What was your childhood like?

James Cameron: It was not remarkable from the standpoint of outside influences. I lived in a small town — it was 2,000 people — in Canada. A little river that went through it and we swam in the — you know, there was a lot of water around. Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away. The Niagara Falls. So I’ve always sort of loved the water — possibly as a result of that — and that has manifested itself obviously in my work.

It’s also a big part of my private time. I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean. My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer. So right there you have a collision of left and right hemisphere thinking and I think I got equal parts of both.

My mother was definitely an influence in giving me a respect for art and the arts and especially the visual arts. I used to go with her to museums, and when I was learning to draw I would sketch things in the museum, whether it was an Etruscan helmet, or a mummy, or whatever. I was fascinated by all that.

I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father’s respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things. And sometimes being a builder can put you in a leadership position when you’re a kid. “Hey, let’s build a go-kart. You go get the wheels and you get this,” and pretty soon you’re at the center of a project.

I look back at, you know, I was at ten years old or nine years old, and I’m the same person now, you know, and in essence — in 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. I’m just getting a bunch of kids to help me build a fort, except that now it takes $100 million, and the kids are all my age.

Were you a good student?

James Cameron: Yes, good student. Mostly because of a real natural curiosity. I wasn’t trying to please anybody. It wasn’t competitive against the other kids. It wasn’t about trying to please my parents so much as I just wanted to know things, the sciences, history, even math to an extent. I was just switched on somehow. That’s the most important thing when I look back to that formative period, junior high through high school. It was a six-year period.

I spent all my free time in the town library and I read an awful lot of science fiction and the line between reality and fantasy blurred. I was as interested in the reality of biology as I was in reading science fiction stories about genetic mutations and post-nuclear war environments and inter-stellar traveling, meeting alien races, and all that sort of thing.

I read so voraciously. It was tonnage. I rode a school bus for an hour each way in high school because they put me in an academic program that could only be serviced by this high school much further away. So I had two hours a day on the bus and I tried to read a book a day. I averaged a book every other day, but if I got really interested in something it was propped up behind my math book or my science book all during the day in class.

Was there a book that influenced or inspired you in some way?

James Cameron: I remember it more by authors. Arthur Clark and A.E. Van Vogt, all of the mainstream old guard of science fiction at that time. In the latter years of high school, I got into the newer guys of that time, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, people like that. It was a steady diet of science fiction.

Were there any teachers who had a big influence on you?

James Cameron: There was. The critical moment for me was in the 11th grade. My biology teacher, Mr. McKenzie, decided that what our school needed was a theater arts program and we didn’t have it. There was wrestling, basketball, football, 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 taught it, and I think he might have done it for nothing. We had to build the props and the scenery and the costumes and do everything ourselves. We had to turn the stage into a proper working stage. It took a year, but we started putting on our own productions. I think that was really a pivotal moment.

My biology teacher 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 in independent film production because it’s the same thing. You know, 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 create some moment of glory, some showmanship — out of nothing, out of baling wire — that is maybe a lesson that was learned there as a result of this man who just decided to have a theater arts program.

Otherwise I would have been marginalized by the fact that it was a very athletically oriented school. 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 all these dramatic awards around the province. So that’s Mr. McKenzie’s legacy. The point is that teachers can be absolutely critical at the right moment in your life and they can be mentors.

Sometimes it’s only just one comment that they can make. I was talking to this man, my biology teacher, and he said, ” I’ve seen your aptitude tests…” or whatever kind of testing they did 30 years ago in Canada, “…and we believe that you have unlimited potential.” Now I don’t know if he’d ever seen the tests 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 of these things later. Because you’re going to have 10,000 people telling you why you can’t do something, and 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, and I remember where the conversation took place.

Did you think of yourself as different from other kids? Were you a gifted child?

James Cameron: I certainly didn’t think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football. I was more like the — kind of the misfit, the outsider. And of course, the misfits and the outsiders all collect together like this kind of pond scum around the sides. And that’s where all the good ideas come from. I certainly never thought of myself as, you know, superior or gifted in any way. Just different. Definitely different. And happy. Satisfied to be different. Maybe not always happy to be different, but satisfied to be different.

How do you think that affected your childhood?

James Cameron: It becomes a defense mechanism, to be contemptuous of people who don’t think outside of the box. I spent a ten-year period being intellectually snobbish and saying, “You guys are just a bunch of jock idiots.” And then I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to reintegrate myself into being a normal person. With limited success probably.

