James Cameron, Academy Class of 1998, Full Interview

a lot of people ask me you know what's the best advice to someone who wants to be a director and the answer I give is very simple be a director 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 and your fee so it's a state of mind is really the point once you once you commit yourself to do it then the hard part starts which is that you have to forswear all other paths because you can't keep a foot in cabinet making on a foot in directing you can't keep a foot in one job and it's it's a total and all-consuming thing and I suspect that many of the difficult and challenging things in the world whether it's research or whatever certainly in the arts must be all-consuming because you're in competition with people who have made that decision who have committed themselves 100 percent you're competing for resources you know it's just it's a big coral reef and it's a big food chain and you're competing for resources and you're competing against people who have made that commitment if you don't make the same commitment you're not going to compete it's that simple you never really get an opportunity you take an opportunity you know the in the film but in the filmmaking business no one ever gives you anything nobody ever taps you on the shoulder and say you know I've really I've really admired the way you the way you talk and the way you draw I think you'd make a good director doesn't happen that that way you have to you have to constantly be pulling on somebody's sleeves saying hey I want to direct I want to direct I want to direct and you have to be willing to make sacrifices to to do that the mistake a lot of people I think making in Hollywood is that they they think well I'll get to the top of my field as a whatever editor production designer writer and then I'll just move laterally into directing and I'll be more respected and they'll have more more power it doesn't work that way because you drop right to the bottom of the pack as it as a director you have to work your way up in that I'm not saying it's not done but but so the the the way I did it was I came in through production design which is good because you're thinking visually and you're very aware of the of the directors problems and trying to tell a story and how they the environment is you know a manifestation of the narrative in some way and you know I sort of proved myself as production designer in the the scrappy stay up all night for 15 days in a row kind of independent filmmaking that was done it at Roger Corman's place this was in the in the early 80s and when they when they see that you have the creativity and the stamina and that you basically understand filmmaking it's not a ridiculous leap in that in that environment to say I now want to try my hand I want I want direct and I just basically went up to Roger one day and said I'd like to direct second unit on this the film that we were making at the time which was a low-budget science fiction horror picture and he gave me a camera at a couple two or three people and we started a little second unit and the second unit basically became this steamroller that wound up shooting about a third of the picture because they were falling way behind on first unit so they'd give me the actors and say well ducing 28 and scene 42 and all of a sudden that was working with actors and that was terrifying because I hadn't really thought that part through yet you know that in order to direct you have to work with actors it's not just about sets and visual effects and so it was simultaneously a shock and a joyful discovery because I found that all actors really want is some sense of what a writer can bring to the moment some sense of a narrative purpose what what am i doing what am i trying to what am I trying to do here what's the scene about and it's really pretty much that simple so that was the next epiphany if you will which is this part of it is fun to the part I didn't expect to be fun the part I didn't expect to be good at turned out to be in a way the most fascinating part I wouldn't say I was good at it right away it took it took me a long time to realize that you you have to have a a bit of an inter language with actors you have to give them something that they can act with you can't tell them a lot of abstract information about how their character is going to pay off in this in this big narrative ellipse that happens in scene 18 that doesn't help them you know they're in a room they have to create an emotional truth in a moment and you know they have to be they have to be able to create that very quickly so they need they need real tangible stuff and that's that's a learned art I think but coming from from writing and understanding what they're feeling and what they're thinking what the character is feeling and thinking and having thought about that a lot for months in advance is is the way that that I get enough respect from the actors that they trust what I'm saying they trust what I'm giving them to do I was hired to direct a film called piranha - I was hired by a very unscrupulous producer who worked out of out of Italy and he and I went he put me with an Italian crew who spoke no English even though I was assured that they would all speak English and I actually had to learn some some Italian very quickly and I'm talking about in two weeks because that's all the prep time I had because I was actually replacing someone else and I was put into an untenable situation and then and fired several couple weeks into the into the shoot and and the producer took over directing and it turns out that he had actually done that twice before on his two previous films and that was his modus operandi in order to get the financing and then acts the director and in the course of throwing me off the movie he never showed me a foot of the film that I had shot he held on to the dailies he wouldn't we were shooting in Jamaica and he would I would shoot in Jamaica those would go to New York be processed he'd fly to New York and look at them and not send them back for me to see so I wasn't even seeing my own film so he you know he basically came in and said your stuff doesn't work doesn't cut together it's a pile of junk and you're off the movie and then he took over the film and I thought you know I really don't I mean okay maybe maybe I'm just bad I mean I'm just not good so I went to you know a couple of months later I went to Rome to find out sort of the truth like what what really happened and he wouldn't show me any of the film and I had been in Rome prepping the film for a couple of weeks before we went and I remembered the code to get in and so um I went in and I just ran the film for myself and it wasn't that bad because all I wanted to know was just one simple fact could I or could I not do this job and so and I made a few changes before I flew back which I don't know if they ever caught I don't know if the editor ever noticed that I actually fixed a couple of things but but you know I had to I had to know whether whether what they had said was true so here's a case where everyone around me had basically said you stink you suck you don't know what you're doing and I just and I accepted it but then a little voice kept saying I don't think so I don't think it could be that bad I remember doing some pretty cool stuff with the actors in this moment in that moment and I looked at it and it was