The director James Cameron is six feet two and fair, with paper-white hair and turbid blue-green eyes. He is a screamer—righteous, withering, aggrieved. “Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this motherfucker?” he shouted, an inch from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face, after the actor went AWOL from the set of “True Lies,” a James Bond spoof that Cameron was shooting in Washington, D.C. (Schwarzenegger had been giving the other actors a tour of the Capitol.) Cameron has mastered every job on set, and has even been known to grab a brush out of a makeup artist’s hand. “I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt,” he says. “It saves so much time.” His evaluations of others’ abilities are colorful riddles. “Hiring you is like firing two good men,” he says, or “Watching him light is like watching two monkeys fuck a football.” A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly; they call the dark side of his personality Mij—Jim backward.

The pressures on Cameron are extreme, never mind that he has brought them on himself. His movies are among the most expensive ever made. “Terminator 2” was the first film to cost a hundred million dollars, “Titanic” the first to exceed two hundred million. But victory is sweeter after a close brush with defeat. “Terminator 2” earned five hundred and nineteen million around the world, and “Titanic,” which came out in 1997, still holds the record for global box-office: $1.8 billion.

Cameron is fifty-five. It has been twelve years since he has made a feature film; “Avatar,” his new movie, comes out on December 18th and will have cost more than two hundred and thirty million dollars by the time it’s done. He started working on it full time four years ago, from a script he wrote in 1994. “Avatar” will be the first big-budget action blockbuster in 3-D; Cameron shot it using camera systems that he developed himself. He is a pioneer of special effects: the undulating water column of “The Abyss” and the liquid-silver man of “Terminator 2” helped to inspire the digital revolution that has transformed moviemaking in the past two decades. The digital elements of “Avatar,” he claims, are so believable that, even when they exist alongside human actors, the audience will lose track of what is real and what is not. “This film integrates my life’s achievements,” he told me. “It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Another time, he said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

George Lucas popularized space opera; Steven Spielberg has perfected awe. Cameron’s movies, soaked in sweat and blood and scorched by apocalyptic flames, have romance at their molten cores. Some of his most memorable characters—Sarah Connor, the heroine of the “Terminator” movies; Ellen Ripley, of “Aliens”—are mothers. The writing is a genre of its own: “tech-noir,” Cameron called it after “Terminator”; his late-period style is more like gear-head schmaltz. “IN THE BLACKNESS we hear the lonely ping of a bottom sonar,” the beginning of his treatment for “Titanic” reads. “Then two faint lights appear, close together . . . growing brighter. They each resolve into clusters of lights, which are soon revealed to be two DEEP SUBMERSIBLES, falling toward us. We are somewhere in the ocean deep, looking up at two subs freefalling like express elevators. . . . Soon they are fireflies, then stars. Then gone.” Spielberg says, “He gets a lot of points for being a techno-brat, but he is a very emotional storyteller.”

“With ‘Avatar,’ I thought, Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys’ adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars—a soldier goes to Mars,” Cameron told me. The hero of “Avatar,” Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a paraplegic ex-marine who travels to Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system, where there is a human colony. Humans can’t breathe the air on Pandora; Jake lies in a casket-like vessel, while his consciousness, projected into an “avatar”—Vishnu-blue and nine feet tall, like the native population, the Na’vi—explores Pandora’s rich interior. It is a fantasy about fantasy, about the experience of sitting inert in the dark while your mind enters another world. Set roughly a hundred and twenty-five years in the future, “Avatar” is, like most speculative science fiction, a cautionary tale. Humans have turned Earth into a wasteland and, in their pursuit of a precious superconductor called Unobtanium, are beginning to do the same to Pandora. Jake, through his avatar, falls in love with a Na’vi princess, who teaches him to live in harmony with nature, and then he leads her people in an insurrection against the colonists. “Of course, the whole movie ends up being about women, how guys relate to their lovers, mothers—there’s a large female presence,” Cameron said. “I try to do my testosterone movie and it’s a chick flick. That’s how it is for me.” This summer, addressing an auditorium filled with thousands of teen-age boys at Comic-Con, in San Diego—an annual convention of science-fiction, action-adventure, and fantasy fans—he made his identification with the fair sex complete. When someone in the audience asked about his next movie, he replied, “You know, it’s not a great time to ask a woman if she wants to have other kids when she’s crowning.”

Cameron behaves as if he were the embattled protagonist of one of his own films—an ordinary Joe beaten on the anvil of extraordinary trials. “The words ‘No’ and ‘That’s impossible’ and phrases like ‘That can’t be done’—that’s the stuff that gives him an erection,” the actor Bill Paxton, who has worked with Cameron since the early eighties, says. Cameron reserves a special quotient of his anger for suits who get in his way. “Tell your friend he’s getting fucked in the ass, and if he would stop squirming it wouldn’t hurt so much” was the message he once told a Fox producer to deliver to an executive at the studio. He sees himself as essentially outside and other and alone; he bites the hand that feeds. “Even though he knew I was on his side, nobody’s ever on his side,” Bill Mechanic, who ran Fox Studios during the making of “Titanic,” said. “It’s like you’re in the trenches and your infantry-mate is shooting at you, even if you’re the only one there who can save his life.”

