The Biography of James Cameron

1. 0:00 – 5:05

   The GQ Profile: Cameron the Explorer and Filmmaker

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      After James Cameron's Avatar made two point seven billion dollars, 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 six-point-eight-mile distance solo. Since then, others have followed, most prominently a private equity titan and former Naval Reserve intelligence officer turned explorer named Victor Vescovo. But Cameron is adamant that none have surpassed him. "Vescovo," Cameron told me, "claimed that he went deeper, but you can't, so he's basically just making shit up." Vescovo disagrees. "I have a different scientific perspective," he told me diplomatically. But even he is a fan of Cameron's films. Like Cameron, Vescovo has made multiple dives to the wreck of the Titanic, and while returning from one of them, he emailed Cameron. "I said, 'I watched 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 his 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 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 dilettante 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 four-oh-five. "That means there's been four hundred and five versions of this before it gets to me," he said. Cameron has been working on the movie since two thousand thirteen. It was due out years ago. The Way of Water was expensive to make. If you ask James Cameron how expensive, he replies, "Very fucking." 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 fucking 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 tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen because the really gifted people don't fucking wanna do it." Cameron and his fifth wife live year-round in New Zealand, where they have owned a five-thousand-acre farm since two thousand eleven. 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 Keanu 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 sixty-eight years old, Cameron wakes up at four forty-five AM and often kickboxes in the morning. Cameron is proud to work at the biggest scale possible. Terminator Two, 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.

2. 5:05 – 9:30

   Self-Taught Confidence, Dreams, and Temper

   1. DSDavid Senra5:05

      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 twenties 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 filmmaking program that Cameron couldn't afford. "I'd find somebody's three hundred page dissertation on optical printing," Cameron said, "and I'd be going through this and I'd think, 'Well, I've gotta get this.' So I'd pull out the staples and I'd photocopy the entire three hundred pages. And then I just kept doing the same thing week after week for about six 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 in visual effects and 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 shit 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 ten lawsuits. Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks that you beamed their idea out of their head. And it turned out there were ten or eleven of them. And so I pointed at this drawing I did when I was nineteen, when I was going to Fullerton Junior College, and said, ‘Do you see this? Do 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 Saldana, 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 the 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’d 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 forty years of filmmaking, 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. But 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 asshole 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 is 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 fucking 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.’"

3. 9:30 – 15:11

   Fox, Avatar's Success, and the Space Shuttle That Wasn't

   1. DSDavid Senra9:30

      It’s a curious fact that Cameron has directed only two feature films in the last twenty-five years. This is a part of the explanation for why Cameron has at times drifted away from filmmaking. 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 taillights 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 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 fucking 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, in caps, ALL THE MONEY. Not some of the money. ALL THE FUCKING MONEY, I said. You can’t 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 fucking gigantic adventure that’s an all-consuming emotional experience that leaves you wrung 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 Mariana 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 four 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 base and 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, 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 in 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 Columbia was lost. On February 1st, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated, taking with it seven 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 planet 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 punchline to the story, Cameron said. The punchline is the shuttle mission that I refused. It was the Columbia. His voice rose. I fucking 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 unbelievable 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 Zach Baron. I read this article. It

4. 15:11 – 19:19

   Senra's Obsession and the Biography Overview

   1. DSDavid Senra15:11

      completely took over my life. This episode that you're about to hear, I have never, ever worked on an episode longer than this one. 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 read this piece. I was 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, is called The Futurist, The Life and Films of James Cameron. It was written by Rebecca Keegan, and it was produced right after, the book's about 10 or 12 years old, it was produced right after the original Avatar came out. But what I would do is every night, 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 Autumn, and you can, instead of reading, you can listen to the whole thing. I would fall asleep as I'm reading 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. He's 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 excerpt from that article first, because that's the order that this information on James Cameron was presented to me. And 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 important things that I learned about him. And one thing I'm going to take away, and I do think this guy's going to change my approach to my own work, but also reinforce it. So let me jump in because I got a ton of stuff to talk to you about. Just going to go over a brief overview and 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 the director work, I became curious about a man who seemed interested only in 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 this book is being written, he's like, hey, this is very curious. 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're, wind up being g- uh, like you solve the, the problem, the technical problems that you have to solve, and you actually succeed at doing the hard things, other people can't help but respect even the people in his field. There's, uh, multiple examples in this book, this is just the first one, where other directors who are at the top of their profession is 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, I got 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."