Do you think you were destined to be an achiever? Is it destiny? Is it chance?

James Cameron: I think it’s, the old adage: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” I think chance 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 even with that chance, the critical factor is being able to recognize a true opportunity and seize it the moment it presents itself, and not wait and over think it, because it will pass.

There are many talented people who haven’t fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith. There are also winos sleeping rolled up in a carpet remnant in an alley some place who also made that leap of faith and either made it at the wrong time or never had the skill to back it up.

If you don’t have the ability to make that leap of faith it’s going to be harder for you to accomplish something great, because there are going to be moments, there are going to be little windows of opportunity that open for a 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 have 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 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 theoretical projection is going to be wrong but half of it will be right and that’s the part you’re going to prevail with.

When did you first know what it was that you wanted to do with your life?

James Cameron: I didn’t know for a long time. I was always fascinated by the sciences. When I was a kid I used to spend all my time collecting pond water and looking at it through my microscope and trying to identify the various protozoa, or I’d be looking through a telescope trying to find the Great Nebula in Orion. My brain was going in all these different directions.

Art was always there. I was always drawing, but it wasn’t the main thing. All the way through high school, even into college, I majored in physics. I hit kind of a wall with math. I had a bad teacher who turned me off of calculus at a critical moment, and even though my grades were very high in astronomy and physics, I switched to English because I wanted to write.

I was sort of going in two different directions. I was 25 or 26 before I really settled in and said, “This is it. I’m going to work in film in some capacity.”

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 technological level — and my fascination with engineering and technology.

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 and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.

I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all. I 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 had never pictured myself in that role, as the guy with the monocle and the megaphone. It 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. 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 is already doing it, then you can visualize yourself doing the job.

Was there a moment when the light bulb went on and you said, “That’s what I want to do. I want to be a filmmaker. I want to be a director.”?

James Cameron: 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 appreciation of how music works with the images and so on. It sort of just blew the doors off the whole thing for me at the age of 14, and I started thinking about film in a completely different way and got fascinated by it.

It was such a fascinating film that they made a book about The Making of 2001. It was, to my knowledge, one of the first films that had a “making of” book. It’s the first one that I knew of, and I read it from cover-to-cover 18 times. I didn’t understand half of it until many years later, but it started a process of projecting myself into the idea of actually creating images using these high tech means.

Of course, I did all my low tech analogues of those means, buying models and gluing them on pieces of glass and moving them around. It was good training to think spatially and to think in terms of story boarding and so on. So I was already a filmmaker but I hadn’t realized it yet.

That was all happening in Canada, thousands of miles from Hollywood, and then ironically, at the age of 17 we moved from Canada to Los Angeles, which is very close to the black hole of Hollywood itself. At that point, I didn’t know if I could get there from here. “Who am I to say that I could be a filmmaker?” It didn’t make any sense so I abandoned it for grown-up things and I decided to be a scientist. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized this is where my heart really lay.

The next light bulb 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 is going to ask you 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.

What films influenced you most as a young person?

James Cameron: The films that influenced me were so disparate that there’s almost no pattern. Stanley Kubrick was an influence because I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey. and the more I learned about him and his methodology the more I realized what a rigorous intellectual exercise filmmaking was for him, and I was inspired by that. The word perfectionist has a fussy connotation of unnecessary work, of unnecessary complication of the process, but I think that everything he did in his process was necessary.

I have since come to learn that process doesn’t work as well for me. There has to be some chaos, some looseness, so the actors are given the opportunities to give you their best. If you have it preconceived in crystallinely perfect form, you don’t leave the door open for magic. The magic doesn’t come from within the director’s mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors. You have to be there to seize it at the right moment. But Kubrick was definitely an important influence.

All the films that I saw in my last two years of high school and my first year of college are the films that still burn vividly for me. Woodstock, Catch-22, Easy Rider, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather. It was such an amazing time in film production, very eclectic and just breaking all the rules.

You’ve also said seeing the film Star Wars affected you.

James Cameron: That was probably the film that galvanized me to get off my butt and go be a filmmaker. I was fascinated by space, I was always painting space ships and living in this world of these whizzing, dynamic space battles.

In my senior year in high school, we used to play “Battleship” in class. We turned it into space battleships and we would draw these elaborate spaceships and send coordinates to each other by notes and try to blow each other up.

I was living in a Star Wars world in my mind, and all of a sudden I saw this film, and it was like somebody had reached into my hind brain 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 George’s creation, because it’s obviously a 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 is doing this stuff, you know, and they’re beating me to it.” That was my reaction. So I — you know, 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 little group of four people.

