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This is Jane Pauley. James Cameron's technology meets classic filmmaking style led to blockbusters like The Terminator, Titanic, Alien, and Avatar. which means he has a lot to talk about with Sunday Mornings Jonathan Vigliotti. I want to get into tech and storytelling. But first, we're a few weeks away from the premiere of the film, and I wonder what's going on in your mind.
Nervous. Are you nervous? Is that your name? Always, always. I was nervous before every film I've ever released.
Um You know, we're three years after the way of water. Audiences have not come back to the cinemas. Right.
So there are market forces that are kind of above my pay grade. And then there's what do people think about sequels? Do they see it as an opportunity to follow characters that they love? Or do they feel like It's just a sequel. I mean, there are so many variables.
going into the release of a film. I feel good about the film. I feel the film sticks to landing, it fulfils my goals as an artist. But Like I said, there are market forces outside my control.
Well, I mean we delivered the film.
So production depends on what you call production.
So the last time I worked with the actors was maybe a year ago.
Okay. Right? A very long post because of all the VFX shots, obviously. We captured the actors for movie two and movie three.
So Sigourney, Sam, Una, everybody, starting in September of 17 and going into 18. Right, so about a year and a half of capture.
So that's where it all starts. It all starts with that performance, with the writing and the performance, and me working directly with the actress. And then the way I've been thinking about it lately is I then shoulder the burden of all the technical stuff, including cinematography, lighting, shot selection, lens selection, all that sort of thing. I take that all off of them and I play that out over the subsequent years. You say stick the landing.
Yeah. How do you know when the film has stuck the landing? If I can make myself cry For me, it's all about the feelings, right? You set this story in motion, you invest in these characters, you learn their problems and their conflicts, and now you're going to go on a journey with them through their lives. and they're going to hit moments that are very hard for them.
That's my goal. And if I can still feel a little bit of emotion Maybe a lot. In the moments where that's meant to be there, then I know the movie's working. If I can't feel it, then I think there's something wrong. What am I doing wrong?
Is it the music? Is it something else? You know what I mean? Because I think of myself as a very average audience member. My film.
I don't believe that.
Well, no, no, I mean, I think it's in terms of taste, it's very middle of the road. You know, my film school was not USC, it was not a film aesthetics course. It was the drive in movie theaters of Orange County. And so it's very blue collar. My taste, my personal taste in movies.
I mean, I think. You know, look, I'm capable of thinking on those other levels and seeing the symbolism and all the things that good film workers do well, but ultimately, you've got to stick to landing. It's got to hit me. In the heart. Take me through that drive-in education of yours.
It was whatever was coming out, and I never knew ahead of time. I never read up. We didn't have the kind of media available then where you know everything about a movie before you go see the movie. It was just what's playing. You know, and I'd either go with my wife or I'd go with a couple of my friends with a six-pack and a, you know, in a Chevy van.
And, you know, I'd like drivings. Yeah. I don't know why, I just liked them. Hyperboards are the drive-in in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Yeah, they're just.
No image quality, dark, crap sound. You know, but I was captivated by the story. No sophistication. Was my point.
Now, later, because I had this urge to make films as well, once I started making them, I realized: okay, there's a burden of responsibility here. I need to study a little bit of. of film theory and history. I mean, you talk to Steven Spielberg, he can run rings around me when it comes to what actor was in what film, and when and who the director was and all that. But I try to keep up.
If Crab Sound and grainy film was enough to draw you in, why so much sophistication in your work today? I'll tell you exactly, and it's psychological. I always felt that the better show I put on, the more it would hide, it would spackle over my inadequacies as a filmmaker or as a writer. It starts from wanting to put on a spectacular show.
So James Cameron has imposter syndrome? Is this what he is? Yeah. Of course. Even now?
I think any good artist does. I think the more confident. I mean, a sort of, I don't want to say confidence, confidence is important, but arrogance. is the enemy. Of bearing your soul, you know.
I think ultimately the only way through is through a truth or an authenticity to yourself, right?
So whenever I look for a film, it's like, what am I saying? What am I learning? What am I exploring that I'm curious about? And what am I going to say about my perspective on life? Not my life.
I don't care if you know about my life, but my perspective on life, which has been learned the hard way often. You know, let's say in the avatar films, especially two and three, as a parent. As somebody who's been in relationships, who's had love, who's lost love, someone who's a parent. I've been a parent of teenagers, which is what drove me to write the particular stories that I wrote for two and three. Actually, here's something most people don't know.
