys. Thanks for the

22:21props. But it's sobering to realize the world that we were living in. And when that film was written

22:29in 1990, we were just past the peak of nuclear weapons deployment in the world. There were something

22:37like 70 or 80,000 nuclear warheads, any one of which would have done what we showed in that movie. We're

22:44currently down to a nice and cozy 12,000 warheads worldwide. And we're in an even more precarious

22:50geopolitical situation today. So it's as relevant now as it as it was then. And of course, the AI

22:57messaging across those two films, that part of it was a bit prescient, because now we're actually

23:01talking about real artificial super intelligence and what that might mean for us as human beings.

23:07It's actually coming true kind of as we speak. And people are spending billions to will this into existence.

23:15When the T-1000 is revealed as this fluid being, I think it's one of the cooler reveals. He's

23:27absolutely terrifying, but in a very different way than Arnold's character. The idea was there,

23:32it was almost like an east-west duality kind of thing. Arnold is highly mechanistic and he's very fluid and

23:40very kind of Aikido, like literally fluid. But his fighting style was to merge and to use the force of

23:47the enemy against him and that sort of thing. We feel a sense of ominousness around him,

23:51but we don't really know what he truly is. And it was only just possible to do. We had done the

23:58water tentacle scene in the Abyss, and that was my first exposure to computer-generated characters.

24:04And I remember I called up Dennis Mirren at ILM when I started writing Terminator 2. And I said,

24:09Dennis, I want to do a guy who's liquid chrome or liquid mercury. Can we do it? He said, maybe.

24:19He said, how many shots are we talking about? I said, all right, we'll try to limit it. I'll

24:22limit it in the storytelling. We eventually wound up with 42 shots and it took a year. And it was very,

24:29very challenging to get the very last shots done. It took everything we had to do those 42 shots.

24:35Cut to this year, we're just finishing up Avatar 3 with 3,500 CG shots, where we're not only doing

24:45the characters in CG, we're doing the animals in CG, we're doing every blade of grass, every leaf in the

24:50forest, every tree, everything all in CG. So that's a huge leap across three plus decades.

24:58Let me go!

25:04Why the hell did you do that?

25:05Because you told me to.

25:07The story is really told through John's perspective, I think more than any other character. As much as we

25:12think of Sarah, it's John's story from beginning to end. And it's a lot of weight to carry for a kid

25:20who was, you know, 10 years old. I knew that you had to be very careful and very sensitive about,

25:26about the kid and what their psychological experience was going to be. And I had this amazing

25:34casting director, Mally Finn. And she went out and she went to all the agencies and we found all the

25:39kids that age. And they all had mostly done commercials and they were these kind of little

25:43smiling robots, you know, because that's what everybody wanted. So Mally said, I got to find

25:47somebody who's a darker, you know, who's got something going on in their life, you know,

25:52that they can draw upon. And so she was at a boys and girls club out, I think in like Pomona or

25:59someplace like that. She would beat the bushes. She'd really go long on this. She saw this kid,

26:05Eddie Furlong, and he was just kind of sulkily, kind of staring at her.

26:09Like what? He called her frog face. She said, what are you looking at frog face? And Mally said,

26:17have you ever done any acting? He said, no. Have you ever been on camera? My dad films our birthdays.

26:27She said, would you like to maybe be in a movie with, you know, we just worked with him. Mally

26:32really was great. And she worked with him. And then I worked with him. And we started to see that

26:36there was this kind of smoldering effect there. And he had this haircut where his bangs just hit

26:41his eyes. And I said, Eddie, can you just kind of push that over a little bit, just so I can see

26:46one eye? And that's how we shot him. But he could also be quite joyful and fun in the role and in

26:53real life. And of course, he bonded with Arnold. Arnold became his dad because Eddie had dad issues.

26:58You know, his dad had split and he was living with his uncle and the fractured family. And he was able

27:05to use all that. And you sense a longing in him for a father. The character never had a father,

27:11and Eddie never had a father, you know. And you sense that in him. And he and Arnold just hit it

27:17off. And then, you know, the rest is history. It all worked. True lies. You know, Arnold and I had

27:25worked together now a couple of times. We'd gotten to be friends. We'd ride motorcycles together. I was part of

27:29his social circle. He was part of mine. And Arnold called me up one day and said, I've got this story.

