Every James Cameron Movie, Explained by James Cameron

If I do have a general philosophy, you know,

looking back across it,

I guess it's just taking people on a journey.

It's creating a narrative around imagery

that's really powerful and almost in a way dreamlike.

It's really about for me, about the sanctity

of the theatrical experience.

But the through line is a transportive experience.

[inspiring music]

Hi, I'm Jim Cameron, and I've directed nine feature films

and we're gonna talk about every one of them.

The Terminator.

I was probably at a point in my career that,

that I would consider to be less than zero.

You're at zero if you haven't directed a film.

I had been hired to direct a film that I won't name

that I got fired off of after a few days.

And so I thought, okay, I'm blacklisted.

You know, I was at less than zero.

I thought I'm gonna have to create something

that everybody wants to make.

And in fact, The Terminator script was very well received

and people wanted to buy it,

but they wanted to buy it, to develop it

and have other filmmakers make the film.

Gale Ann Hurd, the producer and myself made a kind

of a blood oath that we would not be separated,

we would not sell the material.

You know, she'd produce it, I'd direct it or no deal.

And Hemdale bought it, you know, to develop with us.

And they promised me that I would be able to direct it.

[eerie music]

[gun firing]

We got a decent enough budget

that we thought was a pretty good budget.

But we were coming out of Roger Corman film school

where budgets were half a million dollars

or a million dollars at the most.

And you know, we got $4.3 million

below the line to make that film.

We thought we were in Nirvana,

of course, you know, everything is relative.

And that was an ambitious project for that kind of money.

I was living in a little apartment in Tarzana,

and my mom was sending me coupons so

that I could get two Big Macs

for the price of one because she didn't think I was eating

enough, which I wasn't.

Well, The Terminator was sort of a, you know,

what you call a genre bender, I guess.

Gale and I looked up to Carpenter,

and Hill who'd done Halloween and these low budget films.

And you know, I thought if I'm ever wildly successful,

I might be a John Carpenter, you know what I mean?

So we were thinking of it as a low budget slasher movie.

We felt if we contained it

and we kept that sort of greater backstory,

well over the horizon of the present day events, you know,

we could actually do it for a budget.

And so, you know, we went out with a light meter

and found the streets that were bright enough to shoot.

You know, where they had mercury vapor lights.

Used car lots were great 'cause they cast enough light

off their floodlights out onto the street.

We could shoot there.

[car tires screeching]

[car crashes]

But it wound up being a science fiction film.

I think people don't think of it as a horror film

in a classic sense.

Of course, it's based on horror tropes.

The killer that can't be killed

that comes back, Michael Myers.

But we broke in with this story

that had a higher thematic value.

And I think that's why it got more attention.

That and, you know, we cast Arnold.

I'll be back.

Arnold was kinda presented

to us by one of the executive producers,

but to play Michael Biehn's character.

To play the action leading man, I didn't see that at all.

But Arnold had read the script.

He really enjoyed the script.

He liked the script and the character he kept

talking about was a terminator.

I don't think he was trying to angle for that part,

but he just talked about set pieces

that were more Terminator set pieces.

While he's talking, I'm kinda looking at him,

and I'm rapidly readjusting my vision

of the movie and the character

because it's all a no-brainer after the fact.

But what I wrote was a character who was an infiltrator.

He was covered with skin so that he could blend in with us.

So that nobody would look at him twice.

Well, Arnold is not that guy.

So I'm recalibrating in my mind the whole time he's talking.

There are whole parts of the conversation

I don't even remember because I'm just looking at his face.

I'm thinking, okay, he walks into a room,

he looks different, he's bigger, he's wider,

he looks unstoppable.

This is a very different story, but it could work.

So I'm rewriting the script in my mind

while I'm talking to Arnold.

And when I left the meeting,

theoretically we were still talking about

Reese, Michael Biehn's character.

And I went to meet with John Daly,

who was the head of Hemdale, executive producer,

and he said, How'd it go?

I said, He's not Reese.

And he was like, Ah, you know,

and I said, But he'd make a hell of a terminator.

John didn't miss a beat.

Walked over, picked up the phone, dialed up Arnold's agent

and offered him the part.

It got turned down and then Arnold fired his agent.

He hired him back the next day and said, I want this part.

And so then, you know, it all worked out.

When we saw the dailies of how he looked in that kind

of greenish light from the dashboard with no eyebrows.

And Stan Winston's makeup guys had glycerined up his face.

So it had a almost plasticky sheen.

And I had asked him to do a thing where I want you to look

with your eyes first, then turn your head.

So it's a slightly inhuman disconnect

'cause we tend to look together,

but we uncoupled that motion

with a hundred millimeter lens closeup,

and we're sitting in dailies I said, Run that again.

And Gale and I looked at each other,

and we said, We've got a movie.

Okay, who gets the Burly Beef?

I ordered barbecue beef.

[Customer] I think that's mine,

but I didn't order fries. He gets the barbecue beef.

Mine's the chili beef deluxe.

Okay, who gets the Burly beef?

Miss, we're ready to order now.

Yes, ma'am.

Oh, God.

We pulled all of Linda's solo scenes forward

because we didn't get Arnold until day 10 of a 40 day shoot.

So a quarter of the film we had to, so we just shot Linda.

Linda broke her ankle two before shooting,

or seriously sprained it almost like a break.

And she was wearing this really, really tight sports wrap so

that she could barely limp around the set.

And it's about a girl running for her life.

