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1:17

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1:47

Almost exactly a year ago, Colossus entered

1:49

into a partnership with David Senra and the founders

1:51

podcast to join the Colossus Network. The

1:54

show has exploded since with more devoted

1:56

fans than any podcast that I've encountered. With

1:59

that in mind, we are excited to share an example

2:01

episode from his show here today on

2:03

the director James Cameron. It's my personal

2:05

favorite recent episode of David's. I

2:08

also want to mention that David and I will be doing our

2:10

first and probably only live show together

2:13

in New York City on October 19th during

2:15

Tech Week at Webster Hall. Tickets

2:17

are selling pretty fast, so if you're interested in joining

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us, you can check out the link in the show notes. Now,

2:22

please enjoy his episode, and if you haven't already,

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subscribe to Founders.

2:28

After

2:28

James Cameron's avatar made $2.7

2:31

billion, the director found the

2:33

deepest point that exists in all of the Earth's

2:35

oceans and dove to it.

2:37

When Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench,

2:40

he became the first person in history to descend

2:42

the 6.8-mile distance solo.

2:45

Since then, others have followed. Most

2:48

prominently, a private equity titan

2:50

and former Naval Reserve Intelligence

2:52

Officer turned explorer named

2:54

Victor Vescovo,

2:56

but Cameron is adamant that none

2:59

have surpassed him. Vescovo, Cameron

3:01

told me, claimed that he went deeper, but

3:03

you can't, so he's basically just making

3:06

shit up. Vescovo disagrees. I

3:08

have a different scientific perspective, he

3:10

told me diplomatically, but even

3:12

he is a fan of Cameron's films. Like

3:15

Cameron, Vescovo has made multiple

3:17

dives to the wreck of the Titanic, and

3:20

while returning from one of them, he emailed

3:22

Cameron.

3:23

I said, I watched Titanic at

3:25

the Titanic. And he actually replied,

3:28

yeah, but I made Titanic

3:30

at the Titanic. It is perhaps illustrative

3:33

of Cameron's gifts as a filmmaker that even

3:36

his most determined rivals will admit that

3:38

Cameron has written and directed some

3:40

of the most successful films of all time.

3:43

It would be fair to call him the father

3:45

of the modern action movie, which he

3:47

helped invent with his debut, The Terminator,

3:50

and then reinvent with his second, Aliens.

3:53

It would be accurate to add that he has

3:55

directed two of the three top grossing

3:57

films in history. But he's also scientist.

4:01

A camera that he helped design served

4:03

as the model for one that is currently on

4:05

Mars attached to the Mars rover.

4:08

And he's an adventurer and

4:10

not in the dilettante billionaire sense.

4:13

When Cameron sets out to do something it

4:15

gets done. The man

4:17

was born with an explorers instincts

4:20

and capacity. The original avatar

4:22

required the invention of dozens of new technologies

4:25

from the cameras Cameron shot with

4:28

to the digital effects that he used to transform

4:30

human actors into animated creatures

4:32

to the language those creatures spoke

4:34

in the film.

4:35

For the sequel The Way of Water Cameron

4:38

told me he and his team started all

4:40

over again. They needed new cameras

4:42

that could shoot underwater and a motion caption

4:45

system that could collect separate shots

4:47

from above and below the water and

4:49

then integrate them into a unified virtual

4:52

image.

4:53

They needed new algorithms, new AI to

4:55

translate what Cameron shot with what you

4:57

see. Nothing would work

5:00

the first time Cameron and the production

5:02

tried it. Or the second are

5:04

usually the third. Cameron showed

5:06

me a single effect shot numbered 405.

5:08

That means there's been 405

5:13

versions of this before it gets to me he

5:15

said. Cameron has been working on

5:17

the movie since 2013. It

5:19

was due out years ago. The

5:22

Way of Water was expensive to

5:24

make. If you ask James Cameron how

5:27

expensive he replies very

5:29

fucking. But as Cameron worked late

5:32

into the evening day after day solving

5:34

the infinite problems that The Way of Water

5:36

continued to present he seemed to be

5:38

enjoying himself.

5:40

I like difficult he told me. I'm

5:42

attracted by difficult. Difficult is

5:44

a fucking magnet for me. I go

5:46

straight to difficult and I think it's probably

5:48

goes back to this idea that there's a lot of smart

5:51

really gifted really talented filmmakers

5:54

out there that just can't do the difficult stuff.

5:56

So that gives me a tactical edge to

5:59

do something nobody else has

6:01

ever seen because the really gifted

6:03

people don't fucking want to do it.

6:06

Cameron and his fifth wife live

6:08

year round in New Zealand where they have owned

6:11

a 5,000 acre farm since 2011.

6:14

In the early days of the pandemic, Cameron and

6:16

his wife gave up their home in Malibu

6:18

and became full time residents here.

6:21

I asked Cameron if it had been lonely moving

6:23

halfway around the world. I don't

6:25

have any friends, so it's okay, he said, with

6:27

only a hint of a smile. Cameron's

6:30

Malibu compound was known

6:32

for its survivalist vibe. Fast

6:34

cars, a security team trained

6:37

in fighting wildfires, guns.

6:39

He had himself trained by one of the best

6:42

championship shooters in America.

6:44

He's the guy that taught Keanu Reeves how

6:46

to be John Wick. I was his first Hollywood

6:48

contact. I trained with him for three

6:50

years and so I'm a competition grade

6:53

shooter. At 68 years old, Cameron

6:55

wakes up at 4.45 am and

6:58

often kick boxes in the morning. Cameron

7:00

is proud to work at the biggest

7:02

scale possible. Terminator 2, True

7:05

Lies and Titanic were all among

7:07

the most expensive films ever

7:10

made at the time of their release.

7:12

To date, all of his films

7:15

have made their money back, many of

7:17

them spectacularly. Self

7:19

doubt in general is not something

7:22

Cameron has a lot of experience with. I

7:24

don't think I'm hardwired with that. I don't

7:26

know why. Cameron was always

7:28

the type of person whose confidence preceded

7:31

his achievements. Confidence

7:34

preceded his achievements. That is an idea that you and

7:36

I have discussed on multiple biographies.

7:38

It's in a lot of these books, the fact that belief

7:41

comes before ability. That's

7:43

the exact same idea. Cameron was

7:45

always the type of person whose confidence preceded

7:49

his achievements. It was while working as

7:51

a truck driver in his 20s that Cameron

7:53

decided to become a filmmaker. And so he taught

7:55

himself filmmaking.

7:57

He'd go to the stacks at the library

7:59

at the University Southern California, which was home

8:01

of the vaunted filmmaking program

8:04

that Cameron couldn't afford. I'd

8:06

find somebody's 300 page dissertation

8:08

on optical printing, Cameron said, and I'd

8:10

be going through this and I'd think, well, I've

8:13

got to get this. So I'd pull out the staples

8:15

and I'd photocopy the entire 300 pages. And

8:18

then I just kept doing the same thing

8:21

week after week for about six months.

8:24

And I'm driving a truck, but I had these

8:26

binders. I was going through this stuff

8:28

chapter and verse and making my

8:30

own notes and all that.

8:31

I basically gave myself a college education

8:34

and visual effects and cinematography while

8:36

I was driving a truck. The

8:38

idea for the Terminator came to him

8:41

in a dream. So did the pivotal

8:43

scene in his second film, Aliens.

8:46

Cameron has a rich dream life to this day. I

8:49

have my own private streaming service that's better

8:51

than any of that shit that's out there and it runs

8:53

every night for free, he said. Avatar

8:56

also originally came to Cameron while he was asleep.

8:59

I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent

9:02

forest with these trees that kind of

9:04

look like fiber optic lamps and this

9:06

river that was glowing bioluminescent

9:09

particles and kind of purple moss on

9:11

the ground that lit up when you walked on it.

9:13

It was all in the dream. I woke up super

9:15

excited and I actually drew it. So I

9:17

actually have a drawing. It saved

9:20

us from about 10 lawsuits. Any

9:22

successful film, there's always some freak

9:24

with tinfoil under their wig

9:25

that thinks that you beam their idea

9:28

out of their head and it turned out there were 10 or 11

9:30

of them. And so I pointed at this

9:32

drawing I did when I was 19 when I was

9:34

going to Fullerton Junior College and

9:36

said, you see this?

9:38

You see the glowing trees? Do you see the glowing

9:40

lizard that spins around that's orange? Do you see

9:42

the purple moss? And everybody went

9:44

away. Zoe Saldana,

9:46

who starred in the first Avatar and returns

9:48

for the second and who also works frequently

9:51

in the Marvel universe, pointed out how

9:53

comparatively unique Cameron's approach is

9:56

in modern Hollywood. The Marvel franchises

9:58

are built by dozens of.

9:59

comic book artists and writers and directors

10:02

who work together to create these stories. By

10:05

contrast, Avatar is

10:07

the result of the vision of a single man.

10:10

Without Jim's heavy, heavy

10:12

brain, this would all fall apart. When

10:15

Cameron moves, he moves fast and favors one side.

10:17

When I asked him what he'd done to give himself a limp, he

10:19

looked at me curiously. I've got one short

10:22

leg, he said. It doesn't slow me down

10:24

any, though. Cameron, in his nearly 40

10:27

years of filmmaking, has earned a reputation

10:29

for having a temper. Some would say

10:31

he's earned this reputation several times

10:33

over. On more than one Cameron

10:36

set, crew members have taken to

10:38

wearing shirts that read, You can't

10:40

scare me, I work for Jim Cameron. Cameron

10:44

is well aware of this. So I looked

10:46

at it, and I was like, alright, why am I getting so

10:48

upset? And what is that solving? I'm

10:50

not saying I don't get upset once in a while. I mean,

10:52

everybody, I think, is entitled to having a bad day. But

10:55

whereas before, it might have been once

10:57

every couple of weeks, now it's like twice

10:59

a year. Cameron recalled working

11:02

with Ron Howard, the famously nice

11:04

director on the visual effects for Apollo 13.

11:07

And I just watched what a great guy he was. And

11:09

I'm like, I'm a total asshole compared

11:11

to Ron Howard. I have to get in

11:14

touch with my inner Ron Howard. But

11:16

despite his famous temper, Cameron has

11:18

always inspired loyalty.

11:20

The process of how Cameron builds the Avatar

11:22

films is complex.

11:23

I asked if he knew of anyone else

11:25

working this way. And he laughed. They'd

11:28

be insane to even try, he said. And

11:30

I don't mean that we're special. I mean, like, if

11:33

we hadn't made more money than any other

11:35

movie in history, this is the last fucking

11:37

thing that I'd want to be doing.

