"James Cameron"
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Guys, I can't breathe. I'm like, I'm on the top of some mountain and all I have is me and my altimeter and it says I'm super, super, super high and I'm really, really nervous. Oh, wait a minute. I'm...

I'm at the top of the Beverly Center shopping mall. Never mind. Welcome to Smartless. Wait, first of all, Jay, tell us how it's going. You started your film.

Uh, yes. I, uh, good. You don't want to hear boring work crap. I appreciate you asking, but it's, uh, I haven't, can I just ask, have you ever thought about, um, directing? Has that bug grabbed you yet?

He's coming with gas today. Let's buckle up. Yeah. It's, how's your work? You're getting ready to start your rehearsals, yes? All right, stop. Not for six months, but listen. Back to you for a second. Nice deflection. Back to you, Ian. But it's exciting. You're doing a movie with Taron Egerton, right? And what's it called? Are you a fan? It's called Carry On.

It started this week. I spent the day with Danny Dees today. Okay, let's talk. Sweet Pete Giles, Danny Dees, and our good friend. What, golfing? Rob Lowe, yes. Oh, yeah? Hey, guess what? I tried pickleball for the first time. Did you? Yeah, did you? Boy, my neck is snapping all over the place. Let's just keep switching subjects. Oh, wait a minute. But did you play golf with them, Will? Yeah, I sure did. So I played pickleball, I think at the same place you guys played golf. Probably not.

And, um...

They wouldn't dare let that happen. Oh, really? Okay. It was fun. It is fun. Who'd you play with? I played with Kevin and Kerry, who you know. Oh, yeah, sure. They're nice peeps. I like Kevin and Kerry. Yeah, and our friend Rene. I just don't like the sound it makes. Scotty. There's such a great sound to a tennis ball hitting a tennis racket right in the middle of the strings. But that wiffle ball hitting a wood, I don't mean to sound like a purist. A lot of communities on the East Coast are now not letting people build pickleball courts at home because they're too loud.

Huh. They're too loud. Yeah. It's just like hitting a wiffle ball. Pink, pink, pink. No. Yeah. Speaking of noise pollution and the West Coast versus East Coast, I hear that here on the West Coast, they are outlawing gas blowers for leaves that you can only use an electric one now. So is that what you're going to use? Yeah. I mean, I just redid. I just rebuilt the engine on...

on my last one. Uh, but, and you know, gas is getting so expensive. So this is going to be good, but, um, I'll be upside down for a while. Okay, good. Oh, I misheard. I was thinking about, I was thinking about pros who hang around gas stations. Um,

I was like, that's been out loud for a while, but what do I know? You heard blow and gas and everything. Yeah. Listener, you've got a Saturday record here, and it's a 4.30 start. It's late in the day. And everyone's a little punchy. Yeah, but wait, Jason, so do you still fly home every weekend from the shoot? I do. Wow. Isn't that exhausting? Yeah.

Well, no, you sleep on the plane and, you know, the excitement and the love that you feel approaching your family supersedes any fatigue, Sean. All right, I got it. Sure, sure. And how was the flight? It was good? It was good? Did they serve a meal on that? No.

Well, no, you got to pay extra for that. And if you want Wi-Fi or you want to watch a movie or something like that. So what I do is I just bring on my sleep mask. Right. And you've got a neck pillow. I got a neck pillow that's got blinders on it too. So it just sort of sends up a signal. Please don't speak to me. I've got sleep issues. Sean, I wanted to know.

Right behind you, that's a television? That's a television, yeah. Yeah. And that's your desk in your office, right? Your home office? Yes, mm-hmm.

So what's the point? Because I was podcasting off my dining room table. Don't say podcasting. I was doing this. It's not a verb. Okay, here we go. Ready? Oh, here we go. Sorry, are you ready to start? Why are you letting... I'm just saying that that TV, I mean, it's pointed at the back of your head. Well, I would turn around. I'm on a swivel chair. I would turn around or I would sit on the couch behind me that you can't see. It's never happened. It happened once. It happened once. Will, why aren't you wearing white? What happened?

Usually, well, because you know I wear white. Often when we do them in the morning, I wear like a long-sleeve white T-shirt around the house and to bed and stuff. You know that. You know. Wait, why do you wear long sleeves? Why do you wear a long-sleeve T-shirt? Because it's a new thing. It's like the last 18 months because I have room to be very cold, but I don't want to have the covers on me. You don't want your elbows to get chilly. Yeah. Yeah.

I do the exact same thing. Hey, Sean, hang on. What's in your queue to tap in on the conversation? Let him be excited. I found somebody that gets that. Yeah. That is exactly right. It's a new thing. I'm learning all these things. I feel like I'm...

firmly getting older because I'm like, yeah, I'm happy with this. Yeah, I'm happy doing it like this. This is the way I like to do it now. You're talking to a guy who's been wearing pajamas for the last 15 years. I know. I can't believe that you would pass judgment on anybody. I'm not. It's not pass judgment. I'm wondering if I can welcome you into my, you know what I've got on now because we've entered fall. I'm now, well, this is basically this. They're the flannel pants. Yeah, and I've got, now I've got my Berks on and socks.

Yeah, yeah. You're in no position. No, I was just wondering if I can welcome you to granddad land yet. I guess I can. But I was out, so I'm not wearing white because, like I said, I just got back from playing golf with those guys. I wasn't looking for four minutes on this. Okay, wait, let's go. Let's go, wait. I don't want to keep our guests waiting. Let's start podcasting, right, Sean? We got our setup. Now we're podcasting.

Let's get podcasting. Okay, come on. Ready? Here we go. I'm super excited, you guys. This one's big today. Oh, fuck, sorry. Did I fuck up your opening line? I keep your... No, it's big. I'm super excited. This is big. I'm super excited. I want to pick this guy's brain. He's been on my smart list list since the day we started. He's also been on my personal list of people I've always wanted to meet and work with since I was a teenager. John Travolta. Will, he's from your homeland, which means he's nice and probably ice skates.

Let's see. Guys, we're dealing with a major player here in Hollywood, so I'll hold off on all his credits because you'd guess in two seconds. But I'll just say he worked as a janitor before making it into the film industry. He also lived in his car while creating a very famous film. He loves the ocean so much that he built his own submarine.

and he may have written dialogues such as I'll Be Back from his car. He's responsible for directing two of the three highest-grossing films of all time. James Cameron? It's the brilliant James Cameron. Holy Christ. What? What's up, guys? Are you kidding? This is a mistake. What? What's up, guys? I'm going to put my glasses on so I can see who's talking. That really doesn't matter. We're all ones, too. That did shit. That didn't help at all. Ah!

It doesn't matter. Hey, can we swear on this thing? Sure. Are you kidding me? Do we just beep it out later? Good. No. James Cameron, you really have been on my smart list list since the day we started. You've been a part of my...

nerd childhood from Terminator to Aliens to The Abyss, which is one of my favorite movies, Titanic, of course, and now my adult nerd childhood with Avatar and the 17 sequels. So thank you for being on today. This is huge for us. I've just been...

A massive, massive fan for my whole life. Well, thank you. Welcome to podcasting. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I've never done it before. It seems pretty straightforward. You just sit around and dribble on about inconsequential bullshit for a while. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's not much to it. I got it. I got it. Okay. It's kind of like directing, right? Yeah, exactly. A little bit. Except not at all.

You look very healthy and rested for a guy who's been doing some of the toughest work the town has to offer for the last 30 years. Yeah? Yeah, we're in the homestretch of five years of continuous production right now. Unbelievable. Yes, Sigourney was just on and telling us about that. And remind me, you're not shooting all five avatars at the same time, correct? Correct.

Now, the thinking was to be semi-sane and shoot the first couple, and then if that actually worked, finish them out. But it's also, we have a young cast, and they would have aged out of their characters if we had waited to kind of just do them a couple years apart. Right. So we shot all their bit.

Well, but with the, you're talking to a real moron here, but the, because it's- You can't see him, but it's Jason talking. If he or she starts to age out, can't you kind of offset that a bit with some of the computer manipulation that you're doing anyway with their faces or no? You're 100% right, except that I've got one young character who's supposed to be 15, 16 in the story, and he's a human kid.

who's in with the Navi kids and we shoot him photographically. But you're right, some of the Navi kids, they could come back at 22, 23 and still do their 17 year old character 'cause the character doesn't age unless we age the characters in CG. - Yes, yes. - God, it's fascinating. Your brain is fascinating. Okay, so-- - Try living in it. - Yeah.

I had no idea you were Canadian. You learn a little something every day. So I wanted to get into that. You're Toronto, right? I'm from Toronto. Where are you from? Chippewa, Niagara Falls. Oh, fantastic. Okay, so very close. Yeah, yeah. What year did you sort of move from Canada? Did you leave Canada? I left with my parents in 71. I was 17 and rocked up in Orange County. Then later, obviously, moved down to L.A. proper.

And, you know, that was 47 years ago, 48 years ago. Do you feel any connection anymore to Canada in that way? Yeah. Yeah, you do? Yeah. We have a couple of businesses in Saskatchewan, so I mostly get back to Canada to work on that stuff. Like running booze or what? Yeah, right. You're on stuff? Bootleggers. Bootleggers. No.

We grow yellow peas and fava beans and lentils, and we do plant-based protein. We built a factory there for plant-based protein. That's why you look so healthy. I know, it's true. So walk me through this. So you're a young guy who grew up in the Niagara Falls area of Ontario. So that's not New York? That's not Buffalo?

It's close to it. There's a good Niagara Falls and a bad Niagara Falls. The good one just happens to be in Canada. That's right. I got it. So there's plenty of falls to go around. Lots of falls. You should learn some stuff. So you grew up in Ontario, near Niagara Falls, Ontario. When you were a young man living there, did you have aspirations to be a director at that time? Was there something that grabbed you and said, I want to do this when you were living there? No.

Yeah, I like movies and I was making little films just with a Super 8 camera, stuff like that. But the idea that I could actually go and do it for real was so alien and bizarre. It never really occurred to me. But when my parents asked me if I wanted to move to Los Angeles...

because my dad had gotten the opportunity to do a transfer there. I said, "Isn't that near Hollywood?" And my mom said, "Well, we're not really sure, sweetheart, but we think that Hollywood is actually in Los Angeles."

I said, I'm in. How about that? Do you remember the moment that the technology that is specific to some of the parts of movie making really grabbed you and you're like, oh, I'd love to incorporate that into some of the more traditional sort of filmmaking techniques and stuff. What was it? It wasn't like the, well, you tell me.

I was just fascinated by all of it. You know, just grabbing a camera, running around town, shooting neon signs and cutting it together in all kinds of crazy ways. I mean, all the stuff you do as a film student, you know, just trying to express yourself, figure out what you have to say, if anything. Sure. You know, but I remember 2001, A Space Odyssey, which I saw in 68. Yeah.

really kind of just tweaked my brain about what was possible. And then after that, I got really interested in how things were done, you know, on the, on, on big movies. Sure. And you worked at, you know, when you were, what did you do on escape from New York? Which I love that movie. John Carpenter. Great movie. Yeah. Weren't you like the visual effects photographer or something? I was the co-supervisor of visual effects with another guy named Robert Skotak, who was a,

a pal of mine back then and we did it all really old school stuff paintings on glass and things like that yeah that's so cool ernest borgnine was in that yeah yeah do you know jason has a real connection with ernest borgnine yeah do you have any do you have any uh ability to prove the fact will's got a theory that ernest not a theory he not there he gave an interview yeah jason lives in ernest borgnine's old house

And Will is convinced that. Not convinced. He said in a couple interviews that somebody asked him what was the key to his longevity, and he claimed that it was a ritual of daily masturbation. And I said, Jason, when you're in your house, do you imagine Ernest, you know, in different parts of the house, just kind of leaning over the banister up against the wall in the dining room, whatever? Sure.

performing this act in an exercise of keeping to training. Why is he always standing up? Because he's trying to stay older. He's trying to live longer. Anyway. James Cameron is here. I think it's a good plan. I think it's a good plan. Have you ever seen any of that on a set of Escape from New York? The beauty of his plan is there's no downside. There it is. That's right. You either live longer or you don't, but at least you're enjoying it every day. That's right.

That's right. They say live for every day, right? There you go. There you go. Thank you for... And also, it's victimless. Now, did I see him wanking on the set? No. Yeah, no. I can't help you with that. Right. You never came back to base camp and caught Ernest Borgnine snapping one off? Hey, James... Stacking up outside his trailer. Just saying, God, I wish I was at home. Hey, so, James...

I wanted to ask you, sorry. I wanted to ask you, and please do correct me, was the first film that you directed... Piranha 2. Oh, I was going to say Terminator. Oh, Piranha 2. Right? It was the first big studio movie you did, Piranha 2. So here's to clarify. The first film I got hired to direct was Piranha 2. I got fired about eight days into shooting because the producer just wanted to take over. That was his plan the whole time. I was like...

I was like a sacrificial lamb. And the first film that I actually fully directed was The Terminator. So that's the only one I put on my resume. Is that true that you were living in your car when you wrote it and all that? Not really. I had an apartment in Tarzana, but I used to go out to DuPars on Ventura Boulevard late at night, 3 a.m., and just rock up in a booth and just write, you know, just to keep that kind of...

kind of dark film noir. They turned that into a Sephora now. It's a Sephora now. Yeah, right. Oh, baby. Where did you get the idea? Like, the idea is so incredible about sending somebody from the future in the back to stop somebody before they get...

before they, you know, the whole thing is so amazing. Where does that come from? I kind of backed into it because it was like, all right, what kind of film will they let me direct? It's got to be something I could shoot on the streets of present day LA where I live. It's got to be low budget. We can't do a lot of stuff. Maybe we can do a couple of car chases. And they know you've just been fired off the Deadly Fish movie. I had to factor that in too. So it wasn't going to be a big budget. So, yeah.

So then I thought, all right, so how can I get an extra... But I wanted to also sort of make my unique skill set valuable as an effects guy. So I thought, all right, so what kind of effects science fiction story can I tell on the streets of L.A.? Well, there's only two ways to get something extraordinary here,

That's either from space or from somewhere else in time, right? So now all of a sudden, boom, okay, it's a time travel story. Something comes from the future. Why? Okay, and then you go into the grandfather paradox and figure out, you know.

So it just kind of dominoed from the kind of parameters of my life and what I needed to do. Yeah, I mean, because nothing of it looks low budget, by the way, especially at the time. You haven't seen it lately. But at the time, it was pretty incredible. And I read somewhere that you kind of...

you didn't have permits and you kind of shot stuff illegally. And like, what does law enforcement say to James Cameron before he's James Cameron? Did you get caught? Yeah. Yeah. So we're out in the desert doing the final shot of the movie. And, you know, we got a little wooden platform set up. It was me and my wife,

at the time, actually we weren't married at the time, Gail Heard, who produced it, and her secretary. And we had built this little camera platform to shoot the plate for the last shot. And there's nothing visible for 20 miles in any direction. And this little glint on the horizon pulls up and it's a cop. I'm like, you gotta be fucking kidding me. And he walks up to her and says, you have a permit to be doing this? And I said, no.

No, but I'm just a student at UCLA. I think I was 29 at the time. Oh, God. I said, do we need a permit? I didn't know that. And he goes, well, get that off the road. We were on the road by like a foot. And he drove away. So that was it. I just bullshitted my way out of it. And your cast is, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who at the time had been doing the Conan movies and stuff. He wasn't this huge international. Conan.

Conan, whatever it is. He wasn't this huge international superstar that he ended up becoming. Terminator was really the sort of seminal role in his career at that point. That was the thing that really shot him forward. What was that like as a 29-year-old young filmmaker who's trying to make his mark with a guy who's coming from doing these films that weren't necessarily mainstream and big movies to

Did you see, was it like the perfect combination in a lot of ways for you guys? Yeah, we clicked right away. I mean, Arnold is just all about discipline and all about, you know, perfection and trying as hard as you can mentally and physically. And he saw a kind of kindred spirit in me because, you know, we were trying to move mountains to make this movie. He loved the film. I mean, they had the acts all sharpened up and poised to chop me off, uh,

on day two, if I tripped up, they had another director waiting in the wings and Arnold really kind of had my back on that movie. - That's great. That's amazing. - Wow. - And we will be right back. - And now back to the show.

How far do you think we are from completely replacing actors with computer generated people? Because they're kind of doing that or, well, they are doing that online, right? With deep fakes and stuff like that that are really, really convincing. Is that, not that, you know, I'm looking to get actors out of movies by any stretch being one, but I'll bet you that there are moments like if you need to fill in crowds and stuff like that, there's already that, you know, the tiles. We do all that, yeah. But like,

actually putting somebody in the foreground on a mark saying lines, you know, you're doing that to a certain extent when you're, no? It's not what we do. Like with the Avatar films, it's a very actor-centric, actor-driven process. We're not trying to replace the actor. We're trying to perfect what they did in a character that doesn't resemble them as much physically, right? So in a sense, it's more like makeup. Yeah.

It's 100% actor-driven, and we always honor the performance and the nuance of that performance, and you'll see it in the new film. That's my pitch. I'm done. But the kicker is I would have said never

when I made the first film. Today, with what I know about AI and the developments in artificial general intelligence and all the work that's being done, I would say if you converge the tool set that we have created for Avatar and focused it, literally put money into that and focused it in terms of getting it closer to a real-time process, and you added AI to that,

you could fake anything. You just can't do it yet. You can't do it in real time. You can do it with a one month or five month lag right now perfectly, which is kind of what we do. We had 3,200 shots in Avatar 2 that proved that. - But do you think there's any value in pursuing that and in going down that direction?

I think that it has more to do with do we want to have photoreal avatars that we can wear or project within into a metaverse-type environment or a gaming environment. I don't think it has anything to do with how we would create our entertainment. It's still just so much...

easier and, by the way, more fun to just work with actors. Yeah, what about for like a little reshoot though? You know, like let's say your actor's gone off and cut their hair and you got to do a little additional, right? Yeah, but you'd still do it with the actor. See, so like we got this human kid in our story. If I need a pickup with him for Avatar 3, he's already aged out of the part.

by Miles. You know, he's a foot and a half taller. He's two octaves down. You know, we can re-pitch his voice, but we can't change his body and face aging. So if I need that pickup, I'll have him come in. We'll capture it. We have his model and we'll basically just

Put him in the movie as a human. Huh. All right, so I have like a little bit of a long-- so hang in there. This is-- what I love about you, James Cameron-- Jim now. Now we can call you Jim, right? Easy, yeah. So what I love about you is you're a total, like, a figure-it-outer, right?

So really quick, super fast story. When I was, my production company, we made a show called Grimm. And I remember pitching Grimm for like seven years over and over. We'd pitch it. People wouldn't like kind of not get it. We'd put it on a shelf. We'd pitch it again. And I was in this one meeting at this one network and this high level executive was like,

gosh, because there's a lot of special effects in it, they would say, they said to me, gosh, that seems so hard to do. That seems really, really hard to do every week in episode to episode. To which I sarcastically replied, well, then let's just not do it.

Meaning everything is hard, right? So for you, which this is what blows my mind about you, where did the ability come from to... Because movie after movie after movie is like, where did the ability come from to trust your ideas so deeply that you're seemingly willing to sacrifice almost everything to see it through? Like, for example, I remember reading...

decades ago about the studio writing check after check for Titanic because somehow you convinced them that all this is going to work and obviously it did, but you succeed in this philosophy over and over again. Where do the balls come from to just be like, I got this. Trust me, I got this, you know? Well, I think there's a thing of when you see it in your head,

it's kind of like you're watching the movie. So you kind of know then that the movie's good or not good, right? I mean, with some degree of accuracy. And secondly, once you're down the path and you find out how hard it is...

You know, you can't really pull out. I can't pull out, studio can't pull out. So we just got to play it through. And then I think there's something that happens that, all right, well, your standards of excellence better go up then because you can't screw this up. I think that's part of it, you know. But look, every artist of any kind, actor, figurative artist, whatever,

has to have the confidence in what they have to say to call themselves an artist in the first place. And if they get positive feedback with their first few works that are out there, then that confidence goes up, right? You learn to trust your instincts. You also have such a full understanding of what is possible through technology as well. In other words, you can pitch something and a studio head might say, well, that sounds really expensive. No, no, we can do that with computers, blah, blah, blah, blah.

How are you able to stay current with what is possible and cost effective based on how easy it is for that technology to be accessed, etc.? Are you the one that's actually driving what is now possible technologically? Yeah.

as opposed to making sure you read the right article to make sure you stay up to date on what's possible? - Yeah, it's both. I mean, when we evaluate a project going into it, we'll look at what the state of the art is and we'll identify the areas where we have to up the game and that's where we'll put our R&D money. And we'll look at our schedule and say, all right, we've got two years to come up with water simulations, computational fluid dynamics, SIMS for ocean water.

We've got X amount of time and it just becomes a budget line item. So do you then have, do you have people who are writing code for that who work for you? Yeah. So, and you're, and you're, you're directing them saying, okay, guys, this is what we want to do. We want to do the water thing or whatever it is.

and they go, great, and they start to model it out, and they start writing code for it, which is crazy. And then the studio, sorry, Sean, the studio then is financing the R&D, the making of that for that one film. Are they then, not to get in the weeds of all this stuff, I apologize, but are they then in line to reap the profits of that technology going forward for other projects at other studios?

Kind of yes, kind of no. It works like this. If we develop something for Avatar, and usually that's in the form of an asset like a creature or a setting or something like that, that exists digitally. It sits in a server. They can reap the benefit of not having to recreate that every time. So the movies have a kind of economy of scale over the greater arc.

which is why... It's like a scene doc. Yeah, exactly. It's like a digital scene doc. It's exactly that. And your creatures and so on, you can just call that stuff back up. So that's part of the argument for doing three or four films is

kind of back to back. - Of course. - But the technology that you would use, let's say for to make water better today than it was five years ago, let's say Studio X funded that movie during which you developed the code that made water better. Now in five years or a year later, Universal does something that has to do with it. They need to use it. Now does Studio X get reimbursed for that, having developed that code?

Not really, no. They just kind of, they spend the money to make that movie. See, the thing is, we're leaving out an entity, which is the visual effects company. So we work very closely with Weta Visual Effects, right down here in New Zealand where I am right now.

they will develop that code. Now, they'll use some of the money from what we pay them. They'll use some of their own internal resources to do it. And then we can go back to them anytime we want and take advantage of it. And it's proprietary for them. To them. Yeah, exactly. I'll explain it to Jason later. So, Jim, let me ask you about... You're really helping me out a lot today. Well, thank you. Well, we could have just done it in a second. So, Jim, let me ask you this. Can you...

Did you not play well today? I did not. I don't think you did. I didn't. I had a grumpy day. So, Jim, did you... God, I hate that you know that. Jim, can you tell me what happened when you got into all this stuff with actual underwater stuff, when you were in submarines and doing all that kind of stuff? I have like a nine-hour list of questions about all that. Yeah. No, I love that stuff. That's...

I mean, I sort of reached a point when I made Titanic where I was making the movie because I wanted to dive to the wreck. I had done a lot of, I had done thousands of hours underwater by then on scuba, right? But I hadn't done anything with submersibles. I'd made a movie about subs and about ROVs called The Abyss.

And we built all this stuff for the movie, but we never took it in the ocean. So I wanted to go do something for real with deep diving. And then so Titanic was a way of kind of serving both of my greatest interests on one project. And it worked out great and made a bunch of money. And then I spent eight years doing expeditions, building robots, building underwater cameras, building submersibles, and just kind of turned my back on the whole filmmaking thing for about eight years.

- That's amazing. - And then you come back to making the films and doing this like super ambitious stuff with the avatars, but is there part of you that's like, do you prefer one to the other? Do you wish you were just doing more exploration? - Yeah, sometimes. - And does the filmmaking just kind of subsidize that in a way?

Yeah, kind of. I mean, it has so far. It's worked out that way. You know, Avatar made a bunch of money. So then I built a sub to go to the, you know, the deepest places on the planet and worked on that for several years after Avatar made those dives in 2012. So, yeah, for me, it's a full life. It doesn't really make sense to a lot of people looking at it from the outside because in the entertainment business, we're

we always put that first, like it's the most important thing in the world and everything is all very self-referential within that reality bubble. But I was on the NASA Advisory Council. I've been in lots of environments where they don't even think about movies. We don't even exist for them. Maybe on a ship when you're out doing something really important,

and somebody will throw in, you know, a VHS, you know, of some comedy. That's all they, that's the only time they ever think about it. But it's not the center, it's not the center. Well, luckily it's not for me either because I've only made really bad movies and terrible TV shows and everything's been canceled, but it's okay. Uh,

I'm not successful in that way, but I'm good at a dinner party, Jim. So I got that. I'll keep that in mind. It's so fascinating. It just occurred to me that you are incredible at creating fake life and you are incredible at exploring the real reality

raw building blocks of real life, checking out the depths of the earth. The boring stuff, I guess, in comparison, the stuff in the middle, the stuff where the rest of us live, domestic sort of life,

How did you, are you comfortable with the amount of time you spend in that lane as well? I'll bet you are. Well, I got five kids. Yeah. And that's its own whole epic journey, right? Yeah.

You guys have kids, right? Yeah, I've got three. Jason's got two. I've got a dog. It's similar. It's true. They scream and shit everywhere. Yeah, except you never have to come down and bail out your dog. This is true. This is true.

Yeah. But it's such an interesting, you're so incredible at both of those poles, and we just never hear about how awesome you are right there in the middle, but I'll bet you are. But that's where we live. That's where we really live, right? So with the new Avatar sequels, I thought, like the way I brought that around, I wanted to talk about the shit that I'd been living

for years as a father, as a husband and all that sort of thing. And the dysfunction in families, the power and the strength that comes from being in a family and what that all means. And then put that back into what I do as a director. In the same way I wanted to bring the underwater stuff into the directing, which I did on prior films.

I wanted to do family. So these Avatar films are about family, told from the parents' perspective and from the kids' perspective. By the way, you can talk about Avatar all you want. It's one of my favorites. I'm obsessed. I can't believe I'm talking to you. All right, so you've been to the deepest part of the ocean. First of all, where did the love of the ocean come from? Why are you obsessed with it? And is it true that you went down, you've been down deeper than any other human? Is that true? I've been down as deep as...

as a couple of other humans. Like seven miles? Yeah, it's almost seven. Just one more foot, you could have won. Well, the problem is that when you get that deep, it's actually hard to know how deep you really are with great accuracy, like to within a foot. You can't do it within a foot. You can do it within kind of 30, 40 feet, something like that. And it was seven miles, you say? Yeah, it's almost seven miles, 35,000. Man.

35,800 feet. I know. How in the world did you... How in the world does something exist that can survive the pressure of that? We built it. You built it. We built it, yeah. You went so deep and then you got to get a question from somebody who's so shallow. Jim, Jim, can you... There's our clip. There's our clip.

You do a lot of, so you've made a living doing a lot of these great things. And of course you've done, now we cover the deep sea and you do all the, and a lot of, I guess, I hate to use the term science fiction because it feels almost too broad or it feels too...

But is that what interests you? If you're going to watch something, if you're on a long plane ride down to New Zealand, for instance, I imagine you work all the time. But if you were to take the moment to watch other films and watch... I do, yeah. Do you watch science fiction or do you watch dramas or do you watch comedy? Everything. Everything. Yeah, I probably lean more toward...

Drama, science fiction, historical fiction, that sort of thing. Comedy more when I'm with the family. - Sure. - 'Cause I don't do it, you know, but there's always that aspect when you watch a movie and you get really enthusiastic about it, you know you're learning something that you can apply

Back to your own art. I'm going to pitch you a really great comedy series about a guy who's got the bends, but we'll get into it later. Where do you land on... It'll be short. It'll be a very short series. It's very short. It's very sad, actually. It's got a very sad ending. Where do you land on documentary? Because I'll bet you've got a lot of footage of just your expeditions that you've played with. Well, you came and you had one. They were all funded by the documentary. So the documentaries helped pay for the expeditions, right? So I think I've done right now as part...

as producer and or director of somewhere like 11 or 12 documentaries. Yeah. And, you know... One of the best ones is called Deep Sea Challenge. That's the one where you built your own submarine. Yeah, I love that. Deep Sea Challenge, and then there was Ghost of the Abyss, which was about Titanic, but, you know, 3D documentary about the wreck and so on, stuff like that. Do you enjoy sort of, again, the polarity of, you know...

sitting in an editing room and seeing what you got and shaping something from that is more of the typical documentary experience. And, and then in, in avatar, you've got to not only have a script, but you're, you're creating a lot of things digitally. So the amount of planning where there is almost zero surprise about creating in the editing room, I would imagine in comparison to the process of documentary filmmaking, again, like where's that middle lane? Do you have any interest in that? You know?

Well, I love editing. And I think I learned more editing documentaries than I did from editing features. But I think what I brought back into editing, let's say on Avatar 2, is it's an exploration. Just because you got all this footage doesn't mean you're a slave to it. And the story will reassert itself in the editing process. It's almost like a new draft of the script, if you will. Yeah.

Is it ever tempting, as I hear they do in animation, to completely recreate...

a scene, an act, as opposed to going back, rewriting, reshooting. You can almost take an animated approach with it, I'm asking. No, not what we're doing. I mean, Pixar could do that all day long. But once again, it's an actor-centric process. So I'd literally have to rewrite the scene, get the actors back together, capture it again. Gotcha. Now, I could take a line from another scene

and I could recreate the setting that I need and drop that line, drop that actor's performance if it worked, you know, and you'd have to do it. And we've done that a couple of times. But the fun with the CG is I could take a scene that was shot supposedly as a day scene and make it night and make it rain, just like...

And like that, literally. Like, okay, guys, we're making that scene night and rain. I'd love to skip night shoots. Sean, he could shoot a scene with you and he could probably paint out the Skittles so they wouldn't be in your hand. Yeah, you'd keep them right next to you. You could also make it rain Skittles, which would be amazing. You know, it's interesting that you use all this technology. Not only do you use the technology, you're an innovator when it comes to technology, right?

