Part 1: “That’s the Most Bullshit Thing in History”
James Cameron was in trouble.
The filmmaker was in a Russian submersible exploring the wreck of the Titanic when he found himself trapped 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface. “We had been caught in a vortex on the downwind side of the wreck that kept driving us back to the bottom,” Cameron recalls.
The director and his pilot’s attempts to break the sub free had exhausted their battery. So they powered down — and waited. Cameron sat in freezing darkness for about a half-hour in the haunting shadow of the iconic wreck, not knowing if the sub would have enough juice to resurface. It’s a nightmarish scenario eerily similar to what the world initially feared had happened to OceanGate’s doomed Titan submersible in 2023.
“It was,” Cameron admits, “a little spooky for a little while.”
During those tense moments, Cameron did what he always does, literally every day, sometimes for hours at a stretch: “I worked the problem.” The filmmaker has many abilities — as a designer, storyteller, engineer and project leader. But his greatest talent is his ability to problem-solve. He does this for fun.
“No, seriously,” Cameron says. “I can’t just loop endlessly over the problem on a project I’m working on. My way of stress relief is to think about hard engineering problems on other projects.” He doesn’t even like to rely on GPS while driving. “I’m a paper-map guy — I know that sounds crazy,” he says. “But I have a good sense of direction and a good memory. I think it comes from wreck diving. I can always find my way back.”
Throughout his career, Cameron has essentially asked himself: What’s the toughest, most artistically fulfilling problem I can solve that will appeal to a mass audience? Would it be a Terminator sequel hinging on unproven CGI technology for its shape-shifting villain? An action-thriller shot underwater for months? Staging the sinking of the RMS Titanic on a 775-foot replica? Or an adventure on an alien planet that requires pioneering performance-capture and banks on a 3D revolution?
You know his results: a string of hits and three of the biggest films of all time (the first two Avatar titles collectively grossed $5.2 billion globally — more than Disney paid to acquire Star Wars). But Cameron feels many fail to appreciate the level of artistry and real-world effort that go into making the Avatar films, in particular, and he’s not wrong (when I tell a friend I’m writing about Fire and Ash, she says, “It feels like everything is made with AI now” — a comment that would surely drive Cameron up a wall).
“We’ve somehow been lumped in with the issue of AI replacing actors,” he says. “Anybody who has seen our process is shocked by how performance-centric it is.”
Cameron has been emphasizing this on his press tour, and with good reason: Across an 18-month shoot, Cameron would sometimes work with actors for hours before a scene, then his technology translated their every micro-expression into his Na’vi characters. Sigourney Weaver, who plays Kiri in the film, calls the process “the most liberating way of working; it’s absolutely not what people think.”
“On a live-action set, you’re laying track in front of a moving train,” Cameron says. “On a performance-capture set, we take as long as we need to. There’s no worrying about the camera, about the lighting; I’m not coming in with a shot list. For me, it’s about getting to the emotional core of the scene. They say it’s not ‘real acting’ — that’s the most bullshit thing in history, [as if] ‘real acting’ is stage acting where you’re whispering loud enough to be heard 30 rows back.”
The new film has Marine turned Na’vi revolutionary Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), his fierce wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their children on the run from the brutal Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who finds an ally in franchise newcomer Varang (a scene-stealing Oona Chaplin), the frightening, seductive leader of the Ash People.
The Ash clan was inspired by one of Cameron’s globe-trotting explorations, when he met with the Baining people in Papua New Guinea. Cameron witnessed their fire ceremony and toured the remains of a town destroyed by a volcanic eruption.
“They were in this trance state, dancing for seven hours on end in actual fire,” he recalls. “Then I was seeing these kids go into this ash field, joyfully playing in this almost postnuclear devastation. I wasn’t thinking, ‘I can use this for Avatar,’ but it was one of those things that informs my dream landscape.”