11:39

Cameron is famous for being able to do any

11:41

job on a movie set. Some say he can

11:44

do most jobs better than the people he

11:46

employs to do them.

11:47

Cameron disputes this, although mildly.

11:49

Not better than, he told me. But

11:52

I'm not just some brain in a bowl, creative

11:54

type sitting over in a tent someplace saying, yeah,

11:57

put that over there.

11:58

It's a curious fact that Cameron has directed

12:00

only two feature films in the last 25 years.

12:04

This is a part of the explanation for why Cameron

12:06

has at times drifted away from filmmaking. He

12:08

said, there's a certain point where

12:11

my mind wants to solve problems that are

12:13

real-world problems.

12:15

For a while, his career in ocean exploration,

12:18

which Cameron got serious about after making Titanic,

12:21

nearly kept him away from directing a film

12:23

ever again. I didn't get back into

12:25

making movies for eight years, he told me. I was

12:27

having too much fun. And when he did

12:29

decide to return to Hollywood with his idea

12:32

for the first Avatar, Cameron's long-time

12:34

studio, Fox, almost didn't

12:36

want to make it. Cameron has mellowed

12:38

with time and age, but he is still a

12:41

score settler, a keeper of

12:43

grudges.

12:44

And this is what he said when Fox initially passed. And

12:46

I said, now, just so you know, before your

12:48

taillights are out of sight, I will be on

12:51

the phone with Disney, who wants this, and

12:53

we'll make a deal. And that'll be that. And

12:55

then whatever happens, happens. And you might

12:57

look like a big dick if it makes a lot of money.

13:00

In the end, Fox did come back and

13:03

Cameron made Avatar with the studio. But

13:05

Cameron still remembers an executive at the company who

13:07

will go unnamed because this is

13:09

a really negative review. This

13:11

executive approached Cameron after a pre-release

13:14

screening of the film and begged the

13:16

director to shorten it.

13:18

I said something that I've never said

13:20

to anybody else in the business, Cameron

13:23

recalled. I said, I think this movie

13:25

is going to make all the fucking money. And

13:27

when it does, it's going to be too late for you

13:29

to love the film. The time for you to love

13:31

the movie is today. So I'm

13:34

not asking you to say something that you don't

13:36

feel, but just know that I will

13:38

always know that no matter how complimentary

13:41

you are about the movie in the future, when

13:43

it makes all the money, and that's

13:45

exactly what I said, in caps,

13:48

all the money.

13:49

But some of the money,

13:51

all the fucking money, I

13:53

said, you can't come back to me and

13:56

compliment the film or chum along

13:58

and say, look what we did to Cameron. together.

14:00

You will not be able to do that." And

14:03

then of course, the film came out and

14:06

made all the money. I asked

14:08

Cameron whether he had a theory about why.

14:11

I don't think I need a theory, he said. I think

14:13

anybody that's seen the movie knows why. It's

14:15

a fucking gigantic adventure that's

14:17

an all-consuming emotional experience

14:20

that leaves you wrung out by the end of the movie.

14:22

And it was groundbreaking visually and

14:25

it still holds up today. So I don't

14:27

think I need a theory. After Avatar,

14:29

Cameron again walked away for a while. He

14:31

dove to the Mariana Trench, to the deepest point

14:34

on Earth, and there was a period there, about

14:36

a year and a half, where I didn't even know

14:38

if I wanted to make another Avatar

14:40

film.

14:42

I knew how all-consuming it would be.

14:44

It basically took over my life

14:46

for four years. I had no other life for

14:48

four years making that first film. And I thought,

14:51

do I really want to do this again? It's

14:53

the highest-grossing film in history. Can't

14:55

I just tag that base and move on? But

14:58

the problem was, he still had

15:00

ideas. He knew, of course,

15:03

that on some level, he was running out of time.

15:06

When you get into your mid-sixties, you start realizing

15:09

that the axe could fall at any moment. Maybe

15:11

it's next week, maybe it's in 30 years.

15:14

Cameron said that in the end, the answer

15:16

he landed on was this. I'm

15:19

a storyteller and there's stories to be

15:21

told. I'm not done until

15:23

the big hook comes out from the side of

15:25

the curtain. So to me, everything,

15:28

every idea is a work in progress.

15:32

The list of things that Cameron has failed

15:34

at is short, but there are a few destinations

15:37

that have eluded him. One of them is

15:39

space, but he's come close.

15:41

He went to Daniel Golden, who was then

15:44

the NASA administrator and overseeing

15:46

the assembly of the International Space Station

15:48

and asked if he could go up to the American

15:51

side of the ISS.

15:53

They met for a summit. Golden

15:55

offered Cameron a shuttle flight

15:57

instead. No ISS. but

16:00

he'd see the planet from above, he would see

16:02

space. Golden said the ISS

16:04

at the moment was too difficult.

16:06

Cameron thought about it.

16:08

He said to himself, maybe everything

16:10

that I've been doing over the last few years leads

16:12

to this exact moment when the administrator

16:15

of NASA is willing to make a solid

16:17

deal to fly me on the space shuttle.

16:20

But he looked at his heart and he decided no, he

16:23

would only go to space on his own terms.

16:25

Are you seeing a theme here with

16:27

James Cameron? We haven't even gotten to the book

16:29

yet. He would only go to space on his own

16:32

terms. I said, I've got to say no,

16:34

I want to stick to my plan even if

16:36

it can't happen.

16:37

Then Columbia was lost. On

16:39

February 1st, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia

16:42

disintegrated, taking with it seven souls.

16:45

Cameron went to their memorial service, but

16:47

he never got to go to space. I asked

16:49

what level of regret he had about this, the fact

16:52

that he never went. Zero, he

16:54

said, different life. And

16:56

he's been on a planet of his own making ever

16:58

since. I was driving back to my hotel

17:01

not too long after when the phone rang. It

17:03

was Cameron wanting to talk again about

17:05

the shuttle flight that he had turned down. I

17:08

forgot the punch line to the story, Cameron said. The

17:11

punch line is the shuttle mission that

17:13

I refused? It was the Columbia.

17:15

His voice rose. I fucking saved

17:18

my own life by choosing the higher path.

17:21

Okay, so that was a super long excerpt, not

17:23

from the book that I'm gonna talk to you about. This is from

17:25

this unbelievable

17:28

long form piece on GQ. I

17:30

will leave the link down below. It is called The Return

17:33

of James Cameron, Box Office King.

17:35

And it was written by Zach Barron.

17:37

I read this article. It completely

17:40

took over my life. This episode

17:42

that you're about to hear, I have never ever

17:45

worked on an episode longer than this

17:47

one. I've been in the mind

17:49

and completely obsessed with James Cameron,

17:52

starting with this incredible

17:55

piece in GQ.

17:56

I don't even know for how many weeks. So I read

17:59

this piece, I was like, oh my God. Oh my God, I have

18:01

to learn more about this guy. And so I immediately ordered

18:03

a biography on him. That biography, which I'll

18:05

talk to you about today, and I'm going to go over now, is called The Futurist.

18:08

The life and films of James Cameron as written by

18:10

Rebecca Keegan. And it was produced right

18:12

after, the book's about 10 or 12 years old, produced

18:14

right after the original avatar came out.

18:16

But what I would do is every night, I'll

18:19

leave the link down below, you gotta read the entire GQ article,

18:21

it's incredible. But I would also listen to

18:24

it. It's 36 minutes long, they use

18:26

this technology called Autumn, and you can,

18:28

instead of reading it, you can listen to the whole thing.

18:30

I would fall asleep, as I'm reading this

18:32

biography of James Cameron, every night I

18:34

would fall asleep listening to

18:36

this article again. And I probably

18:39

listened to it, I don't know, 10 or 15 times. It's

18:42

just unbelievably impressive with

18:45

not only how he approached his work,

18:48

but his absolute insistence on

18:50

building his own world within the world.

18:52

So I wanted to read the excerpt

18:54

from that article first,

18:56

because that's the order that

18:58

this information on James Cameron was presented to me. I think

19:00

there's gonna be a few of these things that's gonna be repeated

19:02

throughout the book, but I think it

19:05

gives you, that overview's gonna give you a better introduction

19:08

into Cameron, and why he

19:10

is a

19:11

one of one, an unbelievably unique

19:14

individual who is unapologetically

19:16

extreme. That is one of the most important

19:18

things that I learned about him, and one thing I'm gonna take

19:20

away, and I do think this guy's gonna change

19:23

my approach to my own work, but also reinforce

19:25

it. Let me jump in, because I got a ton of stuff to talk

19:27

to you about.

19:28

Just gonna go over a brief overview and the introduction

19:30

real quick. He's a truck driver who directed the

19:32

highest grossing movie of all time. He then

19:34

ditched Hollywood to spend a decade of his life exploring

19:37

the deep ocean and the heights of science. He's

19:39

a tinkerer and a dreamer who pioneered tools that

19:41

revolutionized the way stories are told,

19:44

technologies that a generation of filmmakers

19:46

now rely upon. He spent his adulthood

19:49

doing things that other people called impossible.

19:51

As I watched the director work, I became curious

19:54

about a man who seemed interested only

19:56

in doing things that were hard.

19:59

And so when I got to this point, part, it made me think of one

20:01

of my personal heroes, Edwin Land. This is exactly

20:03

what he said. He says, do some interesting

20:05

science that is all your own. And if it is manifestly

20:09

important and nearly impossible,

20:11

it will be fulfilling and maybe even a

20:13

way to get rich.

20:15

That sounds a lot like Cameron's quote

20:17

in the GQ article. He's like, I'm attracted to hard.

20:19

Hard is like a magnet to me. He says

20:22

that in 2023. And back in 2009 or 2008, when this

20:26

book is being written, it's like, hey,

20:28

this is very curious. I started watching this

20:30

man and he seemed only interested in doing things that were

20:32

hard. Edwin Land was only interested

20:35

in doing things that were hard. Steve Jobs

20:37

was only interested in doing things that were

20:40

hard. And when you choose the hard path and

20:42

you put all your effort and focus into it and you

20:44

wind up being like you solved the problem,

20:47

the technical problems that you have to solve, and you actually succeeded

20:49

doing the hard things, other people can't help but respect

20:51

even the people in his field. There's multiple examples

20:54

in this book. This is just the first one where other

20:56

directors who are at the top of their profession is like, no, I come

20:58

to James to learn. And so we have Peter Jackson

21:00

here.