And it's funny that Terminator and the Terminator films are about a sort of a cautionary tale of technology gone awry, if you will.

Are you afraid of the machines? Oh, absolutely. Well, I'm not afraid, but I'm certainly pretty concerned about the potential for misuse of AI. I think AI can be great. I also think it could literally be the end of the world. I mean, you talk to all of the AI scientists, and I know a bunch of them.

Every time I put my hand up at one of their seminars or something, they just start laughing. Oh, that's that Skynet guy. Yeah, sure. We really want to hear from you. And the point is that no technology has ever not been weaponized.

Yeah. And do we really want to be fighting something smarter than us that isn't us on our own world? I don't think so. I mean, look, an AI could have taken over the world and already be manipulating it, and we just don't know because it would have control over all the media and everything. And what better explanation for how absurd everything is right now? Because nothing makes a damn bit of sense to me. I don't know about you guys. No, that's exactly right. Well, yeah, I mean, you're there, but as you know, here, we're living in a place where it just seems very...

upside down and people are believing seemingly everything. And it's a great point, which is...

Potentially, if the AI is smarter than us and has the potential to be smarter than us, why would it let us know that it was beating us? Because that would be foolish of it to do that. That's right. It would be so easy to cover up. It would be so easy to cover up. But do you feel a responsibility? Have you ever felt or do you feel increasingly a responsibility to have more of a message? I was going to say, I don't know. In your films, do you try to... Yeah.

Well, I mean, the Avatar films are about the environment. I'm not dealing with AI. If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try to launch that franchise again, which is in discussion but nothing's been decided, I would make it much more about...

about the AI side of it than kind of bad robots gone crazy. Yeah, please do. I would watch that. Because the AI thing, not to put the audience to sleep because I've done that before talking about this subject, but just for clarification for me, because you know this answer, I'll bet you. AI is, it's about a computing speed, right? It's an ability to absorb a bunch of information, process it and spit it back out.

I think it has more to do with understanding human consciousness so that we collectively, human technologists, can create an intelligence that functions the way we do. Meaning, generally they call it AGI, artificial general intelligence, that it's not just designed to play chess and beat your ass at chess. It's designed to solve all kinds of problems. So it needs more of a consciousness the way we do.

view and react to the world. And that's made possible just because it's able to absorb so much information now? Vast amounts of data. Yes, you're right. So there's AI and there's AGI. So AI learns. AI is more simple, more directed functions. And what they do is they just shove a whole bunch of training data into it. All the books in the world.

Yeah, kind of, or all the YouTube, all the Twitter, you know, everything. And they just force feed it vast amounts of what they call training data, right? And from that training data, they pose it a problem and says, all right, try a million different things and see what works better than what, and then try another million things.

And it basically is just throwing processing time at the problem. And there's so much computing power, you know, in all our devices. Sean probably doesn't want me to tell this, but his Roomba has been listening to him and it just ordered Chinese food last night. It's learning. And it's going to serve it. It's learning. Well, you know who's going to be vacuuming the room in about five years. Ain't going to be Roomba. No, it ain't going to be Roomba. It's going to be us for the machines. We'll be right back.

All right, back to the show. No, wait, but Jim, to that point, Jason's point that you were talking about, did you ever see the movie Ex Machina? Yeah, it's great. It deals with that issue, yeah. Yeah, it's that same issue about creating a robot or an AI that actually figures out how to mimic everything that is human so that the human is fooled.

Well, what they say to people that are on the spectrum, they say, fake it till you make it. It's like just watch behavior and then learn from it and then you'll fit in better. And that's just what they'll do. That's what AGI will do. I heard somebody told me a couple years ago that –

and maybe you've probably heard it, you've been at a lot of these conferences and symposiums and whatever, gatherings, that this is at least two years ago, this person said to me that somebody at Alphabet or Google or whatever had said to them,

That they were not concerned, but they said it is – the algorithm is already doing things on its own that they don't understand how it knows how to do. That's right. And that's the big problem with using AI to solve any problem is you may get a good result, but it can't tell you what it did.

because it's just randomly problem solving hundreds of millions of times and then just course correcting within that and it doesn't necessarily know why it's better to do it this way versus that way it just knows that it is and so it'll just keep doing that and iterating so it can't tell you how it's solving the problem because it doesn't know that's crazy it's going to start making movies Jim you've taught it to make movies now it's going to start making movies and it's not going to know why wasn't me man

What about crypto? I want to know. Do you believe in crypto? No. No. Good for you. No, no, no. That's the answer I was looking for. With all of this intelligent stuff, do you do anything that's real dumbass? What's the stupidest thing that you do? I could tell you some really stupid things, but it'll get back to my kids and then see that's not going to happen. What about like a dumb hobby? Like you love playing marbles. Bowling. Bowling. Bowling.

You and Mookie Betts. Yeah, Gene Simmons of KISS taught me to bowl at his birthday party about 30 years ago, and I actually enjoyed it. It's like, who knew? Bowling was fun. Have you bowled a perfect game yet? No.

No. Have you gotten close? I have gotten real drunk, bet everybody like a lot of money that I would throw a strike and thrown it and then walked out. Of course, that was a mic drop because I knew I could never do it again. Are you a sports guy? Do you follow any sports at all? No, not at all. Not interested. I have limited RAM and I need to use it for what I need to use it for. Do you think it's a waste of time? I watch a lot of sports. Am I wasting my time? If you're having fun, you're not wasting your time. Okay.

Now, how do you like it? What are you doing down there in New Zealand? Are you still working on the movie? We're just finishing up. We're mixing the last couple reels, you know, as we speak, finishing up. We started out with 3,250 shots. I'm down to 12.

Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. How do you zoom out and have perspective on something like that? I'll get back to you on that. When is the first one coming out?

Okay, so Avatar the Way of Water is coming out in December, and then two years later, Avatar 3, you know, we haven't officially picked a title yet, comes out. Which you've already shot. We've shot it, and we're in post on it. I've seen a cut of the film, but we still have to finish all the effects. It's that 3,000 shot thing starts again. Is that what's driving the two-year gap between it, or was that intentional to have it be two years? Yeah.