fine so that I thought you know what I actually can do this and I just fell in with a pack of you know thieves and wackos here and but I also realized that I was going to have to get busy and create my own thing that nobody would hire me after that experience nobody would hire me and just put me on a film I'd have to create my own thing and hang on tenaciously to that in order to be able to direct again and that's why I wrote the Terminator and I had many many people trying to buy that script but I wouldn't sell them I wouldn't sell the script to them unless I went with it as the director and of course that was a turn-off for almost everybody but we did find one low-budget producer who was willing to make the film and that was John Daly at hemdale and that's how I got my real start the road to success is like Harold and the Purple Crayon you draw it for yourself you have to imagine it first and then you have to draw it and then you have to walk it but I think many people draw many lines that don't necessarily lead there but the ones that do lead there are done way that are done by that process M not not for everybody some people can fall into good luck some people can have it handed to them but I think great majority map it out for themselves but you always have self doubts and when you're working in a public art form like filmmaking you don't really need self-doubt because if it's if it's bad you're going to hear about it exactly what's wrong with it and if it's good you'll hear what's good about it so there are plenty of other people who will inform you so self-doubt is not really is not really necessary you can sort of just set that one aside just drop it at the door what you need is a lot of confidence to stand up to the slings and arrows the the barrage of negativity because what basically it boils down to is that we exist in a peer environment and when we're when we're sort of on the fringe or on the outside and we're trying to get in Ellora peers are like us and just just a bunch of friends or people with similar interests and none of them think you're special they think they're special so no one's going to give you encouragement or very few people will give you encouragement they'll it's like that old adage it's not enough to succeed your friends must also fail you know so you're not going to get a lot of tremendous encouragement from your peer group and you can't feed you can't feed on that energy you can actually support each other in very tangible ways but I think that that thing of dude you got it you're going all the way you're not going to hear that and you're certainly going to you're certainly going to face rejection after rejection you're going to knock on a lot of doors and you're going to have to prove yourself but I think you know I think you kind of know that going in I figure if you're going into the filmmaking process I think you have to go in with your with your eyes open that that's what it's going to be like and there's a here's an interesting thing that there's a tremendous temptation to do a workaround or to do to do a moral or ethical workaround or shortcut in a lot of situations because it's easier and it's just you're so needy to get those little breaks and so on and I think a lot of people get get sort of ethically short-circuited at that stage and they never recover you know because I think a lot of people would say well you know I'll do what I have to do now but then later I'll be good doesn't work that way you are who you are and I you know fortunately I've managed to get where I am without with the occasional burglary aside without having to to really hurt anybody or or go against my word I think ultimately your word becomes the most important thing that you have it's the most important currency that you have having a successful film is very important currency as well but in the long run your word is the most important thing and if you say you're going to do something you have to do it and I think that that's what what saw me through on Titanic Titanic was in some ways the roughest project that I've ever been involved with and what saw me through on that was that I had a relationship with the people who were quite rightly panicking but they never completely panicked because they knew who I was and we always treated each other with a kind of respect I always I always did what I think was the the writer ethical thing throughout that even though it was costing me millions of dollars personally right out of my pocket to do it I felt I had to do it or they would never trust me again on another film and I think that that's ultimately the most important currency that you reap from any situation pretty much everyday but you know the thing is that when you're in a leadership position you can never ever manifest that you can never manifest the panic that you feel inside and Titanic was a situation where I felt I think pretty much like the officer felt on the bridge of the ship I could see the iceberg coming far away but as hard as I turned that wheel there was just too much mass too much inertia and there was nothing I could do but I still had to I still had to play it through there was no way to get off and so then you know you're in this kind of situation where you feel you feel quite doomed and yet you still have to play by your own ethical standards you know no matter where where it takes you you know and ultimately that was the salvation because I think if if I hadn't done that they might have panicked they might have pulled the plug things might have been very different it was the whole thing but it might have crashed and burned but it didn't you know we held on we missed the iceberg by that much well Titanic was conceived as a love story and if I could have done it without one visual effect I would have been more than happy to do that the fact is that you know the ship hasn't existed since 1912 at least not at the surface so we had to create it somehow I visualized making a lot of big sets and so on and keeping the visual effects to a minimum but it turned out that obviously it was it was a big visual effect show before we were all said and done but that wasn't really my my motivation to make the film and I don't think that should ever be the motivation to make a film that it should it should be a means to an end you know certainly there's an aspect of me that likes big challenges big stuff you know whether it's whether it's big physical construction or visual effects or whatever I think that's what I do best and I think there are other people that work at a much more intimate level and do that solely that are better at that you know but I think that in that it was definitely a goal of Titanic to integrate a very personal very emotional and very intimate filmmaking style with spectacle and try to make that not be kind of chocolate syrup on a cheeseburger you know make it somehow work together I think the spectacle got people's attention got them to the theaters and then the emotional cathartic experience of watching the film is what made the film work because and and I think also I think the spectacle served it but was not the defining factor in it success once again I think it's a question of balance it's sort of like looking at a painting and saying what part of the painting was is the part that that makes you like it it's sort of all of it and it's all of it working together that makes you like the