Original subtitles

[FOOTSTEPS]

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

[CHEERING]

[SCRAPING]

[DIGITAL BEEPING]

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

JAMES CAMERON: There's a moment when you're just a fan.

And there's a moment when you're a filmmaker.

And the one moment can follow the other by about 1 minute.

Because all you have to do is pick up a camera

and start shooting something with the intention of making

a film, and you're a filmmaker.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

[GLASS SHATTERS]

[SCREECHING]

JAMES CAMERON: There's a moment where there's no idea.

And then there's the moment where there's the idea.

And I think of it almost the way we assemble images and bits

of narrative in our dreams.

Maybe it's in another time.

Maybe it's in another place.

Maybe it's an entirely different world.

It's up to the filmmaker to create that little bit

of an alternate reality.

And then we get to feel kind of alive

through a completely different set of eyes.

That's an amazing thing.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

I'm James Cameron.

And this is my MasterClass.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

NARRATOR: Whatever you have imagined in your wildest dreams

now becomes a visual reality.

JAMES CAMERON: I had loved films.

I always loved films.

Like, I remember particularly when I was in the third grade,

I saw "Mysterious Island," a Ray Harryhausen film.

And it had lots of wonderful sort of little boy fantasy

adventure stuff in it.

I came back, and I started drawing comics, comics

about "Mysterious Island."

But it wasn't the same story.

I made up my own creatures.

And I made up my own scenarios.

And I started to think in a frame.

And I started to think-- well, I didn't realize it--

but I was doing wide shots.

And I was doing close-ups. And I was doing reverse angles.

And I was doing all the things that a filmmaker does.

So I was doing all those things, graphically, on paper.

But it didn't translate to I want to make movies.

So cut to years later, I'm very excited to see this new film

that's just come out-- this is in 1968--

called "2001-- a Space Odyssey."

Because I love space.

I love science fiction.

I'm an avid reader of science fiction.

And it looked from the images like it was really

a quantum leap in terms of the type of space imagery

that I was going to experience.

So I went and saw that film.

And it had such a visceral impact on me that by the end,

I was probably almost alone in the movie

theater for some reason.

It was a matinee during the day.

I stumbled out of the theater, I sat down on the curb,

and I threw up.

Not because I didn't like the film,

but because when the stargate sequence began,

I felt like I was falling down an infinite corridor of light.

And I got airsick.

I was so subjectively present for that film.

And when I see the film now, it's

a very hard film to be subjectively present for.

It's a very cold and intellectual film.

But I loved it visually.

And it was the first time I really--

at the age of 14--

made the connection that a movie can be a piece of art

and can be an experience.

And it was the first time I noticed film music.

Because obviously, images and music

went hand in glove in that film in a really kind

of almost unprecedented way.

So I started getting really enthusiastic about how

did they do that.

And it just so happened that that

was one of the first films that had a book, a companion

book, that was published and widely available,

"The Making of 2001."

And I remember it was written by a guy named Jerome Agel.

And I got the book.

And I read it cover to cover.

And I understood about a quarter of it.

So I read it again.

And I started making notes.

And I started thinking about, well, how could I do that.

So I got my dad's Super 8 camera.

And I'd take a sheet of glass, and I mount a model on it.

I'd buy a kit model of one of the spacecraft from the film.

And I put it together.

And I'd glue it onto the glass.

And I'd put a piece of black velvet behind it.

And I'd put a light on it.

And it looked terrible, because the model

reflected in the glass.

Then I thought, well, what if I take the model

and put it behind the glass and glue it on from this side

and then put, like, one little tiny piece of detail

over where that glue spot is, and then light it.

And I won't see the reflection.

Now, all of a sudden, I'm with my Super 8 camera,

I'm making a spaceship fly through space.

Well, I don't think I ever looked back from that point.

I always think of it as the door is going

to open for a split second.

Whether you choose to jump through it or not,

it's not going to be there for very long.

Another door will come along sooner or later,

if you stay at it.

When you jump through that door, and you say, I'm here.

I'm ready to do this.

You have to have prepared for that moment for literally years

by being a sponge, by being curious,

by absorbing everything that you can to prepare yourself

for that moment.

I think every filmmaker stands essentially

on the shoulders of the filmmakers that went before.

We see what they've done.

We react to it.

It's like, that was interesting.

And then we start to create our own aesthetic.

And every individual will take what's

been done by other filmmakers and filter it

through their own lens, their own subjective experience,

their own opinions about the world.

And it'll come back in a different form.

And so it's endlessly renewing and endlessly invigorating.

And I think it's the duty of filmmakers

that have been down the road ways

to turn around and say, all right, there's

a landmine over here.

There's a landmine over here.

Don't step on it.

You know, if I can't do that after 40 years in the business,

then I'm not giving back enough.

So why not share that?

So in this class, I'm going to talk about what I've learned.

And one of the things I've learned

is that you never learn everything.

And it's a constant process of learning.

So you're constantly humble before the craft.

And you're constantly learning from other filmmakers.

If I had known when I started out what I know now, of course,

I would have done a lot of things differently.

But I think my films would have been slightly

different, but not that much.

What I would have done differently

is I would have respected all the crafts people around me

more.

I would have learned the leadership lessons earlier.

And I think that that's something hopefully

that I can impart in this class--

the importance of the role of leader of a group.

It's not dictator.

And it's a very collaborative medium.

And your film will benefit from that collaboration.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

I think the important thing to remember

is you can make a great film without a huge budget.

[LASERS BLASTING]

I've done low-budget films.

[EXPLOSIONS]

I've also done very high-budget films.

[ROBOTIC MOVEMENT]

I've been lucky enough to be able to do that.

[WINGS FLUTTERING]

But you can definitely optimize your budget.

And there are ways to do that.

And I'll share with you what I know about some

of the tricks of the trade.

And I wanted to share what's been learned.

Because we had to learn it the hard way.

And there's no reason why I can't

share what's been learned in a way that can benefit you,

as an up and coming filmmaker.

And hopefully then you'll go ahead, and you'll innovate,

and you'll do things.

And I'll follow your work, see what you've done,

and maybe learn from you.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

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.

JAMES CAMERON: When we buy a movie ticket,

we're putting our-- we're creating

a little bit of a social contract

with a bunch of people we never met to go into a dark room

and experience something and be quiet and be passive and be

submissive and not stop, not stop the experience.

The experience is in a dominant position

relative to our consciousness.

And we do it willingly because it's

one of the few times in our lives where we do that,

and where we stop our phone from ringing,

and we give ourselves that respite,

and we give ourselves a moment, might be a two-hour moment,

might be a three-hour moment, to experience something

uninterrupted and unbroken.

And if we have to get up and go to the bathroom,

you run because you don't want to miss something.

And that's a unique experience.

I think as a filmmaker, you know that you

have a dominant or authoritative position

relative to the audience's consciousness.

And you have to honor them, which

is, I'm not going to do something

that-- that's so obvious you can figure it out exactly.

And you get to the end.

And it's been predictable.

But I also don't want to do something that's intentionally

obscure to where I'm just sort of pirouetting how smart I am

and all the big words I can use, and you're lost.

And we've all seen the ones that strike that perfect balance

where you're rewarded for having paid attention

and picking up the clues.

And you go, aha.

And I think there's one thing that a lot of filmmakers

take a while to figure out, which

is it's okay for the audience to be ahead of you.

It's okay because the tension that

goes before a reveal or a cathartic moment

is so much more delicious when it's actually paid off in a way

that you hope for than some utter surprise that's

not satisfying at all.

Sometimes, filmmakers create too much importance

around the idea of surprise versus paying off

in a satisfying, satisfying way.

It's all about this contract.

It's about this dance with the audience

and honoring them and encouraging them to participate

and pay attention.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Well, I can drive that loader.

I have a class 2 rating.

Be my guest.

[LOADER WHIRRING]

JAMES CAMERON: And part of the way you

do that is you plant something, and then you pay it off.

And you say, see how it works?

I want to put something here.

And you're going to think about it,

and then-- and then it's going to be satisfying here.

[SCREAMING]

Get away from her, you bitch.

[END PLAYBACK]

JAMES CAMERON: So that creates a bit of a promise

that we're going to continue to do that.

We're going to do that right through to the end of the film.

The plant might be something that only the audience knows,

that that character needs and wants and can't express.

And you feel that I wish I could just walk into the screen

and shake that other person and say, look at what

this character's going through.

You know, you want to create that tension.

You want to create that-- that sense of wanting to be involved

and playing and participating.

It's participatory.

People say that that film is not interactive,

that only games are--

are an interactive medium.

I don't think that's true at all.

I think films are highly interactive.

You can't change the outcome, but you

can imagine various outcomes in real time as you're going on.

You're playing out those possibilities.

It could go this way.

It could go that way.

It could be this, could be that.

And if you play against the audience's expectation

in a satisfying way, that's good.

Keeps them playing the game.

If you play to the audience's expectation

in a satisfying way, something that they want to see

happen, and then it happens--

maybe it doesn't happen the way they

thought it was going to happen.

Maybe it has to be earned in a difficult way that's

hard for the characters, or maybe the character

has to make the sacrifice that you

didn't see coming to get that result that you wanted,

you know.

But this is all part of the dance.

They know all the gags.

So the question is, how do you play against it slightly?

Or how do you use a little bit of sleight of hand

to disguise what you're doing?

Or how do you lead them on thinking

that it's going to be one thing and then switch track

into something else?

You know, you're doing it at the writing stage.

You should be going through the script and saying, you know,

what--

what am I giving the audience here?

What expectation does that create?

How am I paying that off?

Or how am I working against that expectation later?

It's very important for filmmakers

to ask themselves these questions.

Well, I think one of the first principles of building tension

is you have to care about the character.

And you have to understand the jeopardy

or at least that there is jeopardy for that character.

That might be anything from a free-floating anxiety

that something is going to happen.

And you don't know what it is.

Because you've just walked into an alien spacecraft.

Or you just walked into a haunted house.

Or there's some kind of really bad, negative outcome

that's tied to a ticking clock.

You know, the classic example is the bomb under the table.

Because I think time is a factor on building tension.

You have to believe that it's not

going to happen in two weeks or in an hour.

It's going to happen in the next few seconds or maybe

the next minute.

So you have to be invested in the outcome.

You have to care about the character.

You have to be brought in subjectively enough

into the moment that you're moving through the--

the world, the space, the journey with that character.

And you have to have enough outside information

to know that that character is going into increasing jeopardy.

So crosscutting is a good way to do that--

cutting away to the adversary or the train

coming or whatever, whatever the thing is that escalates,

creating a constant sense of escalation,

creating a sense of frustration.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Don't make me bust you up, man.

[GROANING]

[GLASS BREAKING]

[GROANING]

JAMES CAMERON: You're cutting to a very mundane scene.

But in the context of it being a attention crosscutting

scenario, it's a solution that might happen but isn't

gonna happen.

And they could have been saved but

for had they just answered the phone,

or something has happened.

The ringer got turned off.

And you've established that.

You're building tension in all these ways.

You have to be led to believe as the audience

that something is going to happen soon,

and then you prolong it.

You don't just make it happen.

You prolong it.