5. 19:19 – 23:17

   Childhood: Builder, Reader, and Independent Thinker

   1. DSDavid Senra19:19

      Okay, so I just wanna 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, like, 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 [chuckles] of, like, a little kid version of James Cameron, you see, oh, this is, 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 noticed that his younger siblings and several neighborhood children were streaming into her s- her yard carrying scraps of wood and metal. 'I said, 'What are you guys doing with all this junk?' Jim said, 'We're gonna build something.' And a couple hours later, the kids had constructed an airplane. 'Guess who was 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. It 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 he, she gets another call. It's like, "Oh, no, like, we gotta skip this kid again." And so it's gonna be no surprise to you, a- anybody that's intelligent, they're gonna read all the time. He started doing this at 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 Cameron 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, he's winning every single academic prize you could possibly win at school. He winds up becoming the president of a sci- of the science club. He becomes obsessed with history and studying ancient civilizations. Which is funny, 'cause 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 profession and is like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna take, like, an eight-year break [laughs] and dive to tit- uh, to the deepest part of the ocean and maybe nay- never make a film again, just because this is, this is what I'm happy 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 in to the oth- thoughts of other people is, like, a massive advantage for founders. It says, "The groupthink of his peers baffled him." He's in high school at this point. "First period meant singing the national anthem and saying 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 is something that continues to this day. Uh, something that changed his life when he was a little kid, he becomes, uh, fascinated, uh, by Jacques Cousteau, who was making all these, like, underwater documentaries. So I think even by the time he got to high school, he was already scuba cer- 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, th- this idea as, like, "Hey, I want... I don't just wanna do scuba, I just don't wanna 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 pul- the 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."

6. 23:17 – 28:19

   From 2001 to Self-Education at Fullerton

   1. DSDavid Senra23:17

      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, uh, 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 gonna 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, uh, "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, [laughs] and, like, the stuff that he was reading. He says, "He didn't understand me very well because I was in 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 and 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 where you're 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 film several more times, trying to understand how Kubrick 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, you, there's no way. I think this might even have been his, like, senior year of high school, something like that. And most kids are like, "Oh, I don't wanna 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 J- 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." And it took just meeting the right group of friends that had similar interests. 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 blue, blue-collar jobs that he's gotta work, uh, while he's going to college at the 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 gonna 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 Frakes is the first person who's 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 for, for very famous movies like, uh, Citizen Kane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and he's just like, "Here, James, take a look at these, like, what, what would, what would be considered well-written screenpra- 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 lear- 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 blue-collar jobs. He'd work as a janitor, a truck driver, and a machinist. On breaks, so he's, he's driving a truck, like a lunch truck for the, uh, the school district that he's, uh, li- living by, and on breaks during the day when he's driving the truck, right, he curls up in his truck and starts writing s- uh, writing screenplays. At night after a full day, Cameron would go and hang out with friends with, that had, that had similar interests. 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 he'd photocopy all these graduate student thesis on esoteric filmmaking subjects. He filled two fat binders with technical papers. For the cost of a couple hundred dollars 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.

7. 28:19 – 33:16

   Roger Corman's School and Rapid Rise

   1. DSDavid Senra28:19

      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'd do i- 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 kinda demo or some kinda 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 podcasts 'cause he winds up, uh, starting, like, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. He gives all these, like, legendary directors their first shot in life. So takes, uh, "Exogenesis" to Roger Corman's company. Roger Corman runs this company called New World Pictures. It's like this B movie, like, kinda crappy films. They just churn out a bunch of crappy films, so they make mer- money in volume as, as opposed to, to, uh, quality, right? But it's in- incredibly important because it says Cameron was about to land exactly where he needed to be, in a Darwinian environment for would-be 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 Cameron is at this point in his life? And the author does a fantastic job. R- uh, Rebecca Keegan 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 Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson, and many others in Hollywood. Why? 'Cause 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 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, he 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 model 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's 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 3:00 AM. 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? Nah, uh, 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? And 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, Corman 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 Two or something like that, and this is really important, okay? I, I... You know what? Let me read this to you first, and then I'll read my takeaway from this.