Yeah, it's just the finish work. It takes us about two years to finish a movie that's otherwise all shot and edited. So are you the kind of guy, it strikes me that you might be, that you're up at sort of 5 a.m. looking at stuff, you're working all day, you sleep a few hours, and then you wake up because you're bothered by unfinished business? Sometimes I'll wake up with the answer to a problem. I don't usually wake up because I'm bothered by it, but every once in a while there's a eureka moment, right? Yeah.

But I, no, I get up at five every day. I work out, I noodle around for a while, you know, family stuff. And then I, you know, go to work at eight and work 12 hours. Where do you do your best thinking? Are you a walker? Are you, do you stare at a wall? Do you, where do you, like on planes, some people really see clearly? Stare at a wall. Yeah. Planes are good. Walks are good. You know, dreams are good. Dreams are good. Yeah.

I do a lot of work in dreams and it's not any kind of trained, kind of lucid dreaming. It's just sometimes solutions just work themselves out. Really? You'd be a great person to take us into that unknown place, you know, what dream, where they come from, where thoughts come from. I think it's amazing.

Why don't we do that next? Please do that. I was trying to answer a question another filmmaker had asked me in one of these kind of staged interview things in a magazine, like, you know, about the screenwriting process. And I said, everybody is screenwriting every night. We've got an engine in our head that tells a story in the form of a dream every single night. You know, it's like, I think when we're screenwriting, we're just formalizing that process or giving that engine context.

you know, more power, more dominance over our consciousness. Yeah. Have you ever actually legitimately had...

and you've written it down and it's become the nucleus of like an idea of a natural film? Really? Absolutely. Terminator. Yeah, Terminator. I had an image in a dream of this metal skeleton coming out of the fire. It's like, boom, wrote that down. Avatar, you know, I saw the luminous forest in a dream with the little spinning lizards and all that stuff. Drew it. I didn't write it down. I drew it. I painted it. And I always think I was 19 when that happened. Yeah, I was going to say, high school. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

And so Avatar was something that was always there kind of in the back of your mind. It was this thing that you... For years. Yeah, this thing for years that you wanted to do. Yeah, for, you know, I mean, at this point, that was half a century ago, but it wasn't in the form of Avatar. It wasn't in the form of that story. It was just random imagery, you know? So the way I write, I don't know how you guys write, but the way I write is I start going forward from character and I start working backward from just shit I want to see. Mm-hmm.

And then there's all the middle bit where I get the characters into the places that I want to see, right? No way, really? That's pretty much it. Fascinating. That is fascinating. Sometimes I felt like Mitch Hurwitz was doing that on Arrested Development. He'd think up like the most genius sort of crazy stuff and just write backwards and make it plausible that we would arrive at that point. Yeah, that's true. Well, if you know your ending, you can just write the whole thing, right? Yeah. So now I want to...

I want to just, we got to let you go like in just a couple of minutes, but, and I'm sorry to go way back, but I did have tons of questions about the ocean. And I knew, cause I'm, I think it's just as fascinating as space. I don't ever want to go down the ocean. I mean, it scares the shit out of me, but because I've seen too many movies, I do, I just, I can't swim. So there's a whole thing. Hang on. Do I know that? That I can't swim? Well, I went to the ocean with you a couple of months ago.

But we only went up to our waist. Like, I don't want to go in. But have we had this conversation? You truly do not know how to swim. I don't kind of know how to swim, no. Not really. What? And I'm colorblind. Like a French bulldog. You just go right to the bottom, huh? Let's just all list all the stuff we can't do and our deficits. Well, hang on. It'll be so cathartic. It'll be so cathartic. They named a Rolex watch out of him. He goes so deep. You know what I mean? This is...

Okay, wait a minute. I do have this question. Because I read in anticipation of this, I don't know the story. I read that you took a chicken in a cage when you went down to the bottom when you did that long thing. A, why? B, what happened? Oh, a dead chicken. Not a live chicken. Yeah, no, it was just a chicken, right? You know, like a broiler from the supermarket. Why did he need the cage?

He's not going anywhere. Just hold him in your hand, Jim. He was outside the sub. He was actually on a robotic lander, and it was just in a wire frame.

Why do I feel so persecuted here? - No, I wanna know. I wanna know, like, what was the result? - We wanted to film this sucker getting ripped apart by these little amphipods that live down there that are like the deep ocean piranha. And in like a five minute time lapse, they come in and strip it to the bone. - Wow. - So if you've ever, you know, you've ever seen a burial at sea, you know, with the flag and the guy goes out from under the flag,

He's a skeleton in about 20 minutes. Now, can I ask you, how did you arrive at a chicken? Did you just think, oh, they're going to freak out because they've never smelt or tasted anything from land? In other words, like, why didn't you use a dead fish? They'd rip that apart too. Did you think, chicken, oh, they're going to love this?

They'll eat anything. They don't care because the protein for them is like manna from heaven. It just falls from above. There's nothing really that's very big down where they live and they just scavenge on whatever falls out. So sometimes it could be a whale or a dolphin or a fish or whatever. I don't think they're very picky. The occasional human, you know. Sure, sure. World War II. Heaven help Sean Hayes if he ever gets out there. He'll be right down there. Yeah.

You can just hang it outside my door. You have a pool at your house. Yeah. How do you not swim? I know, well, I doggy paddle. I'm going to text you after this. Jason and I will pool together. We're going to get you some swim lessons. You're going to hold me up? Yeah, Jim, what do you think when you're done with all of this, because you've done so much, the breadth of which is really pretty astonishing, whether it's filmmaking or all this oceanic stuff, etc., etc.,

What do you want to be remembered for? What's your legacy? Because it's pretty remarkable. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I love that. I love that. Yeah, you could qualify for a bunch of legacy things there if you had to pick one. I think, look, explorer, filmmaker, storyteller. I think an explorer is a storyteller. You go...

you go someplace and you come back and you tell the story, right? Yeah. So a documentary filmmaker is a storyteller, uh, you know, scripted filmmakers, a storyteller, um,

You know, I don't know. I mean, do I have to choose? No, no, no. They'll do it. Believe me. But it is really remarkable. Haven't you discovered a species or two as well, perhaps? Yeah, a few. Yeah, about a hundred. Really? You have? Yeah. Well, you see a lot of stuff no one's ever seen when you get down there. I'll bet. Mostly small. Mostly small stuff, but definitely things. You know, Sigourney Weaver said once, you know, because of all your diving, she said...

they as a cast kept thinking, I hope he survives to make another movie. Yeah.