There is a chivalric aspect to Cameron’s antagonism; he figures his struggles in heroic terms. “I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time,” he says. “It’s very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy—a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they’re required to keep an agreement with you only if you’re successful, or they need you. I’ve tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don’t like it when people are deferential to me because I’m an established filmmaker. It’s a blue-collar sensibility.”

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Cameron was born in Canada, and grew up in a small town not far from Niagara Falls. (He revoked his application for American citizenship after Bush won the election in 2004.) His father was an engineer for a paper company; his mother brought up five children, and told stories of racing stock cars and joining the women’s auxiliary of the Canadian Army. Jim was the oldest, the ringleader of his siblings and the other kids in the neighborhood. “There was always some new thing that absolutely needed to get done, whether it was building a fort or an airplane or launching rockets,” he told me. “We made it in the papers once, for a U.F.O. sighting over a hot-air balloon that we built and launched at night that was powered by candles.” His hero was Jacques Cousteau, and although he lived four hundred miles from the ocean, he became obsessed with scuba. He learned to dive in Buffalo one February in a Y.M.C.A. pool.

At fourteen, Cameron saw the movie that made him want to make his own: Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the first cinematically exquisite treatment of what had traditionally been B-movie material. “I saw all these cool spacecraft and I wanted to know how the visual effects were done,” he said. “I started building my own models of spaceships, from the ‘2001’ model kit and the ‘making-of’ book, which was quite thick and well researched.” After he finished making “True Lies,” Cameron called Kubrick, by then a recluse, and invited himself over. They spent a day, in the basement of Kubrick’s house in the English countryside, watching “True Lies” at Kubrick’s flatbed editing station. Cameron went over the shots—Schwarzenegger in a Harrier jet firing a missile, with the villain attached to it, through an office building and into a helicopter: boom!—so that Kubrick could learn how the effects were done.

When Cameron was seventeen, his father was transferred to Southern California, and the family moved to Brea, a small city in Orange County. He had left Canada without a high-school diploma, and started taking classes at Fullerton Junior College, supporting himself by working as a precision tool-and-die machinist. “My dad was a college graduate,” he said. “But, see, I didn’t want to do the things he thought I should—you know, something good, like engineering.” He dropped out, and, when he was twenty-three, married a woman who worked as a waitress at a Bob’s Big Boy. For a while, he drove a truck for a local school district. In archetypal terms, this was his period of exile and self-denial, the refusal of the call. “I just became this blue-collar guy,” he said. “But I was constantly thinking as an artist, so I’m painting, drawing, writing, thinking about visual effects and filmmaking.”

In Brea, Cameron met William Wisher and Randall Frakes, who also wanted to make movies, and who are still his two best friends. Eventually, they raised the money to make a short film, “Xenogenesis,” starring Wisher as a futuristic man in an orange jumpsuit who battles an armored robot with a metal pincer for a hand. It got Cameron a job sculpting models for Roger Corman in L.A.

Corman’s studio—a training ground for filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme—specialized in low-budget genre films. Cameron distinguished himself immediately, and soon he was designing sets. He was focussed—often working through the night—and he was scrappy. “He’d take all these random parts—Winnebago parts, industrial dishwashing racks, Sonotubes, a lot of paint—and turn them into an incredible set,” Paxton, who worked for Corman as a set dresser, recalled. For “Battle Beyond the Stars,” Corman’s takeoff on “Star Wars,” Cameron was asked to design the spaceships. “His sketches were brilliant,” Corman said. “The best of that type of work that I had ever seen.” Each spaceship reflected the character of its pilot, and also Cameron’s instinct for the iconic, literal image; to the mother ship, Nell, he gave a curvaceous shape and a pair of heaving breasts.

James Cameron doesn’t go to the bathroom; he goes to the head. In his universe, there is no front and back, right and left, just fore and aft, starboard and port. He is still an avid scuba diver; when there are sharks in the water, he says, he’s the first one in. Free-diving, he has held his breath for more than three minutes and reached a depth of a hundred and ten feet. (“You feel like a denizen of the deep, if only for a second,” he says. “Plus, diving below the scuba divers, I like just to see the look on their faces.”) He used to have a JetRanger helicopter, and owns a slew of dirt bikes, three Harleys, a Ducati, and a Ford GT—“basically a race car with a license plate”—in classic blue-and-white livery. In Corvettes, he has favored triple black—black body, black interior, black top. For pleasure, he designs submersibles; the one he’s working on now can go to thirty-six thousand feet, and he hopes to use it to explore the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on earth. He signs his missives “Jim out,” and, when he’s working, a deep mechanical roar, like a Navy klaxon, summons him to the stage. “Dive! dive! dive!” he said, an intent look in his eyes, when I asked him what the signal meant.