You know, it's like we pulled out every trick,

and some that no one had ever even imagined

to get that film made.

At that budget level and with all the adversity.

But at that moment, when we saw the dailies

that day, we said, We've got a movie.

And man, everybody's spirits just kinda lifted.

And that gave us the energy to power through.

We had a wrap party halfway through the schedule

because we didn't believe we would live to the end.

Aliens.

Well, things changed for me, you know,

The Terminator made the Time Magazine,

10 Best Movies of the Year list.

I'm like, are you kidding me?

Did I just die or go to another dimension?

So everything's kind of blowing up.

And it was out of, but I had already written the script

for Aliens before I shot The Terminator.

Actually, I'd written a treatment

and I had started the script.

So I kind of was already excited about this movie.

And Walter Hill, who had produced the first Alien

had promised me that they would wait for me to direct it.

So I was on track to do that next.

And everybody's advising me not to do it.

You know, literally the advice I got was,

anything good in the movie you make

will be attributed to Ridley Scott.

And if it's bad, and it fails, it's all on you.

And I said, Yeah, but it's cool.

Move.

[alien hissing]

No.

Here, here.

[alien hissing]

Run.

But the funny thing was,

I'd already gotten into, now we're in pre-production on

Aliens and nobody's talked to Sigourney.

I had gone into it and signed a deal,

and everything on the principle

that Sigourney was under an option.

But there was this thing called the seven year rule,

and the option was unenforceable.

So I drove up to Santa Barbara to meet her.

She was living up there at the time.

And we had this great meeting.

And she was just so sweet and so intelligent,

and we just clicked.

Put it in hard.

Right. Then you're ready

to rock and roll.

What's this?

That's a grenade launcher.

I don't think you wanna mess with that.

So Sigourney shows up on set,

and she says, What's all this with me firing machine guns?

I'm a gun violence anti-gun advocate.

And I said, Did you actually read the script?

She said, Well, I read the dialogue.

I said, You might wanna go back

and read the pro section in act three.

So I took her out back behind the studio in

Pinewood in England, and I put a Thompson machine gun in

her hands, blank rounds and said, Try this.

And she [imitating a machine gun].

And she looks at me and says, Oh, that's kinda cool.

I said, That's what you have to do.

And she said, All right.

[fire blazing]

[alien groaning]

[fire blazing]

I think Ripley was kind of in the mix in my mind

when I was writing Sarah.

And like, and you know, Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.

You know, it was a weird metamorphosis out

of the last girl trope, right?

That you have the last woman that the killer tries

to kill and and she fights back and she prevails.

And I think it comes from maybe, you know,

having a very strong mom, having strong women in my family.

There's probably a whole Freudian interpretation around it.

So somehow the last girl trope in horror movies

to me was more meaningful.

It was about the resilience that a woman could have.

The intelligence, that the things that they,

the type of strength that a woman brings to a character,

which is not the typical masculine kick in the door,

shoot the gun sort of thing.

Although I did give her a little bit of that in Aliens.

It's different, and I think that comes from

my life experience before that,

and funneled through that kind of horror, slasher trope,

and then suddenly taking on its own life.

So after the success of The Terminator

and Aliens, I was like, Oh,

I realize now I'm doing something

that Hollywood hasn't done well.

You know, in mainstream movies.

And I thought I'll just keep doing it.

People are responding to it.

Last time I checked, women are half the audience.

The question is, how can I as a male writer,

a male filmmaker that likes action

and adventure, how can I appeal to a male audience,

and a female audience simultaneously?

And I think that started to come together

for me in The Abyss and in the subsequent films.

It became a more conscious choice,

but it seemed like fertile ground.

Get away from her, you bitch.

[alien hissing]

She's the final girl, but she's got this little girl

that she's protecting, right?

So there was so much more at stake

for her than just her own life.

When we shot that, you know, we thought, okay,

this is a pretty cool moment.

You know, it's one of those moments,

you know, is gonna work but I had no idea.

When we premiered the film,

a thousand of our closest friends,

all of whom had their knives ready

to pull out and carve it to pieces,

and the audience just erupted.

It was spontaneous groundswell of applause,

practically a standing ovation for one line.

And I thought, wow, this is what cinema really is.

[dramatic gong beat]

The Abyss.

Well, coming off of Aliens, we were two for two on hits.

It was an interesting time in my life

because Gale and I had fallen in love toward

the end of the finish of The Terminator.

We'd gotten married before we made Aliens,

then we'd separated and we were on track for a divorce.

After I wrote The Abyss, but before we shot it.

So here I had written this thing about a separated couple,

but we weren't separated when I wrote it.

I'm writing the script and I need a producer.

Gale, I know we're separated and we're getting divorced,

but do you wanna produce this thing?

'Cause there's nobody that could do it better than you.

Long silence, you know? Yes.

So we went into it and we're telling a story about

a couple pending divorce, separated.

Now in the movie, they get back together.

In real life, Gale and I didn't get back together,

but we did have a great experience working on the film.

And we realized that there was a higher thing

to our professional relationship than just kind

of being in love and all that.

Let's get the hell outta here.

[water gushing]

Let's go, let's go. Get the door.

Get the door.

[all screaming]

[door slams]

Very, very difficult film for all the obvious reasons.

Building these giant sets, being able to flood them so

that they appeared to be underwater.

Having people be able to work safely,

and diving helmets that we made up.

They were props in a movie, but they had to really work

or the actors died.