8. 33:16 – 36:48

   Fired After Five Days and the Birth of The Terminator

   1. DSDavid Senra33:16

      On his fifth day at work, Cameron learned that he was fired. His first opportunity to be the main director, right? He lasts five days. Five days. What 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 gonna be this massive hit. This is the punchline 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 a 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, uh, the 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 the chapters I would, I would highly recommend. But there's just a few things about The Terminator that I wanna pull out because I think they're interesting and, and more widely applicable, just, not just to filmmaking. But the aspect, the first thing before you, you have, 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, but 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 unforgiving 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 manage to get the deal done, and it's good that they convince people to finance the movie 'cause the f- 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 f- to film the movie, right? So he's already written it once. He's doing the rewriting. Then he also gets a job. Now, he has no, he has no money at this time, so he gotta take every opportunity that he can 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 Stallone. Listen to how he does it. This is what I mean that he has a Ter- Terminator-like work ethic. This is wild. Uh, 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 three-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, uh, while he's working on

9. 36:48 – 40:36

   Stan Winston, Control, and Clashing with the Aliens Crew

   1. DSDavid Senra36:48

      the pre-production for Terminator, getting ready to shoot the movie, he winds up meeting, um, another, like, high quality person. They wind up 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 gonna reread that book and, and do an episode on it again in the future. But this is something that Lucas and, and, uh, Cameron have in common, is they were constantly had ideas on how visual effects and, 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'll just found my own special effects company." So Lucas famously founded I- Industrial Light & Magic. Cameron's gonna wind up being a, a customer of theirs, and then James does the same thing when he founds Digital Domain 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, 'cause I watched a bunch of his inter- interviews. He's like, "Listen, this is the only way that I can work. It's the way I want to work." Cameron established a 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 on 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 gonna have after this. He's gonna 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. Before he's able to maneuver 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 s- 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 despised 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 has 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.

10. 40:36 – 46:26

    The Abyss: Choosing Hard and Building the Biggest Underwater Set

    1. DSDavid Senra40:36

       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 'cause 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 Ca- 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's 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 Jacques Cousteau's underwater TV documentaries. And so this is something that he's gonna 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 competi- competition there actually be. I think this is something I see a lot of, like, entrepreneurs, like, struggle with, is like they try to look for, like, the easy way out. It's like, no, that's the exact wrong thing you should be doing. You should be trying to avoid competition at all times. And if something's easy, there's gonna 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 one-man 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 the Mariana Trench betw- 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 wanna 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 gonna be made in, I think, 1989, right? So he's trying to figure out a couple years before the movie comes out, "Okay, where, where, how am I gonna do this? Where am I gonna shoot it," right? So they're going and scouting all over Amer- uh, 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 bowl. From afar, it looked something, it looked a little like the Roman Colosseum." So he goes over to it. He's like, "What the hell is this thing?" It's like, uh, essentially like a, an abandoned construction project. What they were trying to make would've been a nuclear reactor's containment vessel. It was only half finished, and it was 250, uh, 240 feet in diameter with 80-foot tall walls and no entrance. So he parks next to this thing. He's like, "Okay, I wanna check, check, I wanna look at this thing. Like, 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 110-foot crane. It is raining, and there's a ton of wind when he's doing this, and he decides, "This is exactly where, this is the set. This is where I'm gonna 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 he just built the world's largest underwater set, movie set ever made. He matches this unbelievable initial comp- 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, uh, he's, they call him a possessed maniac. Listen to this paragraph. Remember, they're filming underwater. At the end of the day, Cameron had to hang 10 feet under the surface for an hour to adjust to the pressure difference. Never one 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 one to waste time, Cameron asked the crew to install a monitor in the control room so he could watch his dailies through the acrylic window while suspended on a line. When his neck was sore from his giant helmet, so he's got this helmet that has all these, like, communication stuff in it, right? He hung upside down and had the crew invert the monitor. He'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 talk 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."

