Earlier this month he was awarded Legends status by Disney with the likes of Angela Bassett, Harrison Ford and composer John Williams. Last week he turned 70, an age when most people are considering retirement. But James Cameron, the Oscar-winning film director and technological pioneer, has no intention of slowing down.
“Look, we all face finite time to get things done in this life,” he says philosophically. “I think you’re a little more aware of that and maybe you prioritise. I love the work that I’m doing right now and I have no complaints whatsoever. As long as I’m healthy and active and doing stuff that intrigues me creatively and intellectually, I’m a happy camper.”
Cameron, director of Aliens, Avatar, Titanic, The Terminator and Terminator 2, spoke to the Guardian from a car as he headed to a surprise appearance alongside Avatar stars Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington at D23, the biennial convention for members of the official Disney fan club, in Anaheim, California.
In a wide-ranging interview he reflects on last week’s new Alien film, responds to director Roland Emmerich’s claim to have quit a project because Cameron was “overbearing”, and discusses a new Terminator project and the threat of artificial intelligence – but admits that writing science fiction is getting harder in the 21st century.
Politics, however, are off the agenda. “I just ate,” he explains. “Not good for your digestion.”
First, Cameron wants to talk about his great hinterland, or rather hinterwater. Fascinated as a child by sea explorer Jacques Cousteau’s TV specials, he has spent hundreds of hours in submarines, been on at least 50 dives deeper than 2 miles (3km) and made frequent dives to the wreck of the Titanic. “I basically took eight years off from Hollywood life to go ocean exploring,” he says.
Cameron teamed up with BBC Studios and the nonprofit research organisation OceanX for a TV documentary about a state-of-the-art scientific research vessel called OceanXplorer travelling in remote seas. He was tied up making Avatar so could not join the expedition himself but now narrates OceanXplorers, a six-part National Geographic series.
Cameron drew on his experience to influence the design of the 285ft ship to make it “media friendly” with built-in lighting, so filming could happen anywhere at any time. The series got shut down by the coronavirus pandemic for about a year, forcing a change in the route map, which settled on the Azores, Bahamas, Caribbean and the frigid Arctic shores of Svalbard, Norway.
OceanXplorers features the spectacular images of marine life that one has come to expect from the BBC as we see polar bears, sharks and whales up close. But given Cameron’s instinct for storytelling, he also brings a human dimension by focusing on the crew and their sense of wonder at seeing bioluminescence or thousands of jellyfish.
He says: “It’s interesting to see the scientists because we’re filming them at the same time from inside the sub, so whenever they see something that’s exciting to them, that excitement is palpable and we’re able to quantify in the moment exactly why it’s interesting.
“My goal in this was to make science aspirational, to see cool young people passionate about science, curious and wanting to find the answers and trying to bottle the spirit of science.
“The average viewer thinks of scientists as guys in labs and white coats and they don’t think of themselves as earthy real people and I wanted to break through that and go on their journey. That was our jumping off point and, because of the pandemic, it took a long time to get going but, once we got out there, we some pretty amazing stuff.”
The team includes deep sea researcher Zoleka Filander from South Africa, shark biologist Melissa Cristina Márquez from Puerto Rico, ocean technology innovator Eric Stackpole from California and former British Royal Marine Aldo Kane.
Cameron, a Canadian who has long been praised for writing strong female characters in his fictional movies, comments: “When you try to put together a small handful of people, you can’t tick every race and background and gender box, but we definitely tried to find a diverse team, a global team, to the extent that we could.
“[Zoleka] distinguished herself among a whole group of applicants and we were lucky to get her. It’s not to jar the audience but just remind them that scientists don’t look like any particular type. The human mind has curiosity no matter where you’re from.”
Cameron cheerfully admits he was jealous of what they got to see and do. He speaks with enthusiasm about how deftly placed cameras allowed them to observe a humpback mother and orca mother doing battle or a hammerhead shark using its sense of vibration sense to feed at night. “The oceans are very unforgiving,” he says, but there no good guys and bad guys.
Did Steven Spielberg unfairly malign sharks in Jaws (1975)? “Steven set the whole shark cause back. Well, sharks are a really important part of the whole food web system as major apex predators. Sharks have a bad rap but the public is wising up now that sharks play a role and they’re they’re important and they’ve been around a lot longer than us: something like 300m years. They emerged very early on in the higher vertebrate life forms on the planet and they’re so well adapted to their environment.”
As in all natural history programmes on TV, the issue of the climate crisis is inescapable, but in OceanXplorers it is more background than foreground. Cameron wanted to show rather than tell. “We wanted to find people where their level of interest was. If they felt going in that they were going to get lectured as opposed to seeing something cool and new that technology was able to allow us to see for the first time – I’d rather reach more people with a softer message than a few people with a targeted message.
“I know that sounds kind of like a cop out but you’ve got to get people engaged and you’ve got to get the caring about what’s happening in the ocean. If one in a thousand kids that watch this show decide to go into Stem or marine biology or the sciences or the technology necessary for understanding the oceans, then we’ve succeeded because the reach of the show will be millions and millions across the Disney platforms. You’ve got to engage with curiosity and excitement first.”
