James Cameron Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films | GQ

I almost bailed on being a filmmaker the thing that that kept me in the game was the possibility of the Avatar Universe reaching a lot of people with a persistent message and reaction on part of the audience to maybe fight for and protect that which we're losing [Music] Titanic [Music] we talked about literally going to the shipyard in Poland and building the Titanic I said all right great so they can build a Titanic for us for 10 million dollars yeah we should think about that now if we sink it how many takes do we get hmm one you know what I mean it's like what if I want a second take so anyway we decided not to do not to build the Titanic as an actual you know floatable ship so then the question is what do we build how do we break it down what do we really need I had this idea that look we've got this great infrastructure just over the Border in Mexico why can't we get the artists and the crafts people and everybody and have them ship up to Baja and do it right in uh Ensenada just over the border that way we can have American Crew or we can get some English-speaking extras out of San Diego and we can bring in thousands of extras like we did from Mexico and thousands of craftspeople and so on so we decided to do that we built a studio down there on a bluff overlooking the ocean so that we could sort of see the sea see see the Horizon have a kind of a natural View and then we'd use obviously digital Composites for other shots shoot people in front of blue screen green screen all that sort of thing [Music] I actually didn't see Kate At first she had done a couple of other historical dramas as well and she was getting a reputation as corset Kate doing historical stuff and so I thought oh man this is gonna look like the laziest casting in the world all right I'll meet her sure you know but I was thinking maybe Gwyneth Paltrow or somebody else and I met Kate and she was fantastic she was just fantastic and so that happened fairly early on we found uh we found Kate so Leo comes in I remember there was a meeting with Leo and then there was a screen test with Leo so the meeting was funny because I'm sitting in my conference room waiting to meet an actor right and I look around and all the women in the entire office are in the meeting for some reason like there's you know there's a female executive producer okay fine but our accountant you know why was she in the meeting they just all wanted to meet Leo it was hysterical I looked around and I went I think I already know the answer to the question here so Leo came in of course Charmed everybody myself included um and I said all right well let's see what your chemistry is like with Kate so he comes in a couple days later and I've got the camera set up to to you know record the video he didn't know he was going to test he came in he thought it was another meeting to meet Kate and I said okay so we'll just go in the Next Room and uh we'll just you know we'll run some lines and I'll I'll video it and he said you mean I'm reading and I said yeah he said oh I don't read I said well I shook his hand I said well thanks for coming by he said wait wait wait you mean if I don't read I don't get the part just like that and I said oh yeah come on this is like a giant movie it's going to take two years of my life and you'll be gone doing five other things while I'm doing post-production and all the model work and everything so I'm not going to it up by making the wrong decision and casting so you're going to read or you're not going to get the part oh okay so he comes in and he's you know he's like every ounce of his entire being is just so you know negative right up until I said action and then he turned into Jack and Kate just lit up and they went into this whole thing and he played the scene dark clouds had opened up on a ray of sun came down and lit up Jack I'm like all right he's the guy so then I finally get the studio to agree to it then Leonardo comes back in and he says you know my dad and I have been talking about the script and we really think it needs this and this and this and this and he wanted to have like I don't know like some Affliction or some problem or some traumatic thing from the past and I said look you you've done all these great characters that all have a problem you know whether it's addiction or whatever it is I said you got to learn how to hold the center and not have all that stuff this isn't Richard III when you can do what you know Jimmy Stewart did or or Gregory Peck did they just stood there they they didn't have a limp or a lisp or whatever then you'll be ready for this but I'm thinking you're not ready because what I'm talking about is actually much harder those things are easier those are props those are crutches what I'm talking about is much harder and you're probably not quite ready for it the second I said that it clicked for him that this was a really hard challenging film for him and I realized my mistake I hadn't laid out the challenge for him sufficiently you want the actor to love you you want them to be in your movie you want them to say yes so you make it all sound attractive but he didn't want something that was easy he wanted something that was hard and that's been his Instinct since then and it leads to things like the Revenant right you don't get any harder than that he knew how to map a career he just didn't know specifically what to do in that in that moment and but you see how fragile this stuff is because you try to imagine that movie without