James Cameron
James Cameron
James Francis Cameronis a Canadian filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, inventor, engineer, philanthropist, and deep-sea explorer. He first found major success with the science fiction action film The Terminator. He then became a popular Hollywood director and was hired to write and direct Aliens; three years later he followed up with The Abyss...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth16 August 1954
CityKapuskasing, Canada
CountryUnited States of America
Nature's not our enemy, it's our sustenance; and we need it - and we need nature healthy for us to be healthy and to survive long term
The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.
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.
So my message is in whichever realm, be it going into space or going into the deep sea, you have to balance the yin and yang of caution and boldness, risk aversion and risk taking, fear and fearlessness. No great accomplishment takes place, whether it be a movie or a deep ocean expedition, or a space mission, without a kind of dynamic equipoise between the two. Luck is not a factor. Hope is not a strategy. Fear is not an option.
The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.
I don't look at scripts. I just write them.
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.
What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?
With ‘Avatar,’ I thought, Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys’ adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars—a soldier goes to Mars,
God wears white flannels.
Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.
I'm certainly not a fan of conversion when you could shoot the movie in 3-D.
The nation that leads in renewable energy will be the nation that leads the world.
I probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that's gone before that it's sort of like a fractal. It's gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you're a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations.