The King Returns with Avatar 2 - James Cameron Interview with GQ Broken Down

Hey everyone, AvatarGuy here. A new interview with James Cameron has just come out with GQ and I've just read through it once and I just thought that I would take this opportunity to go through the interview and pull out some of the best bits because it's honestly one of the best interviews I think I've ever read from Jim. A note for anyone who's new to this, James Cameron often goes by Jim as his nickname and because I've I guess followed him for so long I ended up doing that too so if I accidentally say Jim here and there throughout the going through then forgive me. A little secret, I have been a fan of James Cameron for a very long time, there are loads of videos on it on my YouTube channel that you can check out and as I always I'm actually probably a bigger James Cameron fan than I am just a pure Avatar fan so for me this article is basically Christmas come early. We've already got Avatar 2 to also look forward to so let's dive in. Right off the start we have this cool picture of Jim sat on what looks like one of the huge props from Avatar 2. It's obviously some kind of RDA SecOps vehicle and again showing that not everything in these movies is going to be CGI, they do use massive amounts of practical effects and the title I think is apt it's The Return of James Cameron Box Office King and it just goes over the fact that it's been 13 years since Jim released Avatar which was the highest grossing film of all time and now he's back and so it's by Zach Baron over at GQ who I think again is a really fantastic article and I'll leave a description to the full article in the description so that you can click it and read it through for yourself. So this interview has gone over to New Zealand and actually sat down with Jim and talked to him and it's kind of weird because recently I watched they open it almost straight away with the fact that he was the first person to solo descend to the bottom of the Challenger Deep and the Challenger Deep is the very bottom of the Marianas Trench which is the deepest crack in the world I guess and they talk about Victor Viscovo, I think that's how you pronounce his name, another explorer who has also been to the bottom of the Challenger Deep after James Cameron went and yeah they have this little funny little thing so you talk about that he became the first person in history to descend the 6.8 mile distance solo and one of the only the few people to ever go that deep. Since then others followed most prominently a private equity titan and former naval reserve intelligence officer turned explorer named Victor Viscovo but Cameron is adamant that none have Cameron told me claimed he went deeper but you can't he's basically just making it up and yeah so I thought it was really funny and actually I watched a documentary recently that had Victor Viscovo in it and yeah it was really good. So then like it carries on and goes that as people sometimes do in response to Cameron's films, Viscovo disagrees that he says that he has a different scientific perspective which I think I'm going to side with Jim on this, the bottom's the bottom. I can't imagine how he missed it when he was down there um and yeah then we have this little bit here which had me laughing which was that um that well he has a different scientific perspective that he said that he rang the explorer Victor Viscovo rang James Cameron or emailed James Cameron and said I watched Titanic at the Titanic and James Cameron replied yeah but I made Titanic at the Titanic, a classic I think Jim retort which I just absolutely love and actually if you look up Victor Viscovo he looks a little bit like Jim which makes me laugh as well um and then so they carry on they talk about that um he's he's written and directed some of the most successful films of all time and that it would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie which he helped to invent with his debut Terminator and then reinvent with the second Aliens and that um he's much more than just a filmmaker that he's also a scientist and that I've mentioned this many times on my before a camera he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars attached to the Mars rover Curiosity um and then it talks about this this guy the Daniel Golden who's the former head of NASA said that sometimes um James Cameron seems like a man in search of a problem to solve or a deadly experience to survive but he is in fact there's a purpose to the challenges he takes on I think this really does um I think it's really I don't know like hearing these people who are extremely high up um talk about this and talk about Jim in this way it really shows you how like pioneering he is I've said this in things before but I genuinely do and stand firm to the fact that James Cameron is a modern day Leonardo da Vinci he's not just a filmmaker he can do so many other things and he touches on this later in the article which I was very pleased um and then so the head of NASA and then but Jim retorts back after this and the head of NASA is saying that he looks like a man who always wants to solve a problem and do something extremely risky but James Cameron's response is there's plenty of dangerous things that I won't go near because they're dangerous but they have a randomness factor because they have a randomness factor to them Cameron said white water white water rafting so he's happy to do things that are dangerous but he wants to do things that are dangerous that he can control and again it seems unsurprising from someone like James Cameron um then we go to the the next bit we talk about so in December Disney will release Avatar the way of water many many days and it's the first feature Cameron has directed in 13 years and the first of four planned avatars um and he says that James Cameron says it's about his family there's many of the main characters from the first film are back but older and with kids to take care of what do two characters who are warriors who take chances and have no fear do when they