You know, hello, I'm James Cameron. You know, what set me down the path of actually being a director was my love of cinema, my love of storytelling.

For a second, so that was a grand challenge and we set ourselves a challenge on the first movie of seeing a rainforest environment writ large on another planet with lower gravity where the trees could be, you know, 300 feet tall, a thousand feet tall, animals that could fly, that were huge.

It's not even possible on Earth. So there's a lot of fantasy elements in Avatar and you know, my goal was to reconnect a global audience with that feeling that they had when they were a little kid out in nature and they just loved everything they were seeing.

They might not have understood it, but they but they loved it. They wanted to explore it.

I mean, I think when we're six years old, we're all scientists, you know, it it kind of gets taken out of us as we as we get older and by society.

But you know, I wanted people to to feel that sense of nature deficit disorder that we all have, you know, that we're not in nature as much as as we wanted to be maybe when we were when we were kids and build a world that was fascinating, that had an almost dreamlike quality, that connected with us on a on a subconscious level.

So as I looked at the problem of doing the Avatar sequels, I thought, well, I could do what George Lucas does and there could be a desert planet on a mountain planet and I went, wait a minute, we live on one planet that's got deserts and mountains and oceans and and rainforests and every other damn thing, temperate temperate forest, I don't have to go anywhere but Pandora.

I can tell the whole story on Pandora. We can introduce different cultures, different animals that we haven't seen before, different biomes, different ecosystems.

And so, you know, the sequels will all take place on Pandora. A little bit back on Earth, but mostly, mostly on Pandora.

And it's rich. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger with each film. And and not only bigger, and I don't mean bigger in the sense that like we suddenly wind up with Godzilla.

I mean bigger in scope and scale of the storytelling, um, and with a deeper, richer history and with more stakes going forward and and more stakes, more more jeopardy for our family, for the for the people that we care for in the first film.

Uh, if if you've seen the film, if you remember, um, it's a story really of two young lovers, um, who meet.

So Jake Sully is a marine from planet Earth and he winds up in the very unlikely scenario of going to fill in for his twin brother who was killed on the on planet Pandora.

And he meets a beautiful young indigenous girl there and despite early conflict, they fall in love and then they he he winds up defending them against colonial forces.

I kind of hoped you'd say that. So in the in the second film, we find Jake Sully and Neytiri, who are as we say in the first film, mated for life.

Uh, they now have uh five children, three of their own, one that's adopted and another one that kind of in a sense adopts them, a young human boy.

For one thing, this family is our fortress.

Who's sort of part of the part of the story, so it's really a family story. And that's what distinguishes it from the first story, which was more of a a cross-cultural romance.

So the second film is is at the same time very similar to the first film and it's in its sense of uh epic grandeur, the beauty of the of the planet.

Um you know, I would say spiritual themes, indigenous themes, and all of those things people will find similarity.

But it's a very, very different story and there are more characters there. We see a whole new Na'vi culture that we haven't seen before, which are the sea people, uh called the Metkayina.

And as I'm sure most people know, the Avatar films are a mixture of live-action photography and performance capture.

Performance capture is, you know, where we we put the actors into what we call a volume and in that volume we're able to capture literally capture their performance.

I would say practically at a molecular level of accuracy.

So to tell the story I wanted to tell, which was about the oceans of Pandora, we had to create this new technique, which was how do we capture our human actors in and under the water in the same way that we were capturing them in what would become a rainforest environment on the first film.

You see the rainforest in Avatar 2, but then we leave it behind and we go to we go to the ocean.

So how do you do that? And then from our prototype, we were able to build a huge uh tank for capturing the performances.

120 feet long, had a big wave maker at one end and had the ability to generate strong currents because what we figured is we we can have the actors zipping around on creatures, motorized creatures zipping through the water.

That's dangerous and it's hard to film, or we can bring the movement of the ocean to them and shoot them in a kind of a wind tunnel where we can zoom in and get their performances and uh, very accurately.