21:01

He's the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And this

21:03

is what he says. You can't help but come away from spending

21:05

time with Jim feeling that you're a little bit stupid.

21:08

He's got such a sharp mind. He

21:10

is formidable. This idea

21:12

of

21:13

training ourselves and becoming formidable individuals

21:16

is something that you and I talked about over and over again. I

21:18

jumped out of my seat when I saw

21:20

that word

21:21

in this book. He's got such a sharp mind.

21:23

He's formidable.

21:25

Cameron's career has been built on questioning accepted

21:27

wisdom, believing the power of the individual, his

21:29

outlook,

21:30

this oh my goodness, a goosebumps again,

21:32

his outlook is that we can take fate in

21:34

our own hands. I have to read that to you again.

21:36

This is what gets me so fired up about this guy.

21:39

Cameron's career has been built on questioning accepted

21:42

wisdom, believing in the power of the individual.

21:44

His outlook is that we can take fate in our own

21:46

hands.

21:47

Okay, so I just want to pull out a few things from his childhood.

21:50

It's obvious James Cameron was a builder

21:52

and a founder from an extremely early

21:54

age. He winds up becoming

21:57

even from like he's like a little kid and him his brother, you know,

21:59

they They love to tinker, they love to build things,

22:02

they love to experiment. They're constantly making things

22:04

like go-karts. They make rafts, they make tree

22:06

houses. He's growing up in Canada before

22:08

his dad gets relocated by his

22:10

job to Orange County, California. And I

22:12

think one story that his mom tells in this

22:14

book of like a little kid version of

22:16

James Cameron, you see, oh, this is a founder from

22:19

day one. Cameron demonstrated a knack for

22:21

assembling large groups in service of his

22:23

own goals.

22:24

When her oldest son was about 10, she

22:26

noticed that his younger siblings and several

22:28

neighborhood children were streaming into her

22:31

yard carrying scraps of wood and metal.

22:33

I said, what are you guys doing with all this junk?

22:36

Jim said, we're going to build something.

22:38

And a couple hours later, the kids had constructed

22:40

an airplane.

22:41

Guess who was sitting in it being pulled, his mom

22:43

said. Cameron was very good

22:45

at telling people what to do. And

22:48

so another thing to know about Cameron, I highly likely

22:50

that he's got a genius level IQ. That's

22:52

why I took away from this. His mom gets a call when

22:55

I think he's only third grade.

22:56

Or, yeah, I think it was the second grade. I was like, oh,

22:58

we're just going to skip him to grade three. And

23:01

then he's already skipped one grade, doesn't

23:03

even get halfway through that. And then she gets another

23:05

call. It's like, oh, no, no, we've got to skip this kid again. And

23:08

so it's going to be no surprise to you. Anybody

23:10

that's intelligent, they're going to read all the time. He

23:12

started doing this at a young age. He

23:14

was a voracious reader. And we see this

23:16

with a lot of the interesting founders. When

23:19

they were kids,

23:20

like think Jeff Bezos or think Elon Musk,

23:22

they were obsessed with reading science

23:25

fiction. So James Cameron was the same thing. He would

23:27

just sit there and read all the time.

23:29

And so he's doing that from the time he's in elementary school. By

23:31

the time he gets to high school, he's winning every

23:33

single academic prize you could possibly win at school.

23:36

He wants to becoming the president of the science club. He

23:39

becomes obsessed with history and studying

23:42

ancient civilizations, which is funny because later

23:44

on in the book, he has this great line. I don't know if I'll cover it or not.

23:47

But it says something like,

23:48

I'm an explorer by nature, and

23:50

I'm just a filmmaker by trade. And

23:52

then even as far back as high school, we see this development or

23:54

the initial development of this lifelong

23:57

trade that he has. James is just extremely

23:59

comfortable. Going his own way. He never

24:02

ever felt it Necessary to follow

24:04

the herd you see that in the way he makes his films

24:07

the fact that This guy literally gets to the

24:09

top of his freshen is like yeah, I'm just gonna take like an eight-year

24:11

break Dive the

24:13

tight It's the deepest part of the ocean

24:16

and maybe never make a film again

24:18

Just because this is this is what I'm happy to be interested

24:20

at this moment Not really concerned with what

24:23

other people think I should be doing and I think this is a refusal

24:25

to just give in to The other thoughts of other people is like a massive

24:28

advantage for founders

24:29

It says the group think of his peers baffled

24:31

him He's in high school at this point first period

24:34

meant singing the national anthem and saying

24:36

the Lord's Prayer In 10th grade grade

24:38

Cameron listened to his classmates and felt

24:41

a surge of defiance It struck

24:43

me as this tribal chance in

24:45

the middle of all this He sat down open

24:47

his book and started to read

24:49

this indifference to the opinions of other people Concerning

24:52

like his behavior something that continues to this day Something

24:55

that changed his life when he was a little kid He becomes

24:57

fascinated by Jacques Gusteau who

25:00

was making all these like underwater documentaries

25:02

So

25:03

I think even by the time he got to high school, he was already scuba

25:05

sir certified He winds up begging

25:07

his parents to let him get to take

25:09

like a scuba class at like the local like YMCA

25:13

And we start to see something this

25:15

idea is like hey, I want

25:16

I don't just want to do scuba I just don't want to do anything.

25:18

That's just like the normal way. I want the hard way. He

25:20

is extremely Intentional

25:23

about building himself into a formidable individual.

25:25

So he says in the scuba class. He learned diving

25:28

military style with harassment

25:30

drills In which the instructor pull the instructor

25:32

pulls off your mask and rips the regulator

25:34

from your mouth This harsh training

25:36

engendered in Cameron a confidence and

25:39

resourcefulness that would help him survive

25:41

to near drowning experiences

25:44

in his life

25:45

So James comes from a family of engineers

25:47

his dad is an engineer his brother goes on

25:50

to become an engineer And this is

25:52

something like I was thinking about my relationship with

25:54

my own my own son and my daughter

25:56

for that matter This is just his dad

25:58

just does the right thing He's like, listen, I'm going

26:00

to back you no matter what I

26:03

personally think. And so the note I was leaving to myself,

26:05

I was like going through this. It's like, I really hope I, you

26:07

know, my son's still young, he's three years old.

26:09

I hope I'm like this, I hope I'm a dad like this

26:11

when he's older. So it says, Cameron's relationship with his

26:13

father would strain in his teenage years because

26:15

his father wanted James to

26:18

become an engineer.

26:19

And his dad thought it was a little weird that his son was like

26:21

obsessed with sci-fi and

26:24

like the stuff that he was reading.

26:25

He says he didn't understand me very well because I was in art

26:28

and science fiction and a lot of fantasy.

26:30

However, this is what I meant about good guy dad. He

26:32

would provide financial help in Cameron's hungry

26:35

early years as an inspiring filmmaker,

26:37

tacitly supporting the career

26:40

choice of his son, no

26:42

matter how grievous the odds was that

26:44

his son would succeed. Good guy

26:46

dad. And so there

26:48

is a line from last week's book, last

26:51

week's podcast on Walt Disney Picasso that I absolutely love.

26:53

It says all creative individuals build on the

26:55

works of their predecessors. No one creates in a

26:58

vacuum. It took seeing a

27:00

film,

27:01

another film, we're like, oh, wait, I might be able to

27:03

do this for a living. So it says the first time

27:05

he considered a film as a career was in 1968. I

27:09

think he'd be around maybe 14 or 16 years old at the time.

27:11

He goes to the movie theater and he sees Stanley

27:14

Kubrick's classic film, which is 2001,

27:16

A Space Odyssey. And this

27:18

is one of my favorite lines in the entire book. It was at

27:20

that moment that Cameron went from

27:22

being a fan of movies to wanting to make

27:25

films himself. What

27:27

does he do? He doesn't have to just see the movie the first time. He goes

27:29

back over and over and over again. He's studying how

27:32

did he do this? He returned to the theater and saw the

27:34

film several more times trying to understand how Kubrick

27:37

had managed to pull this off. And

27:39

right after this, his dad gets transferred to Orange

27:41

County, California.

27:42

And most kids, like you're in high school, there's no way I think

27:45

this might even be his senior year of high school or something like that.

27:48

And most kids are like, oh, I don't want to move. This is terrible.

27:51

He knew that Orange County was closer to

27:53

Hollywood. He already had this idea that he wanted to be a filmmaker.

27:56

And so his response, teenage

27:58

high school.

27:59

Cameron's response is very

28:02

unusual. He says, can we leave tomorrow? And

28:04

so it's after high school, Cameron goes to Fullerton Junior

28:06

College, which he mentioned earlier, or mentioned

28:09

the GQ article, right?

28:10

And there's a couple things that are really important here. One, everybody,

28:14

everybody who runs into James Cameron, regardless

28:16

of what point in his life, they all comment on his

28:18

intensity.

28:19

And so this is the first time though,

28:21

he's like, okay, well, maybe the first step

28:23

of making becoming a filmmaker is actually becoming a screenwriter.

28:26

It took just meeting the right group of friends that had similar

28:28

interests. So it says, Cameron was taking 14 credits

28:31

at Fullerton College by day and then working four

28:33

to six hours a night

28:35

as a precision tool and die machinist.

28:37

He has got a bunch of these blue collar

28:39

jobs that he's got to work while he's going to

28:41

college at time.

28:42

And he continued to tackle his own creative project

28:44

on the side, which was writing science fiction

28:46

stories and drawing. Jim was very

28:48

intense. He was very bright and full of ideas.

28:51

He was one of those guys that when you met him, you had

28:53

the feeling he was going to do things.

28:55

And so he meets a friend at the same college, this guy

28:57

named Randall Frakes. And Frakes shares

28:59

Cameron's passion for science fiction,

29:01

for ancient history, for exploration. And

29:04

Franks is the first person who's like, hey, why don't you

29:06

like you should be writing your own science fiction

29:08

movies. And so he goes and gets all

29:10

these scripts, like the original scripts for

29:12

very famous movies like Citizen Kane

29:14

and Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid.

29:17

And he's just like here, James, take a look at these

29:19

like what would be considered

29:21

well written screenplays.

29:23

And that'll like give you ideas on how to do this. And then

29:26

you can just get started by doing that.

29:27

And it's at this point in Cameron's

29:30

life story where it's like, okay, this is

29:32

what a high agency person looks like.

29:34

He's working all the time. He's teaching

29:36

himself how to write scripts in his spare time.