have children and they still have this epic struggle which immediately is like that seems very much like this is almost biographical James Cameron and his wife Susie Amos Cameron she was an actress he's obviously a film director that you can see the parallels there that they've gone from this high-powered exciting world Hollywood to one where they have children and they want to protect their environment things like that um and then he goes their instinct is to be fearless and do crazy things jump off cliffs dive them into the middle of an enemy armada but you've got kids what does that look like in a family setting among other things Cameron said the way of water could be could be a friendly but pointed rebuke to the comic book blockbusters and now war with Cameron's films at the top of the box i mean i wouldn't call it a war when you've sent all those films that Jim and he still haven't managed to beat him doesn't feel like it's a really a war that's my opinion um and Jim does one of his classic criticisms of i think comic book movies which is i completely agree with i was consciously thinking to myself okay all these superheroes they never have kids they never really have to deal with real things that could hold you down and give you feet of clay in the real world and Sigourney Weaver who's also returning as we all know she talks about this and that again it's a parallel to his real life and she says that Jim loves his family so much and i feel that love in our film it's as personal a film as he's ever made and i yeah i mean i think fans of James Cameron can almost see that just already from um the interviews he's given and the little snippets and things that we've seen but yeah i really like that and then talks again goes on about um that for this next section they talk about the original avatar brightly colored dream of a movie set in the year 2145 about an ex-marine falling in love with a blue nine-foot-tall princess on a foreign moon and that's a pretty good summation of the original avatar um which is being stripped invaded of its uh natural resources um they talk about the production that the digital effects users transform human actors into animated creatures and that for the team had to start all over again they needed new cameras that could shoot underwater and a motion capture system that could collect separate shots from above and below the water and integrate them into a unified virtual image they needed new algorithms new ai to translate what Cameron shot into what you see so this isn't just it's almost like they had to go back and start from which is kind of crazy you know and then um and then they go on to this next bit where he talks about two really important points like this this is the first paragraph when i read it i was like wow i even posted it over on my instagram which is that when the number of iterations they go through in fact i'm going just so everyone can understand it so nothing would work the first time Cameron said and the production tried it sorry nothing would work the first time Cameron and the production tried it or the second or usually the third one day in Wellington New Zealand where Cameron was finishing the film he showed me a single effect shot numbered 405 that means there's been 405 versions of this before it gets to me he said Cameron who has been working on the movie since it was due out years ago in September he still wasn't done the way of water was expensive to make how expensive very ******* according to Cameron who told me he'd informed the studio that the film represented the worst business case in movie history in order to be profitable he said you'd have to be the third or fourth highest grossing film in history that's your just to put this into perspective Jim is basically saying that these effects shot these effects are going through 405 different iterations before he even gets to see them that's a lot of work that's a lot of affecting and then these movies have cost so much money that to break even they're gonna have to make break be the third or fourth highest grossing films ever which pretty much means they have to make over two billion dollars he's really set a high bar for himself but then again this is James Cameron and he's the man who raises the bar um so yeah so on to the next part um that yeah he works related to the evening day after day and again this is something that we always hear about James Cameron is that he has a work ethic unlike anybody else he I think he famously said um that he might not be better than some directors are like visually superior but he will outwork anyone and again it's one of the reasons he inspires me because I'd find it like I'm not gonna say I work inside of James Cameron not I definitely think um yeah it's it's what it's it's a while yeah it's a it's it's something that drives me um sorry I'm just referring back to my notes as well just so I don't miss anything um and then he talks about yeah so he talks about is it that he's enjoying himself and that I like difficult I'm attracted by difficult difficult is a ******* magnet for me I go straight to difficult and I think it probably goes back to this idea that there are lots of smart really gifted really talented filmmakers out there that just can't do the difficult stuff so that gives me a tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen because the really gifted people don't ******* want to do it uh I I I can't say that he's not talented but I guess it's the kind of talent and it's a weird humble Jim but not humble in his sense which makes me laugh um and then yeah we go on so we see um Cameron and his fifth wife fifth wife Susie Amos Cameron live year-round in New Zealand where they have a 5,000 acre farm east of Wellington and the ocean on one side lake on the other mountains in the distance and again it shows how he's really is committed to uh to environmentalism he's he's not just I think he's not just a Hollywood person anymore who talks about this about talks about it but he's actually walking the walk I find extremely you know I