So we built essentially an underwater wind tunnel that could generate a current of up to 10 knots, and our actors are all holding on for dear life, you know, on these uh, on these creatures.

And they learned how to do that, and of course everybody loved it, you know, everybody loved the challenge of it.

But you know, ultimately we switched from normally performance capture is done with a marker suit in a volume that could be like this stage.

But you have all these infrared cameras that are looking at the markers. Well, infrared doesn't work underwater, so we went to ultraviolet, so ultraviolet LEDs.

And then you had to figure, well, what are you going to do with the water surface? Because it acts like a moving mirror, and it reflects all the markers.

And so now there's all kinds of wrong markers and the computer's got to figure out which ones are the wrong markers from the right markers, so it knows where the people are and how they're moving.

Well, we figured that out, and the way we figured it out was we put little white plastic balls all over the surface of the water that sat just below the surface and broke that reflection.

So if we get to finish this thing out, it's an epic story told over over time of people that hopefully we've come to care very much about and we want to see what happens to them.

So once again, the heart and that universal sense of connection with the characters, but in a in a world that's uh, of kind of infinite fractal quality and always surprising.

Key to I think any film, but to keeping Avatar alive and constantly refreshing and constantly having farther and farther horizons is surprise.

Whatever happens next, you may think you have a sense of what an Avatar movie is going to be.

Sorry, it's not that. As as it progressed into this world of CG and wanting to create a digital or computer-generated characters, whether they were monsters or fantastic creatures or humanoid characters like in uh in Avatar, when I was writing The Abyss, this idea popped into my mind of this kind of intelligent water that could move in through the the installation um where the people were and communicate with them and do something.

And at the time I kind of thought of it as as just sort of pouring across the floor and down the stairs and moving through the the room.

And then I thought, why not pick it up off the floor?

Why not have it self-supporting column like a tentacle that came in? So I had this image in my head.

I had no idea how to do it. And so I just I wrote it. I didn't let that stop me. I thought, well, we'll figure it out.

It'll be a cool be a cool problem. And I thought, I mean, we had all kinds of ideas for how to do it. And I was thinking, we could do claymation.

You know, we could have like white clay and scope this thing and then project water onto it that had been shot like a maybe like a tap faucet, the camera turned sideways, shot at, you know, 500 frames per second or something like that.

All these different ideas on how you'd do it.

And then somebody said, well, you might want to look at computer-generated subjects because they're doing things with transparency and water and fluid dynamics and that sort of thing.

And it was all very new, so um, you know, I I talked to several different people about CG and I looked at it and they, you know, I wasn't seeing what we needed to do, but I was seeing little bits and clues here and there.

we developed a tool set that allowed us to get closer and closer and closer to actual uh actual human facial expression and so on, and that was critical for Avatar.

You knew this would happen. The thing of course that concerned us was what's called The Uncanny Valley.

Most people are familiar with that, and it's not like some like the Valley of Death. It's not it's not a place. It's a it's a curve.

It's a response curve that can be graphed, you know, on an XY graph. And it goes like this, you know, if you've got sort of cute fuzzy robots with big eyes, you're pretty high over here.

As that robot or that Android starts to approach looking like a real human, our our attraction to it or our positive response dips, goes way down, corpse-like.

It's like a zombie. It's strange. It's off-putting. That's the valley.

Then you come up the other side and go, well, wow, it's so human. I can relate to it. It can tell me a joke. I can have a beer with it.

You see what I'm saying? So it's so it's like the valley, the dip is our negative response to that which approaches human but isn't, creeps us out.

And I think we've all seen on YouTube or whatever, robots that you know, they have a rubber face and a lot of servo motors and things like that, and they're not quite right, and they kind of creep us out.

Although I actually think the uncanny valley is a thing of the past. I actually think we think it's cool now.

It's interesting, right? Um, but that was our big challenge going into Avatar. We wanted we want to create these humanoid characters that are driven by the powerful performances of our actors, Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, and so on.

And we had to you know, be able to take the emotion that they created and translate it into these CG characters.