painting I didn't know for a long I was fascinated by the sciences when I was a kid I used to spend all my time out collecting pond water and looking at it through my microscope and trying to identify the the various protozoa or I'd be looking through a telescope trying to find the great nebula and Orion or whatever you know my brain was going in all these different directions art was always sort of there I was always drawing but it hadn't really manifested itself as the as the main thing and all the way through high school even into college I majored in physics I hit a kind of a wall with with the maths and you know possibly with with a bad teacher who kind of turned me off to to calculus at a critical moment and even though my grades were very high in astronomy and physics I switched to to English because I wanted to write so it was it was sort of going in two different directions it was a long time was about I would say I was 25 or 26 before I really settled in and said this is it this is the decision I'm going to work in film in some capacity and what finally attracted me to film in such a definitive way was it was the only place I could reconcile the need to tell stories and to work in a visual art medium and the desire to understand things at a technical technological level and my fascination with with engineering and technology it's one of the few media that are so dependent on technology so it was a way to fuse those interests I didn't know where I'd wind up within film I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design which made sense because I could draw I could paint and so on but I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots and and I had never quite pictured myself as it as a director I'd picture myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all I mean I I had wanted to make films and I understood at some intellectual level that the director was the person who was most in charge creatively but I'd never should have pictured myself in that all kind of standing up there the guy with the monocle and the megaphone you know had no meaning for me but then 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 and they had these great actors to work with and they just blew it and there was a moment where I said I may not be very good at this but I know I'm better than that guy and that was kind of a critical moment because when you realize that you can at least be better than somebody else who's already doing it then you can visualize yourself doing the job there were several light bulbs at several different times and the first one was when I saw 2001 a Space Odyssey for the first time and the light bulb there was you know a movie can be more than just telling a story it can be a piece of art it can be something that has a profound impact on your imagination on your pre she a shove how music works with the images and so on it sort of just blew the doors off the whole thing for me and at the age of 14 and I started thinking about film in a completely different way and got fascinated by it it's also to my knowledge one of the first films that really had a definitive making of book it was such a fascinating film that they actually that they made a book about the making of 2001 it's the first one that I knew of that was available and I read it from cover to cover 18 times and didn't understand half of it until many years later but it started a process a process of projecting myself into the into the idea of actually creating images using these high-tech means of course I did all my my low-tech analogs of those means you know by buying models and gluing the one pieces of glass and moving them around but it was good training to think spatially and to think you know in terms of storyboarding and so on so I was already a filmmaker but I hadn't really realized it yet and then ironically that was happening in Canada thousands of miles from Hollywood and and we subsequently moved at the age of 17 for me to Los Angeles which is very close to you know the the black hole of Hollywood itself and yet at that point I sort of said well I don't know if I can get there from here I don't I don't know if you know Who am I to say that I could be a filmmaker didn't make any sense so I abandoned it for four grown-up things and I decided to be a scientist and it wasn't until you know many years later that I realized that this is really where my my heart lay you know and then the next lightbulb was really just the one that says just do it just pick up a camera and start shooting something don't wait to be asked because nobody's going to ask and don't wait for the perfect conditions because they'll never be perfect it's a little bit like having a child if you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless and I think filmmaking is very much the same thing you just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad you can always hide it but you will have learned something you know I didn't really have anything to say but I had a lot of images a lot of things crowding into my to my mind visually I had read tons of science-fiction I was fascinated by other worlds other environments for me it was it was fantasy it was not but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism it was as Isaac Asimov used to say science fiction readers are people who escape from reality into worlds of pollution nuclear war overpopulation and you know it's a it's a it's a it's a way of modeling the future or the present through the through the future so you know growing up in the 60s coming to my kind of intellectual awakening in high school at a time when the world was in complete chaos between the war in Vietnam and civil rights and all of the upheavals all the social upheavals you know free love you know everything that was happening in the late 60s it it it gave one an interesting perspective being a science-fiction fan and looking at a world that was coming apart and thinking in very apocalyptic terms about that world I've never lost that sort of almost a fascination with apocalyptic themes and Titanic is just another manifestation of that because for me that film was just a microcosm for the way the world ends however it ends we don't know but if it ends by the human hand it'll end in the way that Titanic ended which is through through some casual simple carelessness so you know being being a child of the 60s and in that way I think very much influenced the way I looked at what could be done with film it was also very interesting time in filmmaking the history of filmmaking because it was the time when that when the when the paradigm of studio film production was completely deconstructed and the independent films emerged and all of a sudden the world the filmmaking world was turned on its head and a film called Easy Rider came out that made for $40,000 and made more money than any other film of that year including all of the big studio films and so that the big smokestack industry of Hollywood was suddenly threatened from within by these these tours these Punk's these these young you know george lucas's and martin scorsese's and you know so was a fascinating time and that's the time at which i came into my awareness of what film was and what film could be so I was definitely informed by that but I would say I didn't really have anything to say yet you know I just had a lot of images and ideas but but I hadn't and you know found my