29:39

And he's giving himself a graduate level

29:42

college education, filmmaking education

29:44

for free or for a couple hundred bucks. This

29:47

is high agency personified in his early

29:49

20s. Cameron held a series of blue collar

29:51

jobs. He'd work as a janitor, a truck driver and

29:54

a machinist on break. So he's he's

29:56

driving a truck like a lunch truck for

29:58

the school district that he's living

30:01

by. And on breaks, during

30:03

the day when he's driving the truck, right, he

30:05

curls up in his truck and starts writing

30:08

screenplays. At night, after a

30:10

full day, Cameron would go and hang out with friends

30:13

that had similar interests. They

30:15

would talk passionately about movies

30:17

for hours on end.

30:18

On Saturdays, that's not enough, right?

30:21

Again, this is high agency. Cameron would

30:23

then go to the library at the University of Southern California and

30:25

he'd photocopy all these graduate

30:27

student thesis on esoteric

30:29

filmmaking subjects.

30:31

He filled two fat binders with

30:33

technical papers. For the cost of a couple

30:35

hundred dollars in photocopying, he

30:37

essentially put himself through a graduate course

30:40

in visual effects at the top film

30:42

school in the country without ever meeting

30:44

a single professor.

30:47

And so then he's like, okay, well, how do I break into the movie

30:49

industry? And he does something very smart. Like, this is what I

30:51

do. I never have

30:53

been on a job interview in my entire life. What if I

30:55

did, right? I wouldn't just send in a resume. I

30:57

would send in some kind of demo or some kind of proof of

31:00

work. And so what he does, he makes this like 12

31:02

minute

31:03

little short film called Exogenesis.

31:06

And so he takes Exogenesis to

31:09

this guy named Roger Corman. Roger Corman has come

31:11

up and passed podcasts because he winds up

31:14

starting like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

31:16

He gives all these like legendary directors

31:18

their first shot in life. So

31:20

takes Exogenesis to Roger

31:22

Corman's company. Roger Corman runs this company called New

31:25

World Pictures. It's like this B movie,

31:27

like kind of crappy films that just churn

31:29

out a bunch of crappy films. So they make money

31:31

in volume as opposed to

31:34

quality, right? But it's incredibly important because

31:36

it says Cameron was about to land exactly where he needed

31:39

to be in a Darwinian environment for

31:41

would be filmmakers, a place that rewarded smarts

31:43

and scrappiness and the kind of alpha

31:45

behavior that he had honked. Why

31:48

would the Roger Corman school film

31:50

like why was that the perfect place for

31:52

a young enthusiastic and driven

31:55

person like James Cameron is at this point in his life.

31:58

And the author does a fantastic job of

31:59

Rebecca King does a fantastic job. She

32:02

goes, the most successful product of Corman's movie-making

32:04

factory had been people. Definitely not

32:06

his movies. Movies suck, right? But why

32:09

is this important? His low budget productions had launched their

32:11

careers. Check this out. This is insane.

32:13

Have launched their careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin

32:15

Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson,

32:17

and many others in Hollywood. Why? Because what he

32:20

does is so smart.

32:21

Corman recruited the young and the eager. He was

32:23

usually the only person working at his company

32:25

over the age of 30. I was giving

32:28

them training and an opportunity to make a

32:30

movie that nobody else would give them.

32:33

You could go from carrying light stands to

32:35

directing your first picture in less

32:37

time than it took to graduate from film

32:39

school. So Cameron starts.

32:41

He creates this like calling card,

32:43

this demo of what he's capable of called Exogenesis.

32:46

And that demo gets him hired

32:49

as a model builder. He's not a screenwriter.

32:51

He's not a director. He's a model

32:53

builder. But I think now

32:56

you've already gotten to know James Cameron a little bit, right?

32:59

Do you think he's going to stay a model builder? There's no way in

33:01

hell this guy is going to whatever the

33:03

fastest path to promotion is, you

33:05

can be sure that Cameron will find it. And

33:07

so that's what we're about to see here.

33:09

And so what we see next is that James Cameron was

33:11

James Cameron before he was James

33:14

Cameron. This is more high agency

33:16

behavior. He is at the

33:19

entry level, bottom of the totem pole.

33:22

Somebody forgot to let him know that that was

33:24

the case.

33:25

Cameron had only been at Corman's for a matter of days. But

33:27

he was already taking charge. Listen to

33:29

this line. He seems constitutionally

33:32

incapable of doing otherwise. He

33:35

had a very commanding presence. Even

33:37

if his position was not running the model shop,

33:40

he clearly seemed to be running

33:42

the model shop.

33:43

Cameron was so eager and the production so

33:45

consuming that he started sleeping at the model

33:47

shop. That was where he was when Corman's

33:50

assistant woke him up at 3 AM. Corman

33:53

had just fired the art director of the

33:55

film that they're working on. Did Cameron want to take

33:57

his place? He had never been an art

33:59

director.

33:59

and had no idea what was involved

34:02

in the job. Sure, Cameron said. In

34:04

a matter of weeks, he had jumped from a model

34:07

builder on a film to its art director.

34:09

So that's another main idea, main theme

34:11

to learn about or learn from. Cameron,

34:14

he just assumes that he can learn any job. So

34:16

if you ask him, hey, can you do this, he'll say yes, and then

34:18

he'll figure out how to do it after.

34:20

And we see this in the early days of company

34:22

founders over and over again. The fact that there is

34:24

some kind of benefit of not knowing

34:27

what you don't know, Cameron says, there

34:29

wasn't time for any doubt. We didn't know the 27 reasons why we

34:32

shouldn't be able to do exactly what we were in the process of

34:34

doing.

34:34

There was this blissful ignorance about

34:37

the process of how films are really made

34:40

that allowed us to do some pretty damn extraordinary

34:42

stuff, given the time and budget restraints.

34:45

You come out of this with the feeling that you

34:47

can do anything. So he's the

34:50

art director, and he's like, you know what? I

34:53

don't think I should be the art director. I think I should be running

34:55

this entire thing.

34:56

And the way what's about to happen here is what he discovers

34:58

is that your mediocrity is my

35:00

opportunity. So he's watching the director

35:03

of this movie, and he says he wasn't impressed.

35:05

These guys had no idea what they were doing. I'm

35:07

watching them just blowing it. They're not getting the

35:09

shots. They're not getting the performances. It was

35:11

a light bulb moment for Cameron. I'm

35:13

thinking, I can do that.

35:15

He cornered Corman. He says, hey,

35:17

I think I should be the second unit director.

35:20

I will work at night. Again, Cameron

35:23

made a job for himself. And

35:25

again, Corman encouraged the enthusiastic

35:27

young man and said, that's a good idea. Start

35:29

tomorrow.

35:30

Because of his work on this film, he eventually gets

35:32

recruited to be a director of this terrible,

35:35

terrible movie. It's called Piranha 2 or something

35:37

like that. And this is

35:40

really important. OK, you know what? Let me read

35:42

this to you first, and I'll read my takeaway from this. On

35:44

his fifth day at work, Cameron

35:46

learned that he was fired. His first opportunity

35:49

to be the main director, right? He lasts five

35:51

days.

35:52

Five days.

35:53

What felt like a career-ending mistake,

35:56

however, was actually just one beginning. The torment

35:58

Cameron went through over his failed first director.

35:59

effort would lead him exactly

36:02

where he needed to be into the dark recesses

36:05

of his mind for that is where he found

36:07

the Terminator which is gonna be this massive hit

36:10

this is a punchline of this entire section he was 27 years

36:12

old broke and depressed

36:15

now this is the entire reason I just want to pull

36:17

down one paragraph

36:18

he gets hired to direct right quickly gets fired

36:21

he finds himself at 27 years old broke

36:24

depressed feeling like a loser 15

36:27

years from now

36:28

he will be at the very top

36:30

the very top of the same

36:33

profession excellence is

36:35

the capacity to take pain what

36:37

if he quit here

36:40

so the Terminator was like one of my favorite movies when

36:42

I was a kid but

36:43

there's a few entire

36:46

chapters like the chapters are separated in this

36:48

book on like what film he's working in so there's like unbelievable

36:50

degree of detail so if you're

36:52

really into some of these films

36:55

reading the chapters I would highly

36:57

recommend but there's just a few things about the

36:59

Terminator that I want to pull up because I think they're interesting

37:01

and more widely applicable just not just a filmmaking

37:04

but

37:05

the aspect the first thing before you how

37:07

you can pitch a film right you have to write the script

37:10

Cameron was not did not feel like he

37:12

was a naturally gifted writer he

37:15

right this is the first time he talks about this we talked

37:17

about this his whole life he finds writing to be torture

37:19

but he does it anyways and I think that's the biggest lesson

37:21

here

37:22

Cameron found writing a lonely

37:24

and utterly unforgiving process it

37:27

is very hard for me to get started and

37:29

it is very hard for me to stay focused he said when

37:31

he's writing he tends to bunker himself

37:33

in working mainly at night and

37:36

withdrawing from the outside world

37:38

he used to tell friends that he'd like to buy

37:40

the most uncomfortable chair he could find for writing

37:42

so he would finish as fast as possible

37:45

just to get out of it

37:46

and so he writes this and then he goes around and tries

37:48

to find convince a studio to make the movie

37:51

there's just one paragraph here great projects can

37:53

happen in bad economies when they're trying to raise

37:55

money for the Terminator this is in 1982 unemployment

37:58

at 10%

37:59

and interest rates are at 17%.

38:02

And they still managed to get the deal done, and it's good

38:04

that they convinced people to finance the movie, because the movie

38:06

only, Terminator, the original Terminator, right?

38:09

It only cost $6 million. It winds

38:11

up making $78 million on

38:13

a $6 million investment. And

38:15

we see that James Cameron actually has a lot in common

38:18

with the Terminator. He has a Terminator-like

38:20

work ethic. He is doing

38:22

the rewrite, he's rewriting the Terminator

38:25

script to get ready to film the movie. So

38:27

he's already written it once, he's doing the rewriting.

38:29

Then he also gets a job. Man, he

38:31

has no money at this time. So you gotta take every opportunity

38:33

that he gets. He gets a job to write the sequel

38:36

to Aliens, and I think it's a sequel to

38:38

Rambo, the movies with

38:40

Sylvester Stallone.

38:42

Listen to how he does it. This is what I mean that he has a Terminator-like

38:45

work ethic. This is wild. That

38:47

meant in a three-month period in 1983, he

38:49

had to write three scripts. Cameron approached this

38:51

dilemma as a Terminator-mite.

38:53

He decided that each script would be 120 pages

38:56

for a total page count of 360. This

39:00

is so wild.

39:01

He divided the total number of waking

39:03

hours he had during the three-month period by 360 and

39:07

figured out how many pages per hour he

39:09

had to write. And I just wrote

39:11

that many pages per hour, he said.

39:15

And so while he's working on the pre-production for the

39:17

Terminator getting ready to shoot the movie, he winds

39:19

up meeting another high-quality

39:22

person. They want to be becoming partners.

39:24

This guy named Stan Winston. And so this

39:26

is James describing the partnership. Stan

39:28

and I clicked early on because we both respect

39:31

the artist and he saw one in me and vice versa.

39:33

And we were both a little crazy and

39:35

enjoy each other's eccentricities. The

39:38

work that he did for Cameron in subsequent films

39:40

would earn Winston three of

39:43

his four Academy Awards and would lead to

39:45

their co-founding a visual effects

39:47

company called Digital Domain in 1993. If

39:50

you studied the career of George Lucas, I covered him

39:52

all the way back on episode 35. I'm gonna reread

39:54

that book and do an episode on it again in the future.

39:57

But this is something that Lucas and...

39:59

and Cameron have in common,

40:02

is they were constantly had ideas on how visual

40:04

effects and things they wanted to do

40:06

in their films that they couldn't figure out how to do. So their

40:08

solution was a little insane.

40:10

They're like, oh, well, I just found my own special

40:13

effects company. So Lucas famously

40:15

founded Industrial Light and Magic. Cameron's going

40:17

to wind up being a customer of theirs.

40:20

And then James does the same thing when he found

40:22

Digital Remain with Stan Winston in 1993. And

40:24

so once the production on Terminator begins, we

40:27

see something that was echoed in the GQ piece,

40:29

the fact that people call anybody that works with James,

40:32

they call him the do-it-yourselfer.

40:34

They all say that he likes being extremely hands-on.

40:36

And then I've seen him speak in other interviews. Because

40:39

I watched a bunch of interviews, he's like, listen, this is the only

40:42

way that I can work. It's the way I want to work. Cameron

40:44

established a hands-on working style that he would take

40:47

to an extreme in later films. Cameron would be

40:49

holding the camera, editing the footage, mixing

40:51

the sound, performing almost every technical

40:53

and artistic task on the film himself,

40:56

except acting. Cameron can do almost

40:58

anything there that he is to do on a movie set,

41:00

as well as any specialist, and

41:02

he knows it.

41:04

So the financial success of Terminator opens

41:06

up every opportunity that Cameron's

41:08

going to have after this. He's going to be able to pick

41:11

and choose what movies he makes. As he continues to

41:13

have financial success with his films, he

41:15

eventually is able to wrestle over complete

41:17

control. He's got final cut.

41:19

He gets to choose, like eventually, his whole

41:21

thing is he's obsessed with controlling all aspects

41:23

of his work. For he's able to maneuver himself

41:26

into a position of complete control, though, he still has

41:28

to work, and he's still young. I think he's like 32

41:30

maybe at this time. This is the first time that he

41:32

actually interacts with people that

41:35

don't love their work. So

41:36

he is doing production on the sequel to

41:39

the very successful movie called Alien. The

41:42

sequel to Alien that he does is called Aliens.

41:45

And so this is the contrast between

41:47

somebody like James who loves his work being

41:49

forced to work with other people who just tolerate

41:52

theirs. They do not love what they do. They just tolerate

41:55

it. Production on Aliens took

41:57

place at Pinewood Studios, which is in London.

42:00

The employees at Pinewood were lifers, locals

42:02

who viewed their film jobs as

42:05

they might factory work, a paycheck,

42:07

and nothing more.

42:08

I was shocked to be working with people who simply

42:11

could not care less about the film they were working

42:13

on, says Cameron. The Pinewood crew

42:15

were lazy, insolent, and arrogant.

42:18

I despise them. And so they're both approaching

42:21

this with vastly different perspectives. At the time,

42:23

there was a sense that you don't get to the top of

42:25

your profession through talent. You get

42:27

there by paying your dues and putting in your time.

42:30

To the Pinewood veterans, Cameron,

42:32

at 31 years old, was an undeserving

42:34

kid.

42:35

And so something that Steve Jobs has said previously, that

42:38

he observed that A players only like

42:40

working with other A players, we see that here.

42:42

When he finally wrapped at Pinewood, Cameron

42:45

stood up to address them. This has been a

42:47

long and difficult shoot, fraught by

42:49

many problems. But the one thing that kept

42:51

me going through it all was the certain

42:53

knowledge that one day, I would drive

42:56

out of this gate and never come back, and

42:58

that you sorry bastards would still

43:01

be here.

43:02

He never did return.

43:04

So if you were able to see all my notes that I have in this book,

43:07

I have these main themes that I keep writing

43:09

down, because I just keep reappearing. And

43:11

then when I went back and started thinking about what

43:13

I wanted to talk to you about, I would continue

43:15

to add to them. And so one main idea, one main

43:17

theme in the life and career of James

43:19

Cameron, is that he's just willing to

43:21

let ideas marinate for decades. In

43:24

many cases, he can't figure out how to make what

43:26

he wants to do, or he has an idea and he doesn't get to actually make

43:29

that idea in like 25 years.

43:30

In this case, there is 19 years

43:33

between this idea and the execution. Water

43:36

and its mysteries would be an abiding source of fascination

43:38

and creative stimulation for Cameron throughout his life.

43:41

One that would inspire him to make his most

43:43

grueling and personal movie, this movie

43:45

called The Abyss. The Abyss began as

43:48

a short story that Cameron wrote

43:50

when he was 16,

43:52

when he was devouring Jacques Cousteau's underwater

43:54

TV documentaries. And so this is

43:56

something that he's gonna work on for his entire life.

43:59

He loves.

43:59

shooting in water for the precise

44:02

reason that nobody else likes

44:05

shooting in water. Let me quote Edwin

44:07

Land again. Don't do anything that

44:09

someone else can do. The harder something

44:11

is, the less competition

44:14

there actually be. I think this is something I

44:16

see a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with. They

44:18

try to look for the easy way. I was like, no, that's

44:21

the exact wrong thing you should be doing. You should be trying to avoid

44:23

competition at all times. And if something's easy,

44:25

there's going to be way more people trying to do it. James is like,

44:27

no, I'm only going after hard because I will

44:29

literally be the only person out there

44:32

doing this. I will be the only person standing.

44:34

I will be a one of one. There will be no competition.

44:36

While making Avatar, he was also at work on an

44:38

engineering project designing and building a one-man

44:41

sphere to dive to the Mariana Trench.

44:43

There's a fantastic documentary

44:45

about this that shows

44:47

all of the engineering that went

44:50

into designing this sphere that he

44:52

used, the sphere that he used to get to the

44:54

deepest part in the world's oceans.

44:57

And he had that idea because he watched this

45:00

video the last time humans

45:02

had gone to the very bottom of the Mariana Trench before

45:05

James Cameron did it, was all the way back in 1960. But

45:07

this sentence tells you a lot about his personality and his approach

45:10

to work.

45:10

That no one else had bothered to try again

45:13

in 50 years did not deter

45:15

Cameron. It makes the journey irresistible

45:17

to him. I like doing things I

45:20

know others can't, he says. That's

45:22

part of what attracts him to shooting movies

45:24

in water. He likes shooting

45:26

in water, he says. It's physically taxing.

45:29

It's frustrating. It's dangerous. But

45:31

when you have a small team of people as crazy

45:33

as you are that are good at it, there

45:35

is a deep satisfaction in both

45:38

the process of doing it and the resulting

45:40

footage.

45:41

So this idea about I'm constantly attracted

45:43

to heart, I want to do things other people aren't doing. What

45:46

is that actually, like what does heart look like in

45:48

this case? Like The Abyss is a

45:50

movie that's going to be made in I think 1989, right? So

45:54

he's trying to figure out a couple years before the movie comes

45:56

out. Okay, where how am I gonna do this? Where

45:58

am I gonna shoot it? Right?

45:59

all over America, locations all over America,

46:02

and they're scouting out one thing and they see

46:04

something kind of weird in the distance. And it says, in the distance,

46:06

Jim could see something really intriguing. It was

46:09

a giant concrete bowl. From

46:11

afar, it looked something, it looked a little like the Roman

46:13

Colosseum. So he goes over to it. He's like, what

46:15

the hell is this thing? It's like essentially like

46:17

an abandoned construction project.

46:20

What they were trying to make would have been a nuclear

46:22

reactor's containment vessel. It was only

46:24

half finished and it was 240 feet in diameter with 80 foot tall

46:27

walls and no

46:28

entrance.

46:32

So he parks next to this thing. He's like, I want to check,

46:34

I want to look at this thing. What is it? Well,

46:36

how are you going to look at something that is,

46:39

has 80 foot wall surrounding it and no entrance? He's

46:42

like, oh, there's a construction crane right here. The crane

46:44

that they were using to assemble it was also abandoned. So what

46:46

does Cameron do?

46:47

He goes and starts climbing up on the 110 foot crane.

46:50

It is raining and there's a ton

46:52

of wind when he's doing this. And he

46:54

decides this is exactly where this is the

46:57

set. This is where I'm going to film the abyss. This is

46:59

what hard looks like. This is what he means like he's

47:01

attracted to hard.

47:02

It would involve pouring thousands of yards of structural

47:04

concrete, installing enormous filtration

47:07

systems and a row of 20,000 heaters

47:10

to warm the 7.5

47:12

million gallons to a comfortable temperature.

47:14

What they were planning wasn't just the largest

47:17

underwater set ever built. It

47:19

was a feat of industrial engineering.

47:22

And so the crazy thing is he just built

47:24

the world's largest underwater

47:26

set, movie set ever made. He

47:29

matches this unbelievable initial

47:32

accomplishment with this insane work

47:34

ethic and dedication. I think they call him a few pages

47:36

later.

47:37

What is the word? They call him like a maniac.

47:40

I think that's the, he's, they saw him a possessed maniac.

47:43

Listen to this paragraph.

47:44

Remember, they're filming underwater.

47:46

At the end of the day, Cameron had to hang 10 feet

47:48

under the surface for an hour to adjust to the

47:50

pressure difference. Never one to waste time,

47:53

Cameron asked the crew to install a monitor in

47:55

the control room underwater. Remember, all,

47:57

everything I'm about to describe to you is happening underwater.

47:59

Never one to waste time, Cameron has to crew to install a monitor

48:02

in the control room so he could watch his dailies through

48:04

the acrylic window while suspended

48:07

online.