PART 2: “THIS CAN BE THE LAST ONE”
Once again, Cameron has depicted an alien world stuffed with diverse beauty, wild creatures and epic action-adventure set pieces while largely filming in a single room in Manhattan Beach Studios in Southern California. There’s a scene in Fire and Ash where the Sully kids swim in a raging, dirty river that’s so photorealistic, it’s almost dizzying (the reality: a water tank, a surging current and tons of brown sugar).
The film’s first assembly cut approached four hours. Viewers at an early test screening were enthusiastic (when asked if they would see the film again, Cameron says the entire audience raised their hands). But some griped about the film’s length. How Cameron handles a preview screening says a lot about his process.
“I read every card [from audience members], and I do my own data-driven analysis,” he says. “There are things that I’ll [keep in the film] that are important to me, and there are things where I’m like, ‘OK, that’s not a hill I’m going to die on.’ I like to please the audience. I’m not somebody that likes the audience to come out of the theater going, ‘What the fuck was that?’”
Cameron trimmed Fire and Ash to three hours and 15 minutes. He admits some at Disney would have preferred a shorter cut (“There’s always pressure — ‘Do we need all this stuff with Quaritch? He’s the bad guy’”).
“There’s a wisdom that’s a carryover from decades ago that if we can have more [screenings per day], we’ll make more money,” he says. “But if you engage people, the word will spread. We proved it with Titanic, which is exactly the same length as Fire and Ash.”
Cameron considers. “This doesn’t mean Fire and Ash will make as much money as Titanic.”
Exactly how much money Fire and Ash will make is a crucial question for the fate of the franchise. Cameron says his original plan of concluding the saga with two more films (some of which already has been shot) depends on the success of Fire and Ash. Weaver says what Cameron has planned for the fourth and fifth movies “is so amazing” that it would be a tragedy for the franchise to halt. “All of them are part of one big story,” she says.
Adds Cameron: “This can be the last one. There’s only one [unanswered question] in the story. We may find that the release of Avatar 3 proves how diminished the cinematic experience is these days, or we may find it proves the case that it’s as strong as it ever was — but only for certain types of films. It’s a coin toss right now. We won’t know until the middle of January.”
I ask something that might sound odd: What do you want to happen? But Cameron gets the implication.
“That’s an interesting question,” he says. “I feel I’m at a bit of a crossroads. Do I want it to be a wild success — which almost compels me to continue and make two more Avatar movies? Or do I want it to fail just enough that I can justify doing something else?”
PART 3: “SHOOOOOT!”
A few weeks back, a headline was trending on Reddit: “Anyone else feel like it’s an unfortunate waste of talent that James Cameron will [spend] 35+ years on Avatar?” This debate has been recurring on fan forums for at least a decade.
“I’m feeling fulfilled as an artist, and when [those critical fans] become filmmakers, they can make those types of decisions for themselves — or just stay the fuck out of it,” Cameron says. “It’s my decision, not yours. It’s like saying, ‘Gee, I wish she wasn’t married to the same guy for so long.’ It’s none of your business.”
That said, for the first time in years, Cameron is ready to move beyond Avatar. “I’ve got other stories to tell, and I’ve got other stories to tell within Avatar,” he says. “What won’t happen is, I won’t go down the rabbit hole of exclusively making only Avatar for multiple years. I’m going to figure out another way that involves more collaboration. I’m not saying I’m going to step away as a director, but I’m going to pull back from being as hands-on with every tiny aspect of the process.”
Cameron has gradually expanded the role of his second units and is confident they could shoulder a heavy load if another film is greenlit. Whether Disney would want another Avatar without Cameron at the helm is unclear. So is whether Cameron would allow himself to relinquish so much control of his franchise’s day-to-day filming. The meticulous director treasures his Avatar playground.
“You’re not waiting 20 minutes for the perfect sunset,” Cameron likes to say, and adds: “They say, ‘practical [filmmaking] is always better.’ Practical is better in one way: It might be cheaper. But I could do the best car chase you ever saw and never put a real car on the road and you wouldn’t know.”
