after James Cameron's Avatar made $2.7 billion the director found the deepest point that exists in all of the Earth's oceans and Dove to it when Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench he became the first person in history to descend the 6.8 M distance solo since then others have followed most
prominently a private Equity Titan and former naval Reserve intelligence officer turned Explorer named Victor vovo but Cameron is adamant that none have surpassed him vovo Cameron told me claimed that he went deeper but you can't so he's basically just making [ __ ] up vovo disagrees I have a different
scientific perspective he told me diplomatically but even he is a fan of Cameron's films like Cameron vovo has made multiple Dives to the wreck of the Titanic and while returning from one of them he emailed Cameron I said I watch Titanic at the Titanic and he actually replied yeah but I made Titanic at the Titanic
it is perhaps illustrative of Cameron's gifts as a filmmaker that even as most determined Rivals will admit that Cameron has written and directed some of the most successful films of all time it would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie which he helped invent with his debut the Terminator and
then reinvent with his second aliens it would be accurate to add that he has directed two of the three top grossing films films in history but he's also a scientist a camera that he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars attached to the Mars rover and he's an adventurer and not in
the dilaton billionaire sense when Cameron sets out to do something it gets done the man was born with an Explorer's instincts and capacity the original Avatar required the invention of dozens of new technologies from the cameras Cameron shot with to the digital effects that he used to transform human actors
into animated creatures to the language those creatures spoke in the film for the sequel the way of water Cameron told me he and his team started all over again they needed new cameras that could shoot underwater and a motion caption system that could collect separate shots from above and below the water and then
integrate them into a unified virtual image they needed new algorithms new AI to translate what Cameron shot with what you see nothing would work the first time Cameron and the production tried it or the second or usually the third Cameron showed me a single effect shot numbered
405 that means there's been 405 versions of this before it gets to me he said Cameron has been working on the movie since 2013 it was due out years ago the way of water was expensive to make if you ask James Cameron how expensive he replies very [ __ ] but as Cameron worked late into the evening day after
day solving the infinite problems that the way of water continued to present he seemed to be enjoying himself I like difficult he told me I'm attracted by difficult difficult is a [ __ ] magnet for me I go straight to difficult and I think it's probably goes back to this idea that there's a lot of smart really
gifted really talented filmmakers out there that just can't do the difficult stuff so that gives me a tical Edge to do something nobody else has ever seen because the really gifted people don't [ __ ] want to do it Cameron and his fifth wife live year round in New Zealand where they have owned a 5,000
Acre Farm since 2011 in the early days of the pandemic Cameron and his wife gave up their home in Malibu and became full-time residents here I asked Cameron if it had been lonely moving halfway around the world I don't have any friends so it's okay he said with only a hint of a smile Cameron's Malibu
compound was known for its survivalist Vibe fast cars a security team trained in fighting wildfires guns he had himself trained by one of the best Championship Shooters in America he's the guy that taught Koo Reeves how to be John Wick I was his first Hollywood contact I trained with him for three
years and so I'm a competition grade shooter at 68 years old Cameron wakes up at 4:45 a.m. and and often kickbox in the morning Cameron is proud to work at the biggest scale possible Terminator 2 True Lies and Titanic were all among the most expensive films ever made at the time of their release to date all of his
films have made their money back many of them spectacularly self-doubt in general is not something Cameron has a lot of experience with I don't think I'm hardwired with that I don't know why Cameron was always the type of person whose confidence preceded his achievements confidence preceded his
achievements that is an idea that you and I have discussed on multiple biographies it's in a lot of these books the fact that belief comes before ability that's the exact same idea Cameron was always the type of person whose confidence preceded his achievements it was while working as a truck driver in his 20s that Cameron
decided to become a filmmaker and so he taught himself filmmaking he'd go to the Stacks at the library at the University of Southern California which was home of the vaunted film making program that Cameron couldn't afford I'd find somebody's 300 Page dissertation on optical printing Cameron said and I'd be
going through this and I'd think well I've got to get this so I'd pull out the Staples and I'd photocopy the entire 300 pages and then I just kept doing the same thing week after week for about 6 months and I'm driving a truck but I had these binders I was going through this
stuff chapter and verse and making my own notes and all that I basically gave myself a college education and visual effects in cinematography while I was driving a truck the idea for the Terminator came to him in a dream so did the pivotal scene in his second film aliens Cameron has a rich dream life to
this day I have my own private streaming service that's better than any of that [ __ ] that's out there and it runs every night for free he said Avatar also originally came to Cameron while he was asleep I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that kind of look like fiber optic
lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that Lit Up When You Walked on it it was all in the dream I woke up super excited and I actually drew it so I actually have a drawing it saved us from about 10 lawsuits any successful film there's
always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks that you beam their idea out of their head and it turned out there were 10 or 11 of them and so I pointed at this drawing I did when I was 19 when I was going to fton Junior College and said do you see this you see the glowing trees do you see the
glowing lizard that spins around that's orange do you see the purple moss and everybody went away Zoe salana who starred in the first Avatar and returns for the second and who also works frequently in the Marvel Universe pointed out how comparatively unique Cameron's approach is in modern Hollywood the Marvel franchises are
built by dozens of comic book artists and writers and directors who work together to create these stories by contrast Avatar is a result of the vision of a single man without Jim's heavy heavy brain this would all fall apart when Cameron moves he moves fast and favors one side when I asked him
what he' done to give himself a limp he looked at me curiously I've got one short leg he said it doesn't slow me down any though Cameron in his nearly 40 Years of filming making has earned a reputation for having a temper some would say he's earned this reputation several times over on more than one
Cameron set crew members have taken to wearing shirts that read you can't scare me I work for Jim Cameron Cameron is well aware of this so I looked at it and I was like all right why am I getting so upset and what is that solving I'm not saying I don't get upset once in a while I mean everybody I think is entitled to
having a bad day whereas before it might have been once every couple of weeks now it's like twice a year Cameron recalled working with Ron Howard the famously nice director on the visual effects for Apollo 13 and I just watched what a great guy he was and I'm like I'm a total [ __ ] compared to Ron Howard I
have to get in touch with my inner Ron Howard but despite his famous temper Cameron has always inspired loyalty the process of how Cameron builds the Avatar films as complex I asked if he knew of anyone else working this way and he laughed they'd be insane to even try he said and
I don't mean that we're special I mean like if we hadn't made more money than any other movie in history this is the last [ __ ] thing that I'd want to be doing Cameron is famous for being able to do any job on a movie set some say he can do most jobs better than the people he employs to do them Cameron disputes
this although mildly not better than he told me but I'm not just some brain in a bowl creative type sitting over in a tent someplace saying yeah put that over there it's a curious fact that Cameron has directed only two feature films in the last 25 years this is a part of the explanation for why Cameron has at times
drifted away from film making he said there's a certain point where my mind wants to solve problems that are real world problems for a while his career in Ocean exploration which Cameron got serious about after making Titanic nearly kept him away from directing a film ever again I didn't get back into
making movies for eight years he told me I was having too much fun and when he did decide to return to Hollywood with his idea for the first avatar Cameron's longtime Studio Fox almost didn't want to make it Cameron has mellowed with time and age but he is still a score settler a keeper of grudges and this is
