[Music] you know. [Music] Hello, I'm James Cameron. [Music] You know, what set me down the path of actually being a director was my love of Cinema, my love of Storytelling is [Music] foreign. [Music] 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 get older and by Society, but you know, I wanted people to feel that sense of nature deficit disorder that we all have. You know that we're not in nature as much as we wanted to be, maybe when we were kids, and build a world that was fascinating that had an almost dreamlike quality that connected with us 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, a mountain planet, and I went, wait a minute, we live on one planet that's got deserts and mountains and oceans and rainforest and every other damn thing, 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 on Pandora, and it's rich. It just gets bigger and bigger with each film. 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, and with a deeper, richer history, and with more stakes going forward, and more stakes, more jeopardy for our family, for the people that we care for in the first film. If you've seen the film, if you remember, it's a story really of two young lovers who meet. They're from different cultures, 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 planet Pandora. And he meets a beautiful young indigenous girl there, and despite early conflict, they fall in love. And then he winds up defending them against colonial forces. I kind of hoped

you say that so in the in the second film we find Jake Sully and natiri 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 or one thing this family is our Fortress. [Music] 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 it a whole new not V culture that we haven't seen before, which are the sea people, uh, called the metcaina and as I'm

sure, most people know the Avatar films are a mixture of live-action photography and performance capture. Performance captures, you know, where 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. So, we weren't doing the rainforest. You see the rainforest in Avatar 2, but then we leave it behind, and we go to the ocean. So, how do you do that? And then, from our prototype, we were able to build a huge 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 known 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's set just below the surface and broke that reflection. So if we get to finish this thing out, it's an epic story told 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 world that's 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. [Music]

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 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 installation where the people were and communicate with them and do something. At the time, I kind of thought of it as just sort of pouring across the floor and down the stairs and moving through 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 wrote it. I didn't let that stop me. I thought, well, we'll figure it out. It'll 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 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. For when we developed a toolset 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. [Music] You knew this would happen. [Music] The thing, of course, that concerned us was what's called the Uncanny Valley. Most people are familiar with that.

it's not like some like the Valley of Death. It's not. It's not a place. 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 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 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 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, next film where we we tackled this was uh Elita battle.

angel. [Applause] So, a leader 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. Does it bother you that I'm not completely... 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 a hundred percent real, but she looked 97% real, and that was exactly where we wanted to be, exactly where we wanted to be. We could, 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 one of our young actors. 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. He lacked it 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. [Music] foreign [Music] 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. [Music] And we saw that the future was CG or CGI, you know, computer-generated animation for character creation. 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 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, had dreams of bioluminescent forests.

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, 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. [Applause] 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. [Music] Um, for an 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 highly situational, you know, when Bill Paxton says, you know, it's game.

over man and Aliens people laugh. They're laughing for a reason. They're getting a release. They're getting a feeling of release from a 25-minute sequence of an incredible tension, so that laugh is vastly magnified just by the situation. It's not innately that funny, but I don't do comedy. But if I can have people respond emotionally to a scenario, a made-up scenario, made up people, actors saying they're somebody they're not, just up there bald-faced lying, you know that's what we do. You know, we make up stories. It's all but it's divine at the same time because it touches us and we can relate to it, and it's almost like, uh, I call it the emotional dipstick, you know, you go to your engine and you check your oil up when you go to a movie, you check your emotion level. It's like, yep, still there, I still feel it. And so you go to a movie theater and you have an emotional response to a movie and everybody else is having the same damn

response like okay, well, I belong. I'm part of the human race. I'm okay, you know, and I think we, I think we all need that um, and that, that gives me great pleasure after the fact in a movie theater that I've, I've put on a good show. I've taken people by the hand. I've taken them down a path. One of the things I'm, I'm proudest of looking back. Yes, we expected people to cry Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic. If you're not crying, then I've failed. But would I have failed making Terminator 2 if you didn't cry for The Terminator? No, big, big loud action movie, lots of suspense and lots of stunts. It probably would have been considered a success. I set myself the challenge. I'm going to take the baddest ass automaton assassin, soulless machine, but you're gonna cry at the end when he sacrifices himself. And if I can do that, I can prove to myself that you can do anything in cinema. So as