How did your parents feel about what you chose professionally?

James Cameron: 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, “Ah-ha, I was right. You should have gone into engineering.” And it was always this sort of attitude of, “Well, you know, one of these days you’ll get a real job and this film thing, you know, will pass as a fad.” 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 do it, but if it doesn’t work out…” sort of thing that it would have been different. But it kind of made me mad, and I had to prove 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 very supportive of the arts, and the visual aspect of it. So there was an interesting dynamic there that probably served me in the long run although it was hard to see it at the time.

Was it difficult not having the support of your father?

James Cameron: It was certainly difficult financially, but you learn to survive. You learn to prioritize, and you learn that if you’re going to do something, you have to do it all the way and you just have to put it before all other things.

When you started out as a filmmaker, did you have something in mind you wanted to achieve?

James Cameron: I didn’t really have anything to say. I had a lot of images crowding into my mind visually. I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism. Isaac Asimov used to say, “Science fiction readers are people who escape from reality into worlds of pollution, nuclear war, overpopulation.” It’s a way of modeling the present through the future.

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 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. And I’ve never lost that sort of — almost a fascination with apocalyptic themes. 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 the Titanic ended, which is through some casual simple carelessness. So you know, being a child of the ’60s in that way, I think, very much influenced the way I looked at what could be done with film.

It was also a very interesting time in filmmaking, in the history of filmmaking, because it was the time when the paradigm of studio film production was completely deconstructed and the independent films emerged.

All of a sudden the filmmaking world was turned on its head. A film called Easy Rider came out that was made for $40,000 and made more money than any other film of that year, including all of the big studio films. So the big smokestack industry of Hollywood was suddenly threatened from within by these auteurs, these punks, the young George Lucases and Martin Scorseses.

It was a fascinating time, and that’s when I came into my awareness of what film could be. So I was definitely informed by that but I didn’t really have anything to say yet. I had a lot of images and ideas but I hadn’t found my themes. It took another few years for that to happen.

What were some other lessons you learned working on that Corman film?

James Cameron: Well, the critical lesson is basically, never give up, because 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 self-confidence to power through it. You have to not listen to the nay sayers 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 my instincts and to not back off, because when the hour gets dark, your instinct is to — or your tendency might be to say, “Well, this is just too hard and no, you know, nobody should have to go through this in order to accomplish X,” whether it’s a movie or whatever. But to — 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 screaming maniac. I mean, you have to be able — you have to have made the 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 by yourself.

Even though you may know how to do many of these different tasks, you physically can’t do it. You need a team, and you need the respect and the trust of that team. That was a lesson that took me a while to figure out, because at first I just wanted to do it all myself. “Ah, you’re doing it wrong!” That doesn’t work. That doesn’t ultimately achieve the vision.

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 (b) good but just different from what I had imagined. And so that the end result of our collected efforts will be exactly that. It’ll be all of our efforts together. It won’t won’t ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it’s going to be the sum total of the group. So choose your group well, and go in with that little voice in the back of your mind that says, “Be Zen about it. Be philosophical. It’s ultimately going to be the best that these people can do.”

That flies in the face of the auteur theory. And I was sort of raised aesthetically on that auteur theory, looking at the much vaunted Hitchcock films that were planned down to every frame and every molecule through storyboarding. It all flowed from the forehead of Zeus, but it’s not that way. When you’re doing your job best you’re a band leader.

How hard was it for you to learn those lessons?

James Cameron: It’s tough, and I’m still learning it, but I’ve learned it well enough to do some of my best work as a result of that lesson, by inspiring the actors on Titanic, the production designers, and everyone on that film. There were several thousand people working on that film. By somehow inspiring them to do their very, very best, they brought me all of the elements, all of the moments that eventually became that film. I couldn’t have done it all myself. I couldn’t have done a fraction of it.

In the face of all of that, how do you pick yourself up and persevere? What does it take?

James Cameron: I had dark hours on Titanic that were just as dire if not more dire than on Piranha II when I got fired, or on Terminator when we had all these problems. 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, but I’m going to have to proceed on this path 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.”

Ultimately you reach a point where people will hire you because you have the strength. Or some people call it vision, I don’t. 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 the possibilities — what you can do and what you can’t do — and over time people will realize 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 “they” is. In my business it’s the studio that’s putting up the money, the completion bond company, the bankers. The people that don’t really understand the day-to-day sweat, blood and tears of the creative process. 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 character feeling at that moment, and it might be some really important, very pivotal scene for them.