themes I took took time for that to happen took another few years never give up is it's going to be unbelievably hard it's going to be a ridiculously brutal uphill fight all the time and you just have to have tremendous stamina and and self-confidence to power through it you have to not listen to the naysayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself but you know what I learned from those early days was to trust trust my instincts and to to not back off because when the hour gets dark your instinct is your tendency might be to say well this is just too hard and open nobody should have to go through this in order to accomplish X whether it's a movie or or whatever but to in in the pursuit of excellence and I think you can be in the pursuit of excellence when you're working on a low-budget science fiction horror film if it's how you define it you have to go all the way it's that simple now I don't mean trample over people I don't mean turn into a into a screaming maniac I mean you have to be able to you have to have made that 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 all yourself even though you may know how to do many of these different tasks you physically can't do it and you need you need a team and you need the respect and the trust of that team so that was that was a lesson that took me a while to figure out because at first I just want to do it all myself I was like hey you're doing it wrong and that doesn't that doesn't work that doesn't ultimately achieve the the vision whatever the vision is whether it's you know someone else's vision or when you you know in my case when I started directing it was my vision I couldn't I couldn't push people out of the way I had to I had to learn to inspire people to give me their best work and I also had to learn to accept what they brought even if it was either a not as good or be good but just different from what I had imagined and say that the end result of our collective efforts will be a like that it'll be all of our efforts together it won't it won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it and that's I think an important lesson as well is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the of the group so choose your group well and go go in with that little voice in the back of your mind that says be be Zen about it be philosophical it's ultimately going to be the best that these people can do and you know that's that's an interesting thing because it a little bit flies in the face of the auteur tour theory and I was sort of sort of raised aesthetically on that on that a tour Theory you know and looking at you know we the much-vaunted Hitchcock films that were planned down to every frame and every molecule through storyboarding and it all you know flowed from the from the forehead of Zeus it's not that way you know you're you're a band leader when you're doing your job best you're a band leader it's tough and I'm still I'm still learning it but I've learned it well enough I think to do some of my best work as a result of that lesson you know by inspiring the actors on Titanic and in fact everyone on that film the production designers the people that were in other there were several thousand people working on that film by somehow inspiring them to do their very very best they brought me I think the the all of the elements all the moments that eventually became that film I couldn't have done it all myself couldn't have done a fraction of it I had dark hours on Titanic that were just as dire if not more dire than on my piranha too when I got fired on terminator when we had you know all these problems I think that that there's just an I think that you have to find some kind of inner strength that says what I'm doing is right it may not seem right to other people and I may not be able to please them right now and I'm going to have to proceed on this path for a while until I can demonstrate to them that what we're doing is probably the right thing at least the best that I know how to do and ultimately you reach a point where people will hire you because you have the strength or the some people call it vision I don't write that that's a bit of a lofty word because I don't think it's something that comes to you necessarily in the night I think it's something that's the process of a very rigorous mental processing of the data on a day-by-day basis and and and the possibilities what you can do and what you can't do and over time people will realize that that you have what it takes to be in that situation where nobody really knows the answer although a lot of them think they do or say they do and you've come up with the right formula and to have come out of these battle situations a number of times with the right formula on a consistent basis they tend to trust you more as you go along they'll never trust you completely the they whoever the day is in my in my business it's it's you know the studio that that's putting up the money the completion bond company whatever the bankers the people that don't really understand the day-to-day sweat blood and tears of the creative process because it's sent through that's another lofty term the creative process when you're on a set the creative process consists of oh my god how are we going to do that you're going to have to move the wall back three feet and then you're going to have to pile up some boxes over here and put the camera on it it's all nuts and bolts things and then you have to be able to switch that off in a heartbeat and think about what's the actor feeling you know what's the what's the character feeling at that moment and it might be some really important very pivotal scene for them I would say there's there's a certain tenacity that's required and that tenacity manifests itself sometimes in in unpleasant ways and other times it can manifest itself in very in very noble ways when you can get other people to go with you that extra mile and I think a lot about of what is misunderstood about about my particular filmmaking process is that I get people to go that extra mile that they've never done before and they go into new territory they go beyond what they previously thought were their limits and then afterwards they talk about it like it was a big adventure home and we worked around the clock and you know we almost died and it sounds like an indictment of the of the production as a bunch of wackos but when in fact they're actually they want to share the fact that they that they did this that they that they they did go beyond they went beyond in there and their creative capacity as well and that's why they always all come back and want to do it again maybe just not right away but I don't make I don't make films back-to-back anyway so that I usually give them a year to go out and see what it's like on all those other boring movies and then they then they all want to come back I lived in a small town was 2,000 people in Canada little River that went through it we swam in the and you know a lot of water around Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away being Agra Falls and so you know I've always sort of loved the water possibly as a result of that and that's manifested itself obviously in my in my work and in my my own private time I do an awful lot of scuba diving I love to be on the ocean under the ocean live next to the ocean but you know in terms of you know some wild family dynamics or anything