27:39So we sat and watched this film together called La Total, a little French film, fun romp. And when it

27:46was done, I turned to him and I said, I see what you see in this guy. He's married. He's a family man

27:53that binds him to a kind of reality that is only half of his reality. The other half of his reality

27:59is he's this extraordinary character, this extraordinary guy. Sir, may I see your invitation,

28:06please? Sure. Here's my invitation.

28:15And I thought, well, that's kind of him, right? You know, he's Mr. Universe multiple times. He's this

28:21movie star, but he's got kids. I got it instantly. We went after the rights and

28:27we just made it. We didn't even think about it twice. What was interesting about it was finding

28:33his Helen, his counterpart in that movie. First person that came to mind was Jamie Lee Curtis.

28:39So obvious in retrospect, right? She crushed it. But Arnold said, I don't think so. Actually,

28:46I didn't hear it from him. I heard it from his agent, Lou Pitt, the guy that got fired for not

28:51taking Terminator that got rehired the next day. I mean, Arnold is always loyal, very loyal to

28:55everybody, right? Sort of. And Lou said, Arnold doesn't want Jamie. Arnold didn't tell me himself.

29:01You know, he doesn't want Jamie. I said, why doesn't he want Jamie? She's great. She's too beautiful.

29:07I don't buy her as a housewife. So now I start seeing every actress of that age that could conceivably

29:15play Helen. Met a lot of great actresses, you know, narrowed it down to a couple, did screen tests,

29:23full on screen tests. And I was in Washington scouting locations. And I got a tape that I told

29:30them to go find a tape of one of Jamie's movies. I can't remember which one. And they sent it to me.

29:38And three o'clock in the morning, after a long day of location scouting, I popped the tape in.

29:42And I'm thinking, she's Helen. Come on. So I flew back to LA. Arnold, what are you doing? Can you

29:49come over? And, you know, he's just across town in Venice. So he comes over. I'll never forget,

29:54he's wearing an orange t-shirt and giant loud purple board shorts down past his knees with

29:59these giant calves, right? And he goes, yeah, what is it? And I said, how much do you trust me?

30:06He goes, I trust you completely. You know that. I said, no, this is for real. How much do you trust me?

30:12And she sort of realized it was a talk, right? He leans forward and he said,

30:18we've made two movies together. I trust you completely. I said, completely. He said,

30:24completely. I said, okay, it's Jamie. And he said, okay, got up, shook my hand, walked out. It was a

30:31bit frosty, right? But it was cool. He accepted it. And then he worked with her for the first few days.

30:37And she just became Helen. And he came up to me after three days of shooting and said, I was wrong.

30:43You were right. She's amazing. But there's a kicker to that story, which is that Jamie had gotten her

30:48agent to get a deal where they asked for her above the title with Arnold in the credits. And I said,

30:57he's never going to agree to that. And the agent said, I will be satisfied if you ask him in post

31:03production when you're mixing with best efforts, if that's a possibility. So I call a partner and I say,

31:10all right, you don't have to agree to this, but I have to ask you, you know, would you consider,

31:17would you consider putting, you know, Jamie's name above the title with you? There's a long silence.

31:23And he says, Jamie is spectacular in the movie. It's the movie it is because of her.

31:30And I'm honored to have her above the title with me.

31:43It's all that sort of marriage thread running through it. It's like Ed Harris in the abyss,

31:46almost having his fingers chopped off, but the titanium wedding ring stops the watertight

31:51door and saves his life. It's the same kind of motif, right? Jamie just inhabited that character.

31:56And she was such a blast to work with the whole thing about her being in the corridor where she

32:00took the stupid frill off and took it off the shoulders. And all of a sudden she's in this

32:05little tight black cocktail dress with her hair slick back. And it's like, no, you didn't.

32:09You just made yourself like, you know, a cover model in 35 seconds. She and I worked all that out

32:16together, which basically means she worked it out and I shot it. Titanic. Well, Titanic had fascinated

32:25me when I was writing the abyss. They had just found Titanic and they were imaging it with little

32:31robotics, right? ROVs. So I got to know Robert Ballard. I got to see the ROVs. I got to fly them,

32:37things like that. So it was all kind of there in my mind. And I was fascinated by the deep ocean.