Cameron has displayed a knack for that in his Hollywood career. His films have earned $8.7bn at the worldwide box office, second only to Spielberg’s $10.8bn (Cameron has directed only nine feature films compared to Spielberg’s 34.) At Sunday’s Disney tribute actor Kate Winslet, who starred in Cameron’s 1997 epic Titanic, praised him for making “some of the most critically acclaimed, culturally loved films” of her lifetime.
After Avatar and its sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: Fire And Ash is set for release on 19 December 2025. Cameron says: “I know what we’ve got with this film and it’s gonna be a trip. What I would tell people is it’s not going to be what you expect but it’s going to be what you want.”
Last week, meanwhile, saw the opening of Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, a story set between Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien and Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, both starring Sigourney Weaver. Cameron offered advice on the project but is quick to play down his role.
“I wasn’t really helping out,” he insists. “I know Fede, the director, and very early on he and his writing partner came to me and said, ‘Got any ideas?’ – no, they had plenty of ideas but they just wanted to kind of, I don’t know, pilgrimage to Mecca or something like that. But that was years ago, then they went off and wrote their thing and I had nothing to do with it.
“Then six months ago or so he shared an early cut of the film with me and I gave him some notes for like an hour. I don’t want to take any credit whatsoever. If the film is great, I don’t want to take any credit; if it sucks, not my fault! Seriously, it’s his thing, so credit due where it’s due and, from what I’m hearing, it’s pretty good.”
Would Cameron ever consider a return to the franchise? “It’s kind of trampled ground at this point. I wouldn’t rule anything out but I’ve got 23 other projects in the queue before that hypothetical one so I’m going to guess, with me turning 70, that ain’t gonna happen. You’ve got to pick your battles at some point. You know what I mean?”
Cameron is famously a perfectionist. Or some would say autocrat. When crew members’ phones rang on the Avatar set he would allegedly nail-gun them to the wall. More recently Independence Day director Emmerich said he quit another Cameron project, a remake of the 1966 sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage, explaining: “James Cameron is very overbearing, and so I at one point just gave up. Because it’s like, is it your movie or my movie?”
Cameron retorts: “If that conversation took place, it was extremely short and, by the way, his version of it, which I have read is, ‘Cameron was overbearing’. Yeah, I’m not going to produce it like a bank. I’m not just going to write you a cheque – I’m going to have an actual opinion considering that we spent years developing the script. And that’s cool. Some directors just have to do their thing and that’s fine. Roland’s a writer, so haul off dude, do your thing, just don’t do it with me.”
He adds: “But quite honestly we’ve had six directors, I think, over the years attached to that project and one thing or another always knocks it out of the box. I’m currently working with another director, a guy that I know quite well – I’m not going to name names right now – but we think we have a pretty good handle on it.
“This thing’s been in progress for – or not progressing – for like 20 years so it’s not exactly a big scoop. If I ever talked to Roland – and apparently I did, and I don’t remember it – it was a very, very brief conversation. It was probably at a party and were probably both drunk and yeah, I was probably overbearing – this is 20 years ago.”
October will mark the 40th anniversary of The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cybernetic assassin sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, whose unborn son will one day save mankind from being destroyed by Skynet, a hostile artificial intelligence. (Cameron rejected a producer’s suggestion that he cast OJ Simpson in the Terminator role.)
“People pay the compliment, ‘Oh, it still holds up’,” he reflects. “I actually think that’s true of Terminator 2 qualitatively. I think Terminator 1 qualitatively is pretty obsolete, although story-wise it’s still pretty intriguing. There’s some interest around this idea that it was a bit prescient on certain things, like the emergence of AI, the potential existential threat of AI, which is transforming our world before our eyes.
“We’re at a point right now where it gets it gets harder and harder to write science fiction because we’re living in a science fiction world on a day to day basis. I’m working through some of the themes that I want to bring into a new Terminator film or possibly even a kind of a reboot of a larger story framework and it’s difficult right now because I want to let the smoke clear on the whole thing. That’s going to be a ride that we’re going to be watching for probably the rest of human history but certainly the next few years are going to be quite telling.”
If AI does come to pose an extinction-level threat, as some experts warn, Cameron’s Terminator films may be seen as a prophecy that humanity was heading as inexorably as the Titanic towards an iceberg of its own making. He adds: “As I jokingly said once in an interview, ‘I warned you guys in 1984 but you didn’t listen!’
“Every time I go to some gathering of AI researchers – the real cutting edge guys that are working in artificial general intelligence right now, actually trying to create a synthetic consciousness – I put up my hand to ask a question and they all crack up. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s the Skynet guy, he’s going to be negative.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not negative, just let me ask my question, don’t judge’. And then I’m negative.”
The six-episode OceanXplorers premiered on 18 August and streams on Hulu and Disney+.