So you've informed the audience in some way stylistically

that something bad is going to happen, or something very bad

could happen to your character, and then you prolong.

So you've told them to be in that state,

and then you suspend that state and then hold them

in that state.

So they don't feel like it's getting just snatched away

from them before they've had a chance to experience and feel

it.

Now, that might be a happy-- a state of happiness,

might be a state of wonder.

You don't want to give them a little taste of wonder

and then take it away.

You want to stay in it.

So tension is the same thing.

So there's a prolongation of tension,

and that's usually done with crosscutting two narratives

that you feel are converging to each other.

There are entire films that build tension

across the arc of the film, or there

are films that build tension across an entire act

of the film, let's say.

So "Titanic" would be an example where tension slowly

builds over time.

Here's a clue.

They got the iceberg warning.

Captain puts it in his pocket, doesn't do anything,

tells them to speed up.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Oh, not to worry.

Quite normal for this time of year.

In fact, we're speeding up.

I've just ordered the last boilers lit.

[END PLAYBACK]

JAMES CAMERON: It's like, well, wait a minute.

There's an iceberg ahead.

So you're building tension at a relatively mild level.

Once they hit the iceberg, now you're

building tension for your main characters.

Who's going to get off?

How are they going to be saved?

What are the obstacles that are going to be in their path?

Bad stuff is coming, and we move relentlessly toward that.

And we even, you know, release the tension for a while.

You know, Rose gets in the lifeboat, and it's very sad.

But you know at least she's going to get away.

Then she jumps back on the ship.

Now you've just ratcheted it up again.

It's important to understand the sort of the meta tension

that can rise across an entire section of a movie

until it has some kind of cathartic or pivotal ending.

In that case, the ship plunges, the scene on the raft.

And Jack dies, and then you get into the kind

of series of codas that kind of resolve

the film emotionally and thematically.

But-- and the tension is released at that point.

And a great example, recent example, is "Dunkirk."

That's two hours-plus of just rising tension.

And it's very skillfully done.

And the score is a major component of that.

It just builds and builds and builds.

And there's just this feeling of dread and anxiety

that builds across that entire film

until those characters finally get pulled off

that beach at the end.

And they're on those boats going home.

And you feel like you've won.

You've earned this feeling of-- of delivery, of transport.

And so, you know, that's a case where it just

was unrelenting across the entire movie on a-- on a rising

curve.

And that's an incredible thing to be

able to modulate that-- that way.

So tension is an art, and it's a discipline.

And it can come in small amounts.

It can come in longer sections.

And it come-- and it can come across an entire--

entire story arc.

[CHEERING]

[DANCE MUSIC]

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

JAMES CAMERON: In this scene, what you

have is the convergence of three separate plotlines.

So that was a structural motif that was used for that film.

We follow in a third-person omniscient way,

jumping back and forth, between three storylines--

Sarah, introducing her and getting to know her

and presumably like her to some extent.

And then we see the Terminator arrive through time.

We don't know it's through time, but we sort of know

he's come from somewhere, and see him start

hunting down and killing--

brutally killing people with her name.

So even though they haven't met, and the two storylines haven't

converged yet, there's already an interrelationship

between those two storylines.

Kyle Reese comes through time same way.

Although his arrival is much messier and rougher on him

than it is on the Terminator, we can

make the assumption he has come from the same place.

He is from whatever that world is.

So there's already a connection between the two of them.

And we don't know if he's a good guy or another bad guy.

He certainly acts very, very sinister.

But I think we innately sense that he's probably

a protagonist.

And he goes through getting weapons, getting clothes,

doing the same things the Terminator does, just

in a different way.

He's more furtive.

He doesn't hurt anybody.

The Terminator just bulldozes through whatever

to get his objectives.

So they're contrasted to each other.

So even though they're clearly both soldiers,

they're both sinister, the Terminator

is the more is the more disturbing of the two.

And they're both stalking Sarah.

Terminator's is moving toward her in this relentless fashion,

Reese is following her.

So is he-- we don't know if he's a protector,

or if he's a good guy, if he's a bad guy.

But we feel a relentless sense that the three storylines

are converging.

[DANCE MUSIC]

The music is pounding.

So she sits down.

She's nervous.

[DANCE MUSIC]

And--

[DANCE MUSIC]

--Terminator walks in.

[DANCE MUSIC]

The music tells me, I'm in the same club.

I'm at the door of the club.

He's there.

He's in the room with her.

The killer that we've seen brutally

kill two other people in his hunt for her

and kill the gun shop owner to get the weapons to do so

is now in the room.

So it's going to happen.

It's going to go down.

So we've just started the clock on our chess move.

We've just started the clock.

And the audience knows it.

And they know that this is the beginning of a thing, a set

piece, if you will, a scene.

It just started.

The second you put them both in the same room,

or in the same space, you've just

said to the audience, all right, guys, it's on.

Right?

Now what's going to happen?

So the jeopardy just shot up.

The jeopardy's been slowly building.

It just shot up to a new level.

[DANCE MUSIC]

Terminator moves in his very machine-like like fashion

searching.

Right?

The clerk tells the bouncer to stop him.

He just crushes the guy's hand.

He doesn't even look at him.

He just glances at him and then moves away.

Now he's in scan mode.

The hunter, killer, machine scanning like a surveillance

camera.

[DANCE MUSIC]

His eyes scan, then his head turns

to give him more compliance.

Then his eyes scan the other way.

Then he has to move his head.

It's unnatural.

It's not human.

It's machine-like.

It's like a surveillance camera scanning.

So that's something that we worked out together

in rehearsal.

Now here's Sarah.

You cut back to the victim, the innocent victim, Bambi.

You know?

Here comes the hunter tromping through the woods.

Here's Bambi.

It's intercutting.

The intercutting intensifies the sense of expectation

and builds suspense.

Something is going to happen.

It is inevitable.

He will find her.

He's very thorough.

So we've established him searching

in a very machine-like and thorough fashion.

And we've established her sitting there and essentially

helpless and worried.

Back to him scanning some more.

Same principle.

Back to her.

Rising tension by intercutting.

Right?

[DANCE MUSIC]

Here comes the big move.

She knocks the water bottle off her table.

And we go into slow motion.

We're telling the audience something.

The Terminator walks into the frame scanning relentlessly,

doesn't see her, misses her completely.

The timing was-- we had to do this shot a few times,

obviously, to get the timing perfectly.

The way he appears through the dancers.

The waitresses cross.

It's very stacked.

This is using a long lens.

If I had done this on a short lens, a wide lens,

I'd have seen too much background.

I wouldn't have been selective enough.

My waitress crossing in the foreground

would have been the size of the Hindenburg.

Sarah would have been a big.

Terminator would have been little.

The farther I move back, the longer the focal length I use.

The more I stack the shot, the more

I compress the space, the bigger he is.

And the more I'm able to look through a number of dancing

bodies and sort of graphic forms that

are out of focus to see him.

He's the plant of focus.

She's not.

She's not.

Right?

So this is selective.

This is being highly selective, leading the audience's eye

in a selective fashion, by using composition, lighting, focus.

He misses her.

She comes back up.

She didn't see him--

not that she even knows what he looks like.

Innocent victim, again.

We're just reminding the audience who

our protagonist is, and the fact that she

doesn't know what's coming.

And it just missed her.

But we have another escalation.

In her eyes, in that moment, and it's

aided and abetted by a little flush of light from the dance

floor as two dancers part.

In slow motion, she sees something.

Now I haven't seen what she sees yet.

She could be seeing the Terminator.

But why would she be alarmed at the Terminator?

She's never seen the Terminator.

She sees something, and we see it in her face.

And this is a beautiful piece of editing by Mark Goldblatt.

He holds on it just enough frames for you

to see her see something.

And we don't know what it is.

And these are magical shots when you're able to get them.

When the character-- she's not doing anything.

It'd be very hard to express it in a storyboard.

It's something changes.

And what she sees is Reese, the person that she knows,

that she's seen stalking her.

Now she is afraid of this guy.

She doesn't even know about the other guy yet.

Reese's eyes come up.

[DISTORTED DANCE MUSIC]

And he sees something.

He sees her.

Their eyes meet in a mirror.

It's a love story.

Their eyes meet across a crowded room.

It's a love story with shotguns.

Another long lens shot that this suggests-- and to this day,

I don't remember if this is supposed to be Sarah's hair

or not.

But I'm shooting over her, and it's a stacked shot.

Or there's just some random foreground.

I think it's a bit of random foreground.

But it's a long lens shot.

So it suggests that her brain has

excluded the entire environment in between her and him

and gone--

[BIG WHOOSH] --like that into--

and this is how lens choices are very subjective.

If I were to duplicate my experience right now,

my subjective experience right now,

my vision stretches out to where my hands are.

Way out here.

And way down here and way up here.

If I were to duplicate that with a lens,

I'd need to be on like a 10 or 12 millimeter fisheye lens.

It would look ridiculous.

It would look highly distorted.

But I'm seeing all this.

But it's not what my brain is focused on.

And it's not what I would remember.

So lens choice is about the memory you

would have if you were there.

So if I saw something really interesting,

my focus, my attention, would go--

[SMALLER WHOOSH] --just to that thing, a very tiny amount

of my visual field.

If I walk into a new room, a place I'd never seen before,

my attention gets much wider.

I want to take in the whole space.

I want to feel where I am.

I want to feel the environment around me.

Right?

That's how we perceive.

That's how we go through life perceiving.

And you look at the whole picture,

and then you see something interesting.

Maybe you walk into a big room that's a party.

And maybe across the room you see

somebody you recognize in your attention goes--

[QUICK EXHALE] You just went from an 18 millimeter lens

to a 175 millimeter lens.

You just did it in your head.

And it's not that we have such a mechanism, but we do.

It's in our visual cortex, in our processing.

And if you remember that moment six months later,

you would remember it that way.

I walked in, I saw the whole place, boom.

I saw Bob.

And I focused on him, and I crossed the room.

Now I'm in a tracking shot going over to Bob, or whoever.

So the point is that cinematic language maps

to human perception.

But if you want to really resonate with an audience,

you resonate based on how a million years of evolution

have programmed our brains and our visual cortexes--

cortexes?

--to be the way they are.

So we're now in Sarah's reality, looking across the room

and zooming in-- not literally zooming in-- but switching to--

I think this was shot on 135 millimeter lens.

And she's looking at him.

And then she doesn't want him to see her, so she looks away.

Meanwhile, Terminator has completed his scan.

This is intercutting.

It's all done in slow motion.

She's moving in slow motion.

The dancers are dancing in slow motion.

It's taken on a dream-like aspect.

On the Terminator's turn, the source music,

the pounding '80s synth dance music

starts to fade away and get very echoey.

And the score, which is saying the--

which is saying the narrative, the driving force, comes up.

[DANCE MUSIC]

Club music's jamming.

[DANCE MUSIC]

A low beat starts to come in here, a threatening energy

on his eyes.

[DISTORTED DANCE MUSIC]

And there's that heartbeat underneath.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

And by the time the Terminator turns, the Terminator's motif,

if you will--

the clanging, metallic rhythmic, relentless sound comes in.

The source music in the club is almost gone.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

So I'll pot that out so you guys can hear me.

And he starts his move.

He's seen the target.