what he said when Fox initially passed and I said now just so you know before your tailights are out of sight I will be on the phone with Disney who wants this and we'll make a deal and that'll be that and then whatever happens happens and and you might look like a big dick if it makes a lot of money in
the end Fox did come back and Cameron made Avatar with the studio but Cameron still remembers an executive at the company who will go unnamed because this is a really negative review this executive approached Cameron after a pre-release screening of the film and begged the director to shorten it I said
something that I've never said to anybody else in the business Cameron recalled I said I think this movie is going to make all the [ __ ] money and when it does it's going to be too late for you to love the film the time for you to love the movie is today so I'm not asking you to say something that you
don't feel but just know that I will always know that no matter how complimentary you are about the movie in the future when it makes all the money and that's exactly what I said Inc caps all the money not some of the money all the [ __ ] money I said you can come back to me and compliment the film or
Chum along and say look what we did together you will not be able to do that and then of course the film came out and made all the money I asked Cameron whether he had a theory about why I don't think I need a theory he said I think anybody that's seen the movie knows why it's a [ __ ] gigantic
Adventure that's an allc consuming emotional experience that leaves you rung out by the end of the movie and it was groundbreaking visually and it still holds up today so I don't think I need a theory after Avatar Cameron again walked away for a while he Dove to the Marana trench to the deepest point on Earth and
there was a period there about a year and a half where I didn't even know if I wanted to make another Avatar film I knew how all consuming it would be it basically took over my life for 4 years I had no other life for four years making that first film and I thought do I really want to do this again it's the
highest grossing film in history can't I just tag that Bas and move move on but the problem was he still had ideas he knew of course that on some level he was running out of time when you get into your mid-60s you start realizing that the axe could fall at any moment maybe it's next week maybe it's in 30 years
Cameron said that in the end the answer he landed on was this I'm a Storyteller and there's stories to be told I'm not done until the big hook comes out from the side of the curtain so to me me everything every idea is a work in progress the list of things that Cameron has failed at is short but there are a
few destinations that have eluded him one of them is space but he's come close he went to Daniel golden who was then the NASA administrator and overseeing the Assembly of the International Space Station and asked if he could go up to the American side of the ISS they met for a summit golden offered Cameron a
shuttle flight instead no ISS but he'd see the planet from above he would see space golden said the ISS at the moment was too difficult Cameron thought about it he said to himself maybe everything that I've been doing over the last few years leads to this exact moment when the administrator of NASA is willing to
make a solid deal to fly me on the space shuttle but he looked at his heart and he decided no he would only go to space on his own terms are you seeing a theme Here with James Cameron we haven't even gotten to the book yet he would only go to space on his own terms I said I've got to say no I want to stick to my plan
even if it can't happen then Colombia was lost on February 1st 2003 the spacial Columbia disintegrated taking with it sever Souls Cameron went to their memorial service but he never got to go to space I asked what level of regret he had about this the fact that he never went zero he said different
life and he's been on a plan of his own making ever since I was driving back to my hotel not too long after when the phone rang it was Cameron wanting to talk again about the shuttle flight that he had turned down I forgot the punch line to the story Cameron said the punch line is the shuttle mission that I
refused it was the Colombia his voice Rose I [ __ ] saved my own life by choosing the higher path okay so that was a super long excerpt not from the book that I'm going to talk to you about this is from this unbeliev believable long form piece on GQ I will leave the link down below it is called The Return
of James Cameron box office King and it was written by Zack Baron I read this article it completely took over my life life this episode that you're about to hear I have never ever worked on an episode longer than this one this I've been in the mind and completely obsessed with James Cameron starting with this
incredible piece in GQ I don't even know for how many weeks so I I read this this piece I like oh my God I have to learn more about this guy and so I immediately ordered a biography on him that biography which I'll talk to you about today and I'm going to go over now it's called the futurist the life in films of
James Cameron it was written by Rebecca Keegan and it was produced right after that the book's about 10 or 12 years old produced right after the original Avatar came out but what I would do is every night uh I'll leave the link down below you got to read the entire GQ article
it's incredible but I would also listen to it it's 36 minutes long they use this technology called and you can instead of reading you can listen to the whole thing I would fall asleep as I'm reading the this biography of James Cameron every night I would fall asleep listening to this article
again and I probably listened to it I don't know 10 or 15 times it just unbelievably impressive with not only how he approached his work but his absolute insistence on building his own world within the world so I wanted to read the the excerpt from that article first because that's the order that this information on James
camer was presented to me I think there's going to be a few of these things that's going to be repeated throughout the book but I think it gives you that overview is going to give you a better introduction into Cameron and why he is a one of one an unbelievably unique individual who is unapologetically Extreme that is one of
the most most important things that I learned about him and one thing I'm going to take away and I I I do think this guy is going to change my and change my approach to my own work but also reinforce it so let me jump in because I got a stuff to talk to you about just going to go over a brief
overview and the introduction real quick he's a truck driver who directed the highest grossing movie of all time he then ditched Hollywood to spend a decade of his life exploring the deep ocean and the heights of science he's a tinkerer and a dreamer who pioneered tools that revolutionized the way stories are told
technologies that a generation of filmmakers now rely upon he spent his adulthood doing things that other people called impossible as I watched a director work I became curious about a man who seemed interested only in doing doing things that were hard and so when I got to this part it made me think of
one of my personal Heroes Edwin land this is exactly what he said he says do some interesting science that is all your own and if it is manifestly important and nearly impossible it will be fulfilling and maybe even a way to get rich that sounds a lot like Cameron's quote in the GQ article he's
like I'm attracted to hard hard is like a magnet to me he says that in 2023 and back in 2009 or 2008 when uh this book is being written he's like hey I this is very curious I I started watching this man and he seemed only interested in doing things that were hard Edwin land was only interested in doing things that
were hard Steve Jobs was only interested in doing things that were hard and when you choose the hard path and you you put all your effort and focus into it and you were wind up being like you solve the the problem the technical problems that you have to solve and you actually succeeded doing the hard things other
people can't help but respect even the people in his field there's multiple examples in this book this is just the first one where other directors who are the top of their professionals like no I come to James to learn and so we have Peter Jackson here uh he's the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and
this is what he says you can't help but come away from spending time with Jim feeling that you're a little bit stupid he's got such a sharp mind he is formidable this idea of of training ourselves and becoming formidable individuals is something that you and I talk about over and over again I jumped
out of my seat when I saw that word in this book he's got such a sharp mind he's formidable Cameron's career has been built on questioning accepted wisdom believing the power of the individual his Outlook this oh my goodness like Goosebumps again his Outlook is that we can take fate in our
own hands I have to read that to you again this is what gets me so fired up about this guy Cameron's career has been built on questioning accepted wisdom believing in the power of the individual his Outlook is that we can take fate in our own hands okay so I just want to pull out a few things from his childhood
it's obvious James Cameron was a builder and a Founder from an extremely early age uh he winds up becoming even from like he's like a little kid him and his brother you know they love to Tinker they love to build things they love to experiment they're constantly making things like go-karts they make rafts