Leo or Kate it's very hard to do [Music] choreograph the kiss in rehearsal weeks ahead of time so we knew what we were going to do even down to I drew little lips on my hands here like this and I showed them exactly you know who's going to lead who's gonna press in who's gonna end and add like a football play on lips right and but they're both so analytical they love that so we knew what we were going to do the question is how were we going to get the elements to agree we scheduled actually for the first day of our outdoor in case we had a nice Sunset and it never looked good and we got down so we burned through our whole 10-day or two week window of our of our exteriors and we were down to literally I think the last day or the second to last day and it was overcast and and I looked up and I said we're going to get a sunset tonight and probably 15 minutes before Sunset it just opened up and turned into these red bands and the sun came down out of the overcast and it was like guys we got a sunset so now everybody's running running the length of the set to get down to the bow and Kate had to like whip one outfit off and get another outfit on and she's sort of doing it in the van and all her handlers around like a like a Formula One pit crew I've never had this happen with an actor in my life before or since Kate gets up there she takes one look at the sunset she turns to me and screams shoot actors are all they always welcome you know to uh so anyway she's like shoot foreign [Music] we wound up getting two takes one take was completely out of focus and the other take was half out of focus and the one that's half autofocus is in the movie The Terminator I was in Rome and and I was sick I don't know what with some some flu-like virus and had a had a bit of a fever and just had a dream and it was a an image that you know that I remembered when I woke up an image of a kind of chrome skeleton emerging from a fire and I always believe that dreams aren't just the image there's also a kind of narrative metadata that runs with it an image where in the dream you know what the image means in my dream I knew that all of its outer covering had been burned Away by the fire revealing it as a chrome what what we later termed the endoskeleton so then looking at it from a from a purely practical kind of strategic standpoint how could I as a filmmaker try to break in and get a directing gig Design This film so that it was affordable enough that they would trust it to me I knew I wanted to do some visual effects but I didn't want to set the whole thing on some some other planet or some distant future so time travel hey let's have him zap in to our reality from some future reality okay what are they trying to do you know manipulate the past to change the future that sort of thing so the pieces fell into place around that seminal image Arnold came in to talk to me about the character of Rhys supposedly he had a great deal of enthusiasm for the script in general and when you know he was waxing eloquent about the action scenes but he kept talking about it kind of from the terminator's perspective and how cool that was and so on we didn't talk about Rhys as much as I would have expected somebody pitching themselves for that character would have he just had this kind of generic enthusiasm for the for the film I couldn't get over kind of how unique his face was how it it just almost just projected this kind of raw power and my conception of the character had been that that he was more of an infiltrator but then you know my perspective shifted and I would say it pivoted kind of on a dime all right if I cast this guy how are they not all going to see him coming how does he not stand out in a crowd how do they not all look at him and I thought you know what don't worry about it because he would make an amazing Terminator because I just saw him as like this kind of bulldozer this kind of armored tank you know and he could just move through a crowd if anybody was in his way he'd just pushed him out of the way and you'd you'd accept it it didn't even have anything to do with the guns it was just that kind of raw strength a kind of a machine strength Stan and I became great friends and you know we hit it off right away I saw the creativity that he had at his disposal with his team he basically sculpted and created the entire endoskeleton and all the prosthetic makes up and the puppet heads and so on and we tried to use puppeteered heads for some of it and then transitioned to prosthetic makeup for other shots we didn't have CG in those days today it's it's a no-brainer how you do that it'd be very easy actually but back then we had to you know we had to be a little bit more clever we had to figure out how we could get a puppeteered head to match perfectly with Arnold matching lighting and matching you know camera angles and moves and all that sort of thing Terminator was done on really quite a shoestring budget and Gail and I came from that same kind of gorilla background I was of that ethos that if my hands weren't filthy by the end of the day I wasn't directing a movie you know because I was helping move the lights help them move the camera help him set everything up move the furniture around that's just how I thought it was I mean the culture shock didn't happen for us on the first film it happened for us on Aliens when we went to England and they had a whole you know it was much more of a kind of suit and tie thing and the director kind of just sat back and let everybody do their jobs and I think that the English crew was unsettled