Two and three were all one script at one point. And it was just so jam-packed and mashed in that it didn't have any breadth. I needed to to breathe with the characters, so I split it into two. two separate stories and opened it up. Our plan was going in, but when I broke story with the with the other screenwriters, our plan was to do that whole story in one movie.
And when we got down to writing it, it just didn't work at all. I couldn't I didn't feel natural. I didn't feel like the scenes really worked. They were being glossed over. It was like driving by on a bullet train.
You know, so I just and I called the studio and I said, I think I might want to break this. Into two movies. No! And I said, well, what point of you get an extra opportunity to make $2 billion is lost on you? You know, I literally said something like that.
And they were like, no, no.
So I went back and I tried to solve it for another six months, and finally, Just one day I got a light bulb for how to do it, and it was, from that moment, it was irrevocable.
So then I called them up, and the conversation went like this: it's two movies, like it or not. And it became two movies. And they didn't say no. No, because I reiterated the argument. This is an additional opportunity for you to make $2 billion, so shut up.
And also for you to explore your curiosity. I don't really talk. And by the way, I was talking to Jim Giannopoulos, who's the head of Fox at the time, and he and I are pals, so I could actually get away with a little bit more with him because we were kind of like an old married couple. It'd be like, okay, Jimmy, right? This was also an opportunity, as you say, to explore your curiosity.
And I wonder what you were most curious about in exploring with Fire and Ash. Brief. I know it sounds like it's a downer movie, and it really isn't, but I did feel that commercial filmmaking, big spectacle filmmaking, does not serve grief well.
So it's not that I painted myself in a corner, I knew what I was doing. We kill off the eldest son, so we put. This beautiful romance, this interracial love story between Jake, interspecies love story between Jake and Neytiria. They love each other so profoundly. How do we put that at risk?
You can't tell a love story without putting it at risk. And when you're telling a multi a multi-part kind of franchise story or saga over a number of films. You can put it at a great deal of risk. And it occurred to me that obviously their conflict over what do we do about the human invasion. He's part human.
She's 100% na'vi. They may differ. How does being parents Put their sort of gung-ho warrior spirit in jeopardy, and then losing a child, the ultimate horror, the ultimate unimaginable for any parent, what does that do to them and their relationship? And how does that really sharpen up those conflicts that they've been having and pull them into the room and into the forefront? You know, you've seen the film, so so you know that we don't shy from that stuff.
We go down those what some movies might consider a side alley that they don't really need to spend time on. I don't think that um superhero films, for example, deal with grief, really. You know, you just want to get back to your baseline state, which is the superhero is doing the superhero thing that they're supposed to do. And they're never sort of deeply deeply threatened emotionally or psychologically, not enough to change them, right? Because we don't want to change them.
They've been going strong for 40 years, 50 years. We don't want to change them too much. They need to rebound. But what you find from grief in real life is it changes you. and you don't change back.
Grief and emotion and technology don't always go hand in hand. No, not at all. How do you use your technology to bring out that very human element? All film is technological. For 125 years, we used cameras, we used photochemical emulsions running through sprockets and gears and lenses, and there's optical science.
And then, when VFX came along, there were optical printers, and then computers, and CG, and all that. It's always been technical.
So, how do good filmmakers? Understand the technology, use it as a tool, and not let it invade. The heart and soul of what they're trying to communicate. The reason I hid away how we Do the performance capture. Because you see somebody in a helmet with a camera on a boom right here, and you see this marker suit, and it doesn't look like the character.
And the instantaneous interpretation is, oh well, this is a technical thing. They're kind of like robots and we're getting some kind of something from them and then we're playing around with it and turning it into something later. The thing that I love about it, this is counterintuitive. The thing that I love about it is it is the most pure form of acting. which makes it the most pure form of a director-actor creative relationship.
because of all the things it isn't. We're not doing coverage. You don't have to perform the scene over and over and over and hit the same marks and hit the same emotional beats for the close-up and the wide shot and the three-shot and everything else. There's no coverage.
So once I've gotten that moment, and we love that moment, as myself, as a director, and if the actors are happy, I'm happy. We're done.
Now I'll go off and I'll impose those angles and that coverage and that lighting and everything on that later. And they don't have to worry about it. Let's expand on this, specifically performance capture, because I watched the behind the scenes documentary and it was incredible. There is this sound stage. When you go inside, it almost looks like your stars are astronauts in training.