like that nothing that would necessarily indicate anything I would say my mother was an artist she was actually a housewife but she you know she was an amateur artist my father was an electrical engineer so right there you have a collision of you know left and right hemisphere thinking and I think I got sort of equal parts of both my mother was definitely an influence in giving me a respect for for art and the arts and especially the visual arts and I used to you know go with her to museums and so on and I'd when I when I was learning to draw I would sketch things in the museum whether it was an etruscan helmet or a mummy or or whatever I just I was fascinated by all that you know I think out of out of attempt maybe to to get my father's respect or interest or whatever you know I was or maybe it was just a genetically pass through love of technology I was always fascinated by engineering I was trying to build things definitely a builder and sometimes being a builder can put you in a leadership position when you're a kid because then it's like hey let's build a go-kart well you go get the wheels and you get this and pretty soon you're at the center of a project and I think that that you know certain things must just be genetic because I look back at you know who I was at 10 years old or nine years old and I'm the same person now you know and and uh in essence and they've been wanting to wanting to build things and wanting to get a lot of people together and do some grandiose thing whether it was build a fort or a tree house or an airplane once we built an airplane not intending it to fly just hang from a tree but you know that sort of thing and I realize I'm just doing the same thing now just getting a bunch of kids to you know help me build for it except that now it takes you know a hundred million dollars and the kids are all my age yes good student mostly because of curiosity I mean a real natural curiosity I wasn't trying to please anybody I wasn't trying to I was for me it wasn't competitive against the other kids it wasn't about trying to please my parents so much as I just wanted to to know things the sciences history even math to an extent I was just you know I was just switched on somehow and I think you know that's the most important thing when I look back to that formative period and I'm thinking junior high through through high school that it was a six-year period it was curiosity and I I spent all my free time in the town library and I read an awful lot of science fiction and the sort of the line between between reality and fantasy blurred you know I mean I I was as interested in the reality of biology as I was in reading science fiction stories about you know genetic mutations and post nuclear war environments and distant you know interstellar travel and meeting alien races and all that sort of thing I read so voraciously I mean it was it was tonnage I wrote a school bus to school for an hour each way each day in high school because they put me in a you know in a program an academic program that could only be serviced by this high school that was much further away so I had two hours a day on the bus and I read I tried to read a book a day and usually it was it averaged a book every other day but if I got really interested in something it was bought propped up behind my math book or my my science book and all during the day in class so it was it was really more by authors you know it would have been you know Arthur Clarke and a even vote all the the kind of the the mainstream old-guard of science fiction at that time and then in the latter years of high school then you get into the Newark you know the newer guys at that time you know Harlan Ellison Larry Niven people like that but it was it was pretty much a steady diet of science fiction a critical moment for me I would have to say was in it was in my we didn't call himself a more senior year sort of things there was in the in the 11th grade my biology teacher mr. McKenzie decided that what our school needed was a theatre arts program and we didn't have it there was you know there was wrestling basketball football you know it was a very jock oriented school and there was no theater program whatsoever so we started a theater program from scratch we bootstrapped it he he taught it and I think he might have done it for nothing and we took you know we took the class but we really had to we had to build the props and the scenery and the costumes and just do everything ourselves and we had to turn the the you know the stage into a proper working stage and it took a year but we started putting on our own productions and and I think that was really a pivotal moment and you know so my my biology teacher was the was our muse at that time and I think the fact that we were having to do everything that it wasn't handed to us may have created a kind of a work ethic that paid off then and independent film production because it's the same thing you know you're you're finding scraps and bits and pieces and putting it all together and putting on a show and it's that sense of being able to to create some moment of glory some showmanship out of nothing out of baling wire that is maybe the lesson that was learned there as a result of this this man who just decided to have a theater arts program otherwise you know I would have been just you know somebody who was marginalized by the fact that it was a very athletic li oriented school and now I've gone back to the school recently and found out that the theater program is the thing that the school is most proud of their teams are doing terribly but their theater program is doing great and they're winning in all these you know dramatic dramatic awards are around the around the province this is back in Canada so that's his legacy but anyway I think that the point is that that is that a teacher can be absolutely critical at the right moment in your life and it can be a mentor and sometimes it's it's only just one comment that they can make and I remember I was talking to this this man my biology teacher and and he said you know I've seen your your your aptitude tests or whatever kind of testing they did back then you know 30 years ago in Canada and we believe that you have unlimited potential now I don't know if you'd ever seen the test and I don't know if any of the data indicated that but hearing that and knowing that somebody somewhere believed that I could go accomplish something was a big contributor to the self-confidence necessary to overcome all these things later because you're going to have 10,000 people telling you why you can't do something sometimes it only takes one person to tell you that you can do something and you take it to heart otherwise I wouldn't have remembered it all these years you know and I remember where the conversation took place I certainly didn't think of myself as gifted certainly the standards for being gifted in my environment where if you were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football or you know so so I was I was more like the like the the kind of the misfit the outsider and of course the misfits and the outsiders all collect together like this kind of you know pawns come around the sides and and that's where all the you know the I think the good ideas come from I certainly never thought of myself as as you know superior or gifted in any way just different def definitely different and and happen