Original subtitles

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JAMES CAMERON: One of the biggest questions

in creativity-- any form of creativity

is, when is an idea that you have

that pops up like a little champagne bubble in your mind

worth pursuing?

The answer to that is highly subjective.

What appeals to you?

What are-- are you interested in as an artist or as someone

aspiring to be an artist in cinema?

What compels you to tell a story?

Is it the visual aspects of it?

Is it the world that you want to immerse people in?

Is it a particular character?

Is it a particular problem for a character

that you want to explore maybe based on how it resonates

with something in your life?

Or maybe it's a story that you've read

and say, I want to do something like that,

or it's a film that you've seen and say, I

want to do something like that.

Maybe it's very unformed at first.

Okay, there's this-- this woman does this.

I want to tell this story, you know?

Put some detail on it, you know?

Who is she?

What time-- what time in the world is it?

What's the setting?

And how does that resonate?

And maybe-- maybe you put her in Cincinnati in 1962

and all of a sudden, ah, too limiting socially.

Maybe it needs to be in some dystopian future, you know?

And so just let it swirl around.

And don't lock in on anything right away.

I mean, I think that one of the keys to this

is to be open and flexible and always--

always keep an openness.

So really, it's a question of after that initial process,

is the-- does the idea stand the sort of sniff test

for something that you want to really devote your time to?

And I think the answer to that is it just won't go away,

you know?

The idea just won't go away.

It starts to resonate with things

that are happening in your life or in the news

or in another film that--

that you see and it starts to get more detailed,

it starts to come into focus.

And then there'll would be a certain point where you say,

I've just got to sit down and write this.

The imagination never stops.

It's always working.

And I think ideas come to any kind of artist

from-- from different sources, and the subconscious

is one that certainly the surrealist artists back

around the turn of the last century believed in.

They believed in dream imagery.

They believed that it was an unmediated, unintellectualized

version of their subconscious creative force or imagination,

and I believe that to be true also.

It's my zero-cost subscription to a streaming service

that's all my own.

Every night I get all kinds of entertaining stuff.

I know I've-- I've woken up having leafed through

sketchbooks or-- or paintings and thought to myself, man,

I wish I could paint like that, then realized I just did.

And then scramble around and try to draw it out,

draw out the ideas that I've seen.

And every once in a while something stands out.

Whether it's a scene in a narrative sense

that might be-- it be tragic, it might be joyful,

or maybe it's just an image.

To pick an example, "Terminator" started as a dream image.

The actual terminator itself and the--

the image of it as a chrome metal skeleton

emerging out of a fire with the certain knowledge,

in the same way that you have a certain knowledge in dreams

about something, about what the thing

you're seeing means or the person that you're seeing,

what they mean to you in the dream,

I knew that it once had skin over it, which

was burned off by the fire and it was walking out of the fire.

So I woke up and I said, that's a pretty good idea,

and I started drawing what I had seen.

And that was the nucleus for "The Terminator."

Then I had to justify, where am I?

Why is there a metal skeleton?

Why was-- why did it have skin over it?

Well, obviously there was a purpose to that.

And we don't have that, so that comes from the future.

And hey, maybe I could make a movie

about that in the present day if there was time travel.

So boom, boom, boom, all the pieces

assembled around that nucleus of a dream image.

You have an idea, what happens next?

Well, there's this pesky little thing called the written word.

You've got to write a story.

Somebody has got to write a story at some point.

Now maybe-- maybe it's a five-page outline,

maybe in my case it's a 75-page outline,

because that's how I work.

I work at a very novelistic way.

Because I have to build the world around the characters

as--

as I'm generating it, and--

because otherwise it's too vague,

it's-- it's too imprecise.

So in my particular case, I write a very long treatment.

In fact, people used to joke that it was more

of a script than a treatment.

We at first jokingly, and then ultimately just adopted

the term scriptment, because it had all of the--

had all of the scenes and had a lot of the dialogue,

it just wasn't in proper script form

because I held on to that kind of novelistic way of writing

prose and dialogue, because it was freer, it was looser.

I could say an argument happens.

Or I could actually write the argument out.

So I tried to take the formality out of the process.

This was just-- I'm speaking for my own development,

and all writers develop differently, all screenwriters

develop differently.

But I think anyone aspiring to be a filmmaker, you know,

the person sitting in this chair still needs to understand

the writing process, even if you know that one

of your limitations is you're not great with dialogue

or you-- you can't--

you don't think structurally like a writer does.

Or mastering the art of the scene

because scene writing is-- is an art in and of it--

in and of itself.

Maybe that's not your thing and you're more visual,

and you just want to grab a camera

and go and let somebody else--

somebody else write it.

That's fine.

But you still need to know how to work with the writer

to get the story to be what you want it to be.

I believe in the three-act structure,

I've just never succeeded in doing one.

"Terminator's" five acts with a coda.

"Aliens" is four acts.

None of my stuff ever fits the three-act structure.

I think thinking an act is good up to a point.

It disciplines you to know that you're

coming up to a transition point in the film.

If you think in terms of act breaks,

you'll create transitions that are interesting.

They always say that you want to end

act one with some kind of sense of-- of stating

the main character's main problem,

and if there's an adversary pitting the main character

against the adversary, there's certain things

that need to be accomplished.