But it is what is known as performance capture.
So, what is performance capture?
So, performance capture, we use essentially a glorified game engine. which is a real-time render system. and we use a whole bunch of cameras to capture the body performance of the actor and we use a a single camera, or now we use actually two, one on top of the other, to video their face. It's actually very simple in its essence. I'm just videoing the actor's face, but that video camera goes wherever they go.
There's no hiding from it. They're in a close-up 100% of the time. But there's a beautiful thing about being in a close-up 100% of the time. It means you're never in a close-up in your mind. The show doesn't stop so that we can come in on a 100-millimeter lens.
And so, You just have to be real. You know, and the actors have talked about this. You know, other actors who haven't done it. have a misconception about it. They think it's artificial.
I would say it's the purest form of acting. It's very much like theater rehearsal. Before you've even figured out the set and before you've even gotten the marks down and long before there's an audience there, you're just exploring. There's a director, sometimes there's a playwright, and there's some actors, and you start getting it up on its feet and you start moving around. And I always say that the dialogue compels the body.
To do something, sometimes nothing, sometimes insular, sometimes moving. Who knows? When I write it, I don't know what they're going to do. I want to see that interpretation. through their life, through their lived experience and their experience as an actor.
I want to see that.
Now I'll start blocking the scene.
So it's the opposite of coming in. Most directors have to come in super prepared.
Okay, here are my storyboards, here's my previs, you have to stand right there and you have to do the line from there. It's like, okay, you've already taken away half the creativity, right?
Now you cut it in half again. because as a live-action filmmaker I'm watching you, but I'm also seeing what's happening with the clouds outside the window. I'm looking at the sun angle and how it's moving the shadows across the floor. And I'm going to have to put in a silk there and I'm going to have to do this. And then there's some extras in the background that aren't doing what they're supposed to do.
Talk to the first AD. Dolly track goes here, jib arm goes here. I need you to do a slow move in like this. I want you to backpan and do a slight zoom during the backpan. This is like your life.
on a live-action set. On a performance capture set, they've got 100% of me, and they can feel that. as a creative dance. Right, I know you've got this monitor, the monitors that are helping assist with you seeing the background, but when you're in this empty space and you're not near those monitors, how are you seeing what no one else can see? I'm just looking.
I'm just there. And you know, it's like the principle of wildlife photography is you get them used to the camera, right?
Well, the creative process is the water hole, and I'm the cameraman and the hide, but they're all used to me.
So, you know, I'll ask them, you know, am I in your visual space? And they always say no, because they just tune me out. They see, they don't see me. They're like the way a teenager sees their parents. You know what I mean, which is they barely exist unless you want something.
You know?
So I'm just there. I just I could be this far away. You know, I won't intrude in the scene, obviously, but I'm where I can see what they're doing and how they're moving.
Now, That said, it's very important for us to shoot reference cameras.
So I've got some handheld operators that come in with me. and they gently surround the actors and they zoom in and then I'll see what we call a matrix, which is I'll see Zoe's close up and Sam's close up and Zigourne's close up. And we have to fight sometimes hard to make sure that we don't miss anything. And that's a little bit of a technical limitation. Maybe that takes 5% of my energy.
But I'll go back and I'll go over and I'll look at playback. And once I know that they're getting it, I won't look at that again. Once I know that my blocking that I do with my virtual camera is sound, I won't look at that again. Because I don't get obsessed in. the lighting and the particulars of the shots.
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Taxes and fees extra. See Mintmobile.com. You call yourself a geek and I want the origin story of the geek because Hollywood was not originally where you had set your sights on. No, not at all. As a kid growing up in Canada, it was science.
I was so far from Hollywood that I didn't even know anybody that knew anybody that had ever worked on a film. As a carpenter. You know what I mean? It was like, it's not like growing up in LA where you're six degrees of separation probably from a movie star. You know, it was rural Canada, a little town, 1,500 people.
But I lived in a world of my imagination. It was comic books, it was science fiction, it was movies, science fiction books. I read a lot, movies, TV shows. And, you know, I mean, I had a pretty fertile imagination. I had a lot of wild dreams, and I even harvested imagery from those dreams as I got into my late teens and 20s drawing.
I was an artist, so I was, I think there's a difference between taking in and then having an imagination, and then having that imagination actually externalize. And I think the second you start externalizing, for me it was through writing, it was through drawing and painting, you start externalizing and then that takes you down a path. I didn't know if I was going to, I mean, I was a very confused young person. As we all were. And we all were, right?