satisfied to be different maybe not always happy to be different but satisfied to be different what your defense mechanism becomes to be you know contemptuous of people who don't think outside of the box and you know now I you know I've spent I spent maybe you know a ten year period in there you know being in a way kind of intellectually snobbish and saying you know you guys are just a bunch of jaw kidiots and then I've spent the last you know 25 years trying to reintegrate myself into what kind of a normal beat you know being being a normal person and with you know limited success probably but I would say that my father was completely unsupportive in any way shape or form and was really sort of just sharpening his knives waiting for me to fail so that he could say huh I was right you should have gone into engineering and it was always this the sort of attitude of well you know in one of these days you'll get a real job this film thing you know pass as a fad and so there was zero support there and I actually think that it made me angry enough that I had to succeed I think if I had a soft rosy supportive kind of it's good if you'd do it but if it doesn't work out sort of thing it would have been different but it kind of made me mad and I had to I had to prove that that I was right that this was the right thing to be doing and I think it made me mad enough to get good you know my mother of course at an earlier time was was very supportive of the art and and you know the visual aspect of it so it was an interesting kind of dynamic there that probably actually served served me in the long run all those it's hard to see it at the time it was certainly difficult financially but you know you learn to you learn to to survive you learn to you learn to prioritize and you learn I think also that if you're going to do something you have to do it all the way and you have to just put put it before all other things I think it's it you know the old adage the harder I work the luckier I get I think chances is not a big factor in the long run it can be a huge factor in the short run being at the right place at the right time but certainly the critical factor even with that chance is being able to recognize a true opportunity and seize it the moment it presents itself and not wait and overthink it because it will pass you know and I think there are there are many talented people who haven't gotten to fulfill their dreams because they over thought it or they were too cautious so they were unwilling to make the leap of faith I think there are a lot of people who are who are winos sleeping rolled up in a carpet remnant down in some alley someplace that also were it what made that leap of faith and either made it at the wrong time or never had the skill to back it up so it's it's necessary but not sufficient to have that as part of your makeup but I think if you don't have the ability to to make that leap of faith it's going to be harder for you to accomplish something great because they're going to be moments they're going to be little windows of opportunity that opened for split-second and you either squirt through or you don't but at the moment that you do that you have to have prepared yourself you have to prepared yourself for that fight because that's going to be the fight of your life whatever that opportunity is when you grab it it's going to be more energy than you can manage it's going to be grabbing the tiger by the tail and if you have not prepared yourself mentally for it through study through knowing and and hypothesizing what it will be like when you're in that position you won't be able to deal with it and half of what you've concluded before the fact in your in your theoretical projections is going to be wrong but half of it'll be right and that's the part you're going to you're going to prevail with the films that influenced me were were so disparate that there's almost no pattern I Stanley Kubrick was it was an influence because I love 2001 a Space Odyssey and the more I learned about him and his methodology the more I realized what a what a what a rigorous I don't even want to use the word perfectionist because that has a kind of a fussy connotation of unnecessary work of a necessary complication of the process I think that his process was was everything he did was necessary and but it was it was it was a rigorous intellectual exercise for him and I was inspired by that I have since come to learn that for myself it doesn't work that well that there has to be there has to be some chaos there has to be some looseness so that the actors are given the opportunities that they need to give you their best and that you have to not have preconceived it in such crystalline ly perfect form that you don't leave the door open for the magic because the magic doesn't come from from within the the director's mind it comes from within the hearts of the of the actors I believe and and so you you just have to be there to kind of seize it at the right moment but that was definitely an influence and an important and important influence than the films it was all the films that I saw in the my last two years of high school those are the films that I ran and maybe my first year of college those are the films that still burn very vividly for me and they were everything from Woodstock to catch-22 to Easy Rider to the Graduate you know it was such an amazing time I mean up through let's say the Godfather you know it's just such an amazing time in film production bonnie-and-clyde you know just just an amazing time very eclectic and just breaking all the rules Star Wars was very interesting because that was probably the film that galvanized me to get off my butt and go be a filmmaker and and the way it worked for me was that that you know I was artists that was fascinated by space I was always painting spaceships and and living in this world of these whizzing you know dynamic space battles and all that sort of thing and I could I used to play you know Weesa play battleship when we were in class where you know we just send coordinates to each other by notes and try to play well we turned it into space battleship and we do draw these elaborate spaceships and try to blow each other up you know that's that was you know my senior year in high school so you know I was living in a Star Wars world in my mind and and all of a sudden I saw this film and it was like somebody had reached into my hindbrain and yanked out a lot of stuff that was in there and I was seeing it on the screen realized and not to take anything away from from from George's creation because it's obviously phenomenal milestone but my reaction to it was not oh wow that's cool I want to see more it was oh wow I better get off my butt because somebody's doing this stuff and I you know and they're beat me to it that was that was my reaction so I you know I I basically quit my job and started you know doing a little film with visual effects and sucked my friends into that vortex and we all quit our jobs and fortunately we've all managed to successfully transition into filmmaking of that of that little group of four people the thing that is exciting about filmmaking is that is to think back to the moment in time right before you had the idea and think about that at the moment that you're sitting or standing on the set and there are thousands of people around and they've built this huge set and there are all