a filmmaker the prime duty is telling a story that looks like it might be interesting based on external cues to the audience. [Music] I just love movies. I loved. I loved the transport from my normal mundane life to some amazing place, some amazing time, some amazing other world, and of course, I love science fiction. I like monsters, I like spaceships, I like robots, all that stuff. So of course, it was a steady diet of monsters and spaceships and robots. You know, I didn't really catch up with the fact that there was this whole other area of cinema that didn't involve fantasy until later. That was storytelling across all aspects of the human experience. Um, you know, and that was an awakening for me a little bit later in life, in my late teens, my early 20s, and school at college and so on, really learning a bit of the history of film and the aesthetics of film and so on, and film as film, film as storytelling, film as the universal human experience, you know, but at the time I was just

voracious for any kind of film or television that was that was science fiction. And back in my really formative years as a as a as a kid and as a young teen, it was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and and Lost in Space and The Outer Limits um and obviously Star Trek, right? So this was a moment in history where television and media in general had sort of discovered science fiction and the fact that they could make money with it, right? So all these things were happening kind of in the 60s and and 70s that were just inputting into my mind, and I I would just turn it around and all of a sudden my own stories started to kind of show up. And I was an avid artist. I could actually draw fairly well, and I love comic books, so it wasn't a big leap to start drawing my own comic. But I wasn't really drawing Comics. I was kind of drawing what today would be called a graphic novel or a storyboard. So all of a sudden I find myself trying

to express myself novelistically, but in frames and pictures, and it kind of teaches you. I mean emulating comic book artists, but it teaches you how to tell a story in a series of pictures. [Music] Close-up, wide shot, moving shot, action, fast cutting, many frames per page versus a few. You know, all of the vocabulary of film is there in comic books and graphic novels, and so that was my training. Now, meanwhile, as a lover of Cinema, I'm starting to think, well, I wonder how you do this, and one of the big light bulb moments for me was watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, a big space fan, right, big fantasy fan, science fiction, so I was the first one in line to see 2001: A Space Odyssey when it was released in the summer of 1968, and nobody had ever seen anything like that before. It's a very opaque film. It's very difficult to understand. The storytelling is, there's a very high aesthetic value to it, but it wasn't

standard storytelling, and it was, it just kind of blew the doors off of everything I had seen before, and it awakened a young mind, you know? I was 16, I think, something like that. Um, and all of a sudden, you know, two things happened. One, as I realized film could be art. What a concept. It could just be pure pictures, didn't have to have a lot of dialogue, you know? And there was this thing called music that went with the pictures. I mean, I obviously watched hundreds, if not thousands, of movies by then and TV shows, but I'm never aware of the music. All of a sudden, here were just pictures and music, and it was like, it was such an epiphany for me of what Cinema could be. At the same time, I was seeing images I couldn't comprehend how they were made. I just didn't get it, and I wanted to know. Interesting thing about 2001: A Space Odyssey is that it had a big thick book that was published on how it was made, and they didn't do that back then. It's

obviously common practice in the decades since. But that was one of the first films that had a big thick book on how it was made, actual chapter and verse, technically how that movie was made. So, I absorbed all that. Once again, that young sponge mind. And then I had to start doing it, you know. Once again, it's that cognitive toggle from being a fan and an appreciator into taking action. And so, if you get anything else from this, if you want to do something, go do it. Don't think about it too long, just start doing it. And then one day you'll find out that you've been doing it. And then after that, you're just sort of negotiating your price because you're already making a film or writing a book or doing art or whatever it is. So, anyway, I just started making models and photographing them, using my dad's little regular eight brownie wind-up camera. You know, it was all crude stuff, but the point is I was doing it. I'd gone from