He starts his move.

Now we see what he sees.

Now, at the time I shot this, I thought, well, maybe I'll

even go into what we called "Termovision," Terminator

vision.

I'll go fully subjective.

I'll have him analyzing the whole scene.

We tried it.

I didn't like it.

Because it broke the flow.

But we still know we're in his vision.

And we're pulling back in front of him.

And we're seeing her revealed.

It's all in slow motion.

So we're stretching time.

We're stretching time, because we've

put you in a state of dread.

We've done it with crosscutting.

We've done it by converging the three storylines.

We've done it with music.

And now we want to stretch that moment.

We want you to continue to feel that grit

as long as we can stretch it out in a nightmarish fashion.

In real life, something like this

might have happened in two or three seconds.

We want to stretch it out as long as we can.

Because once you've gotten the audience to a place

that they're enjoying, because perversely people actually

enjoy being scared, they enjoy being tense,

they enjoy having an emotional reaction.

They also enjoy laughing.

They enjoy crying.

They enjoy the warmth of a great relationship moment.

All those things.

But they're here to enjoy all of it in all its colors,

in all its dynamics.

Once they're enjoying something, you'll

let them stay there as long as you can.

You sustain the state.

So the slow motion is used to continue

to build tension by sustaining and crosscutting,

building the tension.

Something's going to happen right now.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

And her eyes see the Terminator.

Reese sees the Terminator.

He's the first one to take action.

It's in slow motion.

It's all happening in a dream state.

It's horrifying.

Can he get these idiots out of the way in time

before the Terminator puts the laser dot on her?

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

Yes.

Barely.

And it's split-second.

And I just want to compliment Mark Goldblatt

for doing a remarkable job on the cutting of this scene

and refining it down to one split-second shot.

I think Kyle Reese is probably on screen in the pivotal moment

of this scene--

we can find out right now--

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7--

[MOUSE CLICKING]

10 frames.

After all these long slow-motion shots,

it all pivots on 10 frames.

And now watch what happens next, here in real-time.

She falls out the way.

He starts shooting.

We pop back and forth.

These are 10 frame, 16 frame, 18 frame shots.

It all happens like lightning.

It even seems faster because of the fact--

the juxtaposition that you're coming off of slow motion

into action.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

So just to see it again.

We're building.

We're building in slow, nightmarish, dream-like moment

to Reese pulls the trigger.

Everything pivots on that.

And then it's just boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Shot.

Shot.

Shot.

Shot.

Shot.

Shot.

Cut.

It's 18 frames per cut.

And it doesn't stop again until we find out what

happened to the Terminator.

And he's on the ground not dead.

Is he dead?

And he's completely still.

So what the shot is saying is, he's dead.

Or is he?

No he's not.

I could have gone straight to him opening his eyes.

But it was more interesting to do the hand.

So now the whole thing just escalated to a new level.

We cut to Sarah to show that she saw the result of him

taking six 12-gauge rounds at close range

and falling to the ground.

She saw that he's getting up.

Because it's important later that she saw it.

[GUNFIRE, SCREAMING]

This is a case where a low angle--

a low wide-angle lens, an 18 millimeter lens

right on the floor, makes him seem huge.

Because now you want to give him the power.

Power has shifted.

Reese had the power for a moment, but it was ineffective.

Now the Terminator has ascended.

He's that which must be feared.

He's that which is implacable that can't be stopped.

So you want to make him big and powerful at this point.

Here's a shot that's, you know, I

could have done this on a different choice of lenses.

This is actually a relatively short lens

very close to the weapon.

And I found this out when I was storyboarding,

when I was photographing my friend Bill Wisher

and having him stick shotguns out of my car in the--

out in the-- out at the city dump,

that if I got a long lens, I saw a small gun

in the actor's hand relative to the size of their face.

If I moved in on a wider lens, I saw a big gun

that was right in front of me.

It was scarier.

So the instrument of death became as important

as the Terminator.

And he sort of becomes one with it.

And it's because the wide lenses seem to enhance

the power of the shot.

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

Everything you do, every decision you make, every lens

choice you make, everything that you ask an actor to do all

adds up to a total effect of a film.

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

The moment in aliens when Ripley's running

through the station and everything's blowing up

and it's on fire and she runs through a kind of wall of steam

and she finds herself in a room, a big chamber surrounded

by alien eggs and looking at the egg laying creature itself,

seeing its giant egg sack, seeing the creature itself,

and everything goes very quiet.

And you're in this kind of a dream within the greater

dream of the movie, this kind of very dream-like out of body

kind of moment where everything's in slow motion,

and it gets very quiet.

Even though you know the explosions are going off

and all sorts of stuff, you're suddenly

in this subjective reality.

That came from a dream where I went into a dark room,

I walked to the center of the room, and I looked around.

And as my eyes adjusted to the darkness,

I realized that every square inch

of the walls and the ceiling were covered by wasps,

and I knew I couldn't make it to the door before they got to me.

So I just froze.

And I don't remember what happened next doesn't matter,

but the point is that idea of suddenly realizing

you're in an extremely threatening space

and the only thing you can do is freeze and think your way out

of it was the nucleus of an idea that then got turned into what

ultimately became the first encounter with the alien queen

in the egg chamber, which stylistically

is an interesting scene, because I

wanted to capture that feeling.

Know what it is that you're feeling,

that you want the audience to feel, and then

start talking to people and figuring it out

and experimenting around and figuring out

how to convey that feeling to your audience.

All right so we're jumping way forward in the film now.

There at the atmosphere processing station.

Everything's blowing up.

So it's very loud.

I

Mean, we're literally spinning the needle

in the sound design in the mix.

We're in the red.

Explosions are happening, and she's running.

We're mixing very subjective handheld moving shots

with fire, with explosions.

Were blowing cork chunks from air mortars,

and we're blasting her with shots

from CO2 fire extinguishers.

And we've got fire gel burning, and we're

shaking the camera to suggest that it's

a kinetic, very frenzied kind of sequence.

We're on a fairly long lens here.

It's hand-held, fairly long lens.

I can't tell you right now.

I don't remember.

It might be a 50 or 60 mil.

We're handholding it, and we're walking backwards with her.

So it's very shaky.

We feel that sense of the energy of the whole place coming

apart.

Sound design has been very loud and concussive

and lots of camera shake.

And it all fades away, and the only thing that's left

is this kind of droning sound and the breath.

Now the whole place is still shaking and blowing up,

but we've just gone into an altered state of awareness.

And the speed ramp--

we used to call it a speed trap.

Now you do it as a digital post effect to change the speed.

So we've gone from 24 to 48 frames a second.

So we're in slow motion.

We're in an extreme close-up on Sigourney

that she's walked into, and she's looking

around seeing something.

She's seeing it before.

We're seeing it.

So it's the same thing in the audience's interest.

They're leaning forward.

What is it that she's seeing.

What has stopped her?

She's been running as fast as you can.

If you're running with the little girl to get out,

we know that seconds count.

We know the whole place is going to blow up.

What she's doing doesn't seem to make any sense.

So there's a strange nightmarish quality to it.

It's that same nightmarish quality as

in the nightclub in terminator.

The slow motion is telling you something,

and it puts you into an altered state of awareness.

And the sound design is doing the same thing.

All the explosions have gone away.

All the steam blasts and fire effects and deep subwoofer

shape, it's all gone away, and it's

gone very clear and very thin.

And the only thing you hear is your breathing.

So something is going on.

What has she seen?

Shit balls.

100 alien eggs and she's standing right

in the middle of them.

So it's a nightmarish--

it's a nightmarish image.

It's, kind of, her worst nightmare.

So now so we have the wide shot, the wide reveal

shot with all the eggs.

And this is like all the eggs we could afford to build.

If we could do it now digitally same scene,

it would go on there.

There'd be more eggs.

We'd do a digital extension.

We'd build 10 eggs, and we'd digitally

extend it with another couple of hundred

to really hammer the point.

But it plays, and I think that's a good lesson.

If you can't afford to do a digital extension of 100 eggs,

make as many as you can, and it'll still work.

The concept will still work.

So now we just hear this very echoey kind

of drone and her breathing as her eyes slowly track around,

and again we're still in slow motion.

I want you to feel the anticipatory whatever it is.

It's a joyful experience to feel strange, anxious emotions

in a movie.

That's what you paid for.

That's what you came here for.

So if you're giving the audience what they came for,

you extend it.

You stay in that state.

So she doesn't see it yet.

She still hasn't seen it.

Now we're really milking it.

She's turning.

We're still in slow motion.

What are we hearing?

The little pilot light of her flamethrower,

and that strange machine like droning that tells you she's

deep in the heart of the station,

but it sort of reminds us that we're

deep in the heart of this insect hive.

She still hasn't seen it, but she knows it's behind her.

And it's that feeling in a dream in a nightmare where

you don't want to turn and you don't want to turn

and you don't want to turn, but you know you're going to turn.

And the audience plays the game, and they

know the language of this.

They know it's there.

They know it's there behind her.

So we're even milking the turn farther.

Now I've punched in, and the moment where I see her eye

see it is going to be the payoff,

but we've built to it with, I think, six shots already.

So I'm focused on her far eye.

When you're on a lens this long, you

have to pick which eye's in focus.

And sometimes it's a question of some debate with the camera

operator.

You got to pick an eye.

Well, we picked that eye, because we could see it better.

This one's hidden in darkness.

We're not interested in Newt here.

We're following Sigourney.

So Newt even though she's right there in the shot,

she's out of focus.

We're following Ripley.

Ripley is about to meet her nightmare.

So the shot ends when she has seen something.

We're going to cut to it.

Now we may expect to cut to something that we recognize,

an alien, but that's not what we're giving you.

What we're giving you is something mysterious.

It's the thing that's laying the eggs, so now that's progress.

Now we're seeing where the eggs come from.

Her eyes go up, follow it around.

We see the eggs inside it.

We see it glistening.

We see it moving.

It's a biological thing.

It's not like anything we've seen before.

We're curious.

We're afraid.

It's still got a nightmarish quality,

but we're getting there.

We're coming toward the answer, and we're

several shots into the sequence of this reveal now.

We're about to reveal the thing itself.

She keeps looking.

It's mysterious.

It's alien.

It's enigmatic, and it's big.

What this shot tells you, because we jump back over

her is it's big.

Whatever it is it's big, and it's mysterious.

I can't even tell what I'm looking at.

Maybe it's bones.

Maybe it's an insect.

Probably alive, and yes it's moving.

So now it's going to reveal itself not only to her

but obviously to us.

And the teeth extend, and yes it's definitely an alien,

but it's not like anything we've seen before.

And we immediately go from that reveal to the reveal

that there's not just one, but there's a whole army of them.

Ripley immediately knows that for Newt to survive,

she has to survive.

She has to get out of here somehow.

And she's surrounded by alien warriors,

and they're faster than she is.

And they're far more powerful than she is.

So she's not going to fight the warriors.

She's going to negotiate with the alien queen,

and that's exactly what she does.

So she sees the threat.

She's surrounded by the type of alien we've seen before.

The setting down of Newt is the gunslinger pushing their cloak

open to reveal their sixth gun.

She's going to fight.

Or is she?

Now we're in the queen's perspective.