We had a really good designer named Ron Cobb

who designed the face plate so

that you could film the actor from the side,

and from the front.

And then we had to have the Kirby Morgan guys figure out how

to make it breathable so the actors wouldn't suffocate

or get CO2, you know, too much CO2 and all that.

It was a technical nightmare, but it was cool.

So I tried to get all the technical challenges out

of the way first so that when I'm working with the actors,

I can be there and I can be present for them

to do the dramatic work.

With all that's going on up in the world.

You bring a nuclear weapon in here.

This is big.

Does this strike anyone

as particularly psychotic or is it just me?

The Abyss was a real turning point for me in my life,

my greater life because to solve a lot

of the technical challenges and to get it right,

and I'm attracted to projects that I can learn on

because I'm highly curious.

I went to the experts, I went to the people

that build robotic vehicles, ROVs, I went to the people

that are doing the deep ocean exploration.

In the course of that I met Don Walsh,

the world's deepest man, the guy that went to the bottom

of the Challenger Deep.

You know, 50 some years before I did.

But this is the moment where the deep ocean became very real

for me in personal terms.

Woods Hole, Robert Ballard, who found the Titanic,

he took me under his wing, taught me about ROVs.

They were just getting into underwater robotics

at that time, and I wanted to show that in the film.

That was my version of like meeting my heroes.

Then after The Abyss, of course I applied those connections

to my real life and I became

an actual deep ocean explorer as a result of that.

So, you know, there was the challenge

of actually making the film and making it look real.

And I had to understand a lot about

how the deep ocean worked.

In terms of the dramatics of it, you know,

I had to get the actors comfortable being divers.

If you're casting a western,

every actor will tell you they can ride a horse.

And it turns out that, you know, if you ask

all your potential cast members, if they get claustrophobic,

no one will say that they get claustrophobic,

and then you find out later.

And some of them loved it and really leaned into it.

And some of them were terrified.

But I mean, you know, we did take some heat on that

for putting people into a high pressure situation.

And we did, we had challenges.

I just thought, hey guys,

we're all gonna understand the challenge

and we're all gonna go into this together.

And what you find out is

that some people are a little closer to that line

of stress than you would want.

I wouldn't do that again, I wouldn't put people under

that kind of pressure, you know, to use a water metaphor.

But, you know, I was young and kinda crazy,

and I just assumed everybody else was young and crazy too.

[ROV crashes]

[ROV feet plunging]

[Crew Member] What the hell?

We just lost all the top side feeds.

But it was all done safely.

That's the thing I would stress.

We never had any incidents, we never had any accidents.

We had safety divers assigned to every single actor.

I could account for the actual fact of them being safe.

I can't account for how they felt.

And I think I've learned from that experience

to be very careful about the warning signs

that are between the lines.

The director has to be very attuned

to the psychological state of the actors.

'Cause there's a point where they can use it

and use it to play through and to deliver something.

And there's a point where it's actually

a little bit too much,

and you've gotta know where that line is.

And it's different for every single actor, you know?

And that's part of the task.

It's not about coaxing somebody to do something.

It's about trying to pull somebody back.

I gotta do my own stunt, I gotta do that.

It's like, No, it's not safe, not safe for you to do it.

It's safe for a trained stunt professional to do it.

And that's why we have the system that we have.

You know, our unsung heroes obviously are the stunt players.

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had to do a solo scene

where she walks across the bottom of the ocean,

she goes out to the edge of this cliff,

and this alien machine arrives that's beautiful.

And she had to act this kind

of beautific experience where meanwhile she's scared

to death, you know?

I mean she did it very well. She was super professional.

And then there are scenes that have

a difficulty level dramatically.

And I think the scene where they figure out

that the only way for them both to survive is for her

to drown and him to swim her back and revive her.

I drown, you need to tow me back to the rig.

No, no.

I'll go into deep hypothermia.

My blood will go like ice water, right?

My body systems will slow down, they won't stop.

[James] And those two scenes as a couplet, the drowning

and the revival were definitely the most challenging,

dramatic scenes I'd ever done.

Fight, fight, fight.

I'd safely say for those two actors,

probably the most challenging thing

they'd had to work through.

Terminator 2 Judgment Day.

Well set the way back machine to 1990.

So now I've gone through, you know, The Terminator film

almost seven years earlier, created that.

I get a call from the guys at Carolco

that have bought the rights,

and Do you wanna make the film?

And I said, Well, you know, I don't know.

And they said, We'll give you $6 million.

I said, You have my attention [chuckling],

what do you want?

And I said, I really want Linda in the film.

And I said, Have you approached her? No.

I said, All right, well, lemme approach her.

Because I need to know if she's in or out

before I can even write a script.

I don't wanna write a script for her

and have a repeat of the Sigourney experience

where I've got this great script ready to go

and the actress is not signed.

So I went to Linda, I think I flew someplace.

She was making a film in North Carolina or something.

We had dinner, she was pregnant at the time.

I said, All right, we're gonna make a Terminator movie.

And she said, I have one thing that I want.

And I said, Okay. I wanna be crazy.

I just sat here and told you that your son is missing,

that the foster parents have been murdered.

We know this guy's involved.

Doesn't that mean anything to you? Don't you care?

Her hypothesis was that what she had been

through traumatically, and her vision of the future

had basically driven her nuts.

We eventually modified that so that she wasn't,

she was on the edge, but she wasn't really crazy.

But we don't know until partway through the film

where she goes to shoot the guy,

and try to unwind the future and she can't do it.