being a fan to a practitioner without realizing it at the age of 17. [Music] foreign. [Music] pointed out to me a number of times that I have strong female characters in my films, starting with uh Sarah Connor in the Terminator, and obviously in Terminator 2 she she's transformed into a real Warrior by the trauma of the first film. The same thing with uh with the Ripley character, traumatized in Ridley Scott's film Alien, coming back fiercely protective, the kind of warrior mother. So there's definitely a theme, there's a theme there, and I've had other strong female characters in other films. True Lies, the mousy housewife that becomes a kind of super spy by the end of the movie played by Jamie Curtis, and The Abyss, the brilliant engineer who's a very challenging person, who emerges as somebody that we love by the end of the film for her intelligence and her strength, the strength of will. Titanic was Rose's story, it was her

transformation by the end largely due to his impact on her. But it was her story that we followed. So, female characters, what's that all about? Why am I doing that? I mean, you could take an analytical approach and say I was doing that, which others weren't doing at that time. Seemed kind of obvious to me. Female characters were interesting, um, and so it was almost in a way filling void or creating a niche because mostly female characters back at that time were kind of the wife or the girlfriend or the sex object, or whatever, the siren, the seductress, the Femme Fatale, all of those roles but never central to the story, never the one who exhibited the intelligence, the will, the survival will, the protective thing, and so on. So, you could be analytical, say that it was just fulfilling a need. Fifty percent of the audience is female, potentially, if they feel like they've got something to show up for. And I'm not talking about just rom-coms.

but you know, I mean, I think everything goes deeper than that, and it's psychological. So, in my world growing up, I had two very strong female role models: my mother, um, who was an artist and a very willful person in my eyes, a very admirable person, and my grandmother, who was, you know, very iron-willed, kind of ran the whole family. So, while she was very authoritarian, my mother had a balance of being both authoritarian, which mothers are, and very artistic and very encouraging to me in terms of my artistry and my curiosity and so on. And, uh, so look, I was surrounded by good examples, I think, growing up. I loved, I loved female characters in movies. I was fascinated by women in general, their perspective on the world and so on. And this, I mean, I guess I was kind of a feminist at the time without even realizing it. None of these were highly formulated thoughts like, I'm going to go out and be a famous movie director by creating female characters. It wasn't like that at all. I just

followed that which interested me and excited me in terms of storytelling. Um, and I just like the idea of, you know, following somebody that people might classify as a victim who turns out to have a warrior spirit within them. It's the classic trope of well, you picked the wrong guy to mess with, except why does it have to be a guy, you know? They picked the wrong girl to mess with in Terminator, and they found out the hard way in Terminator 2. I like that. Um, so obviously there are a lot of reasons and there were a lot of reasons to continue to do that because I got a lot of positive feedback from women, from audiences everywhere. I think it's part of the strength of my movies commercially that they appeal as action films both to males and females, and that's unusual. I mean, most action films appeal to a very heavily skewed male audience, but my films have always been practically 50/50. And I'm.

proud of that now. It gets a bit tricky these days because we're also trying to empower women as writers and as directors. And they're so poorly represented even today in Hollywood and really around the world that I feel like, you know, okay, I need to step back. I don't want to tell a female story at the expense of a female director getting their shot. But that said, you know, I was married to a female director, Catherine Bigelow, fantastic director, first woman to ever win an Academy Award for directing. And she didn't play by that rule that's being used today. I'd love to just think of myself as a filmmaker. I'm ever grateful if I can inspire some young, intrepid, tenacious male or female filmmaker. So you know, today, if you're making Wonder Woman, get a female director. If you're making Captain Marvel, female superhero, you get a woman. Catherine never played by those rules.

she she would have been horrified if she thought she was she was getting a getting a gig as a director because she was a woman. A concept horrified her, and she certainly wasn't interested in women's issues, you know. So, I think it should be very gender agnostic, the whole directing process and and so on, but anyway, so somehow I guess early on I was just all about um wanting to extol the virtues and the strengths of uh of women, and I still enjoy that. I mean, I'm making a finishing up a film right now, uh Avatar the way of water. It's a very couple of very strong female characters, not just one but two, uh three if you include Kate Winslet's character. All the women are interesting in this film. I happen to think all the characters are interesting, but I think all the women are very interesting, so I'm not going to back off that throttle. [Music] So far, I've done eight Expeditions over the years, and we've built, you know, robotic vehicles to go in and explore.