And yet, when asked his favorite shot in his filmography, Cameron doesn’t pick a scene from Avatar. He points to the sunset kiss from Titanic — where his cast and crew literally had to wait for a sunset. He retells that story with relish: The sky was murky. Nobody thought they would get the shot. Then the clouds parted, revealing a deep blooming red; a cinematic portent of romance and ruin. With only a few minutes of light to spare, Kate Winslet rushed up a ladder to the ship’s bow and screamed: “Shoooooot!” The resulting shot — just slightly out of focus — became one of the most iconic in cinema history.
Cameron smiles at the memory. “I’ve never heard an actor yell at me and say, ‘Shoooooot.’ ”
But, Jim: Would that sunset have been better … if you could have made it anything you wanted?
“That’s a question I’ve asked myself,” he admits, then pivots to explain how adding imperfection has become part of his process when making Avatar. “We strive for perfect imperfection. ‘Let’s overexpose that [shot]; let’s blow it out as if I was in a hurry.’ We build imperfections into the film.”
This is one way digital filmmaking like on Avatar and making movies with AI actually do overlap: They both give filmmakers so much control that they avoid the headaches and limitations that come with traditional moviemaking. But they also miss the opportunities and inspirations that come from being out in the real world.
Cameron has been vocal about artificial intelligence. He’s warned about the technology’s destructive potential on a global level (you know, Skynet) and its danger to Hollywood jobs. He recently judged a New Zealand university’s short-film pitch session and grew increasingly frustrated when one young filmmaker after another failed to mention their cast. He couldn’t resist chiding them. “They were like, ‘Jim Cameron’s mad at us,’ ” he says. “And I was. I’m worried there’s going to be a generation that thinks they could make a movie without an actor.”
Yet the director also sees a business opportunity within the AI space: launching a company, or tool, that helps VFX houses become more efficient — not to replace artists or offer a “magic wand solution that can create a finished image,” but one that allows professional artists to more easily manipulate imagery. Such an innovation could dramatically lower the cost of moviemaking. (Cameron has done something like this before — co-founding Digital Domain in 1993 to improve CGI.)
“People are not creating tools to help us in the VFX realm, they’re making them for the average person,” Cameron says. “So I’m going to roll up my sleeves and investigate some development in that area. My other projects I want to do all require VFX. There’s a certain imaginative type of filmmaking I’m drawn to that is either out of this world or out of this time and place. Contemporary stuff that can just be shot on location, or on conventional sets, is not interesting to me.”
The threat of AI — along with the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and environmental destruction — has been a running theme in the director’s work that goes all the way back to high school, when he wrote a save-the-planet play titled The Extinction Syndrome. Releasing Fire and Ash during a presidential administration that’s unraveled environmental protections, one wonders whether Cameron is frustrated that his eco-promoting franchise hasn’t had a greater impact on issues like climate change.
“I’m not frustrated that Avatar isn’t solving it,” says Cameron — who calls President Trump the “most narcissistic asshole in history since fucking Nero,” and adds, “Yeah, you can quote that” — “I’m frustrated because the human race seems to be delusional about what they think is going to happen next. We are going backwards. But who’s to say we wouldn’t be going backwards even faster if it wasn’t for these films? There isn’t an alternative Earth without Avatar we can point to and say, ‘It made this measurable difference.’ What we can say is the Avatar films are on the right side of history.”
PART 4: “I THOUGHT, ‘I’M NEVER GOING TO WORK AGAIN’ ”
There are, perhaps, more drama-filled stories surrounding Cameron than any other living filmmaker. Do you have a favorite?
Maybe it’s the time on The Abyss when he ran out of oxygen, a safety diver grabbed him and shoved a broken regulator full of water into his mouth, and the director punched him to escape? Or when a disgruntled caterer on Titanic spiked the production’s chowder with a pound of PCP and — in the resulting mass psychosis that followed — a crewmember reportedly stabbed Cameron in the face with a pen? Or maybe it’s some little-known factoid, like how Cameron secretly wrote his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 action classic Point Break? (The script is credited to W. Peter Iliff.) “I wrote Point Break,” Cameron says. “I flat out got stiffed by the Writers Guild on that. It was bullshit.”