think more people should be like this and I mean I'm not rich enough but I also think that James Cameron would probably agree that it should be something that more people are trying to do even if it's a small thing and he he does admit that a lot of the things that he's he's able to do is a product of him being as wealthy as he um he talks about some ideas that he's had so he said that um that they're the biggest supplier of organic brassicas a category of plant that includes broccoli kale cotton cauliflower um and that for a while Cameron attempted an experimental agricultural project taking 25 acres of trees and intercropping between them producing 143 different species of fruit different apples pears and berries and but that provided not to be viable commercially so he thought maybe he'd just open and land up to the public and civilians could just wander in and eat like Eden we could probably feed a thousand people up that forest he told me but then he realized there was also a flaw in that plant his food forest far from the nearest city was nowhere close to the people he's meant to feed you learn as you go he said shrugging um this next bit made me kind of laugh is that he said that the reporter asked him if he was if he's lonely and moving away from California and he says I don't have any friends so it's I feel like from these things Susie's his best friend um and he has his family and then he also has I guess like I I bet he must be friends with John Landau feels like they're very close they've known each other a very long time um but yeah I can imagine that it's it's quite lonely at the top so just um he talks about LA and it says that when Cameron flies over Los Angeles and it's over taxed power grid it's thousands of millions of it's thousands or millions of acres of buildings he recently did he finds himself thinking wow this is an abomination against nature this place I can't believe I lived here so long and then he describes his uh this this next bit's crazy actually it's something I've seen videos of him training to shoot but I didn't realize that he was actually uh like fully qualified I'll read this full paragraph which is Cameron's Malibu compound was known for its survivalist vibe fast cars a security team trained in fighting wildfires guns assault rifle but but assault rifles a band in New Zealand and Cameron told me he perceived a less feral more collectivist spirit in his neighbors I don't have to think about guns here he said in LA he'd have himself trained by one of the best championship shooters in America he's the guy that taught Keanu Reeves how to beat John Wick I was his first Hollywood contact I trained with him for three years he didn't know anybody in Hollywood a guy named Taron Butler up in Simi Valley he has a YouTube channel I'll find I'll find that link and put it in the description as well so I'm a competition grade shooter but I don't have to worry about that here again which I'm bragging but that he doesn't have to worry about it and again if I was a competition grade shooter I'd also brag um and again instead of 68 Cameron rises at 4 45 a.m often kickboxing in the mornings and moves between their farm and a windy mid-sized city in the southern end of New Zealand's North Island where the director Peter Jackson's digital effects company Wayter FX has long been headquartered and then he talks about them that he's working out of Peter Jackson's old offices and that the Avatar sequels were a huge piece of business for New Zealand and their overall population and that sometimes he feels like they have to remind people that these movies costing all this money is ultimately money going into the New Zealand economy it's massively helping their economy even if they're perceived sometimes to be pulling resources away um and then we talk about I guess his biggest biggest films is that um he defends uh spending massive amounts of budgets and talks about he says that um I used to be really defensive about that because it was always the first thing anybody would mention Cameron said and now I'm like if I can make a business case to spend a billion dollars on a movie I will ******* do it you want to know why because we don't put it all in a single pile and light it on fire we give it to people that money was going to be spent somewhere Cameron said if the studio agrees and thinks it thinks it's a good investment as opposed to buying an oil lease off the north of Scotland which somebody would think was a good investment why not do it today all of his films have made their money back many of them spectacularly and that's a little bit of an understatement too um and this bit which I really like um probably I probably need to try and embody it a little bit more myself is that self-doubt in general is not something Cameron has a lot of experience with I don't think I'm hardwired with that I don't know why it sounds egotistical but I think there's an innocence to it I really do I don't think it's about yeah I think I'm better than you I just think it's more like wow that's really interesting let me just pursue that idea for a while Cameron grew up in Hollywood Ontario and then later on Orange County and he's always the kind of person whose confidence I guess is massive in fact Galen Heard another one of his ex-wives has mentioned this in the past interviews that he has this aura about him this energy this real confidence you can feel when he walks into a room um and that yeah he ends that bit with that um and then I think it talks about one of the most this is one of the most famous ones and definitely check it out if you can which is that he was a truck driver when he made The Terminator and that he was in his 20s as a truck driver and the way he taught himself filmmaking was he'd go to the library photocopy dissertations and books about filmmaking techniques and that's how he did it in fact he ends it with that I was either getting stoned and much excited about life's first season I was going through this stuff chapter and verse and making my own notes and all that I basically