these actors and there's all this energy and all this focus and realize that it's all in the service of something that was made up out of whole cloth you know and that's fun I mean that that's what an architect must feel like when they drive down the street and they look up and see a building that they design it's something that you imagined made tangible and I get that rush much more on the set than I do when the film is done because for some reason when the film is done you've lived with it for so long that it's not new anymore and it's it almost seems like just destiny that's just what it is but there's a time on the set when it's when it's new and you can walk into it and you can see it and it's this physical tangible manifestation of pure imagination now as much fun as that is it becomes a curse the next time you sit down and face the blank CRT and you have to come up with something because you know that there's going to be a moment in time when everybody's going to be standing around having built this and having gathered to do it and this huge human enterprise and you better think of something good you know so it's sort of it's sort of the rush that you get out of it but it's also the the thing that haunts you before you start I think that that characterizing whatever I've brought to filmmaking is probably best left to others I know what I've tried to do which is tell stories that that excite the imagination and maybe say something at a thematic level maybe something about the human condition with respect to our human relationship with technology because ultimately I think all my stories have been about that to one degree or another and to allow people to step through that screen into into that world whatever it is you know whether it's the world of the abyss or the world of the Terminator or Titanic to let people live in that create that space for them and let them live in in the shoes of those characters for a while that's what I that's what I set out to do so I think it's it's really up to others to sort of sort it out what it ultimately means the thing is that I see I see my things that I've done that I know were inspired by other things I see then other filmmakers picking up on my leads taking it further and I realize that it's part of an ongoing creative process that that that is kind of self self-perpetuating and I so I think of myself as part of as a link in a chain of cinematic ideas and it's fun it's fun to have that place ultimately the front the frontiers of filmmaking have never changed I mean I think they change in the specifics of the technology and the technique but ultimately it's it's somebody sitting in a room writing its actors saying aligns in front of a lens and that image being captured and that little slice of life that those characters those relationships being made alive in the minds of other people around the world I don't think that is fundamentally going to change indefinitely I think the specifics are going to probably change a lot you know we'll have electronic digital presentation of the film's you know projection of the film's that's going to then start to inform the entire post-production process where we won't be working on film anymore we'll call it film but there won't be any film involved it may be shot electronically film itself as a substance as a thing may be obsolete within within 10 to 20 years other than you know atavistic art artists who choose to shoot on film because of some real or perceived artistic need in the same way that people still make pots by hand even though there are machines that make them beautifully but I think that you know from from a visual effects standpoint I think that visual effects are it's happening now it's not even the next frontier visual effects are just becoming integrated into the basic fabric of filmmaking where they're not something other they're not something that is outside of the normal filmmaking process now all directors are working with visual effects and it's just become as basic to the technique as as a light or a dolly or or or whatever which is good I think this is good it's good to think too - it's empowering I think to the imagination to let people create whatever it is they want to create and do it in a very and a very easy and straightforward manner which visual effects are now capable of doing because of the ease of a digital compositing in terms of computer graphics and animation I think that's going to continue to to have an increasing role and I think that you know very real characters will come out of that I don't think we're going to replace actors they're going to have to be non-human characters I think there has to be a reason to do a CG character and the reason is it can't be you or I it can't be somebody that you that you cast and stick in front of a camera it's got to be something different but the traditional techniques of putting rubber on people's faces and making rubber puppets and moving them with hydraulics and so on I think are going to fall by the wayside actors will still be empowered within that process because it'll ultimately still be a performance created by an actor at some in some way they just won't have five pounds of makeup stuck on their face there are many things that I'd love to do there are still a lot of stories that I want to tell I get very excited by all kinds of different stories I'd love to do a film with a scientist as a main character and and really try to communicate to people the passion of science because I don't because our culture thinks science is kind of unhip you know scientists get it but I think that the greater community doesn't understand how scientists think what drives them and how their passion can be as great as though as the passion of an artist or the passion of a great athlete which art which our culture respects much more unfortunately I'd love to be able to crack that nut because I don't think it's been done well I don't think Hollywood has served the science community well they're usually stereotypes you know geeks bad guys or distant unemotional people and of course none of that is true or it can certainly be true of individuals but it's not generally true I used to think that the great films that I saw the great works of art were just something that somebody imagined in every detail and then went and did I didn't realize that the creative process is is the end result of a lot of different people bringing a lot of different things to the table and it's impossible to predict and it's a real time monitoring shaping molding process that goes along and the end result may be quite different than what you imagined when you started out but that's what that's how it works that's what it is in terms of achievement you know I'm at an interesting point right now because I've just you know just having done this this film it's definitely a high watermark and I have to I have to evaluate what that means do I let do I let the success of that overpower my my artistic instincts you know because I there's a lot of things I want to do and and some of them I know for certain are going to be disappointments to people who think that that you know I'm going to come out and try to kick Titanic's butt because it might be some little intimate thing or it might be something that's a little off-center and I think that what I find interestingly enough is that sometimes success brings with a tremendous amount