That's Sig thinking about her career again. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to make your deal on all this stuff. It must be so complicated. I was just thinking about the lawyers of it all. The risky things that he does. I love the part where they tell me I can't fly in a private plane or a helicopter. And they forget to put that I can't take a sub-seven miles.

down. Yeah, right. But that's my point is like you do all this stuff. It's super risky. And also like, and the technology is proprietary and it's stuff that you're coming up with. And you're, you're like, Hey man, we were, what happened today? Like your kids might be like, dad, what'd you do? We were shooting some stuff and I discovered three new species and, uh, and I built a submarine. The kids, my kids couldn't care less about what I do during the day.

How old are your kids? What are the ranges? 15, 18, 21, 29, and 34. Wow. But the teenagers, they couldn't care less. Whatever your parents are doing is not interesting by definition. Yeah. No, Jason and I know we have teenagers, and they just couldn't. I have a 14-year-old boy. He has a 15 or 16-year-old girl. Our kids just do not care. They are so nonplussed. Keeps us humble. Yeah. Thank God.

Well, you are the king of the world. You really are. You're remarkable. Yeah, until I walk in the front door. Yeah, exactly. In every house but yours. Truly, it's been such a huge, huge honor to meet you and listen to all of this today. It's just, you are such a pivotal part of my childhood and my adulthood. And just, I just think you're incredible. So thanks for being here. You're 52.

I'm 58. Don't put that on me. You are, though. But I was growing up and I was like, I would watch those over and over. By the way, I can't not watch. You know my age more than my own father does. But I can't believe every time I... Hey, we got somebody we'd like to put in a submarine, actually, speaking of that. I can do it. Yeah, that's true. I'm not going to say that you're part of my childhood. I'm going to say you're a tremendous peer.

I consider you a peer. I've had a good time hanging out with you guys today. It's been great. Well, thank you for doing it. Thank you for all your hard work. Yeah, you're a remarkable artist and adventurer, and thank you for everything. All right, cool. This has been great. Good luck with the film. Can't wait to see it. All right, thank you. Thank you. All right, take care. All right, back to the mix. Pretty cool. Wow. You know what I kept thinking, though, is like,

It's just a testament to his tenacity to just believe. And that's why I asked that long-winded question about like, how do you not go...

I was just kidding. Like when the dollar amount gets to... Remember when Titanic was the most expensive film ever made? Yeah. And then Avatar was. Yeah, and then Avatar was. And now these two probably are. I mean, how does he convince these studios? I know. So when it gets to like $200 million, which is what Titanic was at the time. Was it really? How are you not like, okay, never mind. Just kidding. And then it was the first one to make a billion? Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. What a roll of the dice over and over and over again. But then like, you know, you do something like Avatar and you...

He spawns like ancillary thing, like Blue Man Group, you know. Or actually, Blue Man Group inspired Avatar. No, they didn't. No, they didn't. I was really hoping I'd get you on that one. Wait, what? For two seconds, I was like, I don't remember reading that. Can you imagine if they tried to sue Jim Cameron? But the part is, when they testify, they don't say anything. They're just drumming and shit, and they keep...

Surprise Mitch didn't give that line to David Cross in Arrested. While he's all made up in the blue stuff, he went and read for Avatar. I mean, I think that some people are just wired differently, and he's just wired in a different way. Did you ever see the making of The Abyss? Or have you ever seen The Abyss? No. Yeah, I've seen The Abyss. I love The Abyss. I've seen the making of it like five times. It's mind-blowing that he built this tank, and then they forgot to put...

salt in it so it was all fuzzy or something like that. And so then they had a problem after problem after problem for a year and a half, two years. And they only had so much time to breathe underwater and then they couldn't see the faces so they put lights in the helmets and it was just nuts. Yeah, the amount of knowledge he has to have like from computer technology to like engineering to, I mean, just...

I don't know how you get it all in there. But Jay, you know, it's funny you say that. I think that part of it must be that he's willing to take a risk and he's willing to make a mistake.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, he's not nervous. He didn't get it first try. Right. All that stuff he came up with, it would be trial and error. And he seems to be the kind of guy who has the confidence to go like, yeah, I don't know how to do it, but we're going to figure it out. Yes, I love that. And we'll keep going. That's what I love. And there's something, there's a real lesson in that because we're all...

I know I am. You get nervous. You have those moments where you're like, I don't want to fuck up or I don't want to look stupid or whatever. And truly, you know, creating great things comes out of these, you know, if you have the frame of mind of like,

I'm willing to fall on my face. Yeah. And being able to be convincing and articulate your vision, your plan, and lead. Yeah, he's clearly one of our best, I guess. What if the Y was an I in that movie title? Oh, here it comes. Here it comes. Get ready. Get ready, Will. What would it be called? Gee, I don't know. What do you mean? What do you think? It would be called the Bye. Bye. They're always the worst. I know. They're always just...

Terrible. Because he always wants to go to buy and switch. It's the same way that he switched subjects, just on a dime. I got it. We're just getting somewhere. We're having a conversation. We're wrapping up talking about the incredible Jim Camera. Jim Camera. Somebody mentioned chicken. Chicken in the ocean. Chicken in the ocean. And you're like, hey, I got to go find a deep fried chicken somewhere. You're just thinking about a bobbing chicken somewhere.

And you're like, I had so many ocean questions. I want that animator to do Jim taking a chicken down seven miles down.

All right. Well, listen. Happy Saturday. Happy Saturday. Love to you and yours. Is that bi or did we bi it out? I think we bi. We abeist. We abeist. Listen. We abeist. I didn't think it was the greatest sign off, but you know what? I'm biased. Yes. Yes.

That's just as bad. What we've done for the audience is we've done our own audio documentary on the making of a vice. Does that work?

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