to say the least I think they were insulted because they thought I believe they didn't know their jobs and I had to help them you know which wasn't it at all it was just a sort of a muck in and get it done kind of mentality plus they were by the way slow as so you know I thought maybe I could speed them up a little bit with Linda I felt strongly from from her addition work that she could do both pulls of the character she could do the kind of you know valley girl just going about her life kind of character but with some make her interesting because she had to be interested she had to not be somebody that you would just dismiss and then she had to have the strength and the courage for the final scenes you're a terminated very fortunately she had that in Spades in a way that was was never really realized in the first film we didn't really see it until Linda trained and prepared herself for the second film and then a whole new version of Sarah Connor emerged and that's I think when she became a a kind of feminist icon she really flourished in the role and you saw a whole other level not only of her as an actor but kind of of Sarah as a as a character as a planner as somebody who is incredibly disciplined and focused physically strong I've always joked that Linda could just walk by a stack of weights and she'd gained muscle even when she trained lightly she'd get quite buff but but she trained pretty seriously for I want to say probably five hours a day weights and movement and weapons training and all that sort of thing foreign [Music] Terminator filmed it was six years later when I wrote the script seven years later and a lot of things had changed for me I'd done much bigger stuff and a lot of things had changed for Arnold he was a big star so the business case was a very different business case we knew we could afford more I didn't set out to make 100 million dollar movie I set out to make a movie I thought it would be maybe 50 million or something like that I went back to an idea that I had had for the original Terminator which is of the liquid metal robot from the future as well they're kind of their most advanced being they send the guy back that scares them that they didn't use the first time because it was too unpredictable they didn't know what was going to happen if they turned this thing loose and then I had to find the right guy to play to play him Robert Patrick obviously was it was a great choice he really just inhabited that role but of course the other thing was we wanted to push the CG the liquid metal surface the morphing so some fun challenges and taking CG to the next level a budget came out to somewhere in the 80 Millions you know there's over 80 million and I thought holy crap but that's what we went off at that's what Carol called Green lit with a Big Gulp and then as as production went on it crept up and as it was you know kind of approaching 100 million they were they were blanching they thought they were screwed and then it went out to be the biggest hit of the year and so it all paid off uh but it certainly felt like gloom and doom at the time Avatar your blurry reflex is good in a response normal how you feeling Jake hey guys Stan Winston and I form a company called digital domain to create CG World CG characters somewhere around 95 we founded it in 92 kind of came online in 93. I wanted to write something that I thought of as a as a provocation something that I would go get financing for and as a filmmaker I could encourage slash kick everybody up the backside to generate all this new technology so I wrote Avatar which was a kitchen sink approach it wasn't a smart approach I just threw everything into it that I thought would be cool and so we sat we had technical meetings I talked about I want to do facial performance capture I want to do it with a camera but they said we can't get there from here we can't get to what you want to create within a single movie cycle we have to do other projects first and build the tool set and work our way up to it and by the way other people would be doing it because the rising tide of CG was lifting all the ships in the entertainment industry at the same time and people were developing new tools all over the place so that was in 95 I got it out and dusted it off in 2005. was hitting a wall I wanted to make battle angel I was three scripts in and I still wasn't liking it and I thought well I better have a backup plan here so I got out of Avatar and I read it oh this is pretty good you know this is actually not a bad story so then we put battle Angel and avatar on a parallel track to develop the facial capture tools and we thought maybe we flip a coin we'll do one first and then the other and I was thinking we'd probably do battle Angel first that Avatar but then we got to the eve of our big test and there wasn't a scene written for the test and I thought all right well I better write a scene and so then I looked through the battle Angel script and there wasn't a scene that was CG character to CG character and I thought well there's nothing I can take from that well all right I'll look in the Avatar treatment which was 80 pages long and there was a scene that was pretty well fleshed out and it was when Jake first meets natiri in the forest and I said let's just do this the decision was actually made without realizing it that we were going to do Avatar first because once we got into that it just seem more and more obvious that we needed to make that movie John Lando my producing partner and I looked at each other and said we're doing Avatar [Music] we're