32:41And they had made an IMAX film where they went down and filmed Titanic. It's called Titanica.

32:47And I thought, those guys can go down there and film Titanic for real for a relatively small $4

32:52million film. For a big Hollywood movie, I can do it too. So I can go dive Titanic. It was that simple.

32:59I just wanted to go dive Titanic. And then, all right, I might have to write a story. You know,

33:04I might have to get some actors and actually make the movie. But I was more interested in diving the wreck.

33:09So I go to 20th Century Fox, Peter Chernin's office. Here's how I pitch it. There's a beautiful

33:14book called The Illustrated History of Titanic. It's done by an artist named Ken Marshall. The

33:19centerfold double truck painting is about this wide. And it's the ship angled down into the water,

33:27all the lifeboats leaving, the rockets going off, the lights of the portholes glittering golden in the

33:33water, everybody on the decks waiting to leave. It's the beautiful majestic image, right? I walk into

33:38Chernin's office. I pop the book open to the centerfold. I shove it in front of his face,

33:43and I go, Romeo and Juliet on that. Five words. Just insert $120 million right here, please.

33:52Don't do it. Stay back. Don't come any closer. Come on. Just give me your hand. I'll pull you back over.

34:02No. Stay where you are. I mean it. If you look back on it and you synthesize it all down,

34:08every movie's ultimate fate is predicated on a few key decisions usually made in pre-production

34:15and usually around casting. So Leonardo and Kate, boom, on Titanic. It's almost as simple as my pitch

34:22to Chernin. It's just who's Romeo and who's Juliet. So once we had Titanic and my will to make it look real

34:28and all the effects experience that I had and all the practical shooting experience that I had,

34:33we had one corner of that. Now we needed our Romeo and we needed our Juliet. Kate came along. I cast

34:40Kate very quickly and I was skeptical about her because she had only done historical characters.

34:46Her nickname at that time, even as a dewy young actress of 19, was Corset Kate. I thought,

34:53why would I cast Corset Kate in a movie about a corseted girl? You know, I mean, that was the

34:58whole fundamental idea that she's restricted by society. Why would I cast Corset Kate? Lazy casting.

35:04I meet her. It's like, no, it's her. It's her. It was simple. Now Kate tells the story slightly

35:10differently that she lobbied for the part and she sent me a rose and said, I'm your rose. And it's like,

35:16that's all true. But I'd already made up my mind. We just hadn't made the deal yet. It is nice when an actor

35:22really wants the part. I had the opposite experience with Leonardo. He didn't want to do it.

35:26He knew he should. Everybody told him he should do a, you know, career move. He didn't want to do it.

35:30It took me, I don't know, five weeks working with him, probably once a week, to drill down to what

35:35he didn't like about it. And the answer was very simple. He didn't think it was challenging enough.

35:40He didn't want to just be handsome young Leo. And I said, it's not about you being handsome young Leo,

35:45even though you're handsome and you're young. I said, it's about holding the center when you don't have

35:49all those props. I said, those things are props. And ultimately that's the easy path. The hard path

35:56is to do what a Jimmy Stewart would do, which is be the handsome guy in the center and hold the audience,

36:03riveted attention the entire time without all that stuff. And you know, when he signed to do the movie,

36:09when I told him he wasn't ready to do it, I said, you're not ready to do this film. Now I'm going way

36:13out on a limb because I knew I really wanted him. Right. But that's when he did it, when he,

36:18when he realized how difficult it was and it was, then he leaned in and he, he, he brought everything

36:24that he, that he gives to a film. And he was amazing. He was incandescent. She was, you know,

36:29and, and the rest is history. It's almost when you think back on it, all of the physical trials and

36:35tribulations, the gigantic set, the gigantic lighting setups, all the water, all the things that made it

36:41difficult. It all crystallizes down to those early decisions and everything else is all just details.

36:47I put the Jack and Rose story in the foreground, but then immediately behind them, the backup singers,

36:52are all of the real people who are on that ship and their tragic stories as well. And then beyond

36:57that is just the scope and the pageantry, you know, and I don't think I would have made a film

37:02like Titanic if I hadn't fallen in love with, you know, David Lean spectacles. For me, the one that was

37:08the most influential was Dr. Zhivago, which is a love story against a vast canvas of a huge event

37:14that was tragic for many people. So using that as a guide, you know, Titanic kind of fell into place

37:21in a way. Very difficult film to make, very satisfying at the end of the day because it worked.