they make tree houses he's growing up in Canada before his dad um gets relocated by his job to Orange County California and I think one story that his mom tells in this book of like a little kid version of James Cameron you see oh this this is a Founder from day one Cameron demonstrated a knack for assembling
large groups in service of his go his own goals when her oldest son was about 10 she know noticed that his younger siblings and several neighborhood children were streaming into her her yard carrying scraps of wood and metal I said what are you guys doing with all this junk Jim said we're going to build
something and a couple hours later the kids had constructed an airplane guess who is sitting in it being pulled his mom said Cameron was very good at telling people what to do and so another thing to know about Cameron I highly likely that he's got a genius level IQ that that's what I took away from this
his mom gets a call when I think he's in like third grade or uh yeah I think it was the second grade I was like oh we're just gonna skip him to grade three and then he's already skipped one grade doesn't even get halfway through that and then she gets another call like oh no like we got to skip this kid again
and so it's going to be no surprise to you anybody that's intelligent they're going to read all the time he's started doing this a young age he would he was a voracious reader and we see this with a lot of like the interesting Founders is they were when they were kids like think Jeff Bezos or think Elon Musk uh they
were obsessed with reading science fiction so James camon was the same thing like he would just sit there and read all the time and so he's doing that from the time he's in elementary school by the time he gets to high school like he's winning every single academic prize you could possibly win at school he
wents up becoming the president of a SC of the science club he becomes obsessed with history and studying ancient civilizations which is funny because later on in the book he has this great line I don't know if I'll cover it or not but it says something like I'm an Explorer by nature and I'm just a
filmmaker by trade and then even as far back as high school we see this development or the the initial development of this like lifelong trait that he has James is just extremely comfortable going his own way he never ever felt it necessary to follow the herd you see that in the way he makes
his films the fact that this guy literally gets to the top of his refesh is like yeah I'm just going to take like an eight-year break and dive the tit to the deepest part of the ocean and maybe NE never make a film again just because this is this is what I'm happen to be interested at this moment not really
concerned with what other people think I should be doing and I think this refusal to just give into the other thoughts of other people is like a massive Advantage for Founders it says the group think of his peers baffled him he's in high school at this point first period meant singing the National Anthem and sang The
Lord's Prayer in 10th Grade grade Cameron listened to his classmates and felt a surge of defiance it struck me as this tribal chant in the middle of all this he sat down opened his book and started to read this indifference to the opinions of other people concerning like his behavior something that continues to
this day uh something that changed his life when he was little kid he becomes uh fascinated uh by jacqu Gusto who was making all these like underwater documentaries so I think even by the time he got to high school he was already scuba C certified he winds up begging his parents to let him get uh to
take like a scuba class at like the local like YMCA and we start to see something this idea is like hey I want I don't just want to do scuba I just don't want to do anything that's just like the normal way I want the hard way he is extremely uh intentional about building himself into a formidable individual so
he says in the scuba class he learned diving military style with harassment drills in which the instructor pull instructor pulls off your mask and rips the regulator from your mouth this harsh training engendered in Cameron a confidence and resourcefulness that would help him survive two near drowning
experiences in his life so James comes from a family of Engineers his dad is an engineer his brother goes on to become an engineer and this is something like I was thinking about my relationship with my own uh my own son and my daughter for that matter this is just his dad just
does the right thing like he's like listen I'm going to back you no matter what I personally think and so the note I was leaving to myself I was like going through this it's like I really hope I you know my my son's still young he's three years old I hope I'm like this I hope I'm a dad like this when he's older
so it says Cameron's relationship with his father would strain in his teenage years because his father wanted James to become an engineer and his dad thought it was a little weird that his son was like obsessed uh with sci-fi and uh and like the stuff that he was reading he
says he didn't understand understand me very well because I was into Art and Science Fiction and a lot of fantasy however this is what I meant about good guy dad he would provide financial help in Cameron's hungry early years as an inspiring filmmaker tacitly supporting the career choice of his son no matter
how Grievous the odds was that his son would succeed good guy dad and so there is a line from last week's book last week's podcast on Walt Disney Picasso I absolutely love it says all creative individuals build on the works of their predecessors no one creates in a vacuum he it took seeing a
film another film we like oh wait I might be able to do this for a living so it says the first time he considered a film as a career was in 1968 I think he'd be around maybe 14 or 16 years old at the time he goes to the movie theater and he sees Stanley Kubrick's classic film which is 2001 A Space Odyssey and this is one of my
favorite lines in the entire book it was at that moment that Cameron went from being a fan of movies to wanting to make films himself what does he do not good enough to just see the movie the first time he goes back over and over and over again he's studying how do how did he do this he returned to the theater and saw
the films several more times trying to understand how cubric had managed to pull this off and right after this his dad gets transferred to Orange County California and most kids like you're in high school there's no way I think this might even been since like senior year of high school something like that and
most kids like oh I don't want to move like this is terrible he he he knew that Orange County was closer to Hollywood he already had this idea that he wanted to be a filmmaker and so his response teenage High School Jim Cameron's response is very unusual he says can we leave tomorrow and so it's After High
School Cameron goes to Fullerton Junior College which he which he mentioned earlier or mentioned in the GQ article right and there's a couple things that are really important here one everybody everybody who runs into James Cameron regardless of what point in his life they all comment on his intensity and so
this is the first time though he's like okay well maybe the first step of making becoming a filmmaker is actually becoming a screenwriter it took just meeting the right group of friends that had similar interest so it says Cameron was taking 14 credits at Fullerton College by day and then working four to
six hours a night as a Precision Tool and die machinist he has got a bunch of these PL Blue Collar jobs that he's got to work uh while he's going to college at time and he continued to tackle his own creative project on the side which was writing science fiction stories and drawing Jim was very intense he was very
bright and full of ideas he was one of those guys that when you met him you had the feeling he was going to do things and so he meets a friend at the same College this guy named Randall Frakes and Frakes shares Cameron's passion for science fiction for ancient history for exploration and franks is the first
person is like hey why don't like you should be writing your own science fiction movies and so he goes and gets all these scripts like the original scripts from for very famous movies like uh Citizen Kane and Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid and he's just like here James take a look at these like what
what would what would be considered well-written screen screenplays and that'll like give you ideas on how to do this and then you can just get started by doing that and it's at this point in Cameron's life story where it's like okay this is what a high agency person looks like he's working all the time
he's teaching himself how to write scripts in his spare time and he's giving himself a graduate level college education filmmaking education for free or for a couple hundred bucks this is high agency personified in his early 20s Cameron held a series of blueco collar jobs he'd work as a janitor a truck
driver and a machinist on break so he's he's driving a truck like a lunch truck for the uh the school district that he's uh living by and on breaks during the day when he's driving the truck right he curls up in his truck and starts writing uh writing screenplays at night after a full day camon would go and hang out
with friends with that had similar interest they would talk passionately about movies for hours on end on Saturdays that's not enough right this is again this is high agency Cameron would then go to the library at the University of Southern California and need photocopy all these graduate