My favorite (like several of these, chronicled in Rebecca Keegan’s excellent Cameron biography The Futurist) is one you’ve likely never heard.
On The Abyss, a rat used to demonstrate the film’s oxygenated water technology drowned during filming. Faced with the prospect of a dead rat — and losing the production’s “No Animals Were Harmed” certification — Cameron performed CPR on the rodent. The rat sprang back to life, and Cameron adopted “Beady” as his pet.
One can understand why a do-anything-for-the-job director like Cameron would perform mouth-to-mouse resuscitation to protect his film’s reputation. But why did a man running one of the most tortuous shoots in Hollywood history, who was reportedly saying things to crewmembers like, “Firing [you] is too merciful” … Why did that guy open his home to a mere rat?
“Beady and I bonded over the whole thing,” he says. “I saved his life. We were brothers. He used to sit on my desk while I was writing Terminator 2, and he lived to a ripe old age. He didn’t seem particularly traumatized, though I know the film is outlawed in the U.K. because of ‘animal cruelty.’ “
Tales of “James Cameron, the softie” are, admittedly, less exciting than tales of “James Cameron, the asshole.” But it’s an underreported side of the filmmaker. Says Weaver: “He has always been such a sweetheart to me; I have never actually seen [his harsh side]. He’s very playful, and more playful every time I work with him.”
You also see this side of Cameron when he talks about his late producing partner, Jon Landau, who died last year. Cameron and Landau used to connect 20 times a day. A week after the funeral, Cameron caught himself cc’ing Landau on an email. Then he realized …
“It’s like when my parents died,” Cameron says. “It’s like I’ve got nobody left to be proud of me, or to judge me if I fuck up. There’s an absence there, and there’s no way to fill it. We weren’t friends outside of work in the sense of always hanging out and going bowling together. He had his life, and I had mine, but we met in the work, and it was sublime.”
Cameron thinks back. “He believed in Avatar more than I did. I thought, ‘We’re doomed. This is all a giant pile of shit. I’m never going to work again.’ And he believed in it. We used to scream at each other — well, he didn’t scream. I did the screaming, but that was a long time ago. …”
The filmmaker resets himself. “Ironically, Fire and Ash itself is about loss and grief and picking up and going on and how you find hope and how you find the bonds that keep you moving forward in life. It’s all in the movie.” The film is dedicated to Landau.
Cameron’s sentimental side has been critical to his success. His dialogue is often called cheesy, but a better description might be sincere. With a few comic-relief exceptions (and much of True Lies), Cameron’s characters tend to be achingly earnest (critics roll their eyes at Leonardo DiCaprio shouting, “I’m the king of the world!” as James Horner’s score swells, but millions of fans felt otherwise). Cameron says he doesn’t do “smart-alecky” dialogue, noting it’s unrealistic — people in life-and-death situations aren’t flinging around wisecracks.
One moment from the 2014 documentary Deepsea Challenge captures the filmmaker in a particularly vulnerable moment. Cameron was setting a record for the first solo dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench — an incredible 6.6 miles deep — in a craft he helped design. He spoke over the sub’s radio to his wife, Titanic actress Suzy Amis, and said, “I love you, baby” — an echo of Ed Harris’ character in The Abyss messaging, “I love you, wife …” while at the bottom of a similar trench. Cameron then added, “… all the way from the heart of the ocean,” referencing the Titanic‘s coveted diamond. It was the director’s blockbuster art merging with his marriage and real-life adventures in a crazily surreal way.
In a rare interview about her husband, Amis recalls feeling “beyond nervous I would never see him again” during that dive, but also loving that Cameron was, “just so excited; like a little kid. He’d been working on it for years and you can’t hold that back from somebody.” Amis is a recreational pilot (“my risks are in the air; his are underwater”) and describes their home life in New Zealand with their three shared children as the picture of cozy domesticity. “It’s us walking around the house in socks, being voracious readers, building fires, and hanging out — after 30 years, there’s never a moment we don’t have something to talk about.”
When Cameron is back at work, however, the Angry Director of Hollywood lore still occasionally rises back to the surface.