Now we're seeing the little human in the egg chamber

from the Queen's perspective, and she

does something we don't expect.

She opens fire on the eggs, and the queen's response

is instantaneous.

And the audience understands what it means.

Ripley's going to burn the eggs.

She hasn't done it yet, but she can.

She's found the queen's weakness,

and she points the gun at the eggs.

There's not a line of dialogue in the whole scene,

and you see by the gesture that the puppeteers were

able to create-- now remember, this is all practical effects.

This is not CG.

You could do it with CG, and there's

no reason not to or you can do it with practical effects

like we did here.

And there's a place for--

place for both.

The way the alien queen lowers its head tells you

that it's intelligent enough to understand, and she's resolute.

The way Sigourney played it was that's right.

That's right.

I mean business.

Do we have a deal?

An the alien queen looks one way,

and Ripley follows and that warrior backs off.

She looks the other way and hisses.

She tells the other warrior to back off.

It's all in gesture.

And Ripley says, OK, I'm going to take this equipoise,

and I'm going to use it.

And I'm going to get the hell out of here.

And again, we milk it.

We fetishize the moment.

We make it palpable by doing an insert of the feet walking

through the slimy roots of the egg, so that we feel it.

We feel what she's feeling.

We're with her.

We hear what she hears.

We see what she sees.

We feel what she feels, so we're there with her.

Our hearts are pounding, and she knows that this truth

isn't going to last.

And then an egg opens.

Now does the queen control the eggs and when they hatch.

Is to queen is about to unleash 100 face huggers?

She doesn't trust that the truce is going to last,

so she says fuck it.

And then it's on.

So from this moment, because in the queen's mind

Ripley broke the truce it becomes a revenge story.

It's revenge for her burning--

for Ripley burning her babies.

And what's the principle at work here?

It's not to two men going at it to see who is most macho.

It's two women protecting their children

with the fury of the protective mother,

and so the conceit here was it's a different motivation.

It's a different motivation for a heroic action character

and in this case Sigourney's character.

It's a different motivation for a monster

than you've seen before, because I don't believe in villains.

I believe everybody's got a reason for doing what they do.

So what was the alien queen's reason for relentlessly

hunting her down?

This was-- this became a personal story at this point,

and I think a lot of the power of it came from that.

So you have to understand it's not

like I knew going in exactly every beat of how

this came out.

It was an exploration.

I did a lot of coverage on this.

I tried some things.

I didn't know it was going to work, trying to speed ramp,

trying this slow motion thing.

I wanted to do something.

I had a goal, which was to create

that subjective kind of out of body dreamlike nightmarish

experience.

I didn't exactly know how to go about it.

I experimented, talked to the DP.

We figured some stuff out, and it evolved.

And where it really kicked up to the next level

was in the sound design in the mix,

and I remember right now it was one

of the most satisfying experiences I've ever

had on a mixing stage was mixing this scene.

And when we finished it, we all looked at each other,

and we knew it we'd done something,

because we had fulfilled the promise of that nightmare.

[CREEPY MUSIC]

NARRATOR: So here's a scene from "Aliens."

And they've gone into the colony base that's

on the planet where we know from the first film

that the aliens have existed.

And they've already seen face huggers in jars.

So Ripley is already very nervous.

And they've gone in, the whole base seems to be deserted.

There's evidence of violence, evidence of weapons being used,

but there are no people.

We've been in a kind of anxious, suspenseful state.

We've come in, we've been very subjective,

we've searched the place.

We keep expecting something to jump out,

keep expecting something to jump out but it doesn't.

And now we're going to win things a little tighter.

And this is a long game.

We've been building and building and building for a long time

here.

So how do we signal to the audience

that there is an escalation or there's a swerve,

something new is happening?

Our character gets a signal.

They've got these trackers.

They've been walking around the base with these trackers.

Nothing's shown up.

All of a sudden there's movement.

We got something here.

He says we got something, something moving.

Where is it?

Behind us.

One of us?

MAN: Hey [INAUDIBLE].

Where are your people?

You're 20 minutes into a long game

kind of suspenseful sequence at this point.

And now it's going to come to a head.

MAN (ON RADIO): Uh, that's a negative.

We're rolling operations.

It's all up to me, Frosty.

Just keep moving, baby.

NARRATOR: He moves forward with his gun, which is basically

just a steadicam on.

But I made the assumption at the time,

and this was in 1985, that the steadicam was a tool that we

used behind the scenes.

But it wasn't well known.

So we just basically took a steadicam

and dressed it up with a big machine gun sitting on it.

And it was Hell to operate because it was really heavy.

But the two actors that had carry it did a great job.

Okay, so we're in a tracking shot.

The lighting is very low key.

We've got some sense of source lighting here.

And we've got source lighting coming from their lights.

So it feels very, very dim and dark and suspenseful.

These are just basic ways of selling

that you're in sort of a haunted house, the spooky environment,

as opposed to the brightly lit kind of sterile lab

that it could have been.

I mean, it's a lab.

It's a medical space, could have been brightly lit.

But it isn't.

So the power is failing.

There is the suggestion that violence has happened and could

happen again in a split second.

Now we don't know how jumpy Ripley is,

so I did a little thing here where he brushes the microscope

arm, or whatever it is, and there

was this carefully balanced flask sitting here.

And Sigourney jumps.

And it puts you subjectively in her character for a moment.

It's not meant to make the audience jump,

because they see it in progress.

It's different than a jump scare.

In a jump scare the audience doesn't know

what's going to happen next.

And something moves very quickly.

And there might be a music sting.

And we jump.

This case is not us jumping, this is her jumping.

And it's to externalize her mental state, which

is hair trigger.

She's trying to process rationally,

she's trying to be the rational person that she

imagines herself to be, but her heart's pounding.

Because she's the only one there that's encountered this species

before.

So she's more keyed up than everybody else is.

They should be more scared than they are.

They're just treating it as professional soldiers,

military guys doing what they do.

So he's looking at the screen.

He says it's straight in front of us so we're going to move,

we're going to go in that direction.

Because of course that's what you do in a horror movie.

You're going to go toward the danger because of their hubris.

So thematically, that was a theme throughout the film.

These guys thought they were undefeatable.

They had the big guns.

They were against a non intelligent species that

had no weaponry whatsoever.

What's to worry about?

And it was always in my mind writing

this, kind of a metaphor for the Vietnam War,

where the big stomping superpower was going

to go into the little backward developing country

where all they had was a bunch of hand-me-down AK 47s

and they were running through the jungle in bare feet.

And we were going to go in with our helicopters

and our missiles and our defoliants and our B52s.

And we were going to bomb them into the Stone Age

and we were going to win in six months.

Cut to 10 years later, and the US is pulling out of Vietnam

with its tail between its legs.

And that was 10 years before this movie was made.

The fall of Saigon was in 1975.

So it was recent history, it was something

that I was paying attention to.

And it was resonating into a science fiction film that

took place on another planet.

We never specifically say that these guys are Americans.

In fact, you can imagine that they are.

Or do we?

Wait a minute.

Does he have an- oh, sorry.

I take it back.

There are a few extra stars in the number

of states because presumably, America

is a colonial superpower in this imagined future.

But we never say it in dialogue, they're

just the colonial Marines.

And at the time, I didn't really know any Marines personally.

I didn't know their ethos.

Later on in my life, my younger brother would join the Marines,

serve for six years.

And I learned a whole new appreciation and respect

for the US Marine Corps.

And I actually wouldn't make this movie this way

now, because of what I know about the US Marines.

But every filmmaker evolved.

They learn, they observe life, and sometimes

their opinions on things change.

So this is all classic suspense.

So we have the moment where you're at the door, the corner.

The pieing of the room, as they say

in a police show or something like that,

where you sweep the space.

Now we've just gone into a subjective shot.

We don't quite know why we're in a subjective shot.

But the camera's moving.

Why is the camera moving?

Is it something hiding?

This foreground object is meant to suggest that there's a place

to conceal, and we're looking out from behind concealment.

It's totally subconscious.

It's not meant to be a conscious statement.

It's a subconscious statement.

The camera just came to life.

So these guys are moving forward.

The sound design, the chirp of the tracker,

it's getting louder.

And it's getting faster.

It's an increasing tension through sound design.

We want to milk out that state.

We want the audience to be on the edge of their seats.

So here in the graphic, is it moving toward us

or are we moving toward it?

But again, the underpinning to this scene

is the presumption going in that this is an alien.

And that presumption is fed at least,

I would say, 50% by our knowledge of the prior film.

So this is a sequel intentionally

resonating with the film that came before it.

Intentionally and I think successfully.

Not overly so, but definitely that's a factor.

So now we've just gone subjective again.

We're handheld from behind the Marine, Hicks, moving up.

So we're with them.

We're moving with them.

We're on their journey just for that moment,

which is the point of the shot.

To be there and to see that there's nothing ahead of them.

They can't see anything ahead of them.

But here is this foreground thing, the shadowy foreground

thing.

And they're not looking at it.

The camera's moving ever so slightly.

And then something shadowy breaks across the frame.

Sudden lunge and a sudden music sting.

Classic.

Classic music sting.

And Drake, this was a tough one from an editorial standpoint.

Drake, our smart gun operator, opens fire.

But Hicks, with lightning quick reflexes, deflects his weapon.

A little hard to see, and if I'd had a little more money

or maybe I'd seen the dailies, if I was looking at a monitor,

I'd say, I don't see his gun.

I don't see Hicks hit Drake.

I probably would have gone again.

But this was in the day of film.

So you waited the next day and then

there was no time to go back.

But the audience still gets it.

Because two shots later, you see Hicks

having blocked Drake's gun.

You're seeing the questions being answered after the fact

but that's okay.

That's okay.

So there's an interim shot of the rounds hitting the wall.

And we see the destructive power of the smart gun.

And then we see that Hicks has deflected his weapon.

And Drake's pissed off about it.

Because he would have made the shot

if Hick's hadn't done that.

But Hicks has clearly seen something

to stop him from shooting.

And then he does something strange.

Ripley.

NARRATOR: He calls to Ripley.

So now you know it's not an alien.

But what is it?

So now you've just toggled out of suspense mode.

The suspense has been alleviated.

It's now dropped to zero.

Now you're into curiosity.

It's been replaced by curiosity different emotion.

Different physiological response.

Now you're leaning forward.

What is it that Hicks has seen?

We're not telling you.

We saw something, but we don't know what it is.

And we're not going to answer the question right away.

Now she's seeing something.

And we can tell by her expression

that it's interesting.

But we don't know what it is.

Holy shit.

Now to me this is the right order of information.

You see the character see something.

And it's clearly there in her face.

Unmistakable.

I'm looking, I'm looking, and I see something.

Sigourney was not looking at Carrie Henn, who played Newt.

She was probably looking at a dot on the wall

and creating that in her mind.

If she had felt that she needed Carrie to be there,

we might have had Carrie there.

I don't remember.

But it depends on the individual actor.

But she might have been reacting to nothing.

And this is what she sees.

And so now we have the reveal.

We've just introduced a character.

Now as the film was written, we've already met her.

And there was a whole sort of eight minute sequence with her

when she was not the unkempt little savage animal.

My intention there was to draw a contrast

to see her before and after.

