James Cameron Quotations

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 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.

What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?

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.

The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.

I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.

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.

Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.

I blame it on Walt Disney, where animals are given human qualities. People don't understand that a wild animal is not something that is nice to pat. It can seriously harm you.

I'm hopeful that we'll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.

I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. 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.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.

I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.

To convince people to back your idea, you've got to sell it to yourself and know when it's the moment. Sometimes that means waiting. It's like surfing. You don't create energy, you just harvest energy already out there.

If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.

Inspiration can hit you in the head at any time in any context. It could happen in a conversation. Talking to someone at a party, you can get an idea. But you've got to remember those inspirations.

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.

Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don't use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.

People call me a perfectionist, but I'm not. I'm a rightist. I do something until it's right, and then I move on to the next thing.

Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.

The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer.

There is a hugely underserved population out there... those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.

We're in a fight for survival here. Maybe we just need to fight back harder, come out blazing, not wither away and die. D-cinema can do it, for a number of reasons, but because d-cinema is an enabling technology for 3-D. Digital 3-D is a revolutionary form of showmanship that is within our grasp. It can get people off their butts and away from their portable devices and get people back in the theaters where they belong.

We're so scared of piracy right now that we're ready to pimp out our mothers. This whole day-and-date DVD release nonsense? Here's an answer: (Digital cinema is) one of the strongest reasons I've been pushing 3-D for the past few years because it offers a powerful experience which you can only have in the movie theater.

Building upon the world we created with 'Avatar' has been a rare and incredibly rewarding experience. In writing the new films, I've come to realize that 'Avatar's world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.

I felt it was kind of a snub, not of the film per se, but of all the other people who did care and had sweated blood for the movie.

I don't use film cameras. I don't do visual effects the same way. We don't use miniature models; it's all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It's a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same.

There is a hugely underserved population out there, ... Those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.

I think this is likely to get bigger than the interest rate swaps market within 10 to 15 years, particularly once America joins in.

Otherwise we will have a situation like what happened with the peer-to-peer problems in the music industry, and there will be a loss in revenue in the film industry, and then we won't be able to create the magic that we have in the past.

Wall Street is waking up to climate change risks and opportunities. Considerably more of the world's largest corporations are getting a handle on what climate change means for their business and what they need to do to capture opportunities and mitigate risks. This all points to a continued elevation of climate change as a critical shareholder value issue for investors.

We've been discussing already an 'Aliens' attraction and there's a discussion of a 'Titanic' attraction, what I call the 'Titanic' restaurant-slash-near-death experience.

Bill has come down to Hollywood to make this announcement, and that is a first,

Thanks to the support of investors and corporations over the last five years, CDP has generated the leading database of investment- relevant information regarding climate change. We are proud to be able to help investors and corporations make informed decisions on the subject.

People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn't really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things.

Northrop Grumman Technical Services is honored to be selected by the Department of Energy for this significant responsibility. This contract demonstrates our commitment to this market segment and the rationale for the creation of Northrop Grumman Technical Services.

After I told them that was not acceptable, they went right ahead and did it.

It's a relatively new phenomenon... (Investors) want to invest in clean energy, but want to extract a little more value from dirty energy first. They will get there.

Targets and timetables do matter. But there is a dispirited feeling that the U.S. just rejects multilateral target-setting for the time being.

It just shows a total disregard and disrespect for wild animals.

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.

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.

Clearly their business was not highly impacted by it,

Clearly, greenhouse gases are going to become a financial issue of increasing significance.

Everybody's going to do the 3D slightly differently the same way that people are going to deal with color differently. Some movies downplay the color, some color is very vibrant. Color design is very different. We've got to think of 3D like color or like sound, as just part of the creative palette that we paint with and not some whole new thing that completely redefines the medium.

I don't just want to be associated with a few good 3D movies and the audience is saying all of the other ones are crap.

We have nightmares because our brain is running simulations to put us in jeopardy to see what we'll do or to acclimatize us to that idea that something bad could happen. It's just how human beings are wired because the entire time we were evolving we had to jump quick or the leopard would get us or whatever it was. It's Darwinian.

I'm a curious guy. I can't turn away from an investigative story, when it comes to the forensic analysis. I've done 33 dives, to the titanic wreck site. I've spent over 50 hours piloting robotic vehicles at that wreck trying to piece together what happened during the disaster. How the ship broke up, comparing the historical record with the forensic record. Documentaries are kind of my new life. I love documentary filmmaking.

If it was up to the studio, everything would be shot with a camcorder.

Usually, when you go to a movie, your consciousness floats above the film. 3D sucks you in and makes it a visceral experience.

I probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that's gone before that it's sort of like a fractal. It's gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you're a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations.