48:08

When his neck was sore from his giant helmet,

48:10

so he's got this helmet that has all this like communication stuff in

48:12

it, right? He hung upside down

48:15

and had the crew invert the monitor. It's

48:17

like hanging upside down like a bat underwater.

48:19

He asked to patch phone calls from

48:22

the studio through to his helmet

48:24

so he could talk to Fox executives while he

48:26

decompressed underwater.

48:29

After a draining out 18 hour day,

48:32

the few lingering cast and crew members heading

48:34

home would stop and take one last look

48:36

in the viewing room window at their director, clinging

48:39

to the line like a bat on a branch and

48:41

still at work. I was stunned

48:43

by Jim's allegiance to the project and

48:45

the extent of his physical abilities. Jim

48:48

was there for every minute of it. It was beyond

48:50

belief his commitment to what we were doing.

48:54

Another main theme in the life of James Cameron

48:56

is the important and magical power

48:58

of compounding. So present day he's been

49:00

a filmmaker for over 40 years. Where we are

49:02

in the story though, he's only

49:05

a handful of years into his

49:07

career as a filmmaker. The reason I talk

49:09

about the compounding nature of Cameron's

49:12

career that kind of jumps out when you study him

49:14

is he starts experimenting with CGI, with computer

49:16

graphics,

49:17

all the way back in 1988. The

49:19

reason I'm bringing this up is because this is when he starts working with

49:21

George Lucas' company Industrial Light Magic

49:24

and it said Industrial Light Magic assured

49:26

Cameron that they could do it. It would take the company

49:28

nine months, this is 1988, okay? It

49:31

would take the company nine months to deliver 20 shots. Amazing

49:34

when you consider that 20 years later on Avatar,

49:37

Cameron's crew would produce more than 2,000 shots

49:40

in the same time period. Each of

49:42

them, many orders of magnitude more complex.

49:44

So in 1988, it takes nine months to make 20 shots. Twenty

49:48

years later, they can do 2,000 and

49:51

I think 20 years after that, it was like 20,000 or

49:53

maybe even more

49:54

in that same time period.

49:56

There is a massive benefit in getting

49:58

to find your life's work as a filmmaker. fast as possible

50:01

and then once you're there just stay in it all

50:03

the benefits all the future technology all That's

50:06

gonna compound and accrue to the people that don't

50:08

quit and the thing is most people quit

50:11

is another example of that so now he's almost 10

50:13

years into his movie career

50:16

and this is incredible the existing norms

50:19

of the movie industry at this point in time right are

50:21

going to be Temporarily ignored

50:24

to the benefit of James Cameron

50:26

and Arnold Schwarzenegger. So remember Terminator

50:28

I

50:29

think cost let's say six million dollars

50:31

six point eight something like that to make

50:33

so six million dollars made seventy eight million

50:36

dollars in revenue and So now this

50:38

company goes and buys a few years later. They

50:40

pay ten million dollars just for the

50:42

rights, right? Just for the rights to make

50:44

Terminator to

50:46

James Cameron is 35 years old this time the

50:48

this temporary suspension of like the normal

50:51

Economics of the industry that he happens to be

50:53

operating in

50:54

is going to benefit him and Arnold. This

50:56

is what I mean by that So these two guys

50:58

run this company called Carol Co pictures.

51:01

It's this independent production company and

51:03

They call James Cameron and they're

51:05

like, hey, we just bought the rights for Terminator 2 We

51:07

want you to do write and direct the film

51:09

and Cameron was not sure that he wanted to

51:11

do a sequel and they're like Okay, we'll

51:14

pay you six million dollars And so it says they

51:16

offer me a lot of money Cameron says six million

51:18

dollars to be exact It turns out I can

51:20

be bought and so that

51:22

is in 1989 So it's you know be

51:24

like double that or maybe even triple that today For

51:27

a 35 year old director now that

51:29

was hilarious winds up, you know becoming one

51:31

of the most expensive I think the budget they have on this movie is like a

51:33

hundred million dollars, but

51:34

listen to how What they did

51:36

for Arnold so they give James six million

51:39

dollars, you know How they convinced Arnold

51:41

to do the movie these guys gave

51:43

Arnold a twelve million dollar Gulf

51:45

Stream jet to close the deal

51:48

That's incredible. And so while I'm reading about

51:50

how they're making Terminator 2 I stumbled across

51:52

this like a little piece of fun history

51:55

fact, right? So think about one of the most well-known

51:58

software programs of all time is Photoshop

52:00

Well, the crazy thing I discovered in this book is

52:02

that an early version of what eventually

52:05

becomes the first version of what will

52:07

eventually become the commercial product Photoshop

52:09

is actually the first thing they use

52:11

it for is to solve a technical problem that

52:13

James Cameron is having on Terminator 2.

52:16

This is around 1990. I think this is when it's happening.

52:19

Some of the things that Cameron wanted the

52:21

T1000 Terminator to do was a stretch for

52:23

industrial light and magic. When the computerized character

52:25

extended into certain poses, giant black

52:28

gashes appeared in his shoulders. The ILM

52:30

industrial light magic team pulled

52:32

it off thanks in part to a cool new piece of software

52:35

invented by a 20 something person

52:37

working there named John Knoll

52:39

and his brother Thomas,

52:41

a grad student at the University of Michigan.

52:44

That software happened to be the

52:46

very first version of Photoshop, still

52:49

a few years away from becoming

52:51

the industry standard graphics

52:54

editing program.

52:56

That's incredible. I think

52:58

the developers wind up selling the

53:00

rights to Photoshop a few years later for I think $35 million.

53:04

There is something that appears in the book multiple times I

53:06

haven't covered yet. I think you already

53:08

know this, but

53:09

he has

53:10

excessively high standards. He's very

53:12

difficult to work with. This kind of reminded

53:15

me, one of my favorite lines when

53:17

I was reading that chapter on Walt Disney and Picasso

53:19

last week was that Walt Disney put excellence

53:22

before any other consideration. I think James

53:25

would, that applies to James as well.

53:27

It talks about they had to get this movie made

53:30

quickly, but that didn't

53:32

have any effect on James

53:35

Cameron's level of professionalism. He's

53:38

known for doing this on multiple things. He

53:40

shoots a take and then he has a catch phrase.

53:42

He would repeat over and over again.

53:44

He says he would either he'd alternate

53:46

between these two, which is hilarious. That's exactly

53:48

what I didn't want or the other one. Perfect.

53:52

Let's do it again. It says it chafed

53:54

the T2 crew, some of whom

53:56

started wearing shirts that said Terminator

53:59

3, not with me.

54:00

And that dedication to just making the best thing you

54:03

possibly could pays off in the end. Quality will always

54:05

make you more money is another line I think from

54:07

the

54:08

Walt Disney book that I covered last week or

54:10

the Walt Disney essay rather. So what's

54:12

fascinating is I think they pay, they cost like a hundred million

54:14

to make. The movie makes something like five

54:16

hundred million dollars. And so this crazy,

54:20

his movies keep having these fantastic financial

54:22

outcomes. And this is what allows him

54:24

to get to what he really wants. What James

54:26

Cameron really wants and what most of the history's greatest

54:28

founders want. They want the same thing. They want ownership and

54:30

they want control.

54:32

And so, you know, I'm reading about James

54:34

Cameron. I could easily be

54:36

reading about James Dyson or George

54:38

Lucas. And so it says in the spring of 1992, Cameron signed

54:41

an unusual five hundred million dollar multi-picture

54:43

domestic distribution deal with Fox. They gave

54:45

him power to put any movie he wanted

54:47

into production without Fox's approval

54:50

up to a budget of seventy million dollars. And

54:52

he retained ownership of his own films. This deal

54:54

gave Cameron both more control and

54:57

more responsibility than a director typically

54:59

enjoys. This is what he said. And this is what inspired him

55:01

to do so. I just made Terminator 2 for

55:03

Carol Coe Studios and I admired

55:06

how they rolled being their own bosses,

55:08

Mavericks and entrepreneurs. I admired

55:11

how they rolled being their own bosses, Mavericks

55:13

and entrepreneurs, Cameron says. I've been fed up

55:15

with the studio system after Aliens

55:18

and Abyss, both of which I felt were not released

55:20

properly. I could now set up a structure

55:22

which would

55:22

allow me to call the shots myself.

55:25

And so after he signs this next deal, the thing he does

55:27

the following year is he's found his own

55:29

special effects company. I just

55:32

love this idea. It's like James Cameron

55:34

knows that there is a revolution in computer generated

55:36

special effects happening and that one,

55:38

he wants to play a role and two,

55:40

in order to play that role, in order to do so, he decides,

55:43

hey, the correct move here is to start

55:45

my own, to found my own special effects company.

55:47

Cameron wanted to be part of the digital revolution and special

55:49

effects. I wanted to make sure that as a filmmaker,

55:52

I was always ahead of the wave and not behind it.

55:54

To do so, he felt he would need a lab

55:57

of his own.

55:58

He was thinking of founding his own special effects company.

55:59

which they're gonna call digital domain. This

56:02

is how they get the funding for it.

56:04

They raised $15 million from IBM, which

56:06

took a 50% stake in the company and

56:08

provided much of the hardware to get it started.

56:11

Digital domain wasn't a hard sell. The

56:13

guys behind Terminator 2 and Jurassic

56:15

Park were as promising a team

56:18

to back in the nascent, I mean, this is very

56:20

early days, in the nascent digital effects

56:22

industry as existed.

56:24

And then just one more thing I wanna pull off from this section,

56:26

which I think is a good idea, go all in on where

56:28

you believe the future is, regardless of where it

56:30

currently is, the company's first bold

56:32

move would be to wholly embrace

56:34

digital compositing and not even bother

56:37

to open an optical department. It

56:39

was a risky decision at the time. Most

56:41

of Hollywood was still relying on opticals.

56:44

They thought that wasn't gonna be the case in the

56:46

future, so they just skipped that part. They went directly to

56:48

the future. Just go right to the future, I guess, so we had to

56:50

think about what he's doing here. But setting up digital

56:52

domain, that way gave the company an almost

56:55

instantaneous advantage over

56:57

the established effects houses.

57:00

And then there's another theme that appears over and over again

57:02

in the career of James Cameron that I wanna point out to you.

57:05

He's just got intense focus. And so it's

57:07

like, mute the world and

57:09

then build your own world.

57:11

Cameron knows a lot about a lot of subjects. He can talk

57:13

about energy policy.

57:14

He could talk about helicopter engines. He could

57:16

talk about the Punic Wars. But one of

57:18

his rare blind spots is Hollywood

57:21

gossip. He does not give a damn

57:24

what is going on inside of his own industry.