There’s a certain tenacity that’s required, and that tenacity manifests itself sometimes in unpleasant ways. Other times it can manifest itself in very noble ways when you can get other people to go with you that extra mile.

I think a lot about what is misunderstood 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. “Oh, man, we worked around the clock and you know, we all almost died.” And it sounds like an indictment of the production as a bunch of whackos but when, in fact, they’re actually — they want to share the fact that they did this, that they did go beyond. They went beyond in 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. I don’t make films back-to-back anyway. I usually give them a year to go out and see what it’s like on all those other boring movies and then they all want to come back.

You mean a year of to recover.

James Cameron: Oh no. That only takes a couple of weeks. A week in Hawaii usually takes care of it.

How would you explain to somebody who knows nothing about what you do, what it is that’s so exciting to you about doing it?

James Cameron: The thing that is exciting about filmmaking 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’s what an architect must feel like when they drive down the street and they look up and see a building that they designed. It’s something that you imagined made tangible.

I get that rush much more on the set than I do when the film is done. When the film is done you’ve lived with it for so long that it’s not new anymore, and it almost seems like it’s just destiny. That’s just what it is. But there’s a time on the set 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 you know you have to come up with something, because there’s going to be a time when everybody is standing around, having gathered and built this huge human enterprise, and you better think of something good. So that’s the rush you get out of it, but it’s also the thing that haunts you before you start.

How would you characterize your contribution, your achievement in the field of filmmaking?

James Cameron: I think that’s probably best left to others. I know what I’ve tried to do, which is tell stories that excite the imagination and maybe say something at a thematic level, and 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 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 the shoes of those characters for a while. That’s what I set out to do, so I think it’s really up to others to sort of sort it out, what it ultimately means.

I see things that I have done that I know were inspired by other things. I see other filmmakers picking up on my leads and taking it further, and I realize that it is part of an ongoing creative process that is self-perpetuating. I think of myself as a link in a chain of cinematic ideas. It’s fun to have that place.

What do you see as the next great challenge, the next great frontier in filmmaking?

James Cameron: Ultimately the frontiers of filmmaking have never changed. They change in the specifics of the technology and the technique, but ultimately it’s somebody sitting in a room writing. It’s actors saying the lines in front of a lens, and that image being captured, and that little slice of life for those characters, those relationships, being made alive in the minds of other people all around the world. I don’t think that is fundamentally going to change indefinitely.

The specifics are probably going to change a lot. We’ll have electronic digital projection of the films. That’s going to inform the entire post-production process. Ultimately we won’t be working on film any more. 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 10 to 20 years other than atavistic 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.

Visual effects are happening now. It’s not even the next frontier. Visual effects are just becoming integrated into the basic fabric of filmmaking, they are not outside of the normal filmmaking process. Now all directors are working with visual effects and it has just become as basic to the technique as a light or a dolly or whatever. I think it’s empowering to the imagination to let people create whatever it is they want to create and do it in a very easy and straightforward manner, which visual effects are now capable of doing because of the ease of digital compositing. I think computer graphics and animation are going to have an increasing role. I think 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 nonhuman characters.

There has to be a reason to do a CG character, and the reason is it can’t be you or I. The traditional techniques of putting rubber on people’s faces and making rubber puppets and running them with hydraulics and so on are going to fall by the wayside. Actors will still be empowered within that process because it will still be a performance created by an actor in some way. They just won’t have five pounds of make-up stuck on their face.

Titanic has got to be a tough act to follow. Is there something you haven’t done that you would like to do?

James Cameron: There are many things 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 really try to communicate to people the passion of science, because our culture thinks science is kind of unhip. Scientists get it, but I think the greater community doesn’t understand how scientists think, what drives them, and how their passion can be as great as the passion of an artist or the passion of a great athlete, which our culture respects much more, unfortunately.

I’d love to be able to crack that nut because I don’t think Hollywood has served the science community well. They are usually stereotypes: geeks, bad guys, or distant, unemotional people and, of course, none of that is true. It can certainly be true of individuals but it’s not generally true.

What do you understand about achievement now that you did not when you were younger?

James Cameron: I used to think that the great films that I saw, the great works of art, were something that somebody imagined in every detail and then went and did. I didn’t realize that the creative process 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. It’s a real time monitoring, shaping, molding process. The end result may be quite different than what you imagined when you started out, but that that’s how it works.

