James Cameron Talks ‘Avatar,’ ‘Alien: Romulus’ and Whales in Spicy Chat: “Damn Right I’m Overbearing”
You gotta love James Cameron when he’s the most James Cameron.
The Oscar-winning writer-producer-director got on the phone for precisely 15 minutes to talk about his new National Geographic documentary OceanXplorers, and from there we branched out to touch on a host of other Cameron-verse topics — like this week’s release of Alien: Romulus, Netflix’s upcoming animated series Terminator Zero, Avatar 3 aka Avatar: Fire & Ash, the recent 4K transfers of Aliens and True Lies, Roland Emmerich’s viral comments about a Fantastic Voyage reboot, and why Cameron doesn’t believe extraterrestrial life has visited Earth.
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Cameron didn’t hold back. The 69-year-old demonstrated his immense passion and depth of knowledge for all things oceanic when discussing his upcoming series OceanXplorers (trailer below) — which follows a young team of researchers on a state-of-the-art ship exploring uncharted ocean territory. Cameron narrates the six-episode series, which has been dubbed “one of the most ambitious ocean adventures ever filmed.” And Cameron showed he can be super candid when it comes to certain other subjects related to his filmography. The result is a brief but intense chat that captures Cameron as both a scientific mind and explorer and as a legendary franchise-fueling filmmaker who does not mince words (though — and it can be tough to tell this when reading a Q&A — Cameron always retained his sense of humor and infectious LFG energy).
Hi! Thanks for doing this.
No worries. Let’s jump in.
What excites you about this OceanXplorers project?
One thing that excites me is we actually got this damn thing done. It’s been several years because we got preempted by the pandemic, and then there was all the time at sea. With my Avatar duties, I couldn’t actually be on the ship. So it was great when we got to work in the cutting room and saw all the footage coming in and the amazing stuff they were able to gather — like putting our young researchers right there with the animals at depth, or in a boat tagging a hammerhead, or having them right in the middle of a huge pod of orcas.
I’ve done eight [previous] expeditions. Pulling it off always feels like a miracle. They’ve all been very carefully planned. But when you go in the ocean, the ocean hasn’t read your script — you never know what’s going to happen. You got to be very flexible, and you got to be ready to move quick. When something does manifest itself, those doors open for moments. We got a 6,000-meter ROV. We got 2,000-meter subs. We’ve got a good dive team that can do mixed gas, technical diving — all that sort of thing. Then we had these young researchers and explorers who really knew their stuff. They had never been on a ship as well equipped as the OceanXplorer, but then, nobody has — myself included.
There has been a lot of conversation in the past few years about UAPs [unidentified aerial phenomena] along with USOs — underwater submerged objects — which you brought to the pop culture forefront with The Abyss. You’ve spent so much time on and in the ocean. Have you ever seen anything that you cannot explain?
I’ve seen some geological formations that were intriguing that I really wanted to understand better that I don’t think have been well observed before. I’ve photographed new species — things that were not immediately identifiable. But I’ve never seen anything that couldn’t be explained in the sense of some extraterrestrial phenomenon. Now, “belief” is a principle that I don’t have. I don’t believe things. I admit the possibility of things because the universe is infinite and obviously much stranger than we think, and much more complex than we think — that’s what makes science so appealing. But I don’t make broad statements like, “Well, I believe there must be extraterrestrial life; the universe is so big.” Yeah, it’s really big — and getting here would be a really, really big problem if there is even life out there, and if that life is intelligent. How are they crossing light years of space? I studied physics before I became a lit major, and people have no concept of the magnitude of that problem from a physics standpoint. I have a pretty good grasp of where physics was in 1972 — which basically is laughable at this point — but I keep up.
Touching on some other things in your filmic universe, this week we have Alien: Romulus opening — a film you have seen. What did you think of it? [Director Fede álverez has previously said Cameron has “seen the movie and loved it” and that he gave notes.]
I saw a rough cut six months ago, so I’m sure it’s changed a lot. And I viewed it once. I gave some notes to [álvarez]. He and I aren’t close pals. I mean, I wish him the best with it, but I think it’s been overstated that I had some big creative input to that film. I think Ridley [Scott] did because Ridley was an actual producer on the film. So I’m just putting it in perspective.
Another upcoming project that expands on work you’ve previously done is Netflix’s Terminator Zero animated series. I’m curious if you have seen that one, by chance.