57:26

This is not a man who watches E. And

57:29

so what they're talking about is, I

57:31

think this is on true lies,

57:33

he winds up wanting to hire Tom Arnold. And

57:35

he didn't know anything about the back, there

57:37

was some controversy around Tom Arnold. So he gets

57:39

this phone call from a Fox executive and they're

57:41

like, what the hell are you doing? They're just so mystified

57:44

by

57:44

his choice of casting. Remember, he has control,

57:46

so he can do whatever. He gets to choose the actors

57:49

that he wants to work with. And so they ask him, they're like,

57:51

don't you read the papers? Don't you watch TV?

57:53

And Cameron confessed that no,

57:55

that he did not. And so a short while later,

57:57

we hear from his long-term attorney and he said.

58:00

Listen, James is not a guy that would call

58:02

and say, let's do lunch. Cameron rarely

58:04

lunches or parties and applies none

58:07

of his laser beam focus to the Hollywood

58:09

power struggles. Jim doesn't call

58:12

me up and say, what does Spielberg make, which

58:14

some of my other clients do. He

58:16

does not think in those terms.

58:18

And so the note I have on my page is like, this is

58:21

really like a bullet point.

58:22

My bullet point model of James Cameron

58:25

up until my reading up until the point of the book is

58:27

like, he likes to focus. He likes to work.

58:30

He is not motivated, motivated primarily

58:32

by money,

58:34

very much like Walt Disney. Excellence

58:36

came first, right? Financial considerations

58:39

or if it's going to make him money, he's trying to build something great.

58:42

And with the trust that if he builds something great, he'll

58:44

make money. But building something great

58:46

was something that Walt Disney and Cameron put first.

58:49

And then the last note was that he's just got an inner clock.

58:51

He's got an inner scorecard.

58:53

He just wants to focus on the work

58:55

that he's doing. He's not concerned with pulling

58:57

his head up and looking around like, what do other directors

59:00

think or what is everybody else in the industry doing? It's irrelevant

59:02

to him.

59:03

And you see this in how he picks his movies.

59:06

He's trying to figure out like, what am I going to work on next after

59:09

True Lies? And this is where he decides to do

59:11

Titanic, which at the time becomes the

59:14

most finding successful movie of all time.

59:16

What movie he makes next

59:18

is decided intuitively based

59:21

on themes that interest him at the moment and

59:23

what new technical or dramatic territories he

59:25

wants to explore. I had a lot of doubts

59:27

about doing Titanic, he says. Could it be done? I

59:30

wasn't sure. Could the deep dive filming be done?

59:32

I don't know. Could we create the technology? I

59:34

don't know. Would anyone want to see it?

59:36

While he was ruminating on what to do next, he

59:39

received a fax from this other guy, this explorer

59:41

named Sagolvich. And

59:44

so he's reading Sagolvich's thoughts.

59:46

And I love this idea because I find this to be

59:49

true as well when I listen to podcasts or when I read

59:51

books that just one line can change everything.

59:54

And so he's reading this

59:56

fax and says, it is sometimes necessary

59:58

in life to do something

59:59

extraordinary. In Cameron's mind, that line

1:00:02

seemed to glow on the page. Yes,

1:00:04

I realize sometimes you have to

1:00:06

do something extraordinary, something crazy.

1:00:09

And this is the line I mentioned earlier. I am an explorer

1:00:11

at heart and a filmmaker by trade.

1:00:14

And so he looked at creating Titanic, making the movie,

1:00:16

not as I'm making a film. I'm going on an exploration.

1:00:19

I'm going on an Odyssey. And then he has this

1:00:21

great thing where

1:00:22

one of the reasons he wanted to do the film, because

1:00:24

he's been fantasizing about diving down to

1:00:26

the wreck, I think it would cost, I think

1:00:29

it was like $6 million or something like that

1:00:31

to develop the technology, to do it safe.

1:00:34

And I think he went down, you know, maybe a dozen times,

1:00:36

maybe even more. And

1:00:37

what he realized is like, well, really,

1:00:39

we should charge my expedition to the Titanic

1:00:41

as a marketing expense in the studio. It's

1:00:44

like, what are you talking about? And this is actually a genius way

1:00:46

to gain attention for the film.

1:00:48

And so Cameron says, well, the expedition

1:00:50

should be charged to the marketing budget because it's going

1:00:52

to attract way more publicity than just

1:00:54

trotting out the actors and sending them

1:00:56

around for on the talk show circuit.

1:00:59

This is great line in Michael Jordan's autobiography,

1:01:02

which I covered back on Episode 213, where he

1:01:04

says, I focus on the little things, the little things add

1:01:06

up to big things.

1:01:07

And Cameron did this entire career.

1:01:09

You

1:01:10

see it in the Titanic, he was

1:01:12

a stickler for getting the actual historical details

1:01:14

as accurate as possible. There was a degree of

1:01:17

obsession in Cameron's dedication to the

1:01:19

little details from the ship's stationery

1:01:21

down to the white star line stamped

1:01:24

ashtrays. He has always been a stickler for

1:01:26

the little things after I put out that episode on Bernard

1:01:29

and all.

1:01:29

I heard from stories from people listen to the podcast

1:01:31

that he's this way to the

1:01:33

most minute details in the stores,

1:01:36

the businesses that he runs, the hotels, the restaurants

1:01:38

that he owns. He focuses on the large

1:01:41

picture of the strategy, but he also pays attention

1:01:43

to the most minute detail that it would be. Some

1:01:45

of the stories I've heard would just shock you if I

1:01:47

could repeat them. And they came to mind when I'm reading

1:01:49

this section. It's like, oh, well, this is what Michael Jordan

1:01:52

top of his profession, Bernard and all top of his profession,

1:01:54

James Cameron top of his profession, obsessed

1:01:57

with the details, little things add up

1:01:59

to big things.

1:01:59

Let's go back to this idea

1:02:02

that was in that piece by GQ that

1:02:04

jumped out at me, right? Where it's like James is the type

1:02:06

of person whose confidence preceded

1:02:09

his achievements. It's so important

1:02:11

to truly believe in what you're doing to have

1:02:14

superhuman levels of confidence because sometimes you have

1:02:16

people on your own team

1:02:17

trying to talk you out of it. He's

1:02:19

doing Titanic, right? Titanic, this is before Titanic

1:02:22

comes out, is going to be hit with a financially successful

1:02:24

film. And he's got people on his own team.

1:02:27

And 20th Century Fox, one of the

1:02:29

presidents there,

1:02:30

comes to James and

1:02:32

is trying to instill doubts into

1:02:35

James' mind. This is crazy. And this is,

1:02:37

if you listen to the early episodes of Founders, I'd have this segment

1:02:39

because it pop up so many times where

1:02:41

I called it Critics Don't Know Shit.

1:02:43

And what I remember is these just biographies are just full

1:02:45

of people confident in why what

1:02:47

you were doing just won't work. And so we see

1:02:50

that here. 20th Century Fox president Bill

1:02:52

Mechanic told Cameron that the film

1:02:54

would never see a dime a profit.

1:02:55

He suggested that Cameron should not only

1:02:58

surrender all his points, meaning his profits,

1:03:00

on Titanic, but give back half

1:03:02

of his points on the next film he did with Fox.

1:03:05

This conversation happened in Cameron's living room. Mechanics'

1:03:08

counteroffer did not go over well. Get

1:03:11

the fuck out of my house, Cameron

1:03:13

replied.

1:03:14

And I need to make the point that that level of confidence,

1:03:16

like sometimes it has to be externalized even when

1:03:19

it's not, you actually don't feel it at the time inside

1:03:21

because this is coming towards the end of the filming.

1:03:24

So the

1:03:24

production, like the actual shooting of Titanic

1:03:27

is wrapping up, right? But then he's got to figure out

1:03:29

how to edit it. It is one of the lowest points

1:03:32

of James' life. He's

1:03:34

like, just kill me now. But

1:03:36

you still have the strength or the belief

1:03:38

in what you're doing, even though you feel like shit, to

1:03:41

make sure that you don't give in to the doubts of other people. He

1:03:43

was exhausted and drained. He had enough footage for a

1:03:45

four hour movie and was wildly

1:03:48

over budget and had been told there was zero possibility

1:03:50

that the film could make any money. His movie

1:03:53

was the laughingstock of Hollywood. Critics

1:03:55

don't know shit. The

1:03:58

media was attacked. attacking him and ridiculing

1:04:01

him daily. The Hollywood media,

1:04:03

the media that he is right to ignore, is making

1:04:05

fun of him because they think this is gonna be like another

1:04:08

water world, like this

1:04:09

bust, you spend all this money. Remember,

1:04:12

it's about to make more money

1:04:13

than anything else and this is what was happening,

1:04:16

right before, it's darkest before the dawn. This

1:04:19

is Great Line, the founder of Vans,

1:04:21

a shoe company.

1:04:22

He says opportunity is a strange

1:04:24

beast, it commonly appears after a loss.

1:04:27

I don't know why that came to mind

1:04:28

when I got to this point, but this is what I was thinking of.

1:04:31

He had enough footage for a four hour movie, was wildly

1:04:33

over budget and had been told there was zero possibility

1:04:35

the film could make money. His

1:04:37

movie was The Laughing Stock of Hollywood and the media was ridiculing

1:04:40

him, attacking him daily. I thought to myself, Lord,

1:04:42

take me now.

1:04:45

He had finished one impossible task only to face

1:04:47

another, but that was tomorrow.

1:04:49

And then right after this was just this funny interaction

1:04:51

he had with Fox's CEO, Rupert

1:04:53

Murdoch. In the middle of this terminal, the director

1:04:56

ran into the news corporation chairman and CEO, Rupert

1:04:58

Murdoch at the studio. I guess I'm not your favorite

1:05:00

person at the moment, Cameron said to the media baron,

1:05:03

but the movie is going to be good, he promised. It better

1:05:05

be better than good, Murdoch told him.

1:05:08

And so what happens, Titanic winds up being number

1:05:11

one for 16 straight weeks

1:05:13

and makes almost $2 billion. Almost

1:05:16

makes $2 billion in the movie

1:05:18

and this is why he's so interesting. He

1:05:21

is bent on doing what he wants to do when

1:05:23

he wants to do it and maintaining absolute

1:05:25

control of what would be the apex of

1:05:28

his powers as a director. Cameron would

1:05:30

step away from feature filmmaking altogether.