So her moral compass is still intact.

No matter that in that moment she knows

she might be consigning 4 billion people to their deaths.

So, you know, we worked together collaboratively,

we've put her in a mental institution

because of things she had done.

But I wanted to see that even though she definitely

was a victim of trauma, she actually

was rather coldly calculating,

and only cared about one thing,

which was protecting her son.

And also the burden that she bears of knowing

what the future will be

if she can't do anything to prevent it.

And what that drives her to.

We sort of feel for her son John,

when she's so mission focused

that she forgets to actually love him in a way

that he can process.

And she's a very different character when she's introduced.

And we have to fill in that arc in our minds.

You know, how could a person change that much?

And we see, we can sort of almost off camera feel

all the forces and all the trauma

that were on her to produce that result.

And I got to give Linda credit for that.

That's what she wanted.

You know, she wanted to do something different.

And we played with all that stuff.

We knew what we were doing.

Because in my mind, The Terminator movies were always about

our dehumanization of ourself.

It's not about robots from the future.

It's about how we dehumanize ourselves,

how we lose our empathy.

How a psychologist or a policeman

or a soldier can lose their humanity, you know?

And she becomes the terminator of that movie.

The Terminator, Arnold's character humanizes,

she has become an inhuman killing machine,

except at that brink she steps back.

And from then she begins to kind of, her journey back

to humanization and to being able to feel,

and express love and all that.

So there's a whole other subtext going on

underneath this kind of rapid fire roller coaster ride

of an action film.

The fact that that fired on all those different cylinders,

it was about family in a crazy way.

But somehow all my movies are love stories.

And sometimes it's a parent child love.

In that case it was mother, son,

it was surrogate father, son.

[all screaming]

I had done a lot of research on nuclear weapon effects

and what would happen if you actually set one off

over a city or what the experience

of that would be like, however briefly.

And it's very accurate.

In fact, I got a letter from what they call

the Blast Gurus at it was actually Sandia Lab,

which had emerged out of Los Alamos as one

of the main nuclear centers in the US.

And they were highly complimentary about

how I got it exactly right.

Yes, it will, it will flash burn all your flesh to ash

and then the blast wave will knock all

the ash off your bones.

Wow, that's great guys. Thanks for the props.

You know, but it's sobering to realize the world

that we were living in.

And when that film was written in 1990,

we were just past the peak

of nuclear weapons deployment in the world.

There were something like 70 or 80,000 nuclear warheads,

any one of which would've done

what we showed in that movie.

We're currently down to a nice

and cozy 12,000 warheads worldwide.

And we're in an even more precarious geopolitical

situation today.

So it's as relevant now as it was then.

And of course the AI messaging across those two films.

That part of it was a bit prescient

because now we're actually talking about real

artificial super intelligence,

and what that might mean for us as human beings.

So it's actually coming true, kind of as we speak.

And people are spending billions

to will this into existence.

[eerie music]

When the T-1000 is revealed as this fluid being,

I think it's one of the cooler reveals.

He's absolutely terrifying,

but in a very different way than Arnold's character.

The idea was there, it was almost like

an east, west duality kind of thing.

Arnold is highly mechanistic and he's very fluid,

and very kind of Aikido like, literally fluid.

But his fighting style was to merge and to use the force

of the enemy against him and that sort of thing.

We feel a sense of ominousness around him,

but we don't really know what he truly is.

And it was only just possible to do.

We had done the water tentacle scene in The Abyss,

and that was my first exposure

to computer generated characters.

And I remember I called up Dennis Muren at ILM

when I started writing Terminator 2.

And I said, Dennis, I wanna do a guy who is liquid chrome

or liquid mercury, can we do it?

He said, Maybe.

He said, How many shots are we talking about?

I said, All right, we'll try to limit it.

I'll limit it in the storytelling.

We eventually wound up with 42 shots and it took a year

and it was very, very challenging

to get the very last shots done.

It took everything we had to do those 42 shots.

Cut to this year, we're just finishing up Avatar 3

with 3,500 CG shots.

Where we're not only doing the characters in CG,

we're doing the animals in CG, we're doing every blade

of grass, every leaf in the forest, every tree,

everything, all in CG.

You know, so that's a huge leap across, you know,

three plus decades.

Lemme go.

[John thuds]

Why the hell did you do that?

Because you told me to.

The story is really told through John's perspective,

I think more than any other character,

as much as we think of Sarah, it's John's story from

beginning to end, and it's a lot of weight to carry

for a kid who is, you know, 10 years old.

I knew that you had to be very careful,

and very sensitive about the kid,

and what their psychological experience was going to be.

And I had this amazing casting director, Mali Finn,

and she went out, and she went to all the agencies,

and we found all the kids that age,

and they all had mostly done commercials.

And they were these kind of little smiling robots.

You know, because that's what everybody wanted.

So Mali said, I gotta find somebody who's darker,

you know, has got something going on in their life,

you know, that they can draw upon.

And so she was at a boys and girls club.

I think in like Pomona or someplace like that.

She would beat the bushes. She'd really go long on this.

She saw this kid Eddie Furlong,

and he was just kind of sulkily,

kind of staring at her like, what?

He called her frog face.

So, What are you looking at frog face?

And Mali said, Have you ever done any acting?

He said, No. Have you ever been on camera?

My dad films our birthdays.

She said, Would you like

to maybe be in a movie with, you know?

We just worked with him.

Mali really was great. And she worked with him.