student thesis on esoteric filmm subjects he filled two fat binders with technical papers for the cost of a couple hundred in photocopying he essentially put himself through a graduate course in visual effects at the top Film School in the country without ever meeting a single professor and so then he's like okay
well how do I break into the movie industry and he does something very smart like this is what I do if I I never have been on a job interview in my entire life but if I did right I wouldn't just send in a resume I would send in some kind of demo or some kind of proof of work and so what he does he
makes this like 12 minute little short film called exogenesis and so he takes exogenesis to this guy named Roger Corman Roger Corman has come up in past podcast because he winds up uh starting like Francis Ford Copa and Martin scorsi gives all these like legendary directors their first
shot in life so takes exogenesis to Roger corman's company Roger Corman runs this company called new world pictures it's like this bovie like kind of crappy films they just churn out a bunch of crappy films so they make money in volume as as opposed to to uh quality right but it's incredibly important
because it says Cameron was about to land exactly where he needed to be in a darwinian environment for wouldbe filmmakers a place that rewarded smarts and scrappiness and the kind of alpha behavior that he had honed why would the Roger Corman School of film like why was that the perfect place for a young
enthusiastic and driven person like James C is at this point in his life and the author does a fantastic job Rebecca King does a fantastic job here she goes the most successful product of corman's movie making factory had been people definitely not his movies his movies suck right but why is this important his
low-budget Productions had launched the careers check this out this is insane have launched the careers of Francis for Copa Martin scorsi Ron Howard Jack Nicholson and many others in Hollywood why because what he does is so smart Corman recruited The Young and the eager he was usually the only person working
at his company over the the age of 30 I was giving them training and an opportunity to make a movie that nobody else would give them you could go from carrying light stands to directing your first picture in less time than it took to graduate from film school so Cameron starts he create creates this like
calling card this demo of what he's capable of called exogenesis and that demo gets him hired as a model builder he's not a screenwriter he's not a director right he's a model builder but you've already I think now you've already gotten to know James Cameron a little bit right do you think he's gonna
stay a Mel Builder there's no way in hell this guy this guy's going to whatever the fastest path to promotion is you can be sure that that Cameron will find it and so that's what we're about to see here and so what we see next is that James Cameron was James Cameron before he was James Cameron this
is more High agency Behavior he is at the bottom like the entry level bottom of the totem pole somebody forgot to let him know that that was the case Cameron had only been at Corman for a matter of days but he was already taking charge listen to this line he seems constitutionally incapable of doing
otherwise he had a very commanding presence even if his position was not running the model shop he clearly seemed to be running the model shop Cameron was so eager and the production so consuming that he started sleeping at the model shop that was where he was when corman's assistant woke him up at 300 a.m. Corman
had had just fired the art director of the film that they're working on did Cameron want to take his place he had never been an art director and had no idea what the what was involved in the job sure Cameron said in a matter of weeks he had jumped from a model builder on a film to its art director so that's
another main idea main theme to learn about or learn from Cameron he just assumes that he can learn any job so if you ask him hey can you do this he'll say yes and then he'll figure out how to do it after and we see this in the early days of company Founders over and over again the fact that there is some kind
of benefit of not knowing what you don't know Cameron says there wasn't time for any doubt we didn't know the 27 reasons why we shouldn't be able to do exactly what we were in the process of doing there was this Blissful ignorance about the process of how films are really made that allowed us to do some pretty damn
extraordinary stuff given the time and budget restraints you come out of this with the feeling that you can do anything so he's the art director and he's like you know what I don't think I should be the art director I think I should be running this entire thing and the way what's about to happen here is
what he discovers is that your mediocrity is my opportunity so he's watching the director of this movie and he says he wasn't impressed these guys had no idea what they were doing I'm watching them just blowing it they're not getting the shots they're not getting the performances it was a light
bulb moment for Cameron I'm thinking I can do that he cornered Corman right he says hey I think I should be the second unit director I will work at night again Cameron made a job for himself and again Morman encouraged the enthusiastic young man and said that's a good idea start tomorrow because of his work on this
film he eventually gets uh recruited to be a director of this terrible terrible movie It's called like Piranha 2 or something like that and this is really important okay I you know what let me read this to you first and I'll read my takeaway from this on his fifth day at work Cameron learned that he was fired
his first opportunity to be the main director right he lasts 5 days 5 days well it felt like career a career- ending uh mistake however was actually just one beginning the torment Cameron went through over his failed first directing effort would lead him exactly where he needed to be into the dark
recesses of his mind for that is where he found the Terminator which is going to be this massive hit this is a punch line of this entire section he was 27 years old broke and depressed now this is the entire reason I just wanted to pull that one paragraph he gets hired to direct right quickly gets fired he finds
himself at 27 years old broke depressed feeling like loser 15 years from now he will be at the very top the very top of the same profession Excellence is the capacity to take pain what if he quit here so the Terminator was like one of my favorite movies uh when I was a kid but there's a few uh entire chapters
like the chapters are separated uh in this book on like what film he's working in so there's like unbelievable degree of detail so if you're really into some of these films uh reading read the chapters I I would highly recommend but there's just a few things about the Terminator that I want to pull out
because I think they're interesting and more widely applicable just not just to filmm but the aspect the first thing before you you how you can pitch a film right you have to write the script Cameron was not did not feel like he was a naturally gifted writer uh he write this is the first time he talks about
this so he talks about this his whole life he finds writing to be torture but he does it anyways and I think that's the biggest lesson here uh Cameron found writing a lonely and utterly un forgiving process it is very hard for me to get started and it is very hard for me to stay focused he said when he's
writing he tends to Bunker himself in working mainly at night and withdrawing from the outside world he used to tell friends that he'd like to buy the most uncomfortable chair he could find for writing so he would finish as fast as possible just to get out of it and so he writes this and then he goes around and
tries to find convince a studio to make the movie there's just one paragraph here great projects can happen in bad economies when they're trying to raise money for the Terminator this is 1982 unemployment's at 10% and interest rates are at 17% and they still manag to get the deal done and it's good that they
convince people to finance the movie because the the movie Only the Terminator the original Terminator right it only cost $6 million it winds up making 78 million on a $6 million investment and we see that James Cameron actually has a lot in common with the Terminator he has a Terminator like work
ethic he is doing the rewrite he's rewriting the Terminator script to get ready to film the movie right so he's already written once he's doing the rewriting then he also gets a job he has no he has no money at this time so you got to take every opportunity that he could get he gets a job to write the
sequel to aliens and I think it's a sequel to Rambo the the the movies uh with Sylvester Salone listen to how he does it this is what I mean that he has a ter Terminator like worker ethic this is wild that meant in a three-month period in 1983 he had to write three scripts Cameron approached this dilemma
as a Terminator might he decided that each script would be 120 Pages for a total page count of 360 he divided this is so wild he divided the total number of waking hours he had during the 3-month period by 360 and figured out how many pages per hour he had to write and I just wrote that many pages per
hour he said and so it's while he's working on the pre-production for determinator getting ready to shoot the movie he winds up meeting um another like highquality person they wanted becoming Partners uh this guy named Stan Winston and so this is James describing the partnership Stan and I clicked early on