1:05:32

After Titanic, Cameron took to calling

1:05:35

himself the world's busiest unemployed

1:05:37

filmmaker. I've got my fuck

1:05:39

you money and I can kind of step away for

1:05:42

a while. So as you can already tell from his

1:05:44

interviews, from this book, if

1:05:46

you watch a bunch of video, like video interviews of him too,

1:05:49

that is by far his favorite word. These

1:05:51

are his words, right? This is how he talks. I

1:05:53

got my fuck you money

1:05:54

and I can kind of step away for a while. My career is not

1:05:56

going anywhere and I can do all the cool stuff that I've wanted

1:05:59

to do now. And so what does

1:06:01

he do when he wants to get away from all the pressure? He

1:06:03

does what... this is the weirdest thing,

1:06:05

surprising thing to me. It's like, I just did

1:06:07

a Tiger Woods biography on episode 301.

1:06:09

Tiger Woods said the exact same thing that James did. He's

1:06:12

like, the only place he could get away from the pressure

1:06:14

was by diving deep into the ocean. It's

1:06:17

a surprising thing they had in common. For

1:06:19

Cameron, peace is found under the ocean. After

1:06:22

finishing a movie, he says, I usually go diving

1:06:24

first to decompress by literally decompressing.

1:06:27

I find the underwater world to be a great

1:06:29

anecdote to Hollywood. Nobody knows, nobody

1:06:32

down there knows who you are. That's exactly

1:06:34

what Tiger Woods said. And then James

1:06:36

adds another level to this. You are just part

1:06:38

of the food chain. And

1:06:41

so for the next eight years, he just dedicates

1:06:43

himself to becoming an explorer, which is

1:06:45

what he always wanted to be. In fact, there was a little

1:06:47

like a historical anecdote

1:06:49

where James Cameron is actually

1:06:52

underwater at the site of the Titanic

1:06:55

on 9-11. And so they come to the top,

1:06:58

I think he's with another person, I can't remember.

1:07:00

And they get to the top and the boat,

1:07:03

and they thought it was going to be like a cause for celebration.

1:07:05

And they get to the top and everybody's like, sullen

1:07:08

and depressed, and like, what's going on? And that's when he

1:07:10

found out that 9-11 had just happened.

1:07:12

And so he's looking back and trying to explain like why

1:07:14

he did this at this point in his life. And he says,

1:07:17

where are the 21st century's Magellans?

1:07:20

More important, where was the spirit of discovery in

1:07:22

the regular citizen who had once watched the moon

1:07:24

landing and been filled with wonder and

1:07:26

a sense of possibility? Exploration

1:07:28

is not a luxury.

1:07:30

It defines us as a civilization. By 2005,

1:07:33

Cameron had devoted seven of his midlife

1:07:36

years, potentially a director's most productive, to

1:07:38

the discovery of new places and new technology

1:07:41

rather than to making movies. And

1:07:43

so eventually he resurfaces, literally. And

1:07:46

he's like, all right, I'm going to make Avatar. And this is what

1:07:48

I meant. It was like one of the most impressive things about him, is that the

1:07:50

idea that he'll just let ideas simmer

1:07:53

for decades. He may not know how to do it, but he just keeps...

1:07:56

He says there's another line in the book earlier

1:07:58

on where he's like, I'll run out of time.

1:07:59

I ran out of time before I ran out of ideas. So

1:08:02

it says, at this point, Cameron hadn't released a feature film

1:08:04

in over a decade. He had been largely absent

1:08:06

from the Hollywood scene, writing in his

1:08:08

submarines, filming his documentaries, and tinkering

1:08:10

and building new filmmaking toys. The director

1:08:12

wrote his first treatment for Avatar 12 years

1:08:15

before. This is 12 years before he actually starts working

1:08:17

on it.

1:08:18

The only problem with making the movie in 1996 was

1:08:20

that it was impossible. The technology did

1:08:23

not exist. Again, we see this over and over again. I

1:08:25

know what I wanna do. I just don't know how to

1:08:27

do it yet.

1:08:29

And then he comments on this idea that he just doesn't let

1:08:31

ideas die. He doesn't let them go to waste. Cameron

1:08:33

jokes that he is like a Plains Indian who

1:08:35

wastes no piece of the buffalo. In his case,

1:08:38

it is his ideas that are made of use down

1:08:40

to the marrow. Sometimes decades later,

1:08:42

he started creating some of the images in Avatar

1:08:44

in the 1970s. That's what he was mentioning in the piece where

1:08:46

he had these drawings, and all these people come out after

1:08:48

the Avatar's widely successful. Like, you stole the idea from me.

1:08:50

He's like, oh yeah? Look at this, dated. I

1:08:53

wrote this when I was 19.

1:08:54

I had been processing this in my imagination

1:08:57

for decades. That is an incredible statement.

1:09:01

And so all the way back when he's founding his special

1:09:04

effects company, Digital Domain, I think

1:09:06

this is in 1992, the year before he founds

1:09:08

the company, he writes this thing called a digital manifesto.

1:09:11

It's like a 12 page, almost like a white paper, outlining

1:09:14

why he's starting Digital Domain and what he thinks is gonna

1:09:16

happen. And really, not

1:09:17

to focus on specifically what's

1:09:19

happening out there. What is the idea behind what's happening in the book?

1:09:22

And the idea that's happening behind

1:09:24

the book to me is like, what is obvious to you

1:09:26

in your industry that won't be obvious

1:09:28

to other people for a decade? This

1:09:30

was obvious to him a decade before it was obvious

1:09:32

to anybody else.

1:09:33

Cameron had written a digital manifesto, a passionately

1:09:36

argued 13 page document laying

1:09:38

out where he expected filmmaking to go in the coming

1:09:40

years. In his manifesto, he described

1:09:42

something called performance capture.

1:09:44

What he's calling performance capture is now known as motion

1:09:47

capture, and that's what you see in Avatar.

1:09:49

Performance capture, in which an actor would don

1:09:51

a data suit, sending a stream of information

1:09:53

about the actor's physical movements to a workstation.

1:09:56

Remember, this is 1992,

1:09:58

where it'd be inserted into a...

1:09:59

Synthetic environment artists would then use

1:10:02

software to turn the actors digitized performance

1:10:04

into a fantastical character

1:10:06

Cameron was rubbing elbows with the brightest

1:10:08

minds and special effects at that point so back in 1992

1:10:11

Okay, and this is the stuff they were talking about

1:10:13

it all seemed pretty obvious from where we were sitting

1:10:15

He says to most of Hollywood though the

1:10:17

possibilities of lifelike CG characters

1:10:20

driven by human performances wouldn't

1:10:22

be obvious for at least another decade as

1:10:25

As fasting sit here and think about like what

1:10:27

is obvious to you in your industry that will not

1:10:29

be obvious to other people in that industry

1:10:32

for a decade

1:10:33

and can you start working on these things now and

1:10:36

The last chapter in the book is all about the building of

1:10:38

avatar This is another main theme in the life

1:10:40

and career of James Cameron the fact that he said

1:10:42

he feels every idea is a work in Progress

1:10:45

he is attracted to hard.

1:10:47

I love this line It says a crew member wrote

1:10:49

a set catchphrase on the whiteboard.

1:10:52

It's avatar, dude Nothing works

1:10:54

the first time and another cool thing about James

1:10:56

Cameron. He sees all positive some I

1:10:59

love when these like people at the top of professions

1:11:01

interact with each other whether it's historical analogy or

1:11:03

something that's taken place In recent

1:11:05

history. This is where I mentioned earlier

1:11:07

how You know, he's willing to share

1:11:09

everything he learns Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg

1:11:12

wound up spending a week Using Cameron's

1:11:14

equipment visiting working with his crew

1:11:16

visiting the production

1:11:18

and it says he was helping us get our heads around the

1:11:20

equipment

1:11:21

Jim is very generous in the way he shares knowledge

1:11:23

and information He doesn't jealously

1:11:25

guard technology and secrets

1:11:28

and then you fast-forward like another You know decade after this

1:11:30

book ends and that's part of the reason that Cameron

1:11:33

moved to New Zealand because he uses Jackson

1:11:35

special effects company. He was using it to build

1:11:38

on avatar

1:11:39

He's gonna use them for I think avatar 3 and avatar 4

1:11:41

too it's called Weta and it's actually headquartered

1:11:44

in New Zealand very close to where Cameron lives and

1:11:46

Finally one of the last pages of the

1:11:48

book There is a sentence that I think is the perfect

1:11:51

way to end this conversation this podcast

1:11:53

this time together That gives you a great

1:11:56

indication of James Cameron

1:11:58

the person and how he

1:11:59

he approaches his work. James

1:12:02

Cameron put on a blue baseball cap

1:12:04

with the letters HMFIC

1:12:08

printed on it. It stood for head

1:12:11

motherfucker in charge.

1:12:14

And that is where I'll leave it.

1:12:15

I'm going to leave the link down below

1:12:18

for this book. If you buy it, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same

1:12:20

time. I'm also gonna leave the link down for the GQ

1:12:22

article. At the top of the GQ article, you'll

1:12:24

see they'll have audio controls in case you wanna

1:12:27

listen to it. It's excellent. They did an excellent

1:12:29

job on it. I was listening

1:12:31

to it every night as I went to sleep, as I was

1:12:33

working my way through the book and thinking about this podcast.

1:12:36

So hope you check out both the GQ article and

1:12:38

this book,

1:12:39

absolutely fantastic. Another thing

1:12:41

that I hope you check out is if you get on my personal

1:12:43

email list. So I will go through, I don't know, I probably

1:12:46

have 75

1:12:48

highlights of this book. What I'll go through,

1:12:50

and this takes an unbelievable amount of time, is

1:12:52

I will go through and try to find the 10 favorite

1:12:56

sentences in the book. It's like 10 bullet

1:12:58

points that I wanna remember from

1:13:00

the book. If you wanna get on the list, the link is down below.

1:13:03

That is 311 books down, 1,000 to go, and

1:13:06

I'll talk to

1:13:07

you again soon. If you

1:13:08

enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com.

1:13:12

There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete

1:13:14

with transcripts, show notes, and resources

1:13:16

to keep learning. You can also sign up for our

1:13:19

newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense

1:13:21

episodes to the big ideas, quotations,

1:13:23

and more, as well as share the best content

1:13:25

we find on the internet every week.

1:13:30

Thanks for watching. I'll

1:13:32

see you next time. Bye. Bye.

1:13:35

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

1:13:38

Bye. Bye. Bye.

1:13:41

Bye. Bye. Bye.

1:13:43

Bye. Bye.

1:13:45

Bye.