James Cameron

James Francis Cameron 

16 August 1954

A Canadian film director, film producer, screenwriter, editor, and deep-sea explorer.Cameron quit his job as a truck driver to enter the film industry after seeing the original Star Wars film in 1977. When Cameron read Syd Field's book Screenplay, it occurred to him that integrating science and art was possible, and he wrote a 10-minute science-fiction script with two friends, titled Xenogenesis. They raised money, rented camera, lenses, film stock and studio then shot it in 35mm. They dismantled the camera to understand how to operate it and spent the first half-day of the shoot trying to figure out how to get it running.

Cameron's films have recurring themes and subtexts. These include the conflicts between humanity and technology, the dangers of corporate greed, strong female characters, and a strong romance subplot. In almost all films, the main characters usually get into dramatic crisis situations with significant threats to their own life or even the threat of an impending apocalypse. 

He has been nominated for six Academy Awards overall and won three for Titanic. On June 3, 2008, it was announced that he would be inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. On December 18, 2009, the same day "Avatar" was released worldwide, Cameron received the 2,396th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. After the release of Avatar, on February 28, 2010, Cameron was also honored with a Visual Effects Society (VES) Lifetime Achievement Award.

As director, writer, producer

• Xenogenesis (1978)
• Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)
• Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)
• Escape from New York (1981)
• Galaxy of Terror (1981)
• Android (1982)
• Piranha II: The Spawning (1982)
• The Terminator (1984)
• Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)
• Aliens (1986)
• The Abyss (1989)
• Point Break (1991)
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
• True Lies (1994)
• Strange Days (1995)
• Titanic (1997)
• The Muse (1999)
• Solaris (2002)
• Ghosts of the Abyss (2003)
• Volcanoes of the Deep Sea (2003)
• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
• The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (2004)
• Aliens of the Deep (2005)
• Explorers: From the Titanic to the Moon (2006)
• Terminator Salvation (2009)
• Avatar (2009)
• Sanctum (2011)
• Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (2012)
• Deepsea Challenge 3D (2014)
• Terminator Genisys (2015)

Quotations

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Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.

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I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.

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There are many talented people who haven't fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.

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Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.

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If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.

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The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

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You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.

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I mean, you have to be able - you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can't do it by yourself.

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I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.

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People call me a perfectionist, but I'm not. I'm a rightist. I do something until it's right, and then I move on to the next thing.

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If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.

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I'm hopeful that we'll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.

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Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.

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To convince people to back your idea, you've got to sell it to yourself and know when it's the moment. Sometimes that means waiting. It's like surfing. You don't create energy, you just harvest energy already out there.

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The future of 3D will be defined by TV.

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I think people had somehow gotten the sense that we have explored everything, when that isn't the case. We so know so little about the ocean, and so much of it is being destroyed.

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I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.

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I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. It's very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy - a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they're required to keep an agreement with you only if you're successful or they need you.

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I've tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established filmmaker. It's a blue-collar sensibility.

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I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father's respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things.

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Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.

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The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

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The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer.

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You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything.

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I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.

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My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.

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The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.

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I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.

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I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.

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The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there's an alien world here on Earth.

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I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.

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Inspiration can hit you in the head at any time in any context. It could happen in a conversation. Talking to someone at a party, you can get an idea. But you've got to remember those inspirations.

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Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.

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I certainly didn't think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football.

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I don't use film cameras. I don't do visual effects the same way. We don't use miniature models; it's all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It's a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same.

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People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn't really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things.

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So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

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It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.

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