And then I worked with him.

And we started to see that there was this kind

of smoldering effect there.

And he had this haircut where his bangs just hit his eyes.

And I said, Eddie, can you just kinda push

that over a little bit just so I can see one eye?

And that's how we shot him.

But he could also be quite joyful, and fun in the role,

and in real life.

And of course he bonded with Arnold. Arnold became his dad.

'Cause Eddie had dad issues, you know, his dad had split,

and he was living with his uncle, and a fractured family.

And he was able to use all that.

And you sense a longing in him for a father.

The character never had a father,

and Eddie never had a father.

You know, and you sense that in him,

and he and Arnold just hit it off,

and then, you know, the rest is history.

It all worked.

True Lies.

You know, Arnold and I had worked together now

a couple times, we'd gotten to be friends,

we'd ride motorcycles together.

I was part of his social circle, he was part of mine.

And Arnold called me up one day

and said, I've got this story.

So we sat and watched this film together called La Totale.

A little French film, fun romp.

And when it was done, I turned to him

and I said, I see what you see in this guy.

He's married, he's a family man.

That binds him to a kind of reality

that is only half of his reality.

The other half of his reality is

he's this extraordinary character, this extraordinary guy.

[Guard] Sir, may I see your invitation, please?

Sure. Here's my invitation.

[car explodes]

[guards moaning]

And I thought, well, that's kind of him, right?

You know, he's Mr. Universe multiple times.

He's this movie star, but he's got kids. I got it instantly.

We went after the rights and we just made it.

We didn't even think about it twice.

What was interesting about it was finding his Helen,

his counterpart in that movie.

First person that came to mind was Jamie Lee Curtis.

So obvious in retrospect, right? She crushed it.

But Arnold said, I don't think so.

Actually I didn't hear it from him.

I heard it from his agent, Lou Pitt,

the guy that got fired for not taking Terminator,

that got rehired the next day.

I mean, Arnold is always loyal,

very loyal to everybody, right, sort of.

And Lou said, Arnold doesn't want Jamie.

And Arnold didn't tell me himself.

You know, he doesn't want Jamie.

I said, Why doesn't he want Jamie? She's great.

She's too beautiful. I don't buy her as a housewife.

So now he starts seeing every actress of that age

that could conceivably play Helen.

Met a lot of great actresses, you know,

narrowed it down to a couple, did screen tests,

full on screen tests.

And I was in Washington scouting locations,

and I got a tape that I told them to go find a tape of,

of one of Jamie's movies.

I can't remember which one. And they sent it to me.

And three o'clock in the morning,

after a long day of location scouting, I popped the tape in

and I'm thinking, she's Helen, come on.

So I flew back to LA. Arnold, what are you doing?

Can you come over?

And you know, he's just across town in Venice.

So he comes over, I'll never forget,

he is wearing an orange T-shirt,

and giant loud purple board shorts down past his knees

with these giant calves, right?

And he goes, Yeah, what is it?

And I said, How much do you trust me?

He goes, I trust you completely. You know that.

I said, No, this is for real. How much do you trust me?

And he sort of realized it was a talk, right?

He leans forward and he said,

We've made two movies together, I trust you completely.

I said, Completely. He said, Completely.

I said, Okay, it's Jamie. And he said, Okay.

Got up, shook my hand, and walked out.

It was a bit frosty, right? But it was cool.

He accepted it.

And then he worked with her for the first few days,

and she just became Helen.

And he came up to me after three days

of shooting and said, I was wrong.

You were right. She's amazing.

But there was a kicker to that story,

which is that Jamie had gotten her agent

to get a deal where they asked for her above the title

with Arnold in the credits.

And I said, He's never gonna agree to that.

And the agent said, We'll be satisfied

if you ask him in post-production

when you're mixing with best efforts,

if that's a possibility.

So I call up Arnold, and I say, All right,

you don't have to agree to this,

but I have to ask you, you know, would you consider,

would you consider putting, you know, Jamie's name

above the title with you?

There's a long silence, and he says, Jamie

is spectacular in the movie.

It's the movie it is because of her,

and I'm honored to have her above the title with me.

My condolences to the widow.

[suspenseful music] [fire crackling]

[Helen grunts]

It's all that sort of marriage thread running through it.

It's like Ed Harris and The Abyss

almost having his fingers chopped off,

but the titanium wedding ring stops

the watertight door and saves his life.

It's the same kind of motif, right?

Jamie just inhabited that character.

And she was such a blast to work with.

The whole thing about her being in the corridor

where she took the stupid frill off,

and took it off the shoulders,

and all of a sudden she's in this little tight black

cocktail dress with her hair slicked back.

And it's like, No, you didn't.

You just made yourself like, you know,

a cover model in 35 seconds.

She and I worked all that out together,

which basically means she worked it out and I shot it.

Titanic.

Well, Titanic had fascinated me.

When I was writing The Abyss, they had just found Titanic,

and they were imaging it with little robotics, right?

ROVs. So I got to know Robert Ballard.

I got to see the ROVs, I got to fly 'em, things like that.

So it was all kind of there in my mind.

And I was fascinated by the deep ocean.

And they had made an IMAX film where they went down,

and filmed Titanic, it's called Titanica.

And I thought, if those guys can go down there

and film Titanic for real,

for a relatively small $4 million film.

For a big Hollywood movie. I can do it too.

So I can go dive Titanic. It was that simple.

I just wanted to go dive Titanic.