But a confused...
Some people just know what they're going to do. Most people don't. And I couldn't decide. I was fascinated by science. I went to college and majored in physics.
And what happened because you then switched to English.
Well, I started to think, all right, my math is not strong enough to really make any kind of fundamental breakthroughs in physics. I understood physics very well. My math wasn't quite as quick as it needed to be. You wanted to make a difference with whatever it was you pursued.
Somehow, yeah, maybe. I guess I wouldn't have come to that conclusion. I said, all right, maybe I should be a storyteller. You know, maybe I love stories, I love fiction, I love reading, let me study English then.
So I switched majors after the first year from. Physics and marine biology to English. Then I just dropped out. It's like, okay, I want to live life. No point trying to write if I haven't experienced anything.
And you were living life, and I guess that experience includes you were a truck driver. Truck driver, I was a high school janitor, you know, all kinds of blue-collar jobs. And I was happy being a blue-collar guy. It gave me just room to imagine. I wasn't a doctor who's on call 24-7.
You know what I mean? The work was a very bounded thing, and it gave me a lot of time to think and read and imagine and draw and write and so on. What was that transformative moment? How did you go from blue-collar to Hollywood? Watching Star Wars.
And I'll tell you why. Because in my mind I used to put my headphones on and listen to fast electronic music and imagine space battles. Hyperkinetic space battles with all kinds of maneuvers and energy weapons, and people going through debris fields and all that. And then I saw a movie that, if I believed in like people reading your mind with the laser beam and you know, like the tinfoil people, right, I'd have thought. They took that from my brain.
Well, my conclusion was a little less mentally ill. It was. If the things I'm seeing in my mind Can be the same things that are in a movie that's the number one movie in movie history. then I've got a saleable imagination. And then I just started to figure out how to do it, how to start making fantastic films.
I didn't want to just make films, I wanted to make fantastic films. And so I started to study visual effects. And the way I did it was, I didn't have the money to go to USC or anything like that.
So, what I used to do is I'd go down to USC, I'd go bury myself on a Saturday when I wasn't driving a truck in the stacks, and I'd read everything I could find on optical printing, on front-screen projection, and sodium process traveling mat, and everything. I mean, I knew all that stuff. Self-taught. It's all self-taught, completely out of didactic. I'd Xerox all these scholarly papers, put them all in binders.
I had this shelf full of black binders that had essentially a graduate course in visual effects and cinematography. And so when I finally got hired by Roger Corman to work in the model shop on a cheap-ass science fiction film called Battle Beyond the Stars, I knew more than everybody else. And I shot through that place so fast, you know, pretty soon I was running my own VFX unit, camera unit, and then I became the production designer on the film and then, you know, so it happened quickly. Do you have any texts from USC that you have yet to return? No, I never took anything out.
I just I only I spent a fortune on Xerox, you know. As a pioneer of CGI, and I'm thinking of the Abyss, what was the reaction? Was there pushback when you wanted to implement. Or from the industry at large? Was there a fear of technology?
No, I think that came later. I think there was a time after Terminator 2 when I was founding Digital Domain. And Stephen had either just done or was about to do Jurassic Park. I think he had just done it. And there was this sense that, oh, they're going to start doing people.
Oh, we're going to replace actors. And I've had actors back in that time, this is 30 years ago now, right? More than 30 years ago. Actors say, oh, you're just trying to replace us. Like, no, no, no, no, no.
We love actors, we love actors. We just want our imaginations to be able to flow freely. And I think that persisted for a long time, even up through Avatar, actors didn't understand what we were doing. And I was, for some reason, I was, I know what exactly it was, I didn't want. To pull the curtain back and show people in capture suits.
I wanted the characters to just be real in the minds of the audience. I wanted the magic to be kind of unblemished by how it was done. I now realize that was a mistake because for years there was this sense that, oh, they're doing something strange with computers and they're replacing actors, when in fact, Once you really drill down and you see what we're doing, it's a celebration of the actor-director moment and the actor-to-actor moment. It's a celebration of, I call it the sanctity of the actor's performance moment. And we're celebrating that, you know.
Go to the other end of the spectrum, and you've got generative AI where they can make up a character, they can make up an actor, they can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. No, that's horrifying to me. That's the opposite. That's exactly what we're not doing. And why is it horrifying to you?