As the film was finally cut and released,

we took out all of reel two and basically threw it

in the trash.

And so we didn't see Newt.

This is now her introduction shot.

So this was an unplanned introduction

that works very well.

But I think it's critical to understand that every shot is

always doing something.

The audience is learning.

And once the audience jumps hip to the fact

that the film is teaching you things

you need to know further on in the film,

you'll continue to pay attention.

You start to play the game.

The art of low-budget filmmaking is the art of being

thoroughly prepared and maximizing what you have.

And your preparation is at every level of design storyboarding,

technical scouting, selecting your locations,

trying to get the most bang for the buck out of a location,

versus having to build a set.

You'll sacrifice some control.

You'll sacrifice some design elements

that you might have if you'd had the budget to build

a million dollar set.

But it's okay.

The essence of the story will come through regardless.

And you're going to select a crew for their ability

to move fast and take no prisoners,

but still generate images of high quality

that are punching above their weight,

so that the film that you end up with looks great,

and you don't see and feel the compromises

that you know you've made.

You're not going to have a movie star, which

can be a blessing in the sense that it forces you

as a filmmaker to earn the audience's

interest in that character.

So I think it builds craft.

And maybe you have to make two or three films at a more modest

budget to prove--

to prove yourself, and to learn the craft,

and to prove that the craft that you have learned to,

you know, the powers that be, that sign--

that sign the checks.

Pick a subject that can be done within the budget constraints

that you have.

And let me give you an example from my own experience.

When I was breaking in, I made "The Terminator."

That was my first directing credit.

And I knew when I was writing it that I

had to write it for a budget.

So I knew I was going to be on location, so I wasn't

going to be able to build sets.

Now, the difference between building a set of a castle

and going to a castle or a large building or large mansion

and using the location is a difference in control.

You can knock out a wall.

You can go back on a longer lens.

You can stylistically do things in a set that you cannot do

on a location.

Does the audience care?

Probably not that much.

You might not win an Academy Award

for cinematography or design because of the limitations,

but you'll still make a damn good film.

So it's a question of, when are you

getting diminishing returns for where you're spending money?

And so with "The Terminator," the idea

there was to be very everyday, very commonplace, not exotic,

for a specific reason, then drop the exotic element into it.

And that was really a motif throughout "The Terminator"

films, for the most part.

Certainly, the first film was about,

this is everyday Los Angeles.

This is a restaurant.

This is a nightclub.

This is a city street.

And the extraordinary elements came into it

from the future, Kyle Reese, and the terminator.

And even then, they were forced to deal

with contemporary elements in terms of weaponry, and so on.

And that was done by design for a very simple reason.

We couldn't afford anything else.

That script was carefully written

to be something that was affordable.

Because I knew I was coming in as an entry level filmmaker.

I knew that I was going to have to pick

my battles with the visual effects in a very

controlled way, so that it was manageable within the budget.

So we'd do a few prosthetic effects.

We saved up all our big guns for the end, where the endoskeleton

is revealed by the fire.

We had a few prosthetic gags along the way,

and we had a couple of future sequences that could be bigger

or could be smaller, that the film didn't hinge on,

where I could do some of the effects work

that I had learned how to do.

Because I asked myself, what do I bring to this specific story

other than that I created it?

Well, I know tactical filmmaking.

I know visual effects.

I've done a bit of action second-unit direction.

With an early project, you want to come in with something that

speaks to the strengths that you've already developed,

or it better be the best damn screenplay in history.

It's really more important, I would say,

than the technical understanding of the art of photography

and lighting, is to have that communication with the director

of photography.

If you're working with someone you've never

worked with before, spend a lot of time

with that person looking at films and saying what you like

and what you see and what's important.

And ask the director of photography, how do I do that?

How will we do that?

How will we get that--

that sort of highly directional soft cross light

coming in through the window?

How can we get that?

How can we get that richness of tone based on your experience?

How have you done that in the past?

And what will that involve for me technically

during the shooting day?

And if I want to change my angle--

let's say I'm going to go outside the window,

and the person comes to the window,

how does that not suddenly look very flat?

Because I'm literally-- I've got the lights right behind me

at that point.

Well, how will we cheat that?

How will we manage window reflections?

How will we shoot in cars?

How will we do all these things?

So get that dialogue going as early as possible.

When I made "Terminator," I hired Adam Greenberg.

And I sat down with him, and we watched two films together.

One was "Blade Runner," and one was "The Road Warrior,"

so "Mad Max 2."

And we watched both those films.

And I said, I want both of those films put into a blender.

And he said, but they're completely different.

I said, exactly, exactly.

How do we create a common ground between those two films,

the kinetic, moving camera, wide lenses, hauling ass before

and following cars, very dynamic, but at the same time,

that moody, sort of almost noir, film noir quality,

German expressionist quality-- strong shadows,

deep blacks, hard edge lights, where

you need very precise lighting control to get that effect?

I said, we need to figure out how to do that.

And we talked about it a lot.

And we even went out and drove around the town

with a light meter to find out what streets were bright enough

that we could shoot essentially natural light at night

or available light at night.

Because we wouldn't have to bring

in condors and lights and things that we couldn't afford.

So we just found mercury vapor lights

on streets that were brighter.

And a good tip there is car lots, used car lots

or new car lots.

They always have bright lights.

In every city, there's a row of, like, car dealerships.

Just shoot on that street, because everything's all

lit up.

And you won't need any additional lights.

Of course, these days, the cameras

are much more sensitive.

But we were shooting on negative at the time.

So you know, we had to-- we had to find a way

to shoot without a lot of lights.

And Adam said, we're going to be shooting wide open.

We'll be shooting at F1.4 on prime lenses.

So you know, I had schooled myself

on the nature of lenses and photography enough

by that point to understand I won't have a zoom lens.

So if I need to change lenses, that's going to take us time.

I have to factor that into my shooting day.

And you know, I wanted a Steadicam.

We couldn't afford a Steadicam.

So the DP made a rig with some speed rail

tubing to drop the camera down into it,

like a Steadicam low-mode type position.

And he just kind of wore it with some straps over his shoulder.

And he happened to be an extremely good

handheld operator.

So he created, essentially, low-mode Steadicam shots,

and we just did it that way.

And so you know, you have to use--

you have to use every trick in the book and invent new ones.

The whole film was shot in about 42 days.

And when I got it done, when I got that body of shooting done,

there were still some shots I needed.

So I snuck back out with five people

and shot for a week, five people.

And I operated the camera myself.

I lit it myself.

I did all that.

So you have to be prepared to accomplish your goal

in ingenious ways and know where it's okay to compromise

and where it isn't.

And rehearse the crap out of it ahead of time.

Because rehearsals are cheap or free, and they pay off.

And have very, very good communication

with your director of photography,

so that you know exactly how you're

going to shoot everything.

And be prepared with a plan B and a plan C, in case

it's raining, or there's something else that

stands in your way on the day.

Because at that kind of budget, you're

not going to be able to get to go back.

And you know, I go on for hours about all the cheap house

tricks that we used on "Terminator" to tell that--

to tell that story.

But the important thing is to serve--

is to serve the story.

Find a way to serve the story and give it some style.

If I were shooting a very low-budget film right now,

and I need to get a lot of setups a day,

I would have a game plan for every day

of shooting that involved the nature of the lighting.

Because you lose a lot of time to lighting.

And it's technical.

It's understanding it's going to take time to move.

If you've designed the scene in such a way

that you have a big lighting change, that lighting change is

going to take time, you know.

Typically, people call it turning around.

You've shot the scene in this direction,

and the same lighting can't be used.

If you bring the camera around to do your 180

reverses or your reverse over the shoulders,

it's going to look flat.

It's going to look horrible.

And the lighting has to be all cheated

so that that reverse actually looks pleasing to the eye.

I remember once, just to prove the point to myself,

after I had made "Titanic" and done these big films, "Titanic"

and "True Lies" and films like that,

I did the last episode of a series

that I was producing called "Dark Angel."

And just to prove that I could do it,

I did 117 setups in one day.

And I did it in the following way.

I said, you will not bring a C stand or a flag

or a sandbag or any lighting instrument into the set.

We will light the set from across the street

with four 10k Xenons, and I will move every shot to the light.

We won't move the lights to the shot.

And it was a big kind of suspense action fight scene.

It was 117 setups in one day.

I shot it all handheld.

It was myself and another operator.

We kept the crew out of the workspace.

We had the stunt people standing by

to pop in for the actors at a moment's notice

within the fight choreography.

We had all our multiple takes of our effects breaking glass

and breakaway wood doors, and things like

that, all set up in advance.

I never did a second take of the same gag.

But I did have five takes of the gag ready of somebody getting

thrown through a window.

We threw them through one window,

and then we threw them through the next window,

and we threw them through the window.

And I made sure that it would all cut together.

So there are tricks like that that you can do.

And it was a little bit of a competition with Robert

Rodriguez, because I think he had done, like,

105 setups or something in one day on one of his films.

And Robert, of course, has written much and done much

to disseminate his ideas for how you do low budget.

So the point is it can be done, and it

can be done with relatively low level of compromise.

JAMES CAMERON: Arnold Schwarzenegger sucked up

a whole bunch of our budget.

What we had left to make the movie wasn't a lot.

It was around-- around, as I said, around $4 million

for a-- for a pretty ambitious film of a lot of big action

sequences.

And, as anybody knows, night street photography

can be expensive, big action sequences are expensive,

big stunts are expensive.

Visual effects, creating a future world is expensive,

and doing prosthetic makeup can be expensive.

But, you know, I also knew that it

could be done on a shoestring because I'd

worked for Roger Corman for a few years

and we'd done all that stuff.

So, once again, the key was preparation.

So clearly these storyboards were

drawn in that-- in that six-month interval

after I knew I had Arnold and I had time to plan.

So this is clearly--

Arnold has been-- his likeness has been incorporated

into the storyboards.

So he enters the room.

He's a shadowy figure.

He turns on the light.

We see the effect of Reese's firing back at him

and the car chase and the crash and everything.

His eye has been smashed, it's swollen shut.

We're starting to realize that he's partially biological,

that he's a cyborg.

And-- but we don't know exactly why he's-- we don't know yet

why he's bulletproof.

We don't know he has this--

we don't know that he has this endoskeleton inside him.

We just know that he seems to be kind of bulletproof,

but we don't know why.

And we're being led to believe that he's

a biological organism.

He's bleeding, he's swollen, and so on.

So it's-- in a funny way, it's kind of a misdirect.

So he sits down, he looks at a place

where his arm was hit by Reese's 12-gauge shotgun.

And he's prepared himself in advance

in case he needs repairs.

He reaches over, picks up an X-Acto knife,

and it begins to cut his wrist open.

And then I even took the liberty of working with my friend

Stan Winston to figure out how we were going to do it,

because we wanted to see his hand moving, we wanted

to see the actuators, the hydraulic actuators moving

in his forearm.

And so we came up with the idea that he would--

he would hide his real arm.

He would have a false arm, and there'd

be a puppeteer underneath the table coming up

through a hole in the desk.

His hand was inside a sort of glove that continued this way.

It was actually quite a clever solution.

I incorporated that into the storyboards.