For my money, we succeeded. I I believe we succeeded.

I believe the uncanny valley was not an issue. But those characters were not human in the sense that, you know, they had blue skin, they had tiger stripes, they had pointy ears.

They were clearly somewhat alien. And it and it so we didn't have to absolutely perfectly reproduce humanity.

Now, the next film where we we tackled this was uh Alita: Battle Angel.

So Alita was meant to look very human, but she was never meant to be human.

We knew that her body was synthetic, we knew that her face was synthetic. She was meant to be synthetic, but driven by a human mind, a human spirit.

And of course, Rosa Salazar, who played her, did a fantastic performance and it was done with performance capture.

So her mind, her heart, her emotions were in there behind that character.

That said, we surprised ourselves at how real she looked. She never looked 100% real, but she looked 97% real. And that was exactly where we wanted to be, exactly where we wanted to be.

We could, if if it was required, create a 100% photorealistic human.

character right now. And in fact, we have on a couple of shots in the film, and you'll never know which ones they are.

And we intend to do a bunch more in Avatar 3 because of uh one of our young actors. Uh, we have some scenes that we've rewritten and changed a little bit for Avatar 3, and he's now too old to play that character.

So we'll just not a de-aging process where we photograph it and we de-age it.

This will just be we'll just use his model from when he was 15.

And we'll apply his performance to that model, and you'll never know which shots they are. So we're there. It's doable. And it's taken, you know, it's taken 15 years to get here.

The only limitation right now is that it's actually still expensive and and it's very time-consuming on the part of the artist, even using machine deep learning and AI to assist.

So I see a lot of upside in getting AI into it more and more to improve the process of translating it to the screen.

The Abyss was written because at the time I was the chairman of the board and founder of a company called Digital Domain with my founding partner Stan Winston, who is a creature and character creator, did Jurassic Park and Terminator and all that sort of thing.

And we saw that the future was CG or CGI, you know, computer-generated animation for character creation.

We we saw this was in 1992. We saw that that was the future. So we founded a company called Digital Domain to literally kind of go to the next evolutionary stage of CG.

And in in 1994, 1995, I wanted to write something that would challenge that team of brainiacs at that company to push it all to the next level.

And so in that particular case, I actually wrote a story called Avatar that was there specifically to push the effects, to push us all to a new level of capability in the visual effects world.

But I still knew that it has to be a good story first. So I completely forgot about how we were going to do it.

I just started writing characters in a world using my imagination, using imagery from dreams from when I was in college, when I was 19 years old. I had dreams of bioluminescent forests and flying lizards and things like that.

It all lined up in that story. So even though the purpose was to push the envelope of technology, I was just free-flowing from the subconscious, telling a story, things that meant something to me.

I was passionate about the environment, still am.

I was concerned about, you know, indigenous communities that were being destroyed by the advance of civilization. All those things, I got all the thematic stuff in it that I wanted to say.

I got all the emotional stuff in it that I wanted to say.

But the original provocation was, I need to write a story that takes place in a world that can only be done with CG.

So it kind of doesn't matter where you start. The key to it is where you wind up with an emotional, relatable story. And you know, Avatar did very well, obviously.

But what's interesting about it is it did very well in every culture that it went into around the world, whether it was China, whether it was Japan, whether it's France, Germany, England, South America, it didn't matter.

because there are universal aspects of human issues, human concern, the human disconnect from nature that we all feel, that there's something missing.

our human resignation resonating with these characters that are in love and up against impossible odds, all those things. So the storytelling always must be the most important thing.

Um, I love it when I can make people cry. I know that sounds bad. I don't want to make my children cry, no. But I love it if I can, um, if I can guide a human experience for two or two and a half hours, in the case of Titanic, three hours, and create an emotional response amongst the great majority of the audience.

Now, people that do comedy, they know they get immediate feedback.

The joke works or it doesn't. The audience is laughing. I don't get that experience too often. I've got a few good laughs in some of my movies that are that are highly situational.

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