11. 46:26 – 52:04

    Compounding, Terminator 2, and Photoshop's Origins

    1. DSDavid Senra46:26

       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, I talk about the c- the compounding nature of Cameron's, uh, career that kinda 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 'cause this is when he starts working with George Lucas' company in Industrial Light mad- Magic, and it said, "Industrial Light, Light Magic assured Cameron that they could do it. It would take the company nine months," this is 1988, okay? "It would take the company nine 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, it takes twen- nine 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 gonna compound and accrue to the people that don't quit. And the thing is, most people quit. This 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, uh, 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 $10 million just for the rights, right? Just for the rights to make Terminator 2. 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 Carolco 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 dir- 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 to be exact. It turns out I can be bought [chuckles] So that is in 1989, so it's, 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 is like $100 million. But listen to how, what they did for Arnold. So they gave James $6 million. You know how they convinced Arnold to do the movie? These guys gave Arnold a $12 million Gulfstream 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 y- 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 T-1000 Terminator to do was a stretch for Industrial Light & 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 20-something person working there named John Knoll and his brother Thomas, uh, 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, uh, the rights to Photoshop a few years later for, I think, $35 million. There is something that appears in the book multiple times I haven't covered yet. Uh, y- 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, this is 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 is, uh, would... That, 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 Camer- James Cameron's level of professionalism. Uh, he would... He's known for doing this on multiple things, like, the, 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 T2 crew, some of whom started wearing shirts that said, "Terminator 3: Not With Me." And that dedication to just making the best thing he could 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 essay, rather. So what's fascinating is that I think they pay, they cost like 100 million to make. The movie makes something like $500 million. And so this crazy... He ke- his, his movies keep having these fantastic financial outcomes, and this is what allows him to get to what he really wants. What, 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.

12. 52:04 – 56:35

    Ownership, Digital Domain, and Focus on the Work

    1. DSDavid Senra52:04

       And so, you know, I'm reading about James, or, uh, 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 deal 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 Carolco 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 had 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, 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 in 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 gonna 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 nascent... Remember, this is very early days. In the nascent digital effects industry as existed. And then just one more thing I wanna pull out 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 opticals. They thought that was gonna, that that wasn't gonna 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, is 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 theme that appears over and over again in the career of James Cameron that I wanna 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 the, his choice of casting. Remember, he has control, so he can do whatever he... Like, 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 confessed 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 I 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, uh, this is really, like, a bullet point. My bullet point, like, model of James Cameron up until my reading of, up until the point of the book is, 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 gonna make him money, he was trying to build something great, and with the trust that if he builds something great, he'll make money. But he, building something great was something that Walt Disney and, and Cameron put first. And then the last note was that he's just got an inner clock. He's got an inner scorecard. J- He just wants to focus on the work that he's doing. He's not concerned with pu- pu- 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 irrelevant to him.