That's how Stan and I decided that we were going to do it.

So he cuts his wrist, and then he--

you know, we see him-- we see him working.

We don't see what he's doing, we don't see the surgery step

by step.

He puts down the X-Acto knife.

A little bit of blood on it.

And then we see the result of it.

Now I had elected that he basically kind of flayed open

all of the skin of his forearm and we all--

we see the mechanism underneath.

And this was meant to be the big reveal.

He's a cyborg.

He's a machine with some kind of fleshy outer coating.

When we actually did the scene, we

wound up with it being a more contained surgical site,

and I don't remember the reason for that.

Maybe they just decided it was easier to do

or maybe we were a little concerned

about our-- the graphicness of that for the rating.

So now let's take a quick look at the scene.

Let's see where the storyboard led us.

So I'll go back to the beginning storyboard here.

All right.

So we've got the character coming in a window.

The character appears, throwing their shadow on a window.

For a lighting effect, we went with a Venetian blind

so that we could get that kind of German expressionistic kind

of feeling with the shadows thrown by a Venetian blind.

There's a fire escape ladder here, fire escape ladder here.

Different orientation, but it's the same visual cue.

We're in a higher level of the building.

He's coming in the back way, so we

didn't have to go through the lobby and up the elevator.

He's come up the fire escape.

There's some kind of neon sign outside.

It sort of tells us we're still urban

and we're in some flophouse that's on-- on an upper level.

We can tell it's kind of a flophouse

because it's-- it's decorated in a very crude way.

He walks in as a silhouette.

We don't see much.

And he puts on the light, and we go to the close-up.

Light bulb is in frame.

This is tracking very closely to the storyboard.

Here's the storyboard.

Light bulb's in frame.

Naked light.

And we see his injuries.

And that's very much what we shot.

So we had a very clear intention with the scene.

We knew beat by beat what we were doing.

So stylistically we're right in the zone,

we knew what we were doing because we drew it up.

It starts with the art.

And so these-- these drawings are not only storyboards,

but they're also, in a sense, design drawings or style guide.

So go to the next-- next series.

He reveals the injury and he starts to do the surgery.

And that's literally the next cut.

So here, he sits down, and the reason we decided to do this

was to show the audience that there wasn't a hole here

with a puppeteer underneath-- to implant subconsciously

in the audience's mind that it is just a normal table.

He puts his hand on the table.

He reveals the wound.

And then he reaches for the X-Acto knife.

And I knew that that was a critical cutting

piece that we needed.

That's this shot.

So this was just a, you know, 100-millimeter macro

shot that we did deep in post-production.

I probably-- I probably did this shot for 20 bucks.

Shot it myself, you know?

I didn't waste time on my inserts

when I was shooting with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I picked my battles.

And I knew that I could pick up all kinds of stuff

later down and dirty on the cheap

just by renting a camera and a couple of lights,

and I think we--

I think we shot this on my desk at my apartment.

But, knowing that you have that cut, now

in the next shot we see, geez, it looks the same, right?

Except it's not.

We've gone to this other setup.

We've gone to this setup.

And now you could use and blend it.

He could put his hand down and then

you could literally blend to the-- the other practical gag

and it would be seamless.

But who cares?

It worked.

So he starts to cut that same arm

that you think is Arnold's arm that he just set down.

Now he's-- now he's hogging into it.

We cut to Arnold.

There's a known cutaway that was known ahead

of time, planned ahead of time.

He sets the knife down.

That's this shot.

There's Arnold working, there's the knife going down,

and then we're going to reveal what it is he's been doing.

And he reaches in with a pair of forceps.

Again, using inserts to create tension and a sense of detail.

And he's opened up his arm and we

see the actuators moving inside the arm

and we actually even punch in on it.

But the key to it was to hold in this tilt down where we're

coming off his face down, down his arm.

We have no reason to think it's not Arnold's arm,

and we see it moving, and through the hole,

we can glimpse the actuator.

So how'd they do that?

I mean, you've got to remember, this is 1984.

So I think anybody that studies a sequence can kind of see

how it's done now, but the point is,

that with a little planning, a little ingenuity,

working with the right people and Stan Winston--

he was just coming up at the time,

he became one of the top world-class prosthetics

and makeup effects designers, you figure it out.

You figure it out ahead of time, you draw it up,

and if it works in a drawing, it's going to work on film.

Because film is also about image replacement

and image retention.

So seeing Arnold put his arm down and then cutting back

to a very similar angle where it's not his arm, it's now--

it's now your effects gag, creates the impression that

it's still his arm, and when you cut it open, you're--

Arnold's cutting his arm open.

So once again, the emphasis here is on-- is on planning.

When we go to the next sequence where he operates

on his eye, very similar thing.

The payoff is the moment where he sticks the exact knife

into his eye.

Well clearly we're not having Arnold Schwarzenegger stick

an X-Acto knife into his eye.

So this is what we came up with.

That we'd have a puppet head that

was actuated by a puppeteer's hand inside the head.

And there'd be one person who was pretending

to be Arnold's right arm and a completely other person

was pretending to be Arnold's left arm.

And as memory serves, I think Arnold was actually

one of the people.

So we actually got his real hand on-- on one of them.

And so once again, the frame is--

it's what's outside of the frame you're not processing--

you're not able to process.

You're only given what's inside that frame.

So here he is cutting into his eyeball,

and this is the puppet head.

And here's-- here's one person's hand and here's the other

person's hand.

And you can see that they--

they map very well to each other in terms of--

of how the shot was done.

And you're led to believe that it's Arnold,

or at least you're not quite sure of how it's being done.

And then here, he's just faking it.

If you look very carefully, if I were to stop it on a frame--

and this is just kind of looking behind the scene,

there's no blade in that X-Acto knife.

We're not going to have Arnold screw

around with an X-Acto knife up next to his eye.

Safety was more important than us being seen.

And there was no digital way to put the blade in back then.

Now, you could have him poke himself

in the face with a-- with a bladeless X-Acto knife

and put the blade in later and even

see it come out of his skin or whatever,

it'd be very easy to do.

In those days I just took the chance

that people wouldn't see it.

And they don't see it.

Because they see what they expect

to see, up to a certain point, unless you really

play fast and loose.

There's even one shot earlier in the sequence that's even more

blatant, and it's this one.

He literally is just raising an X-Acto knife

that has no blade in it.

But we want there to be a blade there.

And I don't remember anybody raising a fuss about it

at the time.

Now, of course, with internet trolls,

it'll be all over the place within 24 hours.

Aha, those idiots.

But at the time, there was a willing suspension

of disbelief, because effects were cruder back in that day.

And as-- the farther you go back, the cruder they were.

The willing suspension of disbelief was greater.

Now, the willing suspension of disbelief

is not as great, so you've got to be even better.

But the good news is, the effects techniques are better

and they're cheaper.

So you meet-- you meet the demand.

It's a constant dance.

But, you know, just full disclosure,

there's no blade in the X-Acto knife,

and it's right there in front of God and everybody,

and people want to see that there's a blade there,

and so they do.

So once again, a very low-budget film

that was trying very, very hard to punch above its weight.

And when I see it today, you know, it more or less holds up.

There's a lot of little cringey moments, you know?

But I think it did manage to punch

above its weight for its-- for its time period.

And that's what you always want to aspire to,

I think, as a filmmaker working on a low budget.

Try to look like more than what you had.

JAMES CAMERON: Generally speaking,

a lot of visual effects works against you

for a lot of reasons.

It can be numbing.

You can kind of debase the value of a given effect

by having too many of them.

They can blow your budget.

It's better to have a few memorable set pieces.

From a writing standpoint, I sort of treat it

as a standalone thing.

I'll figure out where it's going to start, what the kickoff is.

You know, what the kind of opening bell of the set piece

is and where the resolution is.

I'll figure out where my--

my out point is.

And then I'll work within that so that it's not too long,

it-- it stays focused and it stays of a piece.

And, I mean, I think there's--

just like there's an art to scene writing,

I think there's an art to creating a set piece.

It's kind of a film within a film,

and it kind of has its own-- own rules,

and it's got a beginning, a middle, and an end,

some kind of resolution.

That end may or may coincide with an act break

or it may not.

But, you know, a suspense sequence

or a scene, a dramatic scene in a film

might be a four or five-page dialogue

scene that's done in some stylized way,

maybe without any cuts.

Maybe some circulating Steadicam shot that moves sinuously

through some dramatic moment.

That would be a-- that would be a set piece.

So then you have to pick your battles carefully.

What's the narrative purpose of the set piece?

So to use the example from "Terminator"

of the first future flashback, it was actually

just to build character.

For Michael Biehn's character.

It was to show his traumatic world

and why he was basically a walking, physically-scarred,

and mentally-scarred example of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

He was the living embodiment in the present day

of how bad that future was and why you needed to prevent it

from occurring, right?

So it had a powerful narrative and character

purpose in that film, but it was also

just stuff I wanted to see.

And that's another thing.

Is there are a lot of kind of rules and advisories

about why you put things in movies, and--

and they all have to serve a purpose, except they don't.

Sometimes it should just be something

you want to see as a filmmaker.

And sometimes the only way to see it

is to make it and show it.

And I remember having this discussion

with one of the heads of 20th Century Fox

when "Avatar" was almost done and they were complaining

about the flying scenes.

Why does this flying scene go on so long?

And you've-- you've already proved the point.

It doesn't advance the narrative,

it doesn't advance the character.

I said, you're right on every count,

you've ticked every box like a good studio executive.

But guess what?

I want to see it.

And I extrapolate from that, and Stanley Kubrick

was a firm proponent of this principle.

If I want to see it, my cognitive leap

is, there are going to be lots of people that want to see it.

I want to see it for itself, not for its purpose, right?

Because there is a purpose to the things you want to see.

The purpose is to be present, to be in that world,

to be enjoying what's happening, to sustain a feeling.

So those flying scenes actually did have a big purpose.

That's when Jake and Neytiri fell in love.

And I got into a big fight with the studio over that.

And I'd like to say fortunately I prevailed, because I

love those flying scenes.

They're great.

But life is a whole lot easier if you can actually

dig deep and examine why you've made a decision

or why you have that instinct.

Because it's going to cost somebody else a bunch of money

to follow up on that instinct.

And so the more you can share it,

the more you can inspire others with it

and why that choice makes sense, the better life is going to be.

Set pieces often are good candidates for previs.

Chances are, you're not going to have a budget

to previs the entire picture, nor do you need to.

You should only have to previs the things that

are extraordinary and require really

tight, interdepartmental planning well before the fact.

So in terms of the previs process, you've got to--

you can't just start storyboarding

until you know what things are going

to look like, because what are you going to draw?

Is the character wearing a trench coat or a loincloth,

you know?

So you have to do some design before you can even

start storyboarding, otherwise you're

just going to do stick figures, which

isn't going to tell anybody anything, yourself included.

So I say start the design process,

start to evolve the storyboards.

Now some people work with storyboards

and some people work more with previs tools.

You can use a-- a suite of--

of keyframe previs.

You can do a little animation pieces.

Put a blank face, but at least it

gives you the-- the dynamics and the framing.

And you start to think about composition,

you start to think about cutting.

And now you'll-- you'll essentially do some kind

of a pre-cut of the scene with your-- with your previs.