because we both respect the artist and he saw one in me and vice versa and we were both a little crazy and enjoy each other's eccentricities the work that he did for Cameron in subsequent films would earn Winston three of his four Academy Awards and would lead to their co-founding a visual effects company
called digital domain in 1993 if you study the career of George Lucas I covered him all the way back on episode 35 I'm going to reread that book and and do an episode on it again in the future but this is something that Lucas and and Cameron have in common is they were constantly had an ideas on how visual
effects and things they wanted to do in their films that they couldn't figure out how to do so their solution was a little insane they're like oh well I just found my own special effects company so Lucas famously founded industrial Light and Magic Cameron's going to wind up being a a customer of
theirs and then James does the same thing when he founds digital remain with Stan Winston in 1993 and so once the production on Terminator begins we see something that was echoed in the the the GQ piece the fact that people call anybody that works with James they call him the do-it-yourselfer they they all
say that he likes being extremely Hands-On and then I've seen him speak in other interviews uh because I watched a bunch of his interviews he's like listen this is the only way that I can work that's the way I want to work Cameron established the Hands-On working style that he would take to an extreme in
later films Cameron would be holding the camera editing the footage mixing the sound performing almost every Technical and artistic task on the film himself except acting Cameron can do almost anything there is to do in a movie set as well as any specialist and he knows it so the financial success of
Terminator opens up every opportunity that Cameron's going to have after this he's going to be able to pick and choose what movies he makes as he continues to have financial success with his films he eventually is able to wrestle over complete control he's got Final Cut he gets to choose like eventually his whole
thing is he's obsessed with controlling all aspects of his work four he's able to maneu himself into a position of complete control though he still has to work and he's still young I think he's like 32 maybe at this time this is the first time that he actually interacts with with people that don't love their
work so he is doing production on the sequel to the very successful movie called alien he this the sequel to alien that he does is called aliens and so this is the the the contrast between somebody like James who loves his work being forced to work with other people who just tolerate theirs they do not
love what they do they just tolerate it production on aliens took place at Pinewood Studios which is in London the EMP employees at Pinewood were lifers locals who viewed their film jobs as they might factory work a paycheck and nothing more I was shocked to be working with people who simply could not care
less about the film they were working on says Cameron The Pinewood crew were lazy insolent and arrogant I despise them and so they're both approaching this with vastly different perspectives at the time there was a sense that you don't get to the top of your profession through Talent you get there by paying
your dues and putting in your time to The Pinewood veterans Cameron at 31 years old was an undeserving kid and so something that Steve Jobs just said previously that he observed that a players only like working with other a players we see that here when he finally wrapped at Pinewood Cameron stood up to
address them this has been a long and difficult shoot fraught by many problems but the one thing that kept me going through it all was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out of this gate and never come back and that you sorry bastards would still be here he never did return so if you're able to
see all my notes that I have in this book I have these like main themes that I keep writing down because they just keep reappearing and then I when I went back and started thinking about like what I wanted to talk to you about I would continue to add to them and so one main idea one main theme in James C the
life and career of James Cameron is that he's just willing to let ideas marinate for decades uh in many cases you know he can't figure out how to make what he wants to do or he has an idea and he doesn't get to actually make that idea in like 25 years in this case there is 19 years between this idea and the
execution water and its Mysteries would be an abiding source of Fascination and creative stimulation for Cameron throughout his life one that would Inspire him to make his most grueling and personal movie this movie called The Abyss the abyss began as a short story that Cameron wrote when he was 16 when
he was devouring Jo cau's underwater TV docu mentaries and so this is something that he's going to work on for his entire life he loves shooting in water for the precise reason that nobody else likes shooting in water let me quote Edwin land again don't do anything that someone else can do hard the harder
something is the less compet competition there actually be I think this is something I see a lot of like entrepreneurs like struggle with it's like they try to look for like the easy way out I was like no that's the exact wrong thing you should be doing you should trying to avoid competition at
all times and if something's easy there's going to be way more people trying to do it James is like no I'm only going after hard because I will I will literally be the only person out there doing this I will be the only person standing I will be a one of one there will be no competition while making Avatar he was also at work on an
engineering project designing and building a oneman sphere to dive to the Mariana Trench there's a fantastic documentary uh about this that shows like all all of the engineering that went into designing this this sphere that he used the sphere that he used to get to the deepest part in the world's
oceans and he had that idea because he watched this docu uh this this video the last time humans had gone to the the very bottom of Maran trench before James Cameron did it was all the way back in 1960 but this sentence tells you a lot about his personality and his approach to work that no one else had bothered to
try again in 50 years did not deter Cameron it makes the journey irresistible to him I like doing things I know others can't he says that's part of what attracts him to shooting movies in water nobody likes shooting in water he says it's physically taxing it's frustrating it's dangerous but when you
have a small team of people as crazy as you are that are good at it there is a deep satisfaction in both the process of doing it and the resulting footage so this idea about I'm constantly attracted to hard I want to do things other people aren't doing what is that actually like
what does hard look like in this case like the abyss is a movie that's going to be made in I think 1989 right so he's trying to figure out aoup couple years before the movie comes out okay where how am I going to do this where am I going to shoot it right so they're going and scouting all over locations All Over
America and they they're scouting out one thing and they see something kind of weird in the distance and it says in the distance Jim could see something really intriguing it was a giant concrete bow from afar it looked something it looked a little like the Roman Coliseum so he goes over to it he's like what the hell
is this thing it's like essentially like a an abandoned construction project what they were trying to make would have been a nuclear reactors containment vessel it was only half finished and it was 2 240 ft in diameter with 80t tall walls and no entrance so he parks next to this
thing he's like okay I want to check check I want to look at this thing what is it well how are you going to look at something that is has 80 foot walls surrounding it and no entrance he's like oh there's a construction crane right here the crane that they were using to assemble it was also abandoned so what
does Cameron do he goes and starts climbing up on the 110t crane it is raining and there's a ton of wind when he's doing this and he decid this is exactly where this is the set this is where I'm going to film The Abyss this is what hard looks like this is what he means like he's attracted to hard it
would involve pouring thousands of yards of structural concrete installing enormous filtration systems and a row of 20,000 heaters to warm the 7.5 million gallons to a comfortable temperature what they were planning wasn't just the largest underwater set ever built it was a feat of industrial
engineering and so the crazy thing is you just built the world's largest underwater set movie set ever made he matches this unbelievable initial accomplishment with this insane work ethic and dedication I think they call him a few pages later what is the word they call him like a maniac I think that's he's they saw him a possessed
Maniac listen to this paragraph remember they're filming underwater at the end of the day Cameron had to hang 10t under the service for an hour to adjust to the pressure difference never want to waste time Cameron asked the crew to install a monitor in the control room underwater remember all everything I'm about to
describe to you is happening underwater never wanted to waste time Cameron AS crew to install a monitor in the control room so he could watch his dailies through the acrylic window while suspended online when his neck was sore from his giant helmet so he's got this helmet that has all this like