37:29Avatar started as an answer to a problem. The problem was I had, I had created a new company called

37:37Digital Domain. It was the first all digital visual effects company and our goal was to create new

37:44technology around CG characters and creatures and environments and all that sort of thing. It was all

37:49new technology. We wanted to aggregate all the people that were doing it in one place and create a whole

37:55new way of making movies. And I wanted a story that could drive that. So in 1995, I wrote Avatar. It was an

38:0380 page treatment. And it had basically all the stuff that's in the movie and a whole bunch of stuff

38:07besides. And I was told that it was premature. We couldn't do all that stuff yet. We were, we knew

38:13what we wanted to do, but we went there yet. In early 2005, I was about to make a film called Alita

38:19Battle Angel. I really wanted to do it. And it involved a lot of CG facial, especially facial

38:24performance. So the two films would be done in a very similar way. I was still struggling with the script

38:29on Alita. So I took out this old story and I reread it. I thought, this is a pretty damn good story.

38:37We should do this, or we should at least start developing it. Hired some artists, started breaking

38:42it down, got some money from Fox to go through development. We shot a prototype using the

38:48performance capture techniques, including one that was brand new that I had proposed, which is image-based,

38:55meaning you mount a video camera on a little boom on a head rig, and you video the actor's face. And

39:01then from that, you extract the performance and apply it to the CG character. And then we used

39:06conventional motion capture for the rest of the body. That was already a technology that was available.

39:11So we were merging two technologies. I wrote the script, we designed everything, put together the

39:24best creature designers and layout environment designers, and it just took on this momentum.

39:31And that was the start of what became a four-year journey. I think Zoe was the first person cast.

39:37She was brought to me by Mally Finn, the casting director that had cast Terminator,

39:41True Lies and Titanic. And so we flew Zoe in, and I cast her right away after I met her and auditioned

39:48with her and worked with her a little bit. Just such a wonderful person as a human being, but she had

39:52that grace and a beauty that was quite singular, and she had a grace and movement. She was a classically

39:57trained ballet dancer, and she'd done a lot of other kinds of dance as well. So I knew she could learn

40:03the Navi way of physically being, which we hadn't even worked out yet. But we worked it out with her

40:08and with some movement specialists. And then I was looking for my Jake, obviously. The other actors,

40:14you know, we found in a kind of a conventional way. And there were three young actors that were really

40:21not nowhere kind of in their career at the time. All three of them went on to be movie stars. I had to

40:27choose between them, and I did a series of screen tests. First, it was sort of a straight audition.

40:32Then I set up real screen tests in sets, like there was a lab set, and there was a jungle set.

40:39And Zoe came in and read with everybody, or tested with everybody, because she was now our baseline.

40:45And Sam was the one I kept going back to. And the studio disagreed. The Fox guys liked the other guys

40:50better. I'll say one of them was Channing Tatum. So it's like, okay, Channing did well.

40:55You know, we're all good with Channing Tatum, right? You know, it could have been Channing Tatum.

41:00We will show the sky, people. That they cannot take whatever they want. And that this,

41:08this is our land. That guy I would follow into battle. That guy I would follow into hell. He spoke

41:17to me in a way that resonated. And, you know, he had this thick Australian accent. We had to work with

41:23that. And none of these actors had done performance capture. And they were all kind of like, is this

41:28really going to be anything? I'll never forget screening the film for the cast. And they were like,

41:36you know, Zoe was curled up in her seat like this. Their eyes were wide open and they were just riveted

41:41the whole time because they saw their work. They saw themselves in the characters. I think they might

41:46have been a little bit skeptical up until then. I'd showed them little bits along the way. But until they

41:51saw it all together, I don't think they realized what we had done. Meanwhile, I had lived with it

41:56through the whole thing, you know, 2,500 shots or whatever it was down to the minutest detail,

42:03pining every day on every blade of grass and every bit of lighting and all that. So,

42:08you know, for me it was, you know, but the actors were like, holy crap, what did we just do?