gave myself a college education in visual effects and cinematography while I was driving a truck he's basically the good will hunting of filmmaking um and then he talks about him being hired by Roger Corman Terminator and Aliens which no one is well aware of and then um so again this bit I think is really important that he talks about his creative experience and that a lot of these things come to him in dreams in fact he talks about it in Technoire his art book and even mentions one of the topic titles is Dreaming With Your Eyes Wide Open that um he dreamt about Avatar when he was 19 the bioluminescent forests you know the people running around in this forest and he details that here in fact even the original Terminator came to him as a metal man climbing towards him while he was having a fever and had to dream about it um and he jokes that it was lucky that when he woke up he actually drew that bioluminescent forest and so that when people tried to sue him when Avatar was so successful he could go back to it and say look I've had this idea for years you aren't suing me and I've got and then at the end of this article is something that I really like which is they talk about the mentions Zoe Saldana and that how the approach of the Avatar films is so different to the approach of Marvel which is that the Marvel franchises are built by dozens of comic book artists and writers and directors who work together to create stories by contrast Avatar is the result of the vision of a single man without Jim's heavy heavy brains who told me this would all fall apart I think that that's like one of the things we rarely see in movie making now you know we have we have like Christopher Nolan who writes with his brother and they make films and that's like an author's vision you know it's one person's vision we had you know like a lot of films in the past where there were the vision of a single person and that's that person's vision that you're seeing on the screen whereas in recent decades that's changed you've got much more movie making by committee and much more collaboration based and lots of things based on already existing material that people can communally reference and with Avatar that's not the case it's literally a single man's vision being projected onto that screen it's it's not only different in what we're seeing of the CGI in the world etc it's different in its process and I think that that shines through um again talk about his predecessors and they talk about fellow auteurs, auteurs by the way I think it's it's like a French term and I think it just basically means what I've already described it's a person who it's like the film is their vision that individual's vision um yeah and then he talks about he said quotes very much like this before that he talks about that he's never done a small film and that he doesn't care about that that actually he considers his big films even like small films and he says um on a given day I might be doing a scene with two actors in a room me hand holding the camera how is that indifferent in the smallest independent film it's just that maybe the next day I'm doing a battle with 40,000 people I like to do that too which again if that's true that's interesting if we're gonna see a 40,000 person battle in a movie in the Avatar sequel that's crazy I don't know if we've ever seen something on that scale uh I know there's a Russian movie so an old Soviet movie where they had tens of thousands of extras battle but to see that in a Hollywood movie is going to be insane um a nice picture of Jim um and then again this is my this is against I always love learning something new about him that I never even knew before um and I was just going to read this when Cameron moves he moves fast and favours one side when I asked him what he'd done to give himself a limp looked at me curiously I've got one short leg he said it doesn't slow me down any though I remember my first wife Sharon Williams there's a nice image of her in the Technowire art book um when we were just first dating she said walk ahead of me on the sidewalk and I said why she said I want to study your walk I turned around why she said well I think I can correct it his response is f*** you again typical Jim response and then um they talk about the fact that he follows him um into this big sound mixing room where they're currently sound mixing the um soundtrack for the sequels and they're working on this noisy interrogation scene interesting again they're interrogating someone in the new so there's no interrogation scene um the film's composer Simon Franklin already written a score for the sequence and Cameron is mixed so trying to balance the music against the sound effects in various shots and he says um can you just play the effects themselves when they do it there's no sound and then it doesn't work so basically he makes a joke that the reason it's not working is because there's a famous reporter in the room you know recording which I think is funny and that they have to reset it um which then leads on to this discussion about how James Cameron had this ferocious reputation and that he's earned this reputation of having a temper and some would say he's earned this reputation several times over on more than one Cameron set crew members have taken to wearing shirts that read you can't scare me I work for Jim Cameron Cameron is well aware of this he thinks there was a period of time early on when he told me later and it looked and it took on this Paul Bunyan-esque slightly larger than life quality and then there was a legitimate time when I looked at like all right why am I getting so upset and what is this solving um and he finished it with I'm not saying I don't get upset once in a while I mean everybody I think is entitled to a bad day but whereas before it might have been once every couple of weeks now it's like twice a year the temper of Jim doesn't appear that often anymore and then he talks about how he worked with Ron Howard on Apollo 13 and that Ron Howard was very kind and calm and that he wanted to embrace