the inside of the Titanic, for example, doing a full archaeological survey of the inside of that wreck and also the Bismarck, the famous German battleship. [Music] [Music] and explored hydrothermal vents with 3D cameras and special lighting that we built. And all these things. So I work with a really talented team of Engineers that aren't afraid of anything. Uh, we decided to build a vehicle to go to the deepest place in the world's oceans. And the logic there was that these deep trenches that are all over the world, which total up to an area. If you added up all the deep trenches in the world, they total up to an area about the size of North America. So it's essentially a completely unexplored continent right here on planet Earth in the 21st century that nobody's gone and looked couple places here and there people have looked. But with cameras with remote cameras, but for the most part, almost completely unexplored and unsampled.

so I thought, well, if we build a vehicle that can take a person, a pilot, myself, because I wanted to do it myself, to the deepest place on the planet, then you can do all of the trenches. You could literally go anywhere. You're not, you're not limited. So we decided to set that as our goal. The Challenger Deep is the deepest spot on our planet, and it's, uh, ten thousand some meters deep, almost, almost 11 kilometers down. That's a lot of water over your head. It's like saying, I found a higher spot on Mount Everest. We've built, we designed the sub, um, we built it. It took seven years, and we took it out to sea, and we, we test dove it. I think my first test dive inside the inside the sub was to the, the, uh, or shattering depth of one meter. I only needed to get it just under the surface so we could test all the acoustic communication systems. The second dive was 20 meters, and then the next dive after that was a thousand meters.

you know what do we what are we wasting time at a thousand meters for let's go to let's go to 4,000 meters that's deeper than Titanic so our next dive was 4,000 meters and you know it went on like that and we went through our our testing program we we built ourselves up to going out to Challenger Deep the only problem was we had a great sub but we didn't have a great handling system to get the sub in and out of the water it was a little bit ad hoc and it was just sort of fitted to the ship in a kind of a rush job and it wasn't very good oh that's not good got a lot of failures here we got a problem we need to really know if there's an emergency so there was a sea State Beyond which we couldn't launch it and it was only about a meter and a half C and we looked at the at the weather and we weren't going to have anything less than about a two and a half meter sea

for several days. But there was one moment where it was going to lie down for a few hours, and unfortunately it was at four o'clock in the morning. They said, All right, guys, we're diving at four o'clock in the morning. Now, we had done 10 test dives up to that point, but we had always launched in the daytime and recovered at night. That worked beautifully because you could see the sub clearly. All of our surface operations could be clearly managed in the daytime, and then at night when the sub came back to the surface, I just turned all the lights on. They could see me from 10 miles away. If I didn't come up where I was supposed to, well, we did it exactly the opposite. So I got in the sub at four o'clock in the morning. They put me in the water. Nobody could see what the hell they were doing. We managed to get it in the water and get diving, and I was going to come up in the daytime where, you know, the sub only stuck up about that far.

above the surface of the water. So imagine in a large swell out in the daytime with white caps. You can't see the damn thing. But anyway, we managed to pull the whole thing off. But it was so, I mean, there was a fair bit of trepidation building up to the dive and a lot of thinking and planning and so on. But the moment that I was in there, they got the hatch bolted shut. It was just pure excitement. It's like, All right, I'm really going. I'm gonna get to see what's down there. And that's what drove me to do the whole thing. [Music] Well, I love filmmaking, and the Avatar films are a huge project. I hope I'm able to carve out time to do more expeditions, develop new deep ocean technology. Um, you know, first of all, the deep trenches are, as I said, completely unexplored, and so there's so much to look at down there and so much to investigate. I've spent, by my rough estimate, somewhere around 5,000

hours underwater, most of that on scuba, a lot of it free diving, a lot of it even in diving helmets. Believe It or Not, which I learned how to do when I was making the abyss and uh about five or six hundred hours in uh in deep submersible vehicles. In fact, at this point in time, I'm a registered ROV Pilot. I'm a registered deep submersible pilot as well. So you see, this is where curiosity will take you. It's exploration is only curiosity acted upon. You have to actually go do it. [Music] The other thing that's interesting is what is a movie, what is a movie. Is it you know, it's a linear story that's got a beginning, a middle, and an end, okay. How is a movie that's made for streaming and only plays on streaming different than a movie that's made for a movie theater. It's not, it's the same thing, you know, it's got main title and it's got credits at the end, it's got a whole bunch of