42:13Avatar, the way of water. We had two enormous challenges on the way of water. And one of them was

42:22the obvious one, the water. And the other one was getting to a much higher level of refinement of

42:28preserving the actor's performance. As much as Avatar itself, the first film, was a success,

42:34I always felt like we didn't quite get to the level that I wanted. And if we were going to commit to

42:38doing two more, which was the commitment, actually four more. But, you know, it was really what was

42:45in front of me was two films to be shot as a kind of conjoined production. So we spent a lot of money

42:50on R&D with that facial pipeline to make sure that every single molecule of what the actors did

42:56would be preserved. Every nuance, every glance, every tiny little bit of eye movement, the tendons in the

43:02throat, the swallowing, the breathing, everything, you have to capture it and you have to bottle it and you

43:07have to protect it down through that pipeline. So we spent, we spent three years and, I don't know,

43:1340 million dollars perfecting that before we ever worked with the actors. I wrote four scripts,

43:19you know, two through, through five. And then we just jumped into it. And in September of 17,

43:26we just jumped back into it. And it was like the family coming back together.

43:30Happiness is simple.

43:33But who would have thought a jarhead like me could correct the code?

43:37And it got interesting because in the meantime, Sam and Zoe had become parents themselves.

43:51So now they're starting to relate to their characters in a very different way.

43:54There's a 15 year time jump. They're relating to these young actors as the kids, now that they've had

44:00their own kids and they understand what that protective instinct is and they understand what it means,

44:04how it profoundly changes your life. You know, I always said it was a family story,

44:08but it's a little bit dangerous saying it's a family story from Disney and you think a thing,

44:13but it's not. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a family. It's a generational family story.

44:18It's dramatic, tragic, epic, you know, all of, all of those things. And it's not, it's not all hearts

44:25and flowers. All of the family relationships are, are sometimes quite strained and, and there are some

44:31dark dynamics in there as well, but at the center of it is this love and this cohesiveness that binds

44:37them together. And I think that as human beings, we all long for that. We don't always accomplish it.

44:42Sometimes we do and we don't appreciate it, but I think we all long for it. Ultimately at the bottom

44:48of it all, that's what these two movies, Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 are saying. There's a lot else going on

44:54two themes around colonialism and the environment and extraction industries and all that sort of

44:59thing. But to me at the, at the bottom level, thematically, it's about family and however we

45:05define family, you know, found family, you know, chosen family, biological family, and all of the

45:11dynamics and variants on that theme. Spider, who's got a kind of surrogate father in Jake, but he's

45:17rejected by that family because Nateri, you know, basically is kind of a racist around, around humans,

45:23around the sky people that have destroyed her village and her home tree and killed her father

45:27and all that. Everybody's got stuff going on. Spider and his incarnation of his biological father,

45:33Myles Korich, what does that mean to him? He's a confused young guy, 15 years old. Jack would say to

45:39me, so do I like him or do I not like him? I said, I don't know. You have to figure that out.

45:47He said, no, but tell me. Jack, you're figuring that out in your real life. You need to, as an actor,

45:53your character's figuring that out in his life. So you don't know the answer. So it's not actable

45:59to know the answer. He said, yeah, but tell me anyway. The other challenge was the water.

46:05That's kind of more obvious, right? Technically, nobody had ever done performance capture in water.

46:10I wanted Sigourney underwater. I wanted Britton Dalton underwater. I wanted Jack Champion underwater

46:16because you can't fake that stuff either. And so when you see the film, every time you see

46:22a character underwater, the actors were underwater. Or sometimes it was a stunt double or somebody who

46:28was a specialist stunt double in underwater performance, you know, maybe for some of the

46:33creature riding or some of the more dangerous things, but pretty much they were all down there.

46:37So we had to put them step one. How do you get actors underwater? They got to learn how to hold

46:42their breath, not for like 30 seconds, for like three, four minutes. Kate Winslet came in and just

46:47schooled everybody. I'm sorry. She came in and held her breath after three weeks of training for seven

46:53minutes and 15 seconds, beating Tom Cruise's record. I think, you know, when he was in breath hold training

46:59for one of the Mission Impossible movies. Sigourney, no slouch at the age of 69 or 70 at the time,

47:07held her breath for six minutes, six and a half minutes, I think. The actors were really loving

47:11it because he was something tangible that they could use to prepare. Sigourney had a double challenge.