Minutes after drafting the above paragraphs about the director’s warm and fuzzy side, we had a Zoom call for some follow-up questions. The director had just landed in Paris after days of press junkets and looked exhausted. Then I asked a non-Avatar question.
“All I want to talk about is Fire and Ash,” Cameron snaps. “If we go beyond that, this [interview] is going to get real short, real quick. The Way of Water and Fire and Ash were 10 years of my life. Why would I want to talk about anything else? That’s dumb. Do you honestly believe you’ve heard even more than one-tenth of one percent of what could be said about this project?”
When I explained this story is a broad look at the director, Cameron fires back: “Is this a profile you’re writing? I hate fucking profiles.”
PART 5: “I WANT TO DO NEW STUFF THAT PEOPLE AREN’T IMAGINING.”
Cameron won’t reveal his next project — and he might even be unsure himself — but will give intriguing hints.
In addition to co-directing Billie Eilish’s upcoming 3D concert documentary, Hit Me Hard and Soft, Cameron has another globe-trotting documentary adventure in the works, the details of which are under wraps.
His next narrative film probably won’t be Ghosts of Hiroshima, which has generated considerable press after Cameron acquired the rights to Charles Pellegrino’s book chronicling the true story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who in 1945 survived the nuclear blasts at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cameron promised Yamaguchi on his deathbed in 2010 that he’d make the film.
“The postapocalypse is not going to be the fun that it is in science fiction,” he says. “It’s not going to have mutants and monsters and all sorts of cool stuff. It’s hell.”
Cameron says “a lot of people” in the industry have stepped forward wanting to help make Ghosts, but there’s no script yet. I point out that even if Cameron employs an army of Japanese talent to ensure the film is authentic — which is his plan — he’ll likely still get some backlash for being a white filmmaker telling that story.
“Fuck ’em, I don’t care,” Cameron says. “I’m going to tell this story — because why? Because nobody else is doing it. If you want to haul off and make the film, I’ll hand you the book. But nobody’s putting their hand up to do this. It’ll probably be the least-attended movie I ever make. It’s not a pretty sight what a nuclear bomb does to human beings.”
Cameron first portrayed the apocalypse in his 1984 debut, The Terminator, a franchise he’s quietly working on revisiting. “Once the dust clears on Avatar in a couple of months, I’m going to really plunge into that,” he says. “There are a lot of narrative problems to solve. The biggest is how do I stay enough ahead of what’s really happening to make it science fiction?”
Asked whether he’s cracked the premise, Cameron replies, “I’m working on it,” but his sly smile suggests that he has. The result will be the first Terminator film Cameron has been involved in that won’t star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“I can safely say he won’t be [in it],” Cameron says. “It’s time for a new generation of characters. I insisted Arnold had to be involved in [2019’s] Terminator: Dark Fate, and it was a great finish to him playing the T-800. There needs to be a broader interpretation of Terminator and the idea of a time war and super intelligence. I want to do new stuff that people aren’t imagining.”
When I mention Noah Hawley’s AI-themed reinvention of the Alien franchise with Alien: Earth, Cameron praises the FX drama as “great; a lot of fun,” but notes it leaned on the first two Alien films, and that doing fan-friendly callbacks is “what I’m not going to do” with Terminator. “I’m not criticizing it, but I was there for Aliens, what, 41 years ago? Something like that wouldn’t be of interest to me.”
“The things that scare you the most are exactly the things you should be doing,” Cameron declares. “Nobody should be operating artistically from a comfort zone.”
And that, right there, is perhaps Cameron’s best reason for expanding beyond Avatar. There are all sorts of grueling new problems just waiting to be solved, and the 71-year-old has no shortage of energy — partly crediting his vegan diet, which he adopted for sustainability reasons: “I’m eating the way the rest of the human race is going to have to eat in 50 years or we don’t survive.
“I stay active, I kickbox two or three times per week,” he continues. “I look at other people my age, and it’s like they’re just punching a clock, waiting to go. I have ideas more than I could ever act on in a lifetime. I got shit to do.”
This story appeared in the Dec. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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