his inner Ron Howard um and so yeah and he says that I always figured that no negative comment was the equivalent of a compliment that's not how people are at all you have to actually say it out loud again yeah I really like that no Cameron despite his famous temper has always inspired loyalty his obsessive focus when he's in the middle of making a film often obscures the erudite and charming Canadian he is when he's not working Weaver who first met Cameron when she starred in Aliens in 1986 told me it really wasn't until we went to Venice with Aliens for the film festival when I was sitting at dinner with him and I went Jesus you're so funny where was this guy the whole time others have sworn off working with a director only to return like Kate Winslet who spoke warily after Titanic's shoot of her lack of fondness for Cameron's penchant for filming in water tanks and yet Winslet is not only in the way of water she learned to free dive for it so that she could shoot her scenes underwater I think she had something to prove to herself Cameron said and so I mean no extra charge for the therapy but the healing moment where she got to hold her breath underwater for seven and a half minutes and be the underwater queen um so the and then the sound mixers admit defeat and he goes over to um another area so he says okay that was a total failure and then they go outside and that they walk unevenly down the carpeted hallway to the bfx location where someone barefoot guy called Eric Sandon um is basically talking about him and how they have this really complex process and that you know that Jim talks about the camera moves that he wants etc etc and then he gets her handed over to where to apply the algorithms and layers of animation to complete the template you know to bring it to life um the actors are already defined what they did but it has to be translated and captured to 3d cg characters and there's all sorts of ai steps in there that's him referencing the difference between it being cg and it being animated um and then says if anyone is there anyone else working this way and james cameron laughs says that'd be insane to even try and that i don't mean that we're special i mean like if we hadn't made more money than any other movie in history this is the last ******* thing we'd be doing which makes sense that they're doing this insanely complex thing that the fact that avatar made 2.9 now 2.9 billion dollars has given them the freedom to do this kind of insane manhattan projects here yeah project um and then it gives this interesting one right so again this is showing i think how much how much information he has and how he just like taps into it for everything that they're looking at this thing right that's like some kind of it's a scene with the talking the giant whales that we've seen and that they're showing the scene they're coming up and james cameron says it feels a bit late to me cameron said noting the timer of water the whales sprayed as they arrived at the surface they typically start to exhale just as they're clearing the water like before they've cleared they actually start exhaling while they're still underwater but it's the last half of the lung fill that's shutting the water out of the nostrils they've had a few million years to get their timing down we've only had a few months and again this is the bit that i was referring to earlier and i've heard this many times in other in other reports basically that he can do any job almost that anyone else can so he says that not better than other people just i'm just some brain in the book he's not a brain in a book created things he knows what he's asking for when he's doing he says that he can really get involved and again he's famous for this and it says that um and john landau kind of puts it together he says that um so the south james not better than me he told me but i'm just more i think i'm sorry jump over but he makes a point of understanding enough about things that he knows what he's asking for when he asks for something jim has the ability to articulate the reason behind anything john landau cameron's long-time producing partner told me and only certain people can handle that because of cameron's clarity and his ability to bring his crew into the process saldana said when you were a part of a james cameron project you don't feel like a tool you don't feel objectified but she acknowledged it took a particular mental toughness if you can take it hang on because it is always going to be fun and beautiful and rewarding if you're sensitive and you can't take it then trust me there is always somebody else who's going to accept it she also said she'd gotten good advice from another actor who'd worked with cameron before who noticed that cameron often got so focused on what he was doing that he forgot to eat he starts getting edgy make sure you give him some chocolate and you give him um and then there's this nice little anecdote where they're looking at this shot of some helicopters landing and jim says that's pretty that's good enough and then the director says yeah i mean sorry the cg effects person says yeah okay that's good and then jim goes no because you need to push back kind of jokingly he said you should strive for perfection and you should argue with me you should say you like it but i don't like it yet i mean i guess that's easier said you know then he shows this nice shot of him i think in the cockpit of one again one of the um one of the ships that's probably from the upcoming thing um and then we have this really interesting discussion here about the fact that he's only directed two feature films in the last 25 years and jim says to him that he's had 50 000 ideas um in his head but he's just going to avatar um funny anecdote about him talking about whether how to pronounce hummus i don't know how to pronounce it hummus i don't know i say hummus um so yeah i think i think it's kind of yeah it's interesting that he has all these ideas and all these things that he wants to do um but at the same time they uh they're obviously having