Or the journey begins.

You can follow different-- different schools of thought

around that.

You can-- you know, Shakespeare worked in a five-act structure

very often.

So there are no hard-- hard rules.

Quentin Tarantino takes the action

and just moves them around into different orders, you know?

So there are no-- there are no real rules,

but I think it's good to know the rules before you

break them.

When I'm standing on a whiteboard in a writer's room

with other writers, it's very helpful

to think in a three-act structure,

because everybody gets that, you know?

What's my first act act out?

What is the big thing I want to do to set up-- to really set

the story in motion?

All my kind of throat-clearing and my establishing in my world

building all has to culminate to some point

where we define the conflict, we've

set the character's problem, and now

the story's in motion at high speed beyond-- beyond that.

So that's helpful.

And then what do I need to accomplish in my second act?

And then what's my--

what's my kick-off for my third act?

And then-- because I often find that third acts are kind

of a story within the story.

That third act reiterates a lot of what's

been-- been seen previously and brings it all to a head

and to a-- to either a final conflict or a final culmination

or some kind of emotional catharsis,

and then it resolves.

Or in some cases it doesn't resolve,

and the not resolving is part of the comment or part

of the-- part of the message.

So I think-- you know, read the books,

there are plenty of books on--

on screenwriting.

Read the books, know the rules, and then just break them.

All art has meaning, and that meaning may be overt,

it may be a lesson, it might be a social object lesson

for something that needs to be understood and felt

and requires an empathetic response.

And maybe it has a meaning for you individually.

Some kind of object lesson about the value of duty

or the value of friendship or the value of love

or the price of love, you know?

I read an interesting thing--

interesting quote-- grief is the price of love.

It was a mother--

not-- not an artist, not a writer.

It was a mother who had lost someone very close to them--

I think a child.

And it was just a quote in a newspaper.

You know.

She was-- she was hurting, she was in deep pain.

She said, it's the price of love.

And I thought, that is profound.

That is really profound.

Of course, I mean, we all-- love is a good thing, right?

Right up until it isn't, when it-- it hurts.

Hurts because you lose someone close to you,

you lose contact with them, or they reject you or they die,

whatever-- whatever it is, you know?

And there is a price to be paid.

There's a price to be paid for everything.

And so maybe that's the object lesson of the film.

And maybe that allows us to go on that journey

without having to go through the actual loss.

So films are a way to kind of experience things,

like, you know, kind of a training simulation before we

actually get there.

So it's up to the filmmaker, I think,

to be authentic about emotions.

I mean, the actors, of course, they-- they live,

eat, and breathe authenticity.

And it's all about the research for them

and-- and the truthful moment and all that.

And I think it's up to the filmmaker

to protect that and nurture that, and make

sure it's there-- that the authenticity is there

in the writing.

I had a studio executive-- top, top studio executive

say on "Avatar," we really like this script, but is there a way

that you can take out some of the kind of hippie,

tree-hugging kind of-- kind of stuff?

And I said, no, because it's exactly

the hippie tree-hugging stuff is the reason I

want to make the movie.

So if that's important to you, then we're kind of done here

and I'll have to take it somewhere else.

Oh no, no, no!

You know.

So anyway, film got made with all

the hippie tree-hugging stuff in it.

But, you know, it was a Rubicon moment.

I could have been jeopardizing the financing for a, you know,

$100-plus million movie, but, you know,

I found that as I developed my-- my stories,

there are certain things I never let go of.

There are certain fundamental principles

that I never let go of.

Maybe it's a redemption story, and that never changes,

you know?

So then it's a fine equipoise between being open and being

fluid and being able to take an idea-- maybe not

your idea, but an idea that fits and resonates

and incorporate that without losing

the sight of that core thing that you came there to do.

All my films express thematically my perspective

on existence, and a lot of those ideas

were formed when I was just kind of wide-eyed,

looking around the world.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: Within the past week,

unmistakable evidence has established the fact

that a series of offensive missile sites

is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.

JAMES CAMERON: Remembering distinctly

as a-- as a kid at the age of eight,

seeing my dad going through how to build a fallout

shelter in your basement at the peak of the Cuban Missile

Crisis.

[CHANTING]

Seeing the rise of environmentalism

in the early '70s and seeing the world potentially becoming

a toxic wasteland.

All those sorts of dystopian anxieties.

So for me, the-- the nuclear holocaust of the future

in "Terminator" maps directly thematically to the destruction

of "Titanic" where people just kind of blithely sailed

on right into an iceberg, and their world, the microcosm--

the world of that movie, because you

see very little besides the ship itself in that film,

sinks out from underneath them.

It's destroyed, and it takes down

the rich with the poor as well, which

obviously is a metaphor for our world right now with climate

change.

All the rich people that are-- that are propagating climate

change, all the big corporations, and people

who think they're going to be above the consequences

will not be, you know?

We're all in one world and we're all in it together.

So, you know, I think that the--

but I think the films, I try to keep them from being preachy.

I try to keep them from being too on the nose.

But the message is there if you-- if you want to see it.

And I think it's consistent about the power

of the individual, the strength of women.

You know, my-- my kind of jaundiced view

of organizational systems and authority.

You know, being a child of the '60s,

I have an innate dislike for authority.

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