It's horrifying to me because. I don't, you know, first of all, I don't want a computer doing what I pride myself on being able to do with actors. I don't want to replace actors. I love working with actors. I'm not even really an animator.
I'm not interested in animating. I'm interested in directing.
So it's all about how I can write something and how I can assist them through a process of finding that. emotional moment. And I don't think that's ever going to change, frankly. I don't think Gen AI is going to come in and replace that. I think Gen AI will play a role.
In making VFX more efficient and therefore cheaper, and then opening back up. See, right now, imaginative films, fantastic films, science fiction films, they're starting to die off as a breed. because they're They're expensive. And the theatrical marketplace has contracted, and so now studios are only comfortable spending those kinds of. of you know dollar amounts With Blue chip IP.
that which we've seen, that which we know. A movie like Avatar would never get made in that environment. That was brand new IP. I mean, you know, and nobody'd ever heard of it. Avatar takes us to these incredible worlds, and now AI.
pilfering the work that you and others have done and create that on demand for the consumer on their phone. Do you worry that access to images, video, people even riding dragons in some of these things will undermine your work and the artistry behind Hollywood? It might, but it also causes us to have to set our bar to a very disciplined level and to continue to be out of the box imaginative. Right.
We've seen plenty of examples of kind of alien forests with beautiful pastel colors, purples and greens and so on, since Avatar. Nobody had done that before Avatar. Nobody, right?
So once you have the example, you can iterate. on the example. But what generative AI can't do is create something new that's never been seen. And the other, if you think about it, the models, it's a magic trick. I mean, what they can do is quite astonishing.
But the models are trained on everything that's ever been done before that. It can't be trained on that which has never been done.
So you will innately see essentially all of human art and human experience put into a blender, and you'll get something that is kind of an average of that, right?
So what you can't have is that individual screenwriter's unique lived experience and their quirks. You can't find, you won't find the idiosyncrasies of a particular actor. And by the way, the people that become stars, they're quirky. They're not the average beauty, they're not the average handsome, and they're not the average affect. They have something unique and they all have something unique.
That you can't. It almost sounds like you're saying generative AI presents not just challenges to the industry, but an opportunity to evolve beyond. Yes, exactly. I think it sets a bar high for our idiosyncratic, you know, it's kind of like you're going acoustic. After synthesizers were able to emulate orchestras, you know, I think that now that generative AI can just do new music and it's very credible and do new songs in the style of or you know, emulating, it's like, well, now that the act of performance, the act of actually seeing an artist creating in real time, will become sacred more so, right?
You've had this incredible path. Avatar, to me, as I listen to you tell your story, sounds like the culmination. Of all of your passions, where science intersects with storytelling, cinema, obviously, and then entwined in it all is this environmental message that you carry through. Exactly, and that was the critical thing. It seems like a no-brainer in retrospect, except.
there were no big, expensive Hollywood movies that were about the environment. there was Fern Gully, You know, a tenth the scale of Avatar. In fact, The head of 20th Century Fox, who shall remain nameless for purposes of this discussion. said Pretty good script. Is there any way that we can get out all this kind of uh hippie tree hugging bullshit.
And I said, no, actually, the reason that I want to make this movie and why it's important to me. Is because of exactly all the tree-hugging hippie bullshit.
So maybe we're done here. And I started to get up, and he was like, oh, don't be like that, you know. You're clever in getting your way, and the things that you have done to hustle, using a studio to help with your sea exploration. And it sounds like also in this case, using a script and something that is classified as action and adventure to tell a story that isn't always digestible. Right, exactly.
And sometimes science fiction is a great lens, science fiction or fantasy. I think of Avatar as kind of. Allegorical fantasy in the guise of science fiction, because it's got a little bit of tucked, Baroque detail around it, but really it's a fantasy, you know, that you're going to walk. in the body, in the shoes, and through the eyes of this alien presence and become somebody else in their world. I don't think scientifically that if we go to an exo-moon of a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, we're going to find people that look like us and talk like us, except for their cattail and their ears.
That's not very logical. but people go with the illogic of it. I think movies are Kind of a waking dream state, in a way. We were talking about this earlier before we rolled, you know, a kind of a lucid dream. that's consensual, you've paid to have that dream.
You have an idea of what it will be, but it still unfolds for you in a way that you didn't expect. Ideally, a movie should always surprise you. I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening. And for more of our extended interviews, follow and listen to Sunday Morning on the free Odyssey app.
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