It doesn't mean you're bound to shoot it that way.

You're always going to be open to inspiration of the moment,

but it's a good jumping-off place

so people know how much you have to build,

what does the director expect here in terms of the action?

How long am I going to be on something?

How much detail do we need?

What kind of action are we going to try to do/ How are we going

to move the camera?

How are we going to support the camera?

Is it on a crane, is it on a Steadicam,

is it being handheld?

You know, it starts to trigger a thousand questions.

And a good team around you will start to hit--

hit you with those questions, you know?

The DP's going to want to know, are we on a wide lens style

or are we on a longer lens style?

Are we on a backlight style or are

we on a diffused light style?

What's the style, you know?

Because there's a thousand different ways

to light a scene, there's a thousand different ways

to shoot a scene.

Presumably the filmmaker, if they don't come in with a style

initially, they're going to have to find

one that suits the piece, that suits the story.

That's-- that's a critical part of it.

And when those questions start to get answered,

then you can start saying, okay, I

need this shot, this shot, and this shot.

Just from my own experience, a good example of a set piece

that was done on a film that was made on a very low budget

is Reese's flashback of the future, of the traumatic future

that he comes from in the first act of "The Terminator."

And I say the first act because Reese hasn't met Sarah yet

and he hasn't met--

he hasn't met the Terminator yet.

So this is all sort of in the character setup,

and I wanted to see this future soldier in his world,

and I wanted to go into it through his fatigue-induced

dream state and come out of it where he's shocked

and disoriented and back in our present, which is his--

his past.

I knew it was going to involve visual effects models,

you know, miniatures, miniature explosions,

and some full-sized live action elements

that were done in a-- in a set of some-- some ruins,

some post-nuclear holocaust ruins.

So I thought, I'd a better draw this up.

So I approach it in a very disciplined fashion.

I got my roommate to put on some kind of military uniform.

I went and bought some guns.

We went-- we went out in a field someplace,

and I took pictures of him in all the different poses

that I wanted.

And I also did that for the car chases as well, which I also--

also storyboarded.

Had him, you know, hanging out the window,

I wanted to be able to see what kind of positions

you could get into with the weapons, what kind of lenses

I wanted to be on.

Did I want to be on telephoto lenses or close lenses?

Wanted to make the guns look big, so shorter--

shorter lenses.

And start to think, well, how am I going to shoot this?

How can I get the Insert car there?

So I started going through the whole--

whole exercise.

I got my long-suffering roommate to basically play

every character in the film except for Sarah.

I think he played Sarah a couple times.

And then I brought it all back.

I printed up all the photos.

This is back in the days of photochemistry.

So I had a bunch of prints all over my desk,

and I just started drawing it all up.

JAMES CAMERON: What we have here is the entire first future war

sequence storyboarded from end to end.

So what I was thinking is, we take the movie

and look for the commonality.

So here in the storyboard, I imagine

that Reese kind of lays his head down

on the side of the car door and goes to sleep,

and then this is a dream, as opposed to what we wound up

doing in the film, which is that he's waiting--

sitting, waiting in the car.

And he looks over and sees the construction vehicle.

We do this kind of instant transition to the future,

but we don't know we're in the future yet.

But we are.

We're now on a--

the vehicle that has treads in the future,

it's called a hunter-killer, and we tilt down,

there are a bunch of skulls on the ground.

So clearly we've done some kind of dreamlike transition,

but we haven't seen the moment where he fell asleep.

And we don't even know that that's happening yet.

And now or in the future.

So if you look at-- at the storyboard for that,

it looks like this.

Here's the vehicle with the treads

near the skulls down below.

Here's a fairly abstract shot looking up

at the hunter-killer.

And then if you progress the film,

here's that-- here's that shot.

Now I'm not seeing the spotlight or the searchlight.

And then we see Reese in the ruins.

He's established coming up here.

It wound up being a little bit different,

but, you know, here we establish Reese in his future world.

You don't have to follow the storyboards exactly.

So here's the hunter-killer crushing the skulls,

and here's the hunter-killer crushing the skull.

So there are certain images that survived

through the process and certain ones that were either winnowed

out and we wound up not doing.

For example, the way I imagined it

is that it's all very abstract at first,

and we see Reese introduced by his legs

running as he's getting shot at by this machine,

and we think he's gotten killed, but he's

hiding behind a column.

I wound up not shooting that.

I don't remember exactly why at this point.

Maybe because we didn't have time,

maybe I felt it just wasn't necessary.

But where we get into a similarity to the sequence

again is him taking cover.

Ah.

So here, we introduce this young female resistance fighter,

and then that moment is here.

Now you can see that the camera wound up reversed.

Probably just simply because of the way the set laid out,

you know?

And where the key light was.

And me not having the time--

and it really didn't matter.

And so Reese signals to her, and this

is him signaling to her here.

And then they run together.

He signals and they run.

But first they crawl, then they run.

So I think the fact the idea of him crawling

through the wreckage is actually indicated

in the next storyboard while we see the--

the hunter-killer in the background.

So it was all fairly well thought out ahead of time,

but the important thing about storyboards is

they're-- they're not--

they're not an absolute blueprint,

they're a departure point.

And what you shoot in the moment is what becomes the final film.

So you can see that the idea of seeing the-- seeing

the hunter-killer up through the wreckage as it

towers over them, I believe that-- that concept

was retained.

Ah, there it is.

So maybe-- maybe in the cutting we

decided it was better to put that shot a little bit later,

but you can see, there's a fairly close correlation

between a concept, which is that there's

some post-nuclear holocaust wreckage in the foreground

and this big chrome machine with these lights,

and it's kind of Reese's POV as the little rat running

through the maze and seeing it up above,

and that's more or less what you have right here.

So this was very useful to the miniature unit

when they were trying to build on this.

So they knew they had to build a model big enough

that they could put a foreground piece and it would hold focus.

So they wound up building quite tall models.

I think it was almost four feet tall of the hunter-killer.

So they get a lot of information from these.

And then we see Reese take shelter behind something.

Now they're running through open space here.

That's accounted for here.

So we get the same idea.

So again, this is just an idea for a shot.

This is the execution of it, but what's locked in?

The edgy lighting, the spotlights,

the emphasis on the kind of blue night light,

the cold feeling of it.

The bright magnesium-like explosions on the ground.

So those ideas were already embedded in the-- and these are

sort of a combination of storyboards and design

drawings, really, because they're-- they're giving a lot

of information to the model unit.

There's a big shot where they cover a lot of ground,

and they run-- they run across a large area.

So here, you can see little tiny figures running.

Big machine in the background and ruins.

And-- and then they reappear in another plate.

So a plate is a live element.

Sometimes the background element, sometimes it's

a foreground element.

In this case it's a foreground element of our characters.

In this case, there are actually two plates.

There's one over here before they go behind the car and one

over here after they come out from behind the car.

And then there's another big plate

in the background that's of the-- of the miniature, right?

And then some optical lasers are put across the foreground.

And you can see that that concept exists

in the storyboard and it's in the description

of the storyboard here, that that's one plate.

The car is the breakpoint, and that's another plate.

So the other thing that I think it's

important to remember about "The Terminator"

is that it was done at a time when we didn't have CG at all.

So we were using tools like miniatures,

front screen projection, rear screen projection.

So this is a cheap, low-budget, but high epic--

you know, attempting to be epic on a low budget

and doing it with rear projection.

So literally, this was a rear projection,

this was a rear projection, and that was a rear projection, all

on a big miniature set.

And that's how that was done.

To me, the power of rear screen projection

was that you could hand-hold the camera,

and you could even zoom in or move around

and made it feel very subjective.

It didn't suddenly have to become a lock-off,

because a lot of visual effects suffered from,

all of a sudden you knew you were watching a visual effects

shot because the camera locked off so that they

could composite in things.

It was all very crude.

And nowadays it's not a problem.

You just shoot-- shoot it handheld

if you want a blue screen shot, and you just

make sure you've got your tracking dots around

and then they can extract that camera move

and apply the same camera move to the background.

So you're in a car, and you're supposed

to be driving down the freeway.

There's nothing outside the window but a blue screen.

And the camera operator sitting in the right seat-- well,

I say this in New Zealand here, they'd be sitting in the left

side--

shooting-- shooting the actor driving.

And the camera's kind of shaky and you

pan over and look out the window and you come back.

And there's nothing there but blue.

But it's relatively easy to add a background

plate of what's outside that--

outside that window these days.

It's-- it's not a big deal.

I wound up with six months to sketch out

all of the key scenes and to really refine all the designs

and be ready.

And when I got to shoot that film, every second counted.

We had 42 days, and a lot of them were nights.

And even on a guerilla filmmaking schedule,

I'm working 14-hour days, it was a lot of material

to shoot in that amount of time.

But I was ready.

I knew what to shoot.

I knew every shot that I needed.

And I was just a machine.

Just going from shot to shot to shot, you know?

It's critically important to know your film

before you shoot your film.

And everything starts with the art.

Spend a good part of your time just

looking at how things really are with an artist's eye,

like you're going to try to paint it.

Like Vermeer.

You know.

There were thousands of years of painters before Vermeer,

and Vermeer suddenly figured-- he looked at light

the way it came in a window and the way it lit a scene

or lit a figure of a woman standing at a counter.

And all of a sudden he saw what that light did.

How bright the source was, the fact

that you didn't see the source, you just

saw the effect of the source, how it bounced around,

how it lit her, how it lit the wall, how

the bounce from the wall lit her.

And all of a sudden he was able to do something nobody

had ever done before, which is paint light the way

it really worked.

And he just did it with the wetware.

He didn't have any software, he didn't have any computers,

he didn't even have a camera.

It didn't exist yet.

But he saw how light worked.

So, I happened to be an artist.

Great.

A lot of-- some-- some other directors are artists.

Ridley Scott's a good sketch artist,

Guillermo Del Toro is a very accomplished artist.

Great.

If you're not an artist, study art.

Learn to draw on a very rudimentary way,

and I don't care if it's balloon heads

with smiley faces on them.

Learn to draw so that you force yourself

with a pencil and paper to think compositionally.

Do I want the character in the middle of the frame

or do I want them on the left side of the frame,

leaving the rest of the frame open in a cinemascope aspect

ratio like Sergio Leone used to do?

What style am I going to do?

What's my compositional style?

So that you can have that conversation.

First with yourself, then with your director of photography,

and then subsequent to that, in the moment on the set.

I like this, I don't like that, pan more right.

Study art so you understand perspective,

so you understand light, so you understand

these ideas of what's going on in that frame.

Because figurative art, painting has all been about the frame.

What's in and what's not.

And filmmaking is all about what's in the frame

and what isn't in the frame, and what you need in the frame,

and what you can safely exclude from the frame

and get by inference.

You don't have to see the sun to know it's there,

it's coming in the window.

That's an extreme example.

You don't have to see the other characters to know

they're still in the room when you cut to a close-up.

But what's in the frame and why is it in the frame?

And that's a question that I ask myself a hundred times a day

when I'm composing a shot.

To this day.

There's nothing automatic about any of it.

All of those decisions are fresh decisions

and they have to be made every single day.

So study art.

Study photography.

