A still out Avatar2. (politeness: avatar)
James Cameron, the mastermind behind it The terminator, Aliens and Titanic, has an exhibition in Paris on Thursday showcasing his lesser-known skills with pencil and paper. The Art of James Cameron can be seen at the Cinematheque Francaise until January. The 69-year-old met with AFP there to discuss the origins of his childhood films, his thoughts on artificial intelligence and a few teasers about the third. Avatar film, scheduled for 2025. How important was drawing when you were a child? Drawing was everything. It’s how I processed the world. I was reading, watching movies, absorbing all the stories, and I just had to tell my own stories. I remember very well (when I was eight or nine) that I went to see the movie ‘Mysterious Island’. And I was so amazed by the big creatures and the giant crab, but I didn’t go back and draw ‘Mysterious Island’. I drew my own version with different animals.
I remember in high school being very serious about disciplining myself to draw in all different styles. I made my own comics. I thought maybe I would write a novel and illustrate it. They didn’t have graphic novels yet, but I was thinking in panels… so I was really thinking in shots. The transition to filmmaking was actually quite easy.
How did these early drawings inspire your films?
(My first Avatar drawing) was done when I was 19, so that was 50 years ago. That drawing made me think about a bioluminescent world and I wrote a story about it in the late 1970s. In the early 1990s, when I was starting a visual effects company and we were trying to make computer-generated characters and creatures, I needed a script about another planet, and so I went back and found that piece of art, and it became Avatar– in 1995.
The terminator image came to me in a dream. I was sick, I had a high fever, and in that fever dream I saw a chrome skeleton emerging from a raging fire. I signed it immediately. And then I thought, ‘How did he end up in the fire? What did he look like before?’ And I knew instinctively that he looked human in front of the fire.
As a child, I dreamed of going through water tunnels at high speed, a kind of circulatory system, ending up in the abyss. I had a nightmare about being in a room where the walls were covered in hornets that were going to kill me, and that became the scene in “Aliens” where she runs into the egg room.
Are children today losing these skills due to technology?
I don’t think we can go back, but I think it’s important for people to unplug every now and then. It’s important to spend time in nature, to spend time with yourself, to just calm the mind. People are very creative, but being constantly bombarded by other people’s creativity with movies, games, and the constant flood of media tends to hinder this.
Drawing becomes a lost art. Even the artists who work with me now usually don’t put pencil to paper. They look at me as the dinosaur because I come in and sign something. But I have to feel it in the lines and textures.
Are you concerned about artificial intelligence?
The problem is that there are multiple flavors of AI, some of which are not yet available. Artificial general intelligence is a big question mark. I think we definitely need to put the brakes on that.
In terms of generative AI… that’s very interesting, because the data they collect is all the images humans have ever created. We bring our subconscious mind into the world, and it comes back to us through these images. That’s why they’re so compelling, because by and large they are us. We are going to learn something about consciousness and art.
But there is no original. There is no paint on a canvas. You can use gen AI to make music, but you can’t take it on the road. I think the human artist is becoming more important. Music will have to be about the actual moment of performance.
Can you give us an update on Avatar3?
In film three, we are in a transitional phase between fighting for the survival of Earth and Pandora. We explore other cultures on the planet and enhance the villain’s story. A lot of new things happen to the Sully family… and we introduce one major new character who then becomes an important part of the story. You have to remember that this is a storyline that goes from one to five, and we are right in the middle.
But I can promise you this: whatever you think it will be, it won’t be.
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