I’m at an interesting point right now. Just having done this film, it’s definitely a high water mark and I have to evaluate what that means. Do I let the success of that overpower my artistic instincts? There’s a lot of things I want to do and I know for certain some of them are going to be disappointments to people who think I’m going to come out and try to kick Titanic‘s butt. It might be some little intimate thing or it might be something that’s a little off center.

Sometimes success brings with it a tremendous amount of scrutiny and anticipation of what’s going to happen next. That is not a good thing necessarily. You want to have the freedom to just react instinctively as an artist and not second guess yourself.

I’ve been speaking to young people a lot lately, who are right at the cusp of deciding their path. I relate where I am right now to where I was when I was 18 years old and thinking, “I’ve got to make this big decision what I’m going to be, and if I mess up I mess up my whole life,” and it’s just not like that.

It’s an evolving process, so I think the illumination I might be able to share is, “You’ve got time.” As long as you follow your heart, you’ll be going in 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.

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 and what you should do. Those voices can be deflecting you off your true course. I didn’t find my true course until I was 25, so you’ve got time. I don’t think you have until your 45, but I think you have at least until you’re in your mid 20’s. And, of course, there are stories of a legion of people who didn’t find their true calling until they are in their 40s or 50s.

I had the great opportunity to become friends briefly with a woman who died recently at the age of 105. She was an artist in California named Beatrice Wood. She was a little bit the inspiration for the character 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 kind of a model for this character even though Beatrice had no connection to Titanic itself. She said, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that because I’m only 35.” She was 102 at the time. She was an artist, and none of her significant work was done before she was 90. She switched on when she hit 90. I think that’s an interesting thing to remember.

One hears stories about Jim Cameron at work on the set, the madman, the crackpot visionary. Wherever these stories come from, is it an obsessiveness, a passion that is necessary to get where you want to go?

James Cameron: What people call obsession or passion, for me it’s just a work ethic. I think it comes from an insecurity that I’m not good enough. There are other people out there that I grew up admiring that are still making movies, and those movies are great. I’ve got to compete with these guys and these women. Have I thought of everything? Have I thought of every detail? Is this the best the scene can be? It comes from a healthy insecurity that makes you better as an artist. And just from a kind of gonzo intensity.

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 bulbs. You know? I mean, the more the challenge is, the more I enjoy it. And the more I can lead other people into these situations where they all think they’re going to die, the more fun I’m having. So needless to say we have a few washouts. We have a few people that don’t like my version of day camp, but I would say that 80 or 90 percent of them feel like they’ve been through something. 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.

What does the American Dream mean to you?

James Cameron: As a Canadian, the American Dream had a very negative and pejorative connotation when I was growing up, because it was this kind of cultural imperialism. I grew up in a border town on the other side of the border in Niagara Falls, Canada. But since I moved to the United States at the age of 17, I actually feel very much like I’m probably, in my basic genetic nature, much more American than Canadian because I really believe strongly in a lot of the traditional values of this country in terms of respecting individuals’ rights. The rights to freedom of speech and a lot of the things that are in the basic fabric of this country.

Americans, and Canadians even to a large extent, are — they come from frontiersman stock, so they are people who, you know, hewed their civilization out of the wilderness. It wasn’t given to them. You know, it’s not like people growing up in Italy or France in the shadow of past glories from thousands of years before. 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 sort of puts your hand on the tiller of destiny in a way and America definitely has its hand on the tiller of destiny for this planet. For good or bad. It doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing necessarily.

Americans are very happy to argue like crazy about everything and hold things up to ridicule that other countries just take for granted and I think that that’s a good thing. I mean, the whole Monica Lewinsky thing is the back side of that. It just goes on and on forever and other countries all think we’re a bunch of idiots, but it’s a manifestation of a good thing — that everything has to be examined and challenged, and that’s a great thing.

Anybody can come here from anywhere, and if you’ve got the goods it’s a meritocracy. There are inequities just like anywhere, but we challenge the inequities. We’re trying to evolve. Certain other countries aren’t even trying to evolve. They’re not trying to challenge those inequities. There’s something that can happen here that’s unique.

Because America has imbedded within it this thing called Hollywood — this Mecca to which filmmakers from all over the world come and participate — it has become a kind of entertainment/pop culture leader for the world. There’s a grave responsibility in that as well. I’m not sure that that mantle is being worn well right now, but it’s the place to be. I could go on for hours about that.

We could go on for a couple of hours talking to you. You’ve been terrific and we really appreciate it.