And then, all right, I might have to write a story,

you know, I might have to get some actors,

and actually make the movie.

But I was more interested in, in diving the wreck.

So I go to 20th Century Fox, Peter Chernin's office.

Here's how I pitch it.

There's a beautiful book called

The Illustrated History of Titanic.

It's done by an artist named Ken Marschall.

The center fold and double truck painting

is about this wide.

And it's the ship angled down into the water,

all the lifeboats leaving, the rockets going off,

the lights of the portholes glittering gold in the water.

Everybody on the decks waiting to leave.

It's the beautiful majestic image, right?

I walk into Chernin's office, I pop the book open

to the centerfold, I shove it in front of his face

and I go, Romeo and Juliet on that.

Five words, just insert $120 million right here, please.

[Rose panting]

Don't do it.

Stay back.

Don't come any closer.

Come on. Just gimme your hand, I'll pull you back over.

No, stay where you are.

I mean it.

If you look back on it and you synthesize it all down,

every movie's ultimate fate is predicated on

a few key decisions usually made in pre-production,

and usually around casting.

So Leonardo and Kate. Boom, on Titanic.

It's almost as simple as my pitch to Chernin.

It's just who's Romeo and who's Juliet?

So once we had Titanic and my will to make it look real,

and all the effects experience that I had,

and all the practical shooting experience

that I had, we had one corner of that.

Now we needed our Romeo and we needed our Juliet.

Kate came along, I cast Kate very quickly.

And I was skeptical about her

because she had only done historical characters.

Her nickname at that time, even as a dewy young actress

of 19 was Corset Kate.

And I thought, why would I cast Corset Kate

in a movie about a corseted girl?

You know, I mean, that was the whole fundamental idea

that she's restricted by society.

Why would I cast Corset Kate in lazy casting?

I meet her. It's like, No, it's her, it's her.

It was simple.

Now Kate tells the story slightly differently

that she lobbied for the part and she sent me a rose,

and said, I'm your rose.

And it's like, that'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 really wants the part.

I had the opposite experience with Leonardo.

He didn't want to do it. He knew he should.

Everybody told him he should do it, you know, career move.

He didn't wanna do it.

It took me, I dunno, five weeks

working with him, probably once a week

to drill down to what he didn't like about it.

And the answer was very simple.

He didn't think it was challenging enough.

He didn't wanna just be handsome young Leo.

And I said, It's not about you being handsome young Leo,

even though you're handsome and you're young.

I said, It's about holding the center.

When you don't have all those props.

I said, Those things are props.

And ultimately, that's the easy path.

The hard path is to do what Jimmy Stewart would do,

which is be the handsome guy in the center

and hold the audience riveted attention the entire time

without all that stuff.

And you know, when he signed to do the movie?

When 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 out on a limb

'cause I knew I really wanted him, right?

But that's when he did it.

When he realized how difficult it was.

And it was, then he leaned in and he brought everything

that he gives to a film.

And he was amazing. He was incandescent.

She was, you know, and the rest is history.

It's almost, when you think back on it,

all of the physical trials

and tribulations, the gigantic set,

the gigantic lighting setups, all the water, all the things

that made it difficult, it all crystallizes down

to those early decisions.

And everything else is all just details.

I put the Jack and Rose story in the foreground,

but then immediately behind them,

the backup singers are all

of the real people who are on that ship,

and their tragic stories as well.

And then beyond that it's just the scope and the pageantry.

You know, and I don't think I would've made a film like,

Titanic if I hadn't fallen in love with, you know,

David Lean spectacles.

For me, the one that was the most influential

was Dr. Zhivago, which is a love story against a vast canvas

of a huge event that was tragic for many people.

So using that as a guide, you know,

Titanic kind of fell into place in a way.

Very difficult film to make.

Very satisfying at the end of the day because it worked.

Avatar started as an answer to a problem.

The problem was I had created a new company

called Digital Domain.

It was the first all digital visual effects company.

And our goal was to create new technology

around CG characters and creatures,

and environments and all that sort of thing.

It was all new technology.

We wanted to aggregate all the people

that were doing it in one place,

and create a whole new way of making movies.

And I wanted a story that could drive that.

So in 1995, I wrote Avatar.

It was an 80 page treatment.

And it had basically all the stuff that's in the movie

and a whole bunch of stuff besides.

And I was told that it was premature.

We couldn't do all that stuff yet.

We knew what we wanted to do, but we weren't there yet.

In early 2005,

I was about to make a film called Alita: Battle Angel.

I really wanted to do it, and it involved a lot

of CG facial, especially facial performance.

So the two films would be done in a very similar way.

I was still struggling with the script on Alita.

So I took out this old story and I reread it,

and I thought, this is a pretty good story.

We should do this

or we should at least start developing it.

Hired some artists, start breaking it down.

Got some money from Fox to go through development.

And we shot a prototype using

the performance capture techniques,

including one that was brand new

that I had proposed, which is image based.

Meaning, you mount a video camera on a little boom on

a head rig and you video the actor's face.

And then from that you extract the performance,

and apply it to the CG character.

And then we used conventional motion capture

for the rest of the body.

That was already a technology that was available.

[gun firing]

[dragon moaning]

Yeah.

[gun firing] [dragon moaning]

So we were merging two technologies.

I wrote the script, we designed everything,

put together the best creature designers,

and layout environment designers.

And it just took on this momentum.

And that was the start

of what became a four year journey.

I think Zoe was the first person cast.