stuff that happens in the middle right so if it's on streaming there's no time boundary whatsoever could be a six-hour movie it could be a 10-hour movie stop it and go do something else and you come back when people will sit and binge-watch Breaking Bad for eight hours straight or in the case of my kids The Walking Dead for eight hours straight oh just one more episode the length of an experience is really unbounded so I think that the definition of what a movie is is going to change it has to do with the tension span and interest and wanting to know what happens next so Titanic was a three-hour and 15-minute film Avatar way of water is a little over three hours it's exactly the length that I set out to make essentially now if I'd been proven wrong when we when we screened the film for ourselves and it felt tedious it would have been made shorter I don't feel that I don't think audiences will either so I think that that interest

is the critical factor for the length of an experience. Am I interested in what's going on? Do I want to see what happens next? I can't just get up now and not see what happens to the characters. So I'm not worried about is three hours too long. I'm worried about what is the upper boundary. But I think the one thing that will never change is we'll want to go to a movie theater for the following reason. And it's not something that's necessarily obvious. People are always talking about, Oh, the, you know, being in a big room with strangers and all laughing at the same time gives us a common bond. Well, I think that's true. But there's something else that being in a big room full of strangers does for us. It's a social contract that says you're not going to do stupid stuff like talk or be on your phone or be distracted or be playing a video game at the same time or any of the other things that people do when they're watching streaming with.

their friends or their siblings or their family. Or pause it to go to the bathroom. Hey, is it okay if I pause? I got to go to the bathroom. No, it's not okay. That's not what as a filmmaker I made the movie for you to watch every freaking frame. Now that said, obviously people have biological needs. So anyway, the point is it's about the social contract. You're going to get up and you're going to slink out and you're going to go pee and you're going to come back and the movie's gonna move on. The movie and the time and tides wait for nobody. And that means that you don't have a remote. You can't stop it. You're not in control. And I think that's important. I think people want to not be in control. They want to have. They want to choose their moment and their experience and they want to go into a theater and they want to have the movie be in charge of what's going to happen to them for the next two.

hours or two and a half hours or whatever, and I think that's a sacred experience that we're never going to give up. You can take people on a guided journey. They don't know where they're going, they don't know that's what's going to happen, but they get there, and that's tremendously satisfying. So that's the joy that I get at the end of the day after all the insane hours and all the hardship and the years of work, etc., that go into every film. But it has to be more than that. You have to enjoy the moment of creation. You have to enjoy the day of every day you work on a film. Titanic was 152 days of shooting. These two Avatar films of them just finishing now, five years of production. You can't, it can't all be about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It has to be fulfilling in the moment and continue to be the wonder that it's always been in my life. It's still possible to be a great wonder. I mean

I've been looking at we're re-releasing the first avatar in September, and I'm looking at it on a daily basis, approving the 3D. And you know, we have better projectors now, laser projectors that are so bright. It's almost mind-boggling how good a film can look these days, so much better than when we released Avatar only, uh, at this point 12 years ago. Um, so it's still tremendously exciting, and nobody quite knows exactly where the business is going. [Music] I'd just like to say thank you to, uh, to audiences everywhere. Not just for myself personally, although I love the fact that people enjoy my films and they're so kind for the most part in their commentaries, other than a bunch of trolls that are idiots anyway, and they're all living in their mom's basement. Thank you for keeping Cinema alive. Thank you for loving it. Thank you for loving the thing that I love, that I've loved since I was a kid, you know. Thank you for keeping that experience.

the big screen experience the cinema experience alive and thank you for loving the storytelling that's done with a camera and some actors and some lights you know because I don't think that's ever going to change come back 500 years from now there's going to be a camera there's going to be some actors and there's going to be some lights now there may be 10 other ways to tell stories at that point as well but I don't think that's going anywhere I don't think it ever will so thank you for that

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