communication stuff in it right he hung upside down and had the crew invert the monitor it's like hanging upside down like a bat underwater uh he asked to patch phone calls from the studio through to his helmet so he could talked to Fox Executives while he decompressed underwater after a draining out 18-hour
day the few lingering cast and crew members heading home would stop and take one last look in the viewing room window at their director clinging to the line like a bat on a branch and still at work I was stunned by Jim's allegiance to the project and the extent of his physical abilities Jim was there for every minute
of it it was beyond belief his commitment to what we were doing another main theme in the life of James Cameron is the the important and magical power of compounding so present day he's been a filmmaker for over 40 years where we are in the story though he's you know only a handful of years
into uh his career as a filmmaker the reason I talk about the the compounding nature of Cameron's career that kind of jumps out when you study him is he starts experimenting with CGI with computer Graphics all the way back in 1988 the reason I'm bringing this up is because this is when he starts working
with George Lucas's company in industrial Light mag magic and it said industrial Light Magic assured Cameron that they could do it it would take the company 9 months this is 1988 okay it would take the company N9 months to deliver 20 shots amazing when you consider that 20 years later on Avatar
Cameron's crew would produce more than 2,000 shots in the same time period each of them many orders of magnitude more complex so in 1988 takes 20 9 months to make 20 shots 20 years later they can do 2,000 and I think 20 years after that it was like 20,000 or or maybe even more in that same time period there is a massive
benefit in getting to find your life's work as fast as possible and then once you're there just stay in it all the benefits all the future technology all of that's going to compound and ACR to the people that don't quit and the thing is most people quit is another example of that so now he's almost 10 years into
uh his movie career and this is incredible the existing Norms of the movie industry at this point in time right are going to be temporarily ignored to the benefit of James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger so remember Terminator I think cost let's say $6 million 6.8 something like that uh to
make so $6 million made $78 million in revenue and so now this company goes and buys a few years later they pay $11 million just for the rights right just for the rights to make Terminator to James Cameron is 35 years old this time the this temporary suspension of like the normal economics of the industry
that he happens to be operating in is going to benefit him and Arnold this is what I mean by that so these two guys run this company called Carol Co pictures it's this independent production company and they call James Cameron and they're like hey we just bought the rights for Terminator 2 we
want you to D write and direct the film and Cameron was not sure that he wanted to do a sequel and they're like okay we'll pay you $6 million and so it says they offer me a lot of money Cameron says $6 million should be exact it turns out I can be bought so that is in 1989 so you know be like double that or maybe
even triple that today for a 35-year-old director now that was hilarious winds up you know becoming one of the most expensive I think the budget they have on this movie like $100 million but listen to How what they did for Arnold so they give James $6 million you know how they convinced Arnold to do the
movie these guys gave Arnold a $112 million Gulf Stream jet to close the deal that's incredible and so while I'm reading about how they're making Terminator 2 I stumbled across this like little piece of fun history fact right so think about one of the most well-known uh software programs of all
time is Photoshop well the crazy thing I discovered in this book is that an early version of what eventually becomes the first version of what will eventually become the commercial product Photoshop is actually the first thing they use it for is to solve a technical problem that James Cameron is having on Terminator 2
This is around 1990 I think this is when it's happening some of the things that Cameron wanted the T1000 Terminator to do was a stretch for industrial Light and Magic when the computerized character extended into certain poses giant black gashes appeared in his shoulders the ilm industrial Light Magic
team pulled it off thanks in part to a cool new piece of software invented by a 20s something person working there named John null and his brother Thomas a grad student at the University of Michigan that that software happened to be the very first version of Photoshop still a few years away from becoming the
industry standard Graphics editing program that's incredible I went and looked um and I think the developers wind up selling the rights to photoshop a few years later for I think 35 million dollar there is something that appears in the book multiple times I haven't covered yet I think you already know
this but he has uh excessively high standards he's very difficult to work with this kind of reminded me there one of my favorite lines in that uh when I was reading that chapter on Walt Disney and Picasso last week was that Walt Disney put Excellence before any other consideration I think James's uh would
that applies to James as well and so it talks about like they had to get this movie made quickly um but that didn't have any effect on Jame cam James Cameron's level of professionalism uh he would he's known for doing this on multiple things like so he shoots a take and then he has like a catchphrase like
he would repeat over and over again and so he says he would either he'd alternate between these two which is hilarious that's exactly what I didn't want or the other one perfect let's do it again and it says it chafed the 2 crew some of whom started wearing shirts that said Terminator 3 not with me and
that dedication to just making the best thing he possibly could pays off in the end quality will always make you more money is another line I think from the the Walt Disney uh book that I covered last week or the Walt Disney ESS rather so what's fascinating is I think they pay it cost like 100 million to make the
movie makes something like $500 million and so this crazy he his his movies keep having these fantastic Financial outcomes and this is what allows him to get to what he really wants what what James Cameron really wants and what most of the History's Greatest Founders want they want the same thing they want
ownership and they want control and so you know I'm reading about James or James Cameron I could easily be reading about James Dyson or George Lucas and so it says in the spring of 1992 Cameron signed an unusual $500 million multi-picture domestic distribution deal with Fox they gave him power to put any
movie he wanted into production without Fox's approval up to a budget of $70 million and he retained ownership of his own films this steel gave Cameron both more control and more responsibility than a director typically enjoys this is what he said and this is what inspired him to do so I had just made Terminator
2 for Carol Co Studios and I admired how they rolled being their own bosses Mavericks and entrepreneurs I admired how they rolled being their own bosses Mavericks and entrepreneurs Cameron says I've been fed up with the studio system after aliens and Abyss both of which I felt were not released properly I could
Now set up a structure which would allow me to call the shots myself and so after he signs this next deal the ne the thing he does the following year is he founds his own special effects company I just love this idea it's like James Cameron knows that there is a revolution in computer generated special
effects happening and that one he wants to play a role and two in order to play that role in order to do so he decides hey the the correct move here is to start my own to found my own special effects company Cameron wanted to be part of the digital Revolution and special effects I wanted to make sure
that as a filmmaker I was always ahead of the wave and not behind it to do so he felt he would need a lab of his own he was thinking of founding his own special effects company which they're going to call digital domain this is how they get the funding for it uh they raised $15 million from IBM which took a
50% stake in the company and provided much of the hardware to get it started digital domain wasn't a hard sell the guys behind Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were as promising a team to back in the nent remember this is a very early days in the nent digital effects industry as existed and then just one
more thing I want to pull off from this section which I think is a good idea go all in on where you believe the future is regardless of where it currently is the company's first bold move would be to wholly Embrace digital compositing and not even bother to open an optical department it was a risky decision at
the time most of Hollywood was still relying on optical they thought that was going to that wasn't going to be the case in the future so they just skipped that part they went directly to the Future just go right to the future I guess the way to think about what he's doing here but setting up digital domain
that way gave the company an almost instantaneous advantage over the established effects houses and then there's another thing that appears over and over again in the career of James Cameron that I want to point out to you he's just got intense focus and so it's like mute the world and then build your