She was brought to me by Mali Finn, the casting director

that had cast Terminator, True Lies and Titanic.

And so we flew Zoe in and I cast her right away,

after I met her and auditioned with her,

and worked with her a little bit.

Just such a wonderful person as a human being.

But she had that grace and a beauty that was quite singular.

And she had a grace and movement.

She was a classically trained ballet dancer,

and she'd done a lot of other kinds of dance as well.

So I knew she could learn the Na'vi way of physically being,

which we hadn't even worked out yet.

But we worked it out with her,

and with some movement specialists.

And then I was looking for my Jake, obviously.

The other actors, you know, we found in

a kind of a conventional way.

And there were three young actors

that were really not nowhere,

kind of in their career at the time.

All three of them went on to be movie stars.

I had to choose between them,

and I did a series of screen tests.

First, it was sort of a straight audition.

Then I set up real screen tests in sets.

Like there was a lab set,

and there was a, there was a jungle set.

And Zoe came in and read with everybody

or tested with everybody 'cause she was now our baseline.

And Sam was the one I kept going back to.

And the studio disagreed.

The Fox guys liked the other guys better.

You know, I'll say, I'll say,

one of 'em was Channing Tatum.

So it's like, Okay, Channing did, well.

You know, we're all good with Channing Tatum, right?

You know, it could have been Channing Tatum.

We need to show the Sky People.

That they cannot take whatever they want.

And that this,

this is our land.

[Tsu'tey and Neytiri speaking in Na'vi language]

That guy, I would follow into battle.

That guy I would follow into hell.

He spoke to me in a way that resonated.

And you know, he had this thick Australian accent.

We had to work with that.

And none of these actors had done performance capture.

And they were all kinda like,

Is this really gonna be anything?

I'll never forget screening the film for the cast.

And they were like, you know,

Zoe was curled up in her seat like this.

Their eyes were wide open,

and they were just riveted the whole time.

Because they saw their work,

they saw themselves in the characters.

I think they might've been a little bit

skeptical up until then.

I'd showed them little bits along the way.

But until they saw it all together,

I don't think they realized what we had done.

Meanwhile, I had lived with it through the whole thing,

you know, 2,500 shots or whatever it was,

down to the minutest detail, or pining every day

on every blade of grass,

and every bit of lighting and all that.

So, you know, for me it was, you know?

But the actors were like, Holy crap, what did we just do?

Avatar: The Way of Water.

We had two enormous challenges on The Way of Water.

And one of them was the obvious one, the water.

And the other one was getting to a much higher level

of refinement, of preserving the actor's performance.

As much as Avatar itself, the first film was a success.

I always felt like we didn't quite get

to the level that I wanted.

And if we were gonna commit to doing two more,

which was the commitment, actually four more.

But, you know, it was really what was in front

of me was two films to be shot

as a kind of conjoined production.

So we spent a lot of money on R

and D with that facial pipeline to make sure

that every single molecule

of what the actors did would be preserved.

Every nuance, every glance, every tiny little bit

of eye movement, the tendons in the throat,

the swallowing, the breathing, everything.

You have to capture it and you have to bottle it,

and you have to protect it down through that pipeline.

So we spent, we spent three years

and I don't know, $40 million perfecting that

before we ever worked with the actors.

I wrote four scripts, you know, two through five.

And then we just jumped into it in.

In September of '17, we just jumped back into it,

and it was like the family coming back together.

[Jake] Happiness is simple.

But would've thought a jar head like me

could break the code.

[Jake grunting and speaking in Na'vi language]

[Neytiri speaking in Na'vi language]

[Jake speaking in Na'vi language]

And it got interesting 'cause in the meantime,

Sam and Zoe had become parents themselves.

So now they're starting to relate

to their characters in a very different way.

There's a 15 year time jump.

They're relating to these young actors

as the kids, now that they've had their own kids.

And they understand what that protective instinct is,

and they understand what it means,

how it profoundly changes your life.

You know, I always said it was a family story,

but it's a little bit dangerous saying it's a family story

from Disney and you think a thing, but it's not.

It's a family. It's a generational family story.

It's dramatic, tragic, epic, you know, all of those things.

It's not all hearts and flowers.

All of the family relationships

are sometimes quite strained.

And there are some dark dynamics in there as well.

But at the center of it is this love,

and this cohesiveness that binds them together.

And I think that as human beings, we all long for that.

We don't always accomplish it.

Sometimes we do and we don't appreciate it.

But I think we all long for it.

Ultimately, at the bottom of it all

that's what these two movies, Avatar 2,

and Avatar 3 are saying.

There's a lot else going on too.

The themes around colonialism and the environment,

and extraction industries and all that sort of thing.

But to at the bottom level, thematically, it's about family.

And however we define family.

You know, found family, you know, chosen family,

biological family, and all of the dynamics,

and variants on that theme.

Spider, who's got a kind of surrogate father in Jake,

but he's rejected by that family

because Neytiri, you know, basically is kind of a racist

around humans, around the Sky People

that have destroyed her village and her home tree,

and killed her father and all that.

Everybody's got stuff going on.

Spider and his incarnation

of his biological father Miles Quaritch.

What does that mean to him?

He's a confused young guy, 15 years old.

Or Jack would say to me,

So do I like him or do I not like him?

I said, I don't know, you have to figure that out.

He said, No, but tell me.

Jack, you're figuring that out in your real life.

You need to, as an actor,

your character's figuring that out in his life.

So you don't know the answer.

So it's not actable to know the answer.