this discussion about how much how much to be doing veganism and plant-based lights and things like that and this is where it moves on to it moves on to this him discussing his passion for being plant-based and he says that he's 10 years 100 percent not a molecule that i know of animal entering my face and i'm healthier than i've ever been and most of these punks can't even keep up with me and he says um that he says nobody does empathy better than hollywood cameron told me but there's a certain point where my mind wants to solve problems that are real world problems i think it's extremely funny and a kind of backhand to the whole of hollywood in fact i can see a lot of different articles being created just out of this alone um and he so he talks about yeah that this the plant-based like thing has taken that he's been very very motivated to do it that um he's producing documentaries about veganism they've bought a factory to produce pea protein and all this um and he says that he loves that stuff as much as filmmaking and when he ends that this bit with and i know people think that sounds nuts wait a minute you love farming and pea protein as much as movies and his response is yeah pretty much and that um and he said this before he says that he doesn't like the other term vegan and he's tried to rebrand it in fact i've heard him say many times plant-based vegan and then here he introduced a new term i like which is future of and then that came up with his future we're eating the way people will be in the future we're just doing it early i'm not a vegan by the way i i tried to be vegetarian as much as possible um but yeah i mean if i was as rich as jim i would definitely be a vegan because i have a chef nice farm but yeah i'm not i'm not one myself and then of course that was for a while for a while the career in ocean exploration so again this is really showing i think this article is showing the fact that he is a polymath that like da vinci he's got this if he'd done even a single thing so in exploration in the plant-based stuff in invention he'd be notable but he's done all that as well as being an amazing movie maker in fact vista victor viscova who he talks about the starting who is an explorer he's an explorer he's done more exploration than jim but he's a and james cameron i think even if he hadn't done anything else except the solo descent to the bottom of the challenger deep would be a notable explorer he'd still have his own wikipedia page when you think about that and all the other things that he's done you really start to get this idea of just how yes giant james cameron is it's it's it's i i find it truly inspiring um and then he so he took he has this really big discussion about the history of avatar and his exploration and that when he you know that he didn't know they was going to still do avatar and that there's this famous story that when he went to take the idea of avatar to fox they said no thanks and he said he's going to take it to disney and then fox eventually said okay we'll want it and that got his way in the end and ended up being um you know the most successful film of all time um and there's really really funny bit said that um someone said that they thought the movie was too long and that cameron responds to this like this he says so this executive comes up to james cameron and says it's too long and he begs him to shorten it and he says i said something i never thought i'd say to anybody else in the business that he told him i think this movie is going to make all the ******* money when it does it's going to be too late for you to love the film the time for you to love the movie is today i'm not asking you to say something that you don't feel but just know that i will always know that no matter how complimentary you are about the movie in the future when it makes all the money and that's exactly what i said in caps all the money not some of the money all the ******* money i said you can't come back to me and compliment the film or come along and say look what we did together you won't be able to do that at that point that particular studio executive flipped out and went bug ---- on me and then i told him to get the **** out of my office and that's where he was left i guess that guy ended up looking really bad it did make all the money um yeah the film came out with all the money and this is my favorite bit right okay so he asks cameron whether he had a theory about why the original avatar made all that money and his response is i don't think i need a theory he said i think anybody that's seen the movie knows why it's a ******* gigantic adventure that's an all-consuming emotional experience that leaves you wrung out by the end of the movie and it was groundbreaking visually and it still holds up today so i don't think i need a theory i i love that he's right that any yeah anybody who's seen it knows when you watch it you know um i that bit there i want that on i want that on a poster it just blows everyone out i love it um talks about his deep to dive um whether he even wanted to come back to filmmaking um and that he still has got many ideas but that and this is where it gets kind of interesting is that the reason that he decided not to be an explorer and just stick with avatar he says that at the end the answer he landed on was this i'm a storyteller and there's a story to be told in avatar he decided he could explore everything he cared about and again we mentioned this many times before he can say everything he and that again this is quote anything i need to say about conservation and sustainability and all these themes the pros and cons of technology and where the human race is headed and all that sort of thing i could say within that greater landscape everything that he wants to say creatively and the story world he can say in this world and on pandora in the world of avatar and again more things that we know that she already shot avatar 3 and a big portion of 4 um and that he asked him a really interesting question and i was kind of shocked by this answer