not using photography we're using performance capture so there there is no world that I can show the actors other than having them come over and look at the Monitor and see the results of my virtual camera pass and the interesting thing is it turns out they're not that interested they'll typically do it at the beginning of a scene so they see the setting okay it's a sunset there's a waterfall over there there's some creatures over here but they quickly forget that or or it's not really important what's important is the other actor actors just need other actors foreign activist since since high school the film wouldn't have existed if I hadn't been because the head of 20th Century Fox said I like the story it's a good script can we get all this tree hugging hippie out of it and I said I actually know because the reason I want to make the film is exactly because of the tree hugging hippie hairy legged Birkenstocks wearing you know what happened after the film came out indigenous leadership in various parts of the world approached me and said your film is showing the type of thing that we're actually going through for real and there was you know sort of the unstated request was how can you help us how can you help get our real story out in front of people the way you the way you did this fictional story so yeah then then I went on a couple years of actually becoming an overt activist and trying to help them whether it was the Athabasca tar Sands or down in Brazil with the bellamanche dam and all that and eventually I realized okay I can just be another drive-by do-gooder or I can go make more Avatar movies and reach a much wider audience maybe with a somewhat diluted message because it's interwoven with entertainment but maybe maybe throw a much broader net so that was the point at which I decided to go ahead and make more Avatar films which was actually a difficult decision because I had a lot of things I was interested in in terms of ocean conservation and sustainable agriculture a lot of projects I was working on that I had to turn away from to go back into the saddle as a as a filmmaker I almost bailed on being a filmmaker and the thing that that kept me in the game was the possibility of the Avatar Universe reaching a lot of people with a persistent kind of emotional message and and reaction on the other part of the audience to maybe fight for and protect that which we're losing foreign I knew I was embarking on a multi-year really a kind of decadal project of course everybody was just anxious for the sequel so it always seemed like it was getting put off and put off and put off it really never got put off until we hit the pandemic and we had to push out a year because we had never really decided when we were going to start we were going to start production at the moment that we had everything in a nice pile right so there was technology there was design there were the scripts it was a year and a half to generate three scripts and then six months for me to realize that the first script needed to be two movies and then 18 months for me to go back and redraft and personally write all four of the shooting scripts including the split of the the first sequel so we started production in literally five years ago September of of 17. it's taken that five years to to shoot all of Avatar 2 Avatar 3 part of Avatar 4 and then post-production on Avatar 2 and parts of Avatar 3. because parts of Avatar 3 are actually already in work at what a digital as we speak the new film is much much more nuanced in terms of performance much more complex emotionally I think than the first film by a country mile maybe an order of magnitude the number of emotional scenes Big close-ups that sort of thing that we have in the new film is probably you know five to ten times what we had in the in the first film not to diminish the first film the first film was more about the awe and wonder this is more about the characters aliens I had people who were trying to advise me on my career after Terminator say absolutely do not do this film meaning aliens said if it's good they're going to attribute it to Ridley and if it's bad it's all you there's no upside and I thought well you know you're probably right and that's very logical but I just dig it and I want to do it I just like it the only variable for me was Sigourney getting her into it because they had assured me they had her on under an option for a SQL option and so I went off and wrote this thing okay I'm gonna get to work with Sigourney this will be cool I'll go off and write for six months I come back lo and behold no option they haven't even talked to her so now it's up to me to land Sigourney to talk her into doing this film I don't know her from from you know a stranger on the street so I call her up and send her the script and she agrees to meet with me you know so I went up there you know kind of butterflies in the stomach because everything I'd done in preparation for this film she could shoot it all down she it turns out had been really taken by the story and so she was really leaning in she wanted to do it and then her agents got into it of course and asked for the moon and then the studio said absolutely no way and then the whole thing fell apart again Gail and I said okay all y'all we're we're going to get married in Hawaii and it's all off and we just walked away and then they went wait a minute did they just walk away they can't do that and uh so but you can this is just this is just like movies how movies happen and don't happen it's always it's you know there's