own world Cameron knows a lot about a lot of subjects he can talk about energy policy he could talk about helicopter engines he could talk about the Punic Wars but one of his rare blind spots is Hollywood gossip he does not give a damn what is going on inside of his own industry this is not a man who watches e
and so what um they're talking about is he he I think this is on True Lies he winds up wanting to hire Tom Arnold and he didn't know anything about like the back there was like some controversy around Tom Arnold so he gets this phone call from a fox executive and they're like what the hell are you doing like
they're just so mystified by his choice of casting remember he has control so he can do whatever he he gets to choose the actors that he wants to work with and so they ask him they're like don't you read the papers don't you watch TV and Cameron conf that no that he did not and so a short while later we hear from his
long-term attorney and he's like listen James is not a guy that would call and say let's do lunch Cameron rarely lunches or parties and applies none of his laser beam Focus to the Hollywood power struggles Jim doesn't call me up and say what does Spielberg make which some of my other clients do he does not
think in those terms and so the note I have on my page is like this is this is really like a bullet point my bullet point like model of James Cameron up until my reading up until the point of the book he's like he likes to focus he likes to work he is not motivated motivated primarily by money very much
like Walt Disney Excellence come came first right Financial considerations or if it's going to make him money he's trying to build something great and with the trust that if he builds something great he'll make money but building something great was something that Walt Disney and Cameron put first and then
the last note was that he's just got an inner clock he's got an inner scorecard he just wants to focus on the work that he's doing he's not concerned with pulling his head up and looking around like what what do other directors think or what is everybody else in the industry doing it's a relevant to him
and you see this in how he picks his movies he's trying to figure out like what am I going to work on next after uh True Lies and he this is where he decides to do Titanic which at the time becomes you know the most financially successful movie of all time uh what movie he makes NE next is decided
intuitively based on themes that interest him at the moment and what new technical or dramatic territories he wants to explore I had a lot of D doubts about doing Titanic he says could it be done I wasn't sure could the Deep dive filming be done I don't know could we create the technology I don't know would
anyone want to see it while he was ruminating on what to do next he received a fact from this other guy this this Explorer named sa sagic and so he's reading sagi's thoughts and I love this idea because I I find this to be true as well when I listen to podcasts or when I read books that just one line can change
everything and so he's reading this uh this facts and it says in is sometimes necessary in life to do something extraordinary in Cameron's mind that line seemed to to glow on the page yes I realize sometimes you have to do something extraordinary something crazy and this is the line I mentioned earlier
I am an explorer at heart and a filmmaker by trade and so he looked at creating Titanic making the movie not as I'm making a film I'm going on exploration I'm going on an odyssey and then he has this great thing where uh one of the reasons he wanted to do the because he's been fantasizing about
diving down to the wreck I think it would cost I think it was like $6 million or something like that to to develop the technology to do it safe and I think he went down you know maybe a dozen times maybe even more and what he realized he's like well really we should charge my expedition to the Titanic as a
marketing expense and the F and studio is like what are you talking about and this is actually a genius way to gain attention for the film and so Cameron says well the Expedition should be charged to the marketing budget because it's going to attract way more publicity than just trotting out the actors and
sending them around for on the talk show circuit there's this great line in Michael Jordan's autobiography which I covered back on episode 2113 where he says I focus on the little things the little things add up to big things and Cameron did this entire career he you you see it in in the Titanic he was a
stickler for getting the the actual historical details as accurate as possible there was a degree of obsession in C's dedication to the little details from the ship stationary down to the White Star Line stamped Ash TR he has always been a stickler for the little things after I put out that episode on
Bernard ool I heard from stories from people that listen to the podcast that he's this way too the most minute details in the stores the businesses that he runs the hotels the restaurants that he owns he focuses on the large picture the strategy but he also pays attention to the most minute detail that
it would be some of the stories I've heard would just shock you if I could repeat them and they came to mind when I'm reading this section it's like oh well this is what Michael Jordan top of his profession Bernard oal top of his profession James Cameron top of his profession obsessed with the details
little things add up to big things let's go back to this idea that was in that piece by chq that that jumped out at me right where it's like James is the type of person whose confidence preceded his achievements it's so important to truly believe in what you're doing to have like superhuman levels of confidence
because sometimes you have people on your own team trying to talk you out of it he's doing Titanic right Titanic this is before Titanic comes out is going to be the most financially SU successful film and he's got people on his own team on 20th Century Fox one of the presidents there comes to James and is
trying to like instill doubts into James's mind this is crazy and this is a if you listen to the early episodes of Founders I'd have this segment because it pop up so much so many times where I called it critics don't know [ __ ] and what I meant by that is like these just biographies are just full of people
confident in why what you were doing just won't work and so we see that here 20th Century Fox president uh Bill mechcanic told Cameron that the film would never see a dime of profit he uh suggested that camid should not only surrender all his points meaning his profits on Titanic but give back half of
his points on the next film he did with Fox this conversation happened in Cameron's living room mechanic's counter offer did not go over well get the [ __ ] out of my house Cameron replied and I need to make the point that that level of confidence like sometimes it has to be externalize even when it's not you actually don't feel it
at the time inside because this is coming towards the end of the filming so their their the production like the actual shooting of Titanic is is wrapping up right but then he's got to figure out to edit it it is one of the lowest points of uh James's life he's like just kill me now but you still have
the strength or the belief in what you're doing even though you feel like [ __ ] to make sure that you don't give into the doubts of other people he was exhausted and drained he had enough footage for a 4-Hour movie and was wildly over budget and had been told there was zero possibility that the film
could make any money his moving was the laughing stock of Hollywood critics don't know [ __ ] the media was attacking him and ridiculing him daily the Hollywood media the media that he has right to ignore is making fun of him because they think this is going to be like another water world like this this
bust you spent all this money remember it's about to make more money than anything else and this is what was happening right right before it's darkest before the dawn this's this great line um the founder of Vans you know shoe company he says uh opportuni a strange Beast it commonly appears after
a loss I don't know why that came to mind when I got to this point but this is what I was thinking of he had enough footage for a 4-Hour movie was wildly over budget and had been told there was zero possibility that film could make money his movie was the laughing stock of Hollywood and the media was
ridiculing him attacking him daily I thought to myself Lord take me now he had finished one impossible task only to face another but that was tomorrow and then right after this was just this funny interaction he had with uh Fox's CEO rert Murdoch in the middle of this Termino the director ran into
the news corporation chairman and CEO rubert Murdoch at the studio I guess I'm not your favorite person at the moment Cameron said to the media Baron but the movie is going to be good he promised it better be better than good Murdoch told him and so what happens Titanic winds up being number one for 16 straight weeks
and makes almost $2 billion almost makes $2 billion in the movie and this is why he's so interesting he is bent on doing what he wants to do when he wants to do do it and maintaining absolute control at what would be the Apex of his powers as a director Cameron would step away from feature film making all together
after Titanic Cameron took to calling himself the world's busiest unemployed filmmaker I've got my [ __ ] you money and I can kind of step away for a while so as you can already tell from his interviews from this book uh if you watch a bunch of video like video interviews of him too that is by far his