of scrutiny and anticipation of what's going to happen next and that that's not a good thing necessarily that you don't you want to have the freedom to just just react instinctively as an artist and not second-guess not second-guess yourself so you know what I've been speaking to young people which I've been doing a lot lately there that are right at the at the cusp of sort of deciding that their path I relate to where I am right now I relate where I am right now a little bit to where I was when I was 17 18 years old and thinking oh I've got to make this big decision you know I've got to make this big decision what I'm going to be and if I mess it up I mess up my whole life you know and it's just not like that it's a it's an evolving process so the I think the the illumination that I might be able to share that might mean something to people that are 17 18 19 years old and right in that point where they just think they've got to make this decision is you've got time as long as you follow your heart you'll be going the right direction for you it may not be the direction that everybody around you thinks you should be going but it'll be what's ultimately right for you and I think the problem for a lot of people especially when they show great potential is that all of a sudden you've got 50 people in your hip pocket telling you what you should be in what you should do and that sometimes people need to push other times that those voices can be can be deflecting you off off your true course and I didn't find my true course until I was 25 so you've got time I don't think you have till you're 45 but I think you have at least until you're you know in your in your mid-20s and of course there are there stories are legion of people who don't find their true calling until they are in their 40s or 50s I had the great opportunity to become briefly friends with a woman who died recently at the age of 105 she's an artist in California named Beatrice Wood and she was a little bit the inspiration for the character in in Titanic in fact I called her up and asked her permission to use her a little bit to interview her and use her as a kind of a model for this character even though Beatrice had no connection to Titanic itself and she said oh I couldn't possibly do that because I'm only 35 she you know she was she was 102 at the time she didn't she was an artist who who none of her significant work was done before she was 90 she kind of switched on when she hit 90 and that's I think that's an interesting thing to remember what people call obsession or passion for me is just a work ethic and I think it comes a little bit from an insecurity that I'm not good enough you know that that I have to that there are other people out there that I admire that I that I grew up admiring that are that are still you know that are still making movies and those movies are great and you know I've got to compete with these these guys and these these these women and and you know have I thought of everything have I thought of every detail is this the best the scene can be you know so that it comes a little bit from a healthy and security the healthy and security that makes you better that makes you better as an artist and just from a kind of gonzo intensity you know I mean it's just I just like to do it full bore for me it's not about being comfortable I want to be in there I want to help the guys move the dolly I'm at my best when I'm neck deep in ice water trying to work out how we're going to you know keep the lights turned on when the water hits the hits the the bulbs you know I mean the more the challenges the more I enjoy it and the more I can lead lead other people into these situations where they all think they're going to die the more fun I'm having so it needless to say there that we have a few washouts we have a few people that don't like my version of day camp but I would say that that 80 or 90 percent of them feel like they've been through something they've done there they've done the best that they've done in their professional careers and they're usually pretty eager to re-up for another one well as a Canadian the American Dream had had a very negative and pejorative connotation when I was growing up because it was this kind of you know cultural imperialism you know I grew up in a border town on the other side of the border in Niagara Falls Canada and but you know since I moved to the United States at the age of 17 I actually feel very much like like I'm probably in my basic genetic nature much more American than Canadian because I really believe in a lot of the I believe strongly in a lot of the traditional values of this country in terms of respecting individuals rights the the the rights to you know the freedom freedom of speech and a lot of a lot of the things that that are that are in the basic fabric of the of this country and I think that you know Americans and Canadians even too in tunics to to a large extent are they come from from frontiersman stock so they're people who you you know hewed their civilization out of the out of the wilderness it wasn't given to them you know it's not like people growing up in in Italy or France in the shadow of past glories from thousands of years before and you know we made what we have and we don't have a great cultural depth like they do but what we have is ours by God and you know I like that I like that about it you know it's sort of it sort of put your hand on the tiller of Destiny in a way and America definitely has their the it's hand on the on the tiller of Destiny for this planet for good or bad doesn't mean you know what you're doing necessarily but the other thing is that Americans are are very very happy to argue like crazy about everything and just hold hold things up to ridicule and challenge that other countries just take for granted and I think that's a good thing I mean the whole Monica Lewinsky thing is the dark side of that you know it just goes on and on forever in the other countries all think we're a bunch of idiots but it's it's a manifestation of a good thing that that that everything has to be examined and challenged and that's that's a great thing I mean certainly you know from a from an achievement standpoint anybody can come here from anywhere and if you've got the goods it's a meritocracy you know it's it yes there are there are there are inequities just like anywhere but then but we challenge the inequities we're trying we're trying you know trying to evolve other countries aren't many other countries certain other countries aren't even trying to evolve they're not trying to challenge those inequities you know so I think that there's something that can happen here that's unique and certainly because America has embedded within it this this thing called Hollywood or the movies or whatever which is this kind of Mecca to which filmmakers from all over the world come and participate it's become a kind of entertainment slash you know pop culture leader for the for the world and so there's a there's a grave responsibility in that as well I'm not sure that that responsibility is necessarily being being you know that mantle is being worn well necessarily right now but but it's the place to be you know I could go on for hours about about that

Channel: Academy of Achievement

Views: 71,697

Keywords:

Id: dkHeJOFsQPc

Length: 65min 35sec (3935 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 24 2016