He said, Yeah, but tell me anyway.

The other challenge was the water.

That's kind of more obvious, right?

Technically, I mean, nobody had ever done

performance capture in water.

I wanted Sigourney underwater,

I wanted Britain Dalton underwater,

I wanted Jack Champion underwater

'cause you can't fake that stuff either.

And so when you see the film,

every time you see a character underwater,

the actors were underwater,

or sometimes it was a stunt double

or somebody who was a specialist stunt double in

underwater performance.

You know, maybe for some of the creature riding

or some of the more dangerous things.

But pretty much they were all down there.

So we had to put them, step one,

how do you get actors underwater?

They gotta learn how to hold their breath.

Not for like 30 seconds, for like three, four minutes.

Kate Winslet came in and just schooled everybody. I'm sorry.

She came in, and held her breath

after three weeks of training for seven minutes

and 15 seconds, beating Tom Cruise's record, I think.

You know, when he was in breath hold training

for one of the Mission Impossible movies.

Sigourney, no slouch at the age of 69

or 70 at the time, held her breath

for six and a half minutes, I think.

The actors were really loving it

because here was something tangible

that they could use to prepare.

Sigourney had a double challenge.

You know, she had to play a 15-year-old.

You know, as a septuagenarian that was remarkable.

I think for, you know, she worked,

all the actors worked for about 18 months.

This isn't like rocking up to a lectern.

And in two days doing an entire voice part for

an animated film, Pixar animated film.

Everything you see those characters do, the actors did.

It took 18 months to do the two movies.

So about nine months of capture for each each film.

But it was all intermixed.

We'd do a Avatar 2 scene one day,

and a three scene the next day.

Even some stuff on four.

'Cause all the characters jumped forward in age about

eight years between the end of three and the start of four.

So we knew the kids wouldn't be kids anymore

when we got back around to shooting.

Though as we don't even know when we're gonna shoot those.

We gotta make some money on three first.

But the point that I was trying to make is

it's not voicing a character.

I see that imprint, it drives me nuts.

Oh, Sigourney voiced Kiri.

Sigourney was Kiri for 18 months.

So 'The Volume's got a little black line around it.

The Volume is where we work.

It's the performance capture space.

When she crossed that line, she became Kiri.

But even outside the volume, there was a lightness to her.

She seemed to have gotten younger. 20, 30 years younger.

She was buoyant, she was effervescent.

You know, I think she just tried to live in that space

of being open, and unproven, and vulnerable.

All the things that a teenage girl might feel, you know?

And I think that's why her character's so relatable

as she comes into her power across these two films.

And she becomes quite powerful by the end of movie three.

You see her struggling with it, her uncertainty,

her not understanding what's going on in her body

and in her mind, not understanding her place.

And you know, why she's shunned and not accepted,

and you know, like, it's a typical angsty

teen journey just written large and on another planet,

and in a character that's eight feet tall and blue.

[dramatic gong beat]

It was all shot as one big thing.

And then we went through all the posts on

The Way of Water, and then we went through all the posts on,

on Fire and Ash.

And that took another three years

because Avatar movies are shot twice.

You shoot it with the actors, and then you do all the camera

and the lighting, and the camera angles,

and all the coverage, and everything separately.

It takes a little bit to get your head wrapped around it.

But we uncouple performance acting from cinematography.

Most movies do it all at once, right?

You're acting in front of a camera, they're lighting you,

and you've gotta make a shot.

We don't make shots, we make performances,

and then we make the shots later,

and the actors are all off

doing other movies or vacationing.

[upbeat inspiring music]

I shoot everything, I shoot all the virtual cameras.

I also shoot all the live action stuff myself.

Handholding or, you know, on a remote head,

that sort of thing.

Although in both of these movies,

I relied a lot on second unit directors as well

to do some of the virtual camera work,

and some of the live action stunt work,

and things like that just because of schedule.

It sounds like a very lavish, luxurious schedule

to have three years to finish a movie.

But trust me, you used every second of it.

Both of those films had about 3,500 shots

and every single one of them was a VFX shot

that had to be at the highest possible bar

because you had to believe it,

and you had to believe the characters.

So the facial performance, the hair, the water,

all of the things that are, what we call Sims, right?

So hair blowing in the wind is a Sim.

Somebody stepping out of the water is

a physics-based fluid dynamic simulation of

what water would do if

that character was stepping outta the water.

So the weird thing is, we actually had a character stepping

outta the water, but we can only capture the character.

We can't capture the water.

So then we have to do a Sim

to recreate the water after the fact.

So it's not photography, it's a whole different path,

but it gets you to what looks like photography.

Kind of nuts, right?

If we hadn't made so much damn money with the first film,

we'd never be doing this.

I mean, it's insane. That's my final word on the subject.

[upbeat music]

For the most part, I get excited enough to make a movie,

and commit a year or more of my life to a subject

that I think I will learn from.

Whether that's craft I need to learn

or whether it's a subject I want to learn.

And sometimes, you know,

there might be some technical challenges

in order to create the imagery.

And I think that comes from maybe

feeling slightly inadequate as a filmmaker.

Oh, I can't compete with those filmmakers.

But I think if I can find a new way

to create some imagery that nobody else can do,

then I brought value.

You know, I've think that probably

was a motivator back in the day.

But I'm just fascinated by any kind of challenge.

I just like challenges.

You know, I like to challenge myself.

And I don't want to do anything particularly

that I've done before.

[climactic music]