favorite word these are his words right this is what how he talks I got my [ __ ] you money and I can kind of step away for a while my career is not going anywhere and I can do all the cool stuff that I've wanted to do now and so what does he do when he wants to get away from all the pressure he does what this
is the weirdest thing surprising thing to me he like uh I just did at Tiger Woods biography on episode 301 Tiger Wood said the exact same thing that James did he like the only place he could get away from the pressure was by diving deep into the ocean this is surprising thing they had in common for
Cameron peace is found under the ocean after finishing a movie he says I usually go diving first to decompress by literally decompressing I find the underwater world to be a great anecdote to Hollywood nobody knows nobody down there knows who you are that's exactly what Tiger Wood said and then James adds
another level to this you are just part of the food chain and so for the next eight years he just dedicates himself to to becoming an Explorer which is what he always wanted to be in fact there was a little like a historical anecdote where um James Cameron is actually underwater at the
site of the Titanic on 911 and so they come to the top I think he's with another person I can't remember and they get to the top and the boat um and they thought it was like going to be like a cause for celebration and they get to the top and everybody's like Sullen and depressed and like what's going on and
that's when he found out that 9911 it just happened and so he's looking back and trying to explain like why he did this at this point in his life and he says where are the 21st Century's mellin more important where was the spirit of Discovery in the regular citizen who had once watched the moon landing and been
filled with wonder and a sense of possibility exploration is not a luxury it defines us as a civilization by 2005 Cameron had devoted seven of his midlife years potentially a director's most productive to the discovery of new places and new technology rather than to making movies and So eventually he resurfaces
literally and he's like all right I'm going to make Avatar and this is what I meant I was like one of the most impressive things about him is that the the idea that he'll just let ideas simmer for decades he may not know how to do it but he just he keeps he says there's another line in the book earlier
on where he's like oh I'll run out of time before I run out of ideas so it says at this point Cameron hadn't released a feature film in over a decade he had been largely absent from the Hollywood scene uh riding in his submarines filming his documentaries and tinkering and building new filmmaking
toys the director wrote his first treatment for Avatar 12 years before this is 12 years before he actually starts working on it uh the only problem with making the movie in 1996 was that it was impossible the technology did not exist again we see this over and over again I know what I want to do I just
don't know how to do it yet and then he comments on this idea that he just doesn't let ideas die he doesn't let them go to waste Cameron jokes that he is like a Plains Indian who wastes no piece of the buffalo in his case it is his ideas that are made of use down to the marrow sometimes decades later he
started creating some of the images in Avatar in the 1970s that's what he was mentioning in the piece where he had these drawings and all these people come out after the Avatar is wiely successful like you stole the idea from me he's like oh yeah look at this dated I wrote this one 19 I had been processing this
in my imagination for decades that is an incredible statement and so all the way back when he's founding his uh special effects uh company digital domain I think this is 1992 the year before he founds the company he writes this thing called a digital Manifesto It's like a 12-page almost like a white paper
outlining like why he's starting digital domain and what he thinks is going to happen and really not to focus on specifically what's happening what is the idea behind what's happening in the book and what the idea that happening behind the book to me is like what is obvious to you in your industry that
won't be obvious to other people for a decade this was obvious to him a decade before it was obviously anybody else Cameron had written a digital Manifesto A passionately argued 13-page document laying out where he expected film making to go in the coming years in his Manifesto he described something called
performance capture what he's calling performance capture is now known as motion capture and that's what you see in Avatar uh performance capture in which an actor would Dawn a data suit sending a stream of information about the actor's physical movements to a workstation remember this is 1992 where it' be inserted into a
synthetic environment artists would then use software to turn the actor's digitized performance into a Fantastical character Cameron was rubbing elbows with the brightest minds and special effects at that point so back in 1992 okay and this is the stuff they were talking about it all seemed pretty
obvious from where we were sitting he says to most of Hollywood though the possibilities of lifelike CG characters driven by human performances would it be obvious for at least another decade that is fascinating you sit here and think about like what is obvious to you in your industry that will not be
obvious to other people in that industry for a decade and can you start working on these things now and the last chapter in the book is all about the building of Avatar this is another main theme in the life and career of James Cameron the fact that he said he feels every idea is a work in progress he is attracted to
hard I love this line it says a crew member wrote uh a set catchphrase on the Whiteboard it's Avatar dude nothing works the first time and another cool thing about James Cameron is he's all positive sum uh I love when these like people at the top of professions interact with each other whether it's a
historical analogy or something that's taken place in recent uh history this is where I mentioned earlier how uh you know he's willing to to share everything he learns Peter Jackson and stepen SP wind up spending a week using Cameron's equipment visiting working with his crew visiting the production and it says he
was helping us get our heads around the equipment Jim is very generous in the way he shares knowledge in information he doesn't jealously guard technology and secrets and then you fast forward like another you know decade after this book ends and that's part of the reason that Cameron moved to New Zealand
because he uses Jackson's special effects company he was using it to build uh to on Avatar he's going to use him for I think Avatar 3 and Avatar 4 too it's called weda and it's actually uh headquartered in New Zealand very close to where Cameron lives and finally one of the last pages of the book there is a
sentence that I think is the perfect way to end this conversation this podcast this time together that gives you a great indication of James Cameron the person and how he approaches his work James Cameron put on a blue baseball cap with the letters HMF i c printed on it it stood for head
[ __ ] in charge and that is where I'll leave it I am going to leave the link down uh below for this book if you buy it you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time I'm also going to leave the link down for the GQ article at the top of the GQ article you'll see uh they have audio controls in case you want to
listen to it it's excellent they did an excellent job on it like I said I was listening to it every night as I went to sleep as I was working my way through the book and thinking about this podcast so hope you check out both the GQ article and this book absolutely fantastic another thing that I hope you
check out is if you get on my personal email list so I will go through I don't know I probably have 75 highlights of this book what I'll go through and this takes an unbelievable amount of time is I'll go through and try to find like the 10 like my 10 favorite sentences in the book it's like
10 bullet points that I want to remember from the book If you want to get on the list the link is down below the second thing that I hope you check out which a lot more people are checking out now Founders AMA it is for if you are a fanatic if you are an Enthusiast of Founders it is a way to go deeper here's
what Founders AMA is it is a private podcast feed where if you sign up you get access to a private email address I read every single one of these email addresses right this is where you send in a question if you have a question I read the question I take I answer it in a form of short AMA episodes I think
I've done 28 or 29 up until this point you can listen to them immediately so that's one thing you can listen to all the episodes you can email me a question which you'll know that I'll read and include it in your question if you want to let other other listeners of Founders AMA know what you're working on you can
include your name and your link to your website and I include that in the question so it's a great way to kind of check out what other people that listen to this are working on as well that link this is all optional you don't have to do it you can just listen to the regular Founders episodes there's you
know 310 over there um but if you are an Enthusiast and if you are a fanatic and a maniac like like I am uh and you want to go deeper this is a great way to do that that link is down below and available at Founders podcast.com that is 311 books down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon