← The Town with Matthew Belloni
The Town with Matthew Belloni
Part 1: James Cameron on Avatar Misconceptions, AI’s Skynet Moment, and His Elon Musk Friendship
00:39:19
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- [00:01]
A
This episode of the Town is brought to you by Netflix. Presenting Frankenstein, a film by Academy Award winning director and writer Guillermo Del Toro. A retelling of the classic novel about what it means to be human, to crave love and seek understanding. Starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz, The New York Times raves Frankenstein is stunning, the movie Guillermo del Toro was born to make. Now playing on Netflix for your awards consideration. This episode is brought to you by Sentimental Value, which isn't just the must see film of the season, it's the must feel film of the year from the director of the Worst Person in the World. Joachim Trier's story of love, family and reconciliation is being hailed by critics as one of the best films of the decade, if not ever. Starring Renate Reinsveh, Stellan Skarsgrd and Elle Fanning in career Best Performances Sentimental Value is a modern masterpiece. See it in theaters now. It is Monday, November 24th. There are a handful of upper upper echelon filmmakers in Hollywood. You know their names, I don't need to list them. And then there is James Cameron. Avatar is still the highest grossing movie of all time at $2.9 billion, and with its 2022 sequel in Titanic, Cameron has made three of the top five films of all time. He doesn't make movies that often, but when he does, he's made some all time classics like terminator, terminator 2, aliens, the abyss. You know what he's made at the same time. He's become a technologist, an undersea explorer, an environmental activist, and a filmmaker who despite all his technological chops, including inventing a lot of the technology he uses on the Avatar movies, he still grounds them in human performances. It annoys him, and rightly so. When people refer to Avatar and his motion capture technique as purely visual or CGI or animation or even AI though he has a lot of thoughts on AI. And now he's back with Fire and Ash, which he delivered to Disney just about a week ago. I saw it and of course I wanted to talk to Cameron before he starts his big press tour. So Craig and I went down to Avatar US headquarters in Manhattan beach last week and got him on the town early. We talked about a lot, his exacting filmmaking process, how he works with actors, the cost of the Avatar machine. I believe he used the term fuck ton of money. Why he's letting the audience under the hood for this one, plus his fears for the state of Hollywood and the world and the future of the kind of movies he likes to make even his friendship with Elon Musk. We may have discussed alien life forms a bit. I definitely told him to his face that he's famously difficult. And he talked about why he thinks David Ellison is the right buyer for Warner Brothers and why he's not a fan of Netflix. Really not a fan for a guest this big. We had to do a two parter, a special treat for Thanksgiving, plus a lightning round and a good one today. It's James Cameron, the king of the world from the Ringer and Puck. I'm Matt Bellany and this is the town. All right, we are here with James Cameron. Filmmaker, environmentalist, technologist. Am I missing anything? International man of mystery.
- [03:02]
B
Underwater explorer.
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A
Underwater explorer. I gotta admit, I'm a little intimidated. I don't get intimidated often with guests, but I've got the literal king of the world here.
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B
I would not have thought of you, Matt, as being intimidated in any scen. The number of big shots that you've.
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A
I don't know about that.
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B
Investigated and challenged.
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A
You have a track record. It's. I was reviewing in the research. It's. It's unbelievable the track record you have. I. There has never been a bigger flex in the entertainment business, I don't think, than to come out with a movie that everyone said would flop, that everyone said was going to.
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B
Which one are we talking about? Titanic? Avatar.
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A
You made the biggest grossing movie of all time. And then you kind of go away for 12 years, you do your underwater stuff, you do your documentaries, and then you come back and you beat it.
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B
Yeah, it's true.
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A
That is the greatest flex in the history of Hollywood.
- [03:57]
B
Yeah, well, it wasn't planned as a flex. Neither one of them were. They were just cool projects, you know, I mean, I just follow my nose to stuff that interests me that I know is going to be challenging, you know, that I know is going to put on a big show. I mean, I think that is where the seed of it is. To me. The challenge is how do we do something extraordinary? How do we do something people haven't seen? So, you know, Titanic was. We're gonna go to the wreck of Titanic. We're gonna make a movie about Titanic with the real Titanic. And then, you know, once we'd sort of set that bar for ourselves, then we had to build this giant set and we had to cast it properly and actually make a good movie. And then with Avatar, it was the same thing. Let's do a new form of cinema, see what happens. For me, it's just this crazy, quirky. Let's just do this. Spend a lot of OPM to all other people's money and just see what happens.
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A
We'll get. You just delivered the film to Disney. Do you have a ritual when you finish a film?
- [04:56]
B
No, not really. Because there's never like a clear moment when it's done. It just kind of tapers off. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't die with a bang, but with a whimper. You know, it's like you think.
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A
It's not like you have a special martini or you do it, you have a falafel from your favorite vegan place.
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B
Nothing quite that sort of superstitious or knockwood luck kind of thing. But what we do is on Avatar, we have this tradition. It's a 20 year tradition. When we finish the week's work, we all get together for a shot of tequila and we call it Friday shots. Even if it happens to be Saturday or even, God forbid, Sunday. Right. So we did, you know, our Friday shots when we finished the mix and everybody celebrated. Then we came back to work the next day and fixed some stuff in the mix. So. And then it just sort of attenuates and then there's a moment where it's kind of pried out of your hands, you know, by reality because it's gotta get disseminated across all the international platforms and subtitled and all that sort of thing. So they just yank it away from me and like, okay, I guess we're done, right? You know.
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A
All right, so I want to talk about your filmmaking process. I want to talk a little bit about the kind of machine of the Avatar movies. But let's, let's start with the production element here because I know it's very important to you and you're doing more on this movie than you did on the last one. Kind of explain to people what goes into these movies. Because I don't think with all the press that these movies get, I don't think even people in the business understand the lift for these movies. They don't get it. And there's a great documentary on Disney right now about that. It is not just promotional. It is actually really informative. And it shows you side by side how this is done. And people don't understand, like when, when people talk about, oh, this movie does, you know, $2.3 billion, why is it doing this much? Why is it. It's because when you're watching the movie, either subconsciously or consciously, these are people that you're watching.
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B
Exactly.
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A
You're getting the emotion and you're Getting the movement. And it's something that you cannot get with cgi and you can't get it.
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B
With makeup because makeup suppresses the actor. Whereas a CG version of the character is more emotive. You know, the not me characters have eyes that are volum. Four times the volume of a human eye, so almost twice the width. So they have these big expressive faces. Now it's the actor, right? We start with a scan of the actor, but let me generalize. First, it's about performance. So you've hit on it. Like, what is making these films so compelling? It's the story of these characters. It's going with them. It's feeling their pain, feeling their emotion, feeling their joy and their own wonder at this world that they're exploring. It's in their eyes, it's in their voices, in their faces. So it starts with the actors. That starts with. Hopefully, decent writing, starts with great casting, because I always think the casting makes up for any deficits in the writing. Speaking as the screenwriter, you know, I listen to how the actors express themselves. Sometimes I change. Change the dialogue starts with performance. So people hear about performance capture, they kind of dismiss it as the kind of redheaded stepchild of film acting like it's not real acting. It's not real acting. Like when you're in front of a camera, you know, I mean, I could do an hour just on that subject.
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A
You know, and annoy the shit out of you when people say, oh, they're animated. Oh, it's cg. Oh, oh, it's AI.
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B
Well, I'll tell you what annoys me is when it's misrepresented, especially in media that, you know, let's say Sigourney Weaver voiced the character of Kiri. When you voice a part for, let's say, a Pixar film. We all love Pixar movies. I'm not dissing them. But when you come in to do that as an actor, you stand at a podium for a day or two or maybe three, and you say the part. You know, you act it out verbally. And then a team of animators goes off and does the physical character, the inter. The visual interpretation of that voice part. That's not what Sigourney or any of the other actors did for making Avatar 2 and Avatar 3, we did 18 months of capture. They perform everything. Every breath is recorded, every bit of movement, every hand gesture, a lot of.
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A
It here at the studio.
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B
Right here. Right here at Manhattan Beach Studio, and we even had a big tank here. So if you Saw the characters underwater. The actors were underwater. If you saw them riding a creature, they were riding a water.
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A
I love that Zoe didn't want to go underwater.
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B
Zoe is, well, she's very much like a cat, you know, kind of. Her beauty is a very kind of feline beauty. You know, her grace, her poise, her athletic speed, all those things. And sure enough, she doesn't like being underwater.
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A
That's really.
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B
You know.
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A
By the way, Pixar completely ripped you off for their new movie. Have you seen the Hoppers trailer?
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B
No. No.
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A
They even have a joke in it because it's literally Avatar, except the avatar is an animal.
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B
Okay, great. You know, I mean, it's the sincerest form of flattery. Right. Right up until it starts to bite into my box office. Then it's actionable.
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A
Yes, exactly. Make your lawyers aware. I'm sure Disney will be getting a call. All right, so the performance aspect is important to you and I feel like you are doing a better job this time because I think there's probably a temptation for you to just let the movie speak for itself.
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B
Absolutely. Well, you're right on the button with that. Because I thought I don't want to disperse the magic or I kind of swept our process under the rug because I thought seeing people in tights and marker suits doesn't. Is not transportive. It doesn't take your mind to. To another place, your imagination. Right. So I swept it under the rug for Movie one and Movie two. I think on Movie two, you know, the Way of Water came out three years ago. I think we got burned a little bit by the advent of Gen AI at that point and people conflating us with computer made images. You know, our images are. They're performed by actors, they're made by artists. Sure. We use computers. You're using a computer to read your notes right now. It's a tool. It's not the creative force. The creative force is the human imagination. Right. And I realized after the fact, okay, it was a mistake to hide the man behind the curtain, so to speak. The man being Stephen Lang or Sam Worthington or whatever. And all our digital artists, you know, who do you know, takes over a thousand people to make one of these movies. And they're all artists. Yeah, we have some engineers too, of course, but so this time I thought, no, I got to reverse the polarity on this. I've got to show people what these actors are doing, the commitment they make, their passion, how they put their heart and soul into the character as much as any live action Production. And I would even make the case, and we can circle back to this if you want. I would make the case that it's the purest form of cinema acting, the purest form of acting in general. Because what you've got is photographic cinematography. You've got capture based cinema and you've got theater. Those are basically your three kind of thresholds for acting. And people sort of judge as if cinema, 125 years of photographic cinema is best simply because it's essentially first and the one we all grew up in. But it's not best from an actor's perspective. And most actors haven't done capture, so they don't know. So the vast majority haven't done it and therefore dis it. And the small minority have done it and aren't listened to.
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A
Well, it's arguably more difficult because there's nothing around you either. Very Shakespearean.
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B
All right, let's take it point by point. Okay, let's break it down.
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A
Let's do it.
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B
Okay. All right. All right. So you're on a set, a beautiful set. You know, maybe it's a set for Wicked, maybe it's a set for Harry Potter, whatever. They really put lavish attention into it. You walk in before the crew gets there, it's dark, you see nothing. You walk in when the crew is there. There's lights everywhere, there's stands everywhere, there's big flags everywhere, there's big silks everywhere. You can barely see the set based on where the camera will be looking at a given moment. Now you're in the scene, there's flags and lights all around you. There's a grip on a ladder with his butt cleavage kind of hanging out right next to you.
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A
It's in the Teamster contract.
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B
Yeah, right. I mean, there's a guy that just does that. I mean, that's all he does. He's supposed to be holding something. He's the butt guy. So the point is that the actor must tune all that out. They must zero in on the other actor. They must get the eyes of the other actor, get the feeling, get the wave of whatever the emotion is. Hostility, conflict, love, whatever it is, longing. And that's what they play to. All right, so take that. Those same. That same pair of actors. Let's call it a two hander scene. Right? Let's stick them in the volume. I'll show them the set, I'll walk them through it. Virtually, they'll know, okay, There's a waterfall over there, there's a sun, sunset over there. There's Some interesting flying creatures flapping around. They're in the jungle. There's a stream right there. I'll make it real for them in their minds, and then I'll let their imaginations take over. And then it becomes that kind of childlike process when, you know, I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, a cardboard box became a submarine or an airplane or a spaceship or whatever. We have that capacity. It takes them back to a very pure, kind of almost childlike place. Now, it doesn't mean their character is necessarily childlike, but at that point, they have total freedom to just walk. I mean, they can't walk in what we know is the water, but they can. I let them. I let the emotion of the moment let them drive their bodies to wherever they feel they need to be. I don't go in previs. I don't go in storyboarded. I go in and I just open it up to blocking on rehearsal and just feeling. It's very much like theater rehearsal, Right? So theater rehearsal, you haven't put the marks down yet. You start at the table, you talk about the character, then you stand it up and you start moving around and you start finding it. And the. And the setting kind of evolves from that often.
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A
Right?
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B
That's how we do it.
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A
And you've been doing that in demonstrations for various groups around town.
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B
Right.
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A
You've done it for the dga, you've done it for sag.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Why are you doing that? Just to explain, as part of the education process.
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B
So far, we've done four demos, two for dga, two for sag, and the result have been that people stayed for literally hours afterwards and wanted to talk about it. Their minds are kind of blown at how actor centric it is. How much. For example, the director said, well, wait a minute, 100% of your focus is on the actors? I said, exactly. I'll worry about all the cinematography later. I'll do the beautiful Dolly moves, the.
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A
Beautiful city cameras, because you're known as the great technologist.
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B
See, a certain set of assumptions work against this, you know, and people think that it's a very tactical thing. They see somebody in a capture suit and they think, oh, you're just a robot. You know, they don't realize how absolutely liberating it is, both from. For them, for the actors and for me, I don't have to think about the Dolly track. I don't have to think about the setting sun and the fact that I've got 20 minutes to get the shot. I don't have to think about all the background extras missing their marks or. Or dropping something or screwing up or mugging the camera or whatever it is. I don't have to worry about a car hitting its marks or all of these sort of background exigencies. I don't have to worry about the lighting. I don't have to worry about the lens. I don't have to worry about it being out of focus and having to go again. And oy, we just had the best performance conceivable. And here's the other thing most people forget. There's no coverage. We don't shoot for coverage. We shoot for the truth of the scene. The right, you know, kind of dramatic timber to the moment.
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A
You build the coverage around.
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B
I'll build the coverage later. The actors are all gone at that point. And then I'm doing the two shot, the close up, the overs, you know, the wide, the helicopter shot. I'm doing all that later, you know, so I take that burden upon myself to take it off them. It also gives me time to really finesse that and not have to rush that either, because I love both. I love the acting. I love the. As a writer, director, I love finding the character with the actor. There's nothing more fun in this work.
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A
Even though you were drawing and sketching these characters like when you were a kid, you're still finding it?
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B
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Sure. It's a. It's, you know, we call it Pandora because, you know, it's like it's everything flow, everything flows. Pandora was the first woman, by the way, in Greek mythology, everybody thinks of Pandora's box and that part of the story, but she was considered the first female in Greek mythology. So there's a lot of female energy in the story in Pandora, certainly in this movie. Female deity, yeah, we got the villain. We got. We got Zoe Saldanya, we got Kate Winslet.
- [17:44]
A
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B
Let's just go there.
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A
I know you've made a lot of comments in the past about. In 2023, you said that AI could never come up with a quote, good story that could replace screenwriters.
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B
Let me be more specific. Okay, here's what AI can do, right? It's trained on everything we ever valued artistically. You know, they don't put the crap stuff into the training data. They put the stuff that's been published that's online, the art, the performances, the movies, all that sort of thing, whether they're doing it legally or ethically or not, or that's. That's all in flux, obviously. But let's assume that there's. That there is this kind of almost de facto selection for that which the human eye and the human consciousness enjoys, right? And that goes into the training data. So millions and millions of images and millions, thousands of hours of performance and so on. So what you're going to get is the average. It goes in a blender, right? And then it precipitates out as a single unique new image. But it's based on a sort of a generic feedstock, if you will. What it can never do is create a unique lived experience reflected through the eyes of a single artist, right? Whether that's a single writer, single director, single actor.
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A
You still believe that?
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B
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. It won't select for the quirkiness for the offbeat. And I think what we celebrate is the uniqueness of our actors. Not their perfection, not their kind of glossy Vogue cover beauty. But they're off centerness, you know, I mean, Sigourney Weaver, Cate Blanchett, they're not, they're, they're not like supermodels. They're they themselves. Right. And I think that's true. Jesse Buckley. They're themselves. They're, you know, and they're, they're not generic.
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A
But you have also said that you see an AI revolution coming and that it sort of has to happen in order to bring the cost of movies down.
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B
Right.
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A
How can that necessarily coexist without. With not replacing.
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B
I have lots of dualities in my mind that I'm very comfortable with. Okay, so that's a duality. Right. I think there, there's a great deal of caution around generative AI. I think we as an industry need to be self policing on this. I don't see government regulation as an answer. That's a blunt instrument. They're going to mess it up.
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A
But who does that, Gils?
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B
I think the Guild should play a big role. I think the Directors Guild and the Actors Guild should play a big role in this, just as they did. I mean, the actors certainly did, you know, to the detriment of a lot of people. But they definitely drove a flag in the ground over this a couple of years ago. Right. I think we have to be self policing. We've got to talk about. It's not a question of what we sort of can legally do or even ethically what we should do. It's a question of. I almost want to say morally what we should do, what we should embrace, you know, how we should celebrate ourselves as artists and how we should set a kind of set of artistic standards that celebrate human purpose. Because the overall risk of AI in general, not just gen AI, but AGI, right, Any form of AI, is that we lose purpose as people, we lose jobs, we lose a sense of, well, what are we here for? You know, we are these flawed biological machines. And a computer can be theoretically more precise, more correct, faster, all of all of those things. And that's going to be a threshold existential issue. I'm not, I'm now sort of jumping to AI more broadly. Artificial general.
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A
You said a thousand people work on Avatar movies. What is the correct amount of people that should be working on Avatar movies?
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B
A thousand people for half the time. And then we start the next one. Okay, so nobody loses a job. Our cadence increases, our throughput increases I can make. Look, I'm 71. I got a finite amount of time. Maybe another 30, 40 years at most.
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A
At most. I don't know. Elon Musk seems to have ideas about that.
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B
Yeah, no, I'm not one of these longevity freaks, but I just have a lot.
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A
You don't have a chamber?
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B
No, I don't have a chair. I don't. I'm not doing the hyperbaric oxygen or any of that stuff. I am. I am vegan, though.
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A
That's true. That adds at least 10 years.
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B
I think so. I mean, I think if you catch it in time. Right. You know, I mean, I started 13 years ago, and I don't want to get off onto that subject, but I will just put a quick footnote on that, which is I. I started it for sustainability and environmental reasons because of the, you know, the serious, serious impact of animal agriculture on the planet, on, you know, ecosystems on indigenous territory and so on Amazon, all that stuff. I could do hours on that too. But I've found the health and energy benefit of it as I go along. And as a director, it's all about your energy.
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A
I'm drinking coffee. You're not.
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B
Yeah, I don't need it. It's built in at this point. Endorphins. But, you know, as the director shows up, if, if his muffler's dragging or her mufflers, Dragon and the whole crew just. Right. So you've got to. You got to lead by example. So energy is a good thing. I don't know how we got off on.
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A
But back to AI. I mean, you are on the board of a AI company, right?
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B
That was a learning. That wasn't to sort of make money. That was to learn that business and how they think. Right. And it's not one of the big companies, you know, the Googles of the world that are spending billions on AI superintelligence. That scares me. That's a whole other thing.
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A
Yeah, you've made comments about that to me.
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B
There's. Everybody sort of conflates AI, especially people that don't work in it, don't really know it. But there's really two massively different flavors of AI. There's artificial super intelligence, which we don't quite have yet, but people see pathways to it, and they're going full tilt, boogie right toward it.
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A
And you're. You are not for that.
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B
I am absolutely not for that. Not, certainly not without guardrails.
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A
Skynet.
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B
That's Skynet, and it will be Skynet. And the first application oh, they always talk about how it's going to revolutionize medicine and all this and, and economic efficiencies and there's going to be this massive.
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A
Elon says it's going to make us all rich because we're going to be able to live like only rich people can live now. With access to the best medical care and best entertainment.
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B
He says, yeah, the 5% of the population that survives the wars precipitated by, by AI being put in charge of weapons systems.
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A
And we'll all be living on the moon.
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B
Yeah, right. Or Mars, you know, because those are such human friendly places. Let's leave this, this beautiful green and blue water planet that sustained life for a few billion years and let's go to a place where it probably never existed.
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A
It's inevitable. Do you agree with him that it's inevitable that we will live there?
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B
Well, look, I mean, I think that we got to get our priorities straight in this lifetime, okay? Mars is a crap little planet. It's cold, it's airless, it's fucked up, let's face. Can I say fucked up?
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A
You can? Absolutely.
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B
Okay, great.
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A
We'll get the little E. But that's okay.
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B
I've studied, you know, colonizing Mars, going to Mars for, for, I don't know, 25 years. At this point I started a little more. I started it, I studied it, man. I got an entire library on Mars.
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A
For a movie or just for, for fun project.
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B
I didn't know what the project was going to be. I was imagining maybe an IMAX film at first. Then it turns into a miniseries. I've been writing this thing for ages and it keeps evolving. Technology evolves. I never could have anticipated Elon Musk and how he's transformed space flight. I never believed that Private was going to do it, but now it's clearly obvious. That's the only way. But anyway, yeah, so I know a lot about this and when Elon and I get together, we jam on rocket engines. We don't talk politics.
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A
You guys get together.
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B
Oh yeah, yeah. He was part of the Mars Society in 98, 99. I know him from that.
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A
I figured you would know each other because he loves filmmakers.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And he loves people who are into technology. It seems like he would gravitate toward. Did he make that outreach?
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B
No, I mean, we knew each other from the Mars Society. When he formed SpaceX, I used to go over there.
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A
He'd tour down the street.
- [27:12]
B
Yeah, yeah. And, and so, you know, we were pals there for a while. I mean, politically, I Don't agree with him on a lot of stuff. Most stuff seem, seems lately. But, you know, I certainly respect what he's done in the, in the space sector. You know, I think it's quite remarkable.
- [27:27]
A
Would you guys ever collaborate more formally?
- [27:30]
B
Maybe, you know, maybe I can, I can separate a person and their politics from the things that they want to accomplish if they're aligned with what I think are, are good goals. I just think it's important for us as, as a human civilization to prioritize. We gotta, we've gotta make this Earth our spaceship. That's really what we need to be thinking about.
- [27:51]
A
And he doesn't agree?
- [27:52]
B
No, I mean, look, yeah, we could get taken out by an asteroid. We could be the, we could be no better than the dinosaurs looking up and going, what? You know, right now. So look, I think it's good that he's doing it, but I don't think all of us should just jump on that bandwagon and be ready to sacrifice the Earth. We have the best planet that's known. Now here's the thing. We've looked out to the cosmic microwave background, so that's 13.5 billion years ago. We've looked across all of known or observable space that's observable, you know, based on relativity and expansion and all that stuff, and we have seen nothing that is like as good as Earth. Right? It's possible. We have no, I mean, I'm going to go way out there now.
- [28:37]
A
Please.
- [28:38]
B
It's possible, based on all of the scientific evidence that we have to date, that we are the only place with life in the universe. That's a possibility. We all grew up with Star Trek. We don't think that's likely.
- [28:51]
A
Well, you don't. The theory is infinite.
- [28:53]
B
Carl Sagan, infinite chances, okay, but it's not infinite. It's finite. And there is a number, right? 1 in 10 billion trillion of planets where life can emerge spontaneously. We don't know what that number is. It's a factor, it's the fifth factor in the Drake equation, right? So there's a thing called the Drake equation that says what is the likelihood of a civilization being out there, right? There's also a thing called the Fermi paradox, You know, that Enrico Fermi said back in the 50s, okay, we're looking out with radio telescopes, telescopes, we see the entire cosmos. Now where is everybody, right? Why aren't we seeing communication? Why aren't we seeing civilizations? You know, so anyway, the point is we don't know.
- [29:36]
A
You're Not. And what about God? Didn't God do it?
- [29:39]
B
Do we need to drag God into this?
- [29:41]
A
Sorry. We're gonna, we're gonna stop there. On that, on that. All right, back, back to you, back.
- [29:45]
B
How did we get.
- [29:47]
A
We went to God.
- [29:48]
B
We went there. So Gen AI. We're talking about Gen AI, right? So let's bring it back. That's the thing that's in front of us. Generative AI and that dualism of, okay, we've got things that can threaten the jobs of actors. So the fundamental difference, I'm going to just point this out, it's almost like a particle and an antiparticle. So there's the particle, which is performance capture. And I worked that for 20 years now. Actually we were working on it at digital domain 10 years before that. But in terms of, actually my career as a director, I've been working with it for 20 years now, refining and refining that process. It's entirely actor driven. It's actor centric. We honor the performance. Right? Opposite end of the spectrum. Anti particle, generative AI. A generation of young filmmakers coming up who think they don't need actors at all. I can make a film. I don't even need actors. Look how much money I'm saving. And so then they get into this kind of echo chamber, this kind of very reduced kind of universe where they're not getting human experience or not informing their storytelling with actual lived experience. I think directors should be doing the opposite. I'm talking about young directors, I'm talking about late teens, young 20 somethings, you know, that are experimenting with the tools. And they say, look mom, I can make a film in your basement where.
- [31:07]
A
I live, you know, if everybody can, then the performance is going to distinguish.
- [31:12]
B
What distinguishes it, right? What sets you apart from all the other artists if your art is being created by a Gen program, you know, so Gai can sort of democratize the filmmaking process, but it also, to me, it sets off a lot of warning lights right around music, around, around acting and so on. Ultimately, even maybe directing right around screenwriting. And again, it's that unique lived experience aspect of it. Now the duality for me is VFX cost too much, right? They're starting to constrict the number of big, beautiful, imaginative films that can get made. Now studios are getting very cautious about green lighting. A film like Avatar that was new ip, not based on something that was in a comic book 40 years ago, not based on a best selling book, just coming out of nowhere, would not get greenlit.
- [32:07]
A
You believe that even coming off Titanic.
- [32:10]
B
Well, okay, with you attached, maybe. Look, it was by the.
- [32:14]
A
I don't know the answer to that.
- [32:15]
B
It was by the skin of our teeth that we got that film made.
- [32:19]
A
I know John Landau wrote about this in his book. Tom Rothman tried to kill it.
- [32:23]
B
Oh, exactly. Peter Chernin. Peter Chernin did kill it. He came over to my office and officially passed on the movie. And he came to my place because he said, I don't want you to think that it's some middle management decision. It's coming from me. We're passing. And this was on September 11th of 2006. And I said, I'll never forget the date. And I don't.
- [32:47]
A
But what revived it?
- [32:48]
B
I took it to Disney and I told Peter at the time, I said. I said, you know that before your taillights are out of sight, I will be on the phone to Dick Cook and have this set up, because I've already shared the script with him and he loves it and he's dying for it. And his eyes kind of glazed for a second. Then he said, you do what you have to do. And he walked out kind of frostily. And then I said, I'll never forget the date, you know, and then I was on the phone before his car was out of the parking lot, and I got it set up at Disney. And then Jim G. Who's a generous friend of mine for ages from when he was at Carolco, he was international. He was co. Running Fox at the time, but before that, he was like their international distribution head. And I knew him from that, from Titanic, and we were pals, and. And we're still pals. And he called me up and said, is there any way to salvage this? I said, hey, talk to your boss. It's above my pay grade.
- [33:42]
A
Yeah.
- [33:42]
B
You know, but anyway, the whole thing.
- [33:44]
A
Is ironic because now Disney bought Fox and now they have the.
- [33:47]
B
The real answer is Vicki Rossellini, Victoria Rossellini, who was, I think, I don't know, CFO or head of legal affairs. I can't remember exactly what her position was, but she was in. On the finance side. She went out and got Dune. And the other. There was another big fund that came in, and they took. They took all the downside risk off of. Off of Peter, and then he graciously greenlit the movie. If I sound a little negative, you know, I am.
- [34:15]
A
Well, your. Your former producer, John Landau, the late produce or great guy who is famously the nicest guy in Hollywood. He wrote about it in his book.
- [34:21]
B
Yeah, right, right. So, yeah, I'm just. Yeah, what he said exactly.
- [34:26]
A
Well, and there was the whole thing on Titanic that we don't have to get into that has been, you know, more than, well, tried credit.
- [34:31]
B
To Peter's credit and to Jim and Tom Rothman. They supported. They ultimately wound up supporting. Probably one of the biggest, craziest bets ever.
- [34:41]
A
I remember before the Cinemacon presentation in 2009.
- [34:45]
B
Yep.
- [34:46]
A
When everybody thought it was a joke.
- [34:48]
B
Yeah.
- [34:48]
A
It's fern gully.
- [34:50]
B
Yeah.
- [34:50]
A
These people are blue.
- [34:51]
B
Yeah. What.
- [34:51]
A
What is going on?
- [34:52]
B
Smurfs in space.
- [34:53]
A
Yes.
- [34:54]
B
Yeah.
- [34:54]
A
And then we saw the footage and everyone was like, holy shit, this is actually going to be good.
- [34:58]
B
It was a fun moment because we actually dodged a bullet. I was in a meeting with, with Jim and Tom Rothman and I said, look, the scariest thing to me is the 32nd TV spot. And the second scariest thing is a trailer that drops online. I said, you're going to talk about a little tiny screen, not in 3D. People are going to be looking at a wallet sized image and it just doesn't convey. It won't convey.
- [35:24]
A
This was pre social media.
- [35:25]
B
Oh yeah.
- [35:25]
A
Imagine if it was sliced and diced on TikTok.
- [35:27]
B
No, it wasn't pre social media. The word was stuff. There was, there was massive trolling. Massive trolling. It just was, it was, it was not as pervasive, but it was still pretty massive. And so I said, we're going to get hammered. We're going to get trolled. I said, we need to do, I propose this idea of Avatar Day. So we had a good, a good thing at Cinemacon and Hall H. Right. And people saw it. I said, we need to go into every premium theater that we can in the world and do one screening of that 16 minute clip for free. But we'll sell the tickets, we'll make it a kind of a premium ticket and everybody will have to fit it into their day and it'll be one day. And Tom said, we'll call it Avatar Day. I said, call it Avatar Day. That's cool. Because his fixation was, we gotta get that name. Cause it's not based on existing ip. We gotta get that title out there. I said, all right, fine, call it Avatar Day. And we did that. We went into 100 markets, best theaters in town, IMAX and 3D. And we sold tickets. And so whatever it was, I don't know, a hundred thousand tickets, something like that. And we showed that 16 minute clip. And so what you had is an avalanche of comment outpouring from Avatar Day, where Fox screwed it up was they jumped the gun because of, like, Australia, New Zealand being on the other side of the Dateline. They released the trailer online a day earlier than they were supposed to. And so what you had was this avalanche of the worst, most vitriolic trolling you have ever seen. Thundercats in space. Smurfs in space. People were laughing their ass off. And then the word came out from the screenings and it canceled out to neutral net, charge zero. So now we had created a mystery. Well, who's right?
- [37:12]
A
Right?
- [37:12]
B
These guys or these guys. The ones that have actually seen something or the ones commenting on the trailer.
- [37:17]
A
Are you monitoring this stuff?
- [37:18]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [37:19]
A
Are you in the marketing? And, I mean, I totally. When you were very involved, had to be, you know. But you are also. Forgive my. My comment here. You are also famously difficult and famously demanding.
- [37:29]
B
Famously is not the same as actually.
- [37:31]
A
Okay, well, tell me that you're not.
- [37:33]
B
I'm not.
- [37:34]
A
You're not.
- [37:34]
B
Well, I was. I mean, you know, you've mellowed with age. Well, no, this is. Yeah. Like a fine wine. Right. You know, like a. You know, I'm not a young wine anymore. Right. I'm not a young man. I'm not a young wine. I'm not. I'm a lot more experienced, you know, and there have been a series of evolutions on that, which we could talk about if you want to. I was an asshole of the 80s. Absolutely. And you know what? That's what got things done. That's what needed to happen then. But once you have some stature, you have some responsibility to play within a system and respect other people's viewpoints and their needs and all that, and to be a partner. People are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars. They're your partner. You've got to honor them. Right. So anyway, I can do. I can do a lot on that.
- [38:16]
A
Yeah. What's something that you did in the 80s that you don't do anymore?
- [38:19]
B
I think it's a philosophical thing. I put the film before everybody on the film. The film was the most important thing. I had this just innate feeling that, you know, you do anything to get the film made, you know, and forget about. Forget about, you know, being Mr. Nice Guy. It's not a popularity contest. We're here to make a piece of art, God damn it. You know, and that's a mentality that was on Terminator. And I would say Aliens for sure. Less so on the Abyss. And then it kind of sunsetted. But what really changed it was doing the deep ocean exploration stuff, and I'm 500 miles offshore with a little tiny team, and we're doing extraordinary stuff that it bonds us together, kind of like a family. And then the Avatar family kind of. I think that mentality kind of emerged.
- [39:07]
A
Okay, we'll stop part one right there. Thank you to Jim Cameron, thank you to producer Craig Horlbeck, our editor Jesse Lopez, and thank you to you. No call sheet today. We will see you with part two later today.