It looks interesting. My relationship to that is very much like The Sarah Connor Chronicles — other people spinning stories in a world I set in motion is interesting to me. What’s their takeaway? What intrigued them about it? Where are they going with it? It looks like they’re going back to the root cause of Judgment Day — the nuclear war — and whether that’s an ultimate timeline. I’d be curious to see what they’ve come up with. I’m working on my own Terminator stuff right now. It’s got nothing to do with that. Like with The Sarah Connor Chronicles, they occasionally touched on things I had been playing with completely independently. So there’s some curiosity there. It’s not a burning curiosity, but, obviously, it’d be nice to see it succeed.
Wait. What’s your own Terminator stuff that you’re working on? I wasn’t aware of that.
It’s totally classified. I don’t want to have to send out a potentially dangerous robotic agent if you were to talk about it, even retroactively.
Fair. Intriguing, though. Another potential project for you is the Fantastic Voyage movie. Roland Emmerich said at Comic-Con that he pulled out of that.
How is this a headline?
Well, he called you “overbearing.”
I’ve never said anything negative about Roland. But anyway: Yes, I’m overbearing. Damn right. When it’s a project where I’ve contributed to the writing, I might actually have an opinion on it. I actually don’t even remember talking to Roland Emmerich about Fantastic. I remember the other directors that we worked with for months on end trying to develop that project. If I talked to Roland, it was for two minutes. I have a pretty good memory, and I don’t remember that at all.
Is that project still in the works?
Move on, that’s a non-story.
So you’ve also had recently the 4K transfers of Aliens and True Lies that came out. It did get blowback in the fan community, some feeling that the image quality wasn’t as high as they wanted it to be. You obviously have a very high standard. So I’m wondering what you thought?
When people start reviewing your grain structure, they need to move out of mom’s basement and meet somebody. Right? I’m serious. I mean, are you fucking kidding me? I’ve got a great team that does the transfers. I do all the color and density work. I look at every shot, every frame, and then the final transfer is done by a guy who has been with me [for years]. All the Avatar films are done that way. Everything is done that way. Get a life, people, seriously.
Speaking of Avatar, you’re in postproduction on Avatar 3 for a couple years. How is that going? Any updates for those fans?
Yeah. It’s really fucking cool. You’re going to love it. And I can’t talk about it.
Do you still plan to personally direct four and five? [It was previously reported Cameron might not.]
Sure. Absolutely. I mean, they’re going to have to stop me. I got plenty of energy, love doing what I’m doing. Why would I not? And they’re written, by the way. I just reread both of them about a month ago. They’re cracking stories. They’ve got to get made. Look, if I get hit by a bus and I’m in an iron lung, somebody else is going to do it.
Well, hopefully that won’t happen.
Yeah, I try to avoid that kind of scenario.
Let’s end by circling back to OceanXplorers. Was there anything that came out of this that sort of surprised even you, with all your experience and exploring?
It’s always a surprise. Every time you go into the deep, you never know what you’re going to see. It’s a lot of disappointment and a lot of fun surprises, and there’s a lot of luck involved. Getting a camera onto a female mother orca who’s trying to teach her 1-year-old male calf how to feed on a humpback calf when its mother is protecting him. We got a camera onto her and watched her in action underwater during this long, repetitive attack. It’s heartbreaking. At the same time, it’s kind of heartwarming because she’s taking care of hers and the poor humpback mom was trying to take care of hers, and it didn’t work out so well for the humpback. But you’ve got to appreciate both sides of that equation. And my editorial team, when they first cut the sequence, the orchestra [music was like], “Oh, here come the bad guys.” And I said, “Guys, this is totally wrong, go back, redo it.”
I have also done a lot of ship-based filming and I put together a list of all the things I believed one would want to see — all the dream elements from doing expedition work. That’s what I recommended to [billionaire investors] Ray and Mark Dalio when they were putting the ship together and refitting it. I brought in a Hollywood-style production designer and said, “Let’s make this look like the most advanced research platform that it actually is. Let’s have it be a place where you can walk into a room, switch on the camera and start rolling because all the lighting is built in, so you’re not going to crush the spirit and momentum of the moment by having to rig the lights and do all that sort of thing.” We applied a reality TV shooting mentality to a legitimate research endeavor and had all the tools available, subs, the vehicles, the cameras, the camera rigs.
Some of the footage is quite remarkable and there are a lot of new science things people didn’t know. Hopefully some actual publishing will emerge from this. I don’t think the TV audience cares about that, but we do.
The six-episode OceanXplorers premieres Sunday, Aug. 18, and streams on Hulu and Disney+.
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