47:16You know, she had to play a 15 year old, you know, as a septuagenarian. That was remarkable. I think

47:23for, you know, she, she worked, all the actors worked for about 18 months. This isn't like rocking

47:29up to a lectern and in two days doing an entire voice part for an animated film,

47:35Pixar animated film. Everything you see those characters do, they, the, the actors did.

47:39That took 18 months to do the two movies. So about nine months of capture for each,

47:44each film, but it was all intermixed. We'd do a Avatar two scene one day and a three scene the

47:49next day, even some stuff on four because all the characters jumped forward in age about eight years

47:55between the end of three and the start of four. So we knew the kids wouldn't be kids

47:59anymore when we got back around to shooting those. We don't even know when we're going to shoot those.

48:03We've got to make some money on three first. But the point that I was trying to make is

48:08it's not voicing a character. I see that in print. It drives me nuts. Oh, Sigourney voiced Kiri.

48:13Sigourney was Kiri for 18 months. So the volume's got a little black line around it. The volume is

48:19where we work. It's the performance capture space. When she crossed that line, she became Kiri. But even

48:24outside the volume, there was a lightness to her. She seemed to have gotten younger,

48:3020, 30 years younger. She was buoyant. She was effervescent. I think she just tried to live

48:37in that space of being open and unproven and vulnerable, all the things that a teenage girl

48:43might feel. And I think that's why her character is so relatable. As she comes into her power across

48:50these two films. And she becomes quite powerful by the end of movie three. You see her struggling with

48:57it, her uncertainty, her not understanding what's going on in her body and in her mind, not understanding

49:05her place and, you know, why she's shunned and not accepted. And, you know, it's a typical angsty

49:14teen journey, just writ large and on another planet and end up in a character that's eight feet tall

49:21and blue.

49:26It was all shot as one big thing. And then we went through all the posts on on the way of water.

49:31And then we went through all the posts on on fire and ash. And that took another three years because

49:37Avatar movies are shot twice. You shoot them with the actors and then you do all the camera and the

49:43lighting and the camera angles and all the coverage and everything separately. It takes a little bit

49:47to get your head wrapped around it. But we uncouple performance acting from cinematography. Most movies

49:54do it all at once, right? You're acting in front of a camera. They're lighting you and you've got to make

49:59a shot. We don't make shots. We make performances and then we make the shots later. And the actors are all

50:05off doing other movies or vacationing.

50:17I shoot everything. I shoot all the virtual cameras. I also shoot all the live action stuff myself,

50:22hand holding or, you know, on a remote head, that sort of thing. Although in both of these movies,

50:27I relied a lot on second unit directors as well to do some of the virtual camera work and some of the

50:32live action stunt work and things like that just because of schedule. It sounds like a very lavish,

50:37luxurious schedule to have three years to finish a movie. But trust me, you use every second of it.

50:42Both of those films had about 3,500 shots and every single one of them was a VFX shot that had to be

50:48at the highest possible bar because you had to believe it. And you had to believe the characters.

50:52So the facial performance, the hair, the water, all of the things that are what we call sims,

50:58right? So hair blowing in the wind is a sim. Somebody stepping out of the water is a physics-based

51:05fluid dynamic simulation of what water would do if that character was stepping out of the water.

51:10So the weird thing is we actually had a character stepping out of the water,

51:13but we can only capture the character. We can't capture the water. So then we have to do a sim

51:18to recreate the water after the fact. So it's not photography. It's a whole different path,

51:24but it gets you to what looks like photography. Kind of nuts, right? If we hadn't made so much

51:30damn money with the first film, we'd never be doing this. I mean, it's insane. That's my final word on

51:34the subject. For the most part, I get excited enough to make a movie and commit a year or more of my life

51:44to a subject that I think I will learn from. Whether that's craft I need to learn or whether it's a subject

51:51I want to learn. And sometimes, you know, there might be some technical challenges

51:57in order to create the imagery. And I think that comes from maybe feeling slightly inadequate as a

52:04filmmaker. Oh, I can't compete with those filmmakers. But I think if I can find a new way to create some

52:12imagery that nobody else can do, then I've brought value. You know, I think that probably was a motivator

52:18back in the day. But I'm just fascinated by any kind of challenge. I just like challenges. You know,

52:24I like to challenge myself. And I don't want to do anything particularly that I've done before.

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