I first met Cameron in April of 2008. “Avatar” was in its third year of production. For much of that time, Cameron had been working out of a couple of hangars in Playa del Rey, south of Los Angeles. He was sitting in his office, a small room at the edge of one of the hangars, beside a bust of a feline-looking blue alien covered in bioluminescent spots: Neytiri, the Na’vi princess. “Our leading lady,” Cameron called her, or just “the blue chick.” He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Scubapro” and had a pair of earphones around his neck. Despite moviegoers’ associations of 3-D with schlocky horror films and animated stuff for kids, Cameron said he was resolved to work in the medium: “It gives you more of a sense of participation, involvement, and immersion. You feel like you’re bearing witness, and that makes the journey feel more real.” It was also a business decision. Having developed the camera technology, he knew that only a high-profile movie, such as “Avatar” promises to be, would accelerate the conversion of theatres. “I said, ‘They know the product. They better get ready.’ It was a little bit cheeky—a leap of faith that the screens would be there for us.” That spring, there were about fifteen hundred 3-D screens in the United States; by December, there will be three times that many. (“Avatar” will also have a wide release in 2-D.)

There was a knock at the door. “I have to go make a shot,” Cameron said. He walked swiftly toward the floor of the hangar, a vast industrial space that he referred to as “the performance-capture volume.” The stage floor, furnished with just a low riser, had been painted battleship gray. Zoë Saldana, who plays Neytiri, stood among a group of actors wearing black unitards covered with reflective white dots: a retro vision of the computer age, Pilobolus style. The ceiling was studded with black-and-white surveillance cameras that tracked the actors’ movements and positioned their performances inside a digital set—in this case, a Na’vi battle camp deep in the rain forest, where Jake’s avatar is preparing the warriors to fight with bows and arrows against the high-tech human war machines. Saldana wore a special head rig fitted with a tiny camera that floated inches from her face, to capture her expressions in minute detail: the movements of her facial muscles, the contractions of her pupils, the interaction of her teeth, lips, and tongue. The data uploaded to a dozen computers banked around the room, which translated the movements of the actors onto the physiques of their digital characters, and fed the images, along with the digital set design, into the eyepiece of Cameron’s “virtual camera”—essentially, a viewfinder with a monitor. For him, it was like directing a live-action shoot on Pandora. Saldana, who is five feet seven, performed in his eyepiece as a nine-foot alien in a rain forest.

On cue, the actors began to make strange trilling sounds, ejectives and glottal stops and rolled “r”s: Na’vi. Cameron stopped the scene. “When Jake goes”—Cameron uttered a mellifluous sentence in Na’vi—“you go, ‘Whoop! Whoop!’ ”

Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn in “Aliens” (1986). Photograph from 20th Century Fox / Everett Collection Photograph from 20th Century Fox / Everett Collection

Back in his office, Cameron played an unfinished scene from “Avatar” on a large screen. The renderings were crude, like paper cutouts: the graphic sophistication of a nineteen-nineties video game. Neytiri—hipless, lean, with proportions to make Barbie look like a Cabbage Patch Kid—crouched on a tree limb high above the forest floor. She spotted Jake’s avatar for the first time, and took aim. The next shot was much more evolved. Neytiri’s skin was tactile and radiant; her eyes were huge and green and flecked with light, like five-dollar marbles from Conran. “This is ninety or ninety-five per cent done,” Cameron said. “By the way, we didn’t have the equipment when we started this. It took nine months to build the computer model and to get it right. It’s incredibly computationally complex, but now we’re able to replicate the interaction of muscle under skin.” He stopped the footage on a closeup of Neytiri’s face. “She exists only as a big string of ones and zeroes,” he said, as if he could not quite believe it himself. “Computing a single frame of this takes thirty hours.” He paused. “Everybody in this building has had more college than I have.”

All directors have a God complex; Cameron takes his unusually seriously. For “Avatar,” he worked with a linguist to develop the Na’vi language, inspired by fragments of Maori he picked up in New Zealand years ago. He based Pandora, and its myriad flora (spike tears, cliff slouchers, stinger ivy) and fauna (direhorses, banshees, slinths), partly on the creatures of the coral reefs and kelp forests he has seen at the abyssal depths. He hired a team of artists to execute his ideas, but reserved one creature for himself: the thanator, a six-legged black pantherlike beast, twenty-four feet long, covered in plate scales, with a reptilian double set of jaws and a threat display resembling that of a fan lizard. “The thanator is the baddest, meanest predator the planet had to offer,” Neville Page, the lead creature designer, said. “As Jim put it in the treatment, a thanator can eat an Alien for dessert. He wanted to outdo himself, outdo the Alien Queen.”