always a story behind the story and so I called a blue pit Arnold's agent and I said Lou we're kind of over this right so we've decided that we really like the story and all the Marine Corps characters and the world that we've created and everything and really we've thought about it and we really just don't need Sigourney I've created all these characters and and my pride of authorship tells me I should go ahead with this and we'll just cut her out of it and we'll just cut her character out of it won't we won't recast it I'll just rewrite it so I'm going to start on that tonight now did I have any intention of doing that whatsoever no not at all but I happen to know that Lou is at the same agency as sigourney's agent who is in New York and I knew that the second he hung up with me he called him and said sign Sigourney now and guess what the deal was done in 12 hours after that so I never wrote A word of that hypothetical story that I said I was going to do that I had no intention of writing anyway so anyway it worked and Sigourney got her million bucks and everybody was happy [Music] get away from her You I'd actually been writing this thing a couple years earlier when I was still working for Roger Corman called mother it was a science fiction story and it ended in this kind of Elemental battle between the main character using a power suit and this mother creature that was defending her children so I wonder where aliens came from it was basically just a a revamp of that story so the the power loader was innate already to that story where I got the idea before that exosuits had been in the literature the Forever War they had these kind of power suits that were kind of half spaced suit half power suits Starship Troopers had these kind of EXO frames that they used to carry heavy loads it's like all the stuff that DARPA has developed now for actual use in infantry War fighting and so if you think about it I went from endoskeleton and Terminator to exoskeleton and aliens the abyss well I always saw the deep ocean as kind of Inner Space as having the same appeal as outer space having that same kind of remote Frontier dangerous not for the faint of heart you know the Blackness the fact that the sun doesn't reach there you have to use high technology and trust it to get down there and I had written a a little story in in high school called The Abyss after aliens you know I thought well I'll just do the abyss I'll just write a write a story around that so but then I added in the element of you know kind of an extraterrestrial intelligence or a non-terrestrial intelligence as I called it in that and used it as a kind of a first Contact story taking place instead of an outer space in Inner Space in the in the Deep more of a close encounter is than it was a follow-on to aliens um you know I didn't I didn't want too much of the military stuff I didn't want too much of that sort of conventional action all movies are hard you know they're long hours there's never enough time you don't get enough sleep everybody's working really hard and then you add water to it and it becomes you know well nigh impossible or insurmountable but fortunately I happen to like big challenges and I love being underwater and I thought the idea of the movie was really cool so you know nothing was going to stop us so we had to figure out you know helmets so the actors could breathe underwater and the lighting and all that and we basically took underwater lighting from a very primitive standpoint they were they were lighting sets on the on the Deep with 500 watt lights so imagine you walk into a set the size of a big Sound Stage and your lighting kit consists of a 500 watt bulb you're not going to make it through the first day as a DP you're going to get fired when you open your lighting kit but that's what we that's all that existed so we went to some engineers and said what can you do one engineer told us you're all going to die you're all going to get electrocuted the other engineers said oh I know what to do we'll use that we'll use HMI bulbs and we'll use double inline ground fault Interrupters to make sure that there's no short circuiting that injures anybody and that's what we did so we went with engineer B clearly a guy named Pete Romano but [Music] okay that's okay sweet Christ oh my God [Music] well I came up with this idea for this Alien Probe that I called the pseudopod and so the pseudopod was a water tentacle it could lift itself off the ground it obviously could sense its environment it could image its environment and so on I didn't know how to achieve it I had the idea for it and there were some non-cgi solutions that we explored I talked to Dennis murin at ilm he said have you thought about doing it as as uh computer generated animation and they were just getting into it themselves and for me it was an unknown terrain I didn't really drive this I took the leap of faith based on Dennis assuring me that it could be done now I hadn't worked with Dennis before but I knew him by reputation and he just had this very calm very Zen demeanor and he said they could do it and they did and it took you know it took them a probably a year and a half to do 16 shots now cut to 33 years later right now we're doing 3 000 shots in two years on Avatar 2 the rate of everything has accelerated the pipelines have accelerated back then it was very much pioneering work and hand work by the animators

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Id: nIEbpGdctyg

Length: 29min 25sec (1765 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2022