he says would he be happy if avatar is the thing that ends up being his monument you know the monument and he says that he thinks that's an unhealthy question to ask and he said i think first of all that's really unhealthy camera side shakings secondly i'm not done until the big hook comes out from the side of the curtain so to me everything every idea is a work in progress which i would love to see him continue to direct until he's old like i mean look at clint eastwood then eastwood's direct tons of you way past 70 um maybe james cameron's got left in him um and then it kind of gets to the i think this is like the yeah this is the final bit of the um the bit where and this bit's really interesting right but this is the final bit of the article and he talks about how a list of things that james cameron has failed is at its sharp but there are a few destinations that have eluded him and this is quite famous one is that he did do the training to go to space in the late 90s i think early 2000s and that he actually had a he ended up getting a seat um but it didn't pan out because he basically said that um that he talked with the head of nasa and it's like a scene from one of his movies and saying that golden asked cameron why he wanted to go um mars was the camera said and that would require long duration space flight and so the camera really wanted to see with human drama of people living in space golden offered cameron a so not to go to the iss but he'd see the planet from above he'd see space golden said the iss at the moment was too difficult but he wants to go into what the iss the international space station and the counter offer is no you can go on one of the shuttles so not in space like on the iss but you can go on one of the shuttles in um so cameron decides pretty much no he doesn't want to do it thought about it and he said to years leads to this exact moment where the administrator of nasa is willing to make a solid deal to fly me on the space shuttle but he looked in his heart and he decided no he would only go to space on his own terms i said i've got to say no i want to stick to my plan even if i can't if it can't happen even if it only gets derailed first of all there was a long pause and dan looks over to me and he says now i know you're serious i said i'm right i'm serious so but he says that golden got him in line to go to ass i went to houston started training began mapping logistics shoot and i'm going to fly me cameron told me then columbia was lost clearly you don't know yet february 3003 special columbia disintegrates and re-entry taking with it seven goals cameron went to their memorial service but he never got to go to space um and he asked what the interviewer asked james cameron what level of regret he had for this that he never went and he said zero different life the stuff i did instead was equally cool yeah it would have been great and i think if i had really really put my mind to it i could have re-manifested that a few years later with a better camera system and a better plan even but see by then i was into avatar and that was a whole other level of cool i mean he's implying that avatar's good on going to space which maybe it is i don't know about that jim um but also the fact that he did choose avatar over going to space which um yeah he traded mars for pandora uh and he's been on his own planet his own planet of his own making ever since speaking of which he said he had to get back to finishing the film there were more effects shots to review the sound was far from complete there were hundreds of people just beyond the doorway with a hundred problems that only camera could solve we shook hands and he walked me out and then this final bit really stuck with me um because again it's something i didn't ever knew about him i was driving back to my hotel not too long after when the phone rang it was camera wanting to talk again about the shuttle flight he turned down which eventually became and which eventually became golden's recollection differs here again but no matter a very notorious flight indeed i forgot the punchline to the story camera set the punchline is the shuttle mission i refused it was the columbia his voice rose his voice rose i ******* so yeah we nearly lost jim um yeah this is i encourage you all really please read the entire article yourself i purposely kind of jumped over a couple of bits um just because i think it's nicer just to read the actual reporters pros um this for me was an absolute treat it confirms everything about james cameron that i've thought that i knew and gave me a lot of cool information that i never knew before it really gets me more even more excited for the avatar sequels and it just yeah it's weird to say that you know he is a complete inspiration to me um in every sense of the word i i mean i'm wearing a shirt that he made but this isn't his shirt it's just same kind of ---- but yeah i just in many ways he is inspiring to me and i think that that's one of the things that makes these movies so groundbreaking that they have this genius at the helm that this da vinci kind of character who i think a lot of people sleep on because they don't realize how amazing he is and the things that he's achieved you know to go from being a truck driver who teaches yourself filmmaking from the library and making titanic and avatar and terminator 2 and avatar and avatar 2 and you know these this behemoth of a project making films unlike anyone else as well as his exploration as well as his environmental causes it's just truly inspiring and i really hope that his popularity increases as the sequels come out and as more people realize you know what talent he truly is what genius he truly is um yeah i think that's it that's that's my kind of going over this article i loved it um everyone should read it um i'll get i'll drop a link in the description um please subscribe if you haven't already this is probably going to be one of my longest videos ever so thanks for everyone who stuck out to the end um as always thank you and thank you for watching