I think "Avatar" is kind of a unique category where people are enjoying the unique theatrical experience even though they may have seen it on the small screen. They want to have that immersive, transportive experience. "2001: A Space Odyssey" played for three years at the Loews cinema in Toronto. I remember that. It just kept playing. People wanted to return to that experience. That may not be the best example because I think "2001" took 25 years to break even.

You can have a strong economy or you can help the environment, but you can't do both at the same time. That's ridiculous. In fact, as a sustainable vision for a healthy economy has to involve changing our energy policy and changing with respect to the natural world. Because we're hitting nature's thresholds, we're hitting nature's limits with respect to water and crop yields and energy use and fossil fuels heating the atmosphere at the same time we're past global peak and running out of that.

The nation that leads in renewable energy will be the nation that leads the world.

I'm certainly not a fan of conversion when you could shoot the movie in 3-D.

Climate change is critical to me because I'm a parent; I feel a sense of responsibility to the future. I'm not going to be around to see its worst effects, which are going to be hitting in the 2030s, '40s, '50s, but my kids will.

Everybody is always talking about droughts and sea level rise, but when human civilization, with more crowding and greater resource depletion, is under that much stress, it translates into wars and huge displaced populations. The Syrian refugee crisis is just a first taste of what it's going to be like. I don't want my kids growing up in that kind of world.

Jack: Where to, Miss? Rose: To the stars.

The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.

I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt. It saves so much time.

It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.

Rose: You have a gift Jack, you do. You see people. Jack: I see you. Rose: And? Jack: You wouldn't have jumped.

It's really the sense of isolation, more than anything, realizing how tiny you are down in this big vast black unknown and unexplored place,

We have a great responsibility. Whatever we make will become the truth, the visual reality that a generation will accept.

If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.

Rose: But now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me... in every way that a person can be saved

Muslims shared many of the deep-seated characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon elite-an intuitive resentment of culture, an amicable contempt for women, a proclivity for riding about on horses, a pleasure in discipline, and a covert homophilia.

I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff "pieces", when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.

Targets and timetables do matter. But there is a dispirited feeling that the U.S. just rejects multilateral target-setting for the time being.

That worst evil of long dictatorships: the loss of all political experience.

I dreamed I was a soldier who could bring peace. Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up.

You can't really call yourself an environmentalist if you're still consuming animals. You just can't.

The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask.

Much of my life seems in retrospect to have been spent in the company of putative national leaders passing through the process of being denounced and imprisoned for sedition, as part of the inevitable progression towards the Prime Ministership and the ritual tea-party at Windsor Castle.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff. Don't get high on your own supply. The hardest thing as a filmmaker is when you're watching a film that you've worked on for several years. You know every frame so intimately that holding lots of the objectivity of a new viewer who has just seen it for the first time is the hardest thing. Every aesthetic decision you make - and you make thousands of them every day, have to - in theory, must be done from you being a blank slate. You almost have to run a program, like a mind wipe, every time you watch the movie.

When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long.

Go home, pick up your video camera, and make a film.

I'm willing to engage or indulge real ideas, but if we don't do something [about global warming], we're all going to die! What's it going to take, a big f--ing disaster with all kinds of people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.

I guess Titanic because it made the most money. No, I`m kidding. I don`t really have a favorite. Maybe Terminator because that was the film that was the first one back when I was essentially a truck driver.

You don't rest well as long as you're seeking vengeance. I feel sad justice wasn't done, but it's time to move on and sleep well.

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.

Broken Horses is an artistic triumph. Beautifully written, acted and imaged, this film wraps slowly around you like a king snake and squeezes,

God wears white flannels.

Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.

I'm King Of The World!!!

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Where else but in Texas would men set up to administer space?

Your only competitors are your past achievements.

It's about human imagination and curiosity. What's out there? What's in the great beyond? What exists at levels we can't see with our five senses?

Hate is a disease, and in 1930 I became sick with hatred.

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.

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.

I don't look at scripts. I just write them.

I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength. [From a 1986 Fangoria interview]

So my message is in whichever realm, be it going into space or going into the deep sea, you have to balance the yin and yang of caution and boldness, risk aversion and risk taking, fear and fearlessness. No great accomplishment takes place, whether it be a movie or a deep ocean expedition, or a space mission, without a kind of dynamic equipoise between the two. Luck is not a factor. Hope is not a strategy. Fear is not an option.

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,

Religions fulfill deep-seated psychological needs for people, and if you don't get it from a specific religious doctrine, you'll get it from the kind of films I like to make. A film like The Terminator is consciously meant to give a sense of empowerment to the individual.

The last I checked, 'Titanic' worldwide has grossed $1.3 billion. Imagine how much more it would have grossed if I had gotten the sky correct,