13. 56:35 – 1:04:12

    Titanic: Obsessive Detail and Defying Doubters

    1. DSDavid Senra56:35

       And you see this in how he picks his movies. He's trying to figure out, like, "What am I gonna work on next after, uh, True Lies?" And he, this is where he decides to do Titanic, which w- at the time becomes, you know, the most succ- finan- 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 di- 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 fax from this other guy, this, this explorer named Sa- Sagalovich. And so he's reading Sagalovich's thoughts. And I love this idea 'cause 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 fax, and it says, "In s- i- it's sometimes necessary in life to do something extraordinary." In Cameron's mind, that line seemed to g- 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 film, because he's been fantasizing about diving down to the wreck, I think it would cost, I think it was, like, six million dollars or something like that to, to develop the technology to do it safe. And then I think he went down, you know, maybe a dozen times, maybe even more. And what he realized is, like, well, really, we should charge my expedition to the Titanic as a marketing expense. And the Fi- and the studio's 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 gonna 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, uh, Michael Jordan's autobiography, which I covered back on episode 213, 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 Cameron's dedication to the little details, from the ship's stationery down to the White Star Line stamped ashtrays. He has always been a stickler for the little things. After I put out that episode on Bernard Arnault, 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 Arnault, 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 GQ 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 [chuckles] the most financially successful film. And he's got people on his own team. On 20th Century Fox, uh, one of the presidents there comes to James and is trying to, like, instill doubts into James' mind. This is crazy, and this is a... If you listen to the early episodes of Founders, I'd have this segment 'cause it'd pop up so much, so many times where I called it critics don't know shit. 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 Mechanic, uh, told Cameron that the film would never see a dime of profit. He, uh, suggested that Cameron 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 counteroffer did not go over well. "Get the fuck out of my house," Cameron replied. And I need to make the point that that level of confidence, like, sometimes it has to be externalized 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 gotta figure out how 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 shit, 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 four-hour movie and was wildly over budget and had been told there was zero possibility that the film could make any money. His movie was the laughing stock of Hollywood. Critics don't know shit. The media was attacking him and ridiculing him daily. The Hollywood media, the media that he has a right to ignore, is making fun of him because they think this is gonna be like another Waterworld, 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. There's this great line, um, the founder of Vans, you know, the shoe company. He says, uh, "Opportunity is 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, uh, footage for a four-hour movie, was wildly over budget, and had been told there was zero possibility that the 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, Rupert Murdoch. In the middle of this turmoil, the director ran into the News Corporation chairman and CEO, Rupert 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 from 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 it and maintaining absolute control. At what would be the apex of his powers as a director, Cameron would step away from feature filmmaking altogether. After Titanic, Cameron took to calling himself the world's busiest unemployed filmmaker. "I've got my fuck 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 he, how he talks. "I got my fuck you money, and I can kinda step away for a while. My career's 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, this is the weirdest thing, uh, surprising thing to me. It's like, uh, I just did a Tiger Woods biography on episode 301. Tiger Woods 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 a 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 Woods said. And then James a-adds another level to this. "You are just part of the food chain."

14. 1:04:12 – 1:08:08

    Exploration Years, Long-Gestating Ideas, and the Digital Manifesto

    1. DSDavid Senra1:04:12

       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 9/11. 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, gonna 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 9/11 had 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 Magellans? 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 gonna make Avatar." And this is what I meant. It was like one of the most impressive things about him is that the f- 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, s- there's another line in the book, uh, earlier on where he's like, "Oh, I'll, 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 wanna 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's 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 Avatar's widely successful, and like, "You stole the idea from me." And he's like, "Oh, yeah? Look at this. Dated. I wrote this when I was 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 gonna happen. And really not to focus on specifically what's happening in it. What is the idea behind what's happening in the book? And what, the idea that's 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 obvious to anybody else. Cameron had written a digital manifesto, a passionately argued 13-page document laying out where he expected filmmaking 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 don a data suit, sending a stream of information about the actor's physical movements to a workstation. Remember, this is 1992, uh, where it'd 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 in special effects at that point, so this is 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 p- possibilities of lifelike CG characters driven by human performances wouldn't be obvious for at least another decade. That is fascinating to 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?

15. 1:08:08 – 1:11:45

    Avatar, Generosity, and Closing Thoughts

    1. DSDavid Senra1:08:08

       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. He 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 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 Steven Spielberg would 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 and 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 gonna use them for, I think, "Avatar 3" and "Avatar 4" too. It's called Weta, and it's actually, uh, headquartered in New Zealand, very close to where Cameron lives. And finally, in 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, [chuckles] 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 H-M-F-I-C printed on it. It stood for Head Motherfucker 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 gonna leave the link down for the GQ article. At the top of the GQ article, you'll see, uh, they'll have audio controls in case you wanna listen to it. It's excellent. They did an excellent job on it. Like I said, I've, I, 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 will go through and try to find, like, the 10 f- like, my 10 favorite sentences in the book. It's like 10 bullet points that I wanna remember from the book. I- if you wanna 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 t- 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 AMA ep- episodes. You can email me a question, which you'll know that I'll read. And included in your question, if you want to let other p- 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 wanna go deeper, this is a great way to do that. That link is down below and available at founderspodcast.com. That is 311 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.

Episode duration: 1:11:45