Still photography.

Black and white photography.

Understand light, understand how it works.

Those are great-- those are great basics.

Before you ever pick up a motion camera, study perspective.

Study aerial perspective.

What makes things look far away?

So the most important thing as a filmmaker in general

is your power of observation.

What you learn about people by observing them.

And participating with them.

But there's a part of your mind that's always observing.

Even interactions where you're directly involved, even

in a heated argument or in a torrid love affair

or whatever it is, there's a part of your mind

that's a video camera that's recording and making notes.

Because ultimately you're going to have to create something

in a highly artificial environment surrounded

by lights and people like we are right now,

looking through cameras, and you're

going to have to create a bit of reality that

is credible to an audience.

And it's especially true in visual effects.

You have to understand how light works.

You have to understand what things really look like.

Now that's if you're trying to make a realistic visual effect.

Some-- some people aren't interested in reality,

they might be going for some--

some kind of heightened or stylized look, or maybe

it's a Pixar animated film and the characters

don't really exist and everything is kind of

heightened or stylized.

That's great, but know the rules before you break the rules.

And these days with--

with visual effects, with the quality

that's available right now, there's

nothing that can't look 100% real.

It's not-- it's not about the tools,

and not about how expensive the tools are.

It's about how good the power of observation

is of the people manipulating the tools.

And obviously that buck finally stops

on the desk of the director, because the director's

got to approve the shot or not.

And it's going to cost you a ton of money if you literally

say,it doesn't look real, try it again.

And any filmmaker should feel comfortable

being able to do that.

And then you have control.

It's safer.

You can control the lighting.

It can always be exactly the right time of day

with the sun in exactly the right position.

But you have to be very-- you have to be

observant of the natural world.

The key to visual effects, I believe,

the one great fundamental is observe reality carefully.

If you don't effects but you want to do an effects film

and you want to do it on a low budget,

get really chummy with some aspiring visual effects

people that have been noodling around with this stuff,

maybe doing it--

maybe doing it at a boutique effects house

where they've actually been hands-on and done shots,

maybe working on their own with apps

like After Effects and things like

that where you can do relatively simple composites.

Tracking-- tracking software is readily available

now so that you can track images.

You can do composite work.

You could even set up your own facility if you wanted to.

You could probably put five or six seats

in of Maya and Nuke and things like that

and just be able to do basics.

So you've got a network.

You've got to have like-minded colleagues.

You have to build your little revolutionary army.

You don't just spend all your time

knocking on doors trying to have lunch with people that

are way above you in the food chain,

you're wasting your time.

You've got to work at a peer level.

There's no sort of inside knowledge that so--

that's a magic bullet that's going

to leap you up three levels in the film industry.

You have to work your way up through those levels

and you have to do it by learning the craft.

So it's a chicken and egg problem.

Who's going to give you the budget?

Well, probably nobody.

So you have to figure out how to do it

for basically almost nothing and build

the skill set that is scalable once you do get a little money.

You've already done it.

You've already done examples of it.

I'd already done, working for someone else,

working for Roger Corman on super low-budget science

fiction films, I'd done examples of all the types of shots

that I had in mind for "Terminator."

So I was taking what I knew, I was meticulously

planning how it was going to be done,

and-- and what that allowed the-- the-- the effects

people to do was to budget very close to the bone.

Because normally, visual effects budgets,

they have to pad them up because they don't know

what the director really wants.

And that lack of precision translates to additional costs,

like a lot.

They'll put in a big fudge factor.

It might be 30%, it might be 40%, because they don't know.

But here, they could literally budget almost to the dollar

how much it was going to cost them

to do these shots because I had been so precise in my--

my previs.

And that's what allowed us to do the film for basically

$4 million below the line.

So I felt I was presenting a package

to a low-budget producer that was actually

attractive and made sense.

There was logic behind every decision that was made.

There was logic to shoot the vast majority of the film

on the streets of LA with available light,

and to only dip our toe into the exotic environment that

required the visual effects sparingly.

Pick our battles.

It's absolutely critical in any film to have a character

that you're willing to go on the journey with.

And people use the term a fully-realized character.

But I think it's important to understand that film

is a very stylized art form.

It it's not capable of the kind of novelistic detail of a 600

or 1,000-page novel.

So you're never going to know everything

about that character.

You have to fill in the blanks with bits

and pieces of your own life, and those of your friends,

and so on.

So how do you do all that?

Well, you have to find little, universal things

that you can relate to from one's life,

as an audience member, and have the character do

something or do things that you recognize.

You can set huge challenges for yourself

if it's a nonverbal character.

And you're putting so much on the actor

to express with their eyes, with their face,

with their yearning expression, or whatever it is.

But every character is a creation that exists between

the screenplay-- the imagined character--

which is still out of focus, we don't apply a face yet,

and then the director's imagination of what

that can be on the screen.

And then the actor fills in the final and, ultimately, the most

important piece, what does this person look like?

How do they move?

How do they speak?

So a character is really never more than a sketch.

But it has to be a very compelling sketch.

Giving an average person, a relatable, average person,

an enormous problem and seeing how

they solve that problem or process that problem

is a good way to get buy-in.

You basically want the audience to buy into the narrative.

And they usually buy into the narrative

through the characters.

It's key in the way that you introduce a character

to understand where they are in their life, what they're

feeling, and what their problem is.

Any character that you're going to follow has got a problem.

And that problem needs to be declared fairly early on.

Sometimes you can do it in the very first scene.

And then the whole movie should ultimately be about somehow

that problem gets addressed, gets resolved, or at least

we understand that it's the thing that

drove that character into whatever situation evolves.

And the problem may escalate as well.

But I do believe in the kind of principle of character

is destiny.

That character winds up in a situation of their own creation

in some way.

And it's somehow related to them solving their problem,

whatever their problem might be.

It might be that nobody sees them,

that they're kind of invisible to the people around them,

that they haven't found who they are

yet or a way of expressing it.

It may be that they don't have love, or that they've lost love

and are now incapable of opening themselves

to a new relationship.

Whatever the character's problem is,

you need to define it early on.

And you need to do it in an interesting way where

the audience can sympathize because we

have this capacity for empathy and for understanding

other people.

It's innate to who we are as human beings.

So you introduce a character.

And then we somehow relate to that character.

Even if that character is Frankenstein's monster

and the story is told from the perspective of the monster,

we must somehow find a way, a sense of empathy.

The film must create that in us, an interest in that character.

I think it's about expressing something

that the audience can relate to and you care about the outcome.

Or at the very least, you care about seeing

what this person is going to do next

and what they're what's around the corner for them.

In the case of "The Terminator," the initial idea

was that there was an entity sent from the future

to kill somebody in the past whose life had great meaning.

I pretty quickly went to a female character

whose son, in the future, will become a great sort of prophet,

so basically a kind of Virgin Mary character,

because that's an archetype that we all get quite quickly.

And she was, in the biblical story, of very humble origins,

basically a kind of a peasant.

Her husband was a tradesman, a carpenter.

So I said, all right, a waitress, a very common job,

a very dismissible person.

I wanted the most dismissable person you could imagine.

It could have been a secretary.

It could have been a waitress, somebody like that.

It like, they couldn't possibly be

an important, earth-shaking existence.

And I thought that's good because that's

how most people feel.

Most people going to a movie theater

are not presidents, or heads of major corporations,

or big, important people.

They're average people.

And they could, I thought, invest

in the idea of an average person who is suddenly snatched out

of their daily existence and finds out

that their life has great meaning in another framework,

in another frame of reference, which the film supplies.

And all of a sudden, not only is she fighting for her life,

but she's fighting for the future of the entire world.

She becomes the most important person

in the world for a moment in history.

So now I'm telling the story from a female perspective.

So now I have to draw upon all the women

that I've ever known in my life and/or read

about in anything from comic books, to novels, to the news.

Now, it just so happens that just before I wrote that,

I was married to a Bob's Big Boy waitress.

So I went, Bob's Big Boy waitress, perfect.

Write what you know.

So I basically wrote my first wife, which was plucky,

a lot of humor, kind of cynical, but likable.

And so, boom, there's your character.

Now put that character in an extraordinary circumstance.

And I think what I would advise is

that people be kind of authentic to their own life experience,

but not to the extent that you're literally just telling

your own life story.

I happen to enjoy writing female characters.

That's controversial now.

There are people that say, oh, well,

female characters and films about female characters

should be directed by women and they

should be written by women.

It's like, okay, so I can only write

paunchy, middle-aged Canadian white guys?

I don't think that's how art works.

The whole point of acting, the whole point of storytelling,

I think, is to live outside yourself.

But you have to do it with some connection

to your own personal experience.

You have to make it personal.

But that shouldn't prevent you from writing a character that

is not like you.

How am I going to introduce my main characters?

And how am I going to do that in a way that

is the quintessence of that character?

What is the quintessence of that character?

And how can I encapsulate that in a kind

of almost a synecdoche.

A synecdoche is-- if I get this right--

it's like if you call somebody a suit.

You're using the suit as a stand-in

for an entire description of them

as a corporate executive or whatever.

It's basically taking a person or reducing them

to a single object or principle.

But you want a kind of creative synecdoche of your character

when that character's introduced.

So I think that there are interesting ways to do that.

Colonel Quaritch in "Avatar," he was a military guy.

He was very formal.

And he was in a position of command and authority.

And he was introduced with the image of his military boots

on a steel floor.

We hear the creak of the leather.

We hear his voice.

He was a very verbal character and he carried a lot of power

in his voice.

We see his pistol.

We see his broad shoulders.

We see the back of his tightly-clipped Marine Corps

haircut.

And we think we know who the guy is.

And then he turns to us and he's got these massive scars.

And he delivers a line on that turn.

Wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes.

I was reasonably pleased with that as a as a character

introduction because, once again, he

was reduced to that synecdoche of his greater character.

He was also a character that didn't exist in shades of gray,

kind of to a fault. He was, what you see is what you get.

And there wasn't a lot of nuance to his character.

There was just a lot of flourish in creating

that relatively simplistic character, which

is another way to go.

I use the Darth Vader example.

Darth Vader didn't have a lot of shades

of gray in the first movie.

But there was some subtlety that was

brought into it later, obviously, which

was interesting then.

But he was kind of archetypal.

And that was okay because it was just

do the archetype really, really well and in a new creative way.

You also look forward to the moment

where that main character meets that main character.

So that moment of introduction is also very important.

So when you went to Titanic, and you probably

knew from the poster, at least, that there

was going to be a girl and going to be a guy.

And if you knew more about the film, that there was Rose,

and there was Jack, and Leonardo, and Kate Winslet.

Well, how are they going to meet?

Are they going to meet cute?

Which is the sort of classic screenwriter term for,

do they get in a car crash, and have a big argument,

and then realize they actually like each other?

And there are infinite number of variations of that.

And people generally look forward to that moment

when the characters collide.

In "Terminator" it was interesting, structurally,

because it was the end of act one

was the three main characters meeting.

And they met in a violent life-or-death confrontation.

But we had been following them as individual story streams

for an entire act, and literally just jumping back and forth

between three plot lines, and watching these plot lines

slowly converging to a point in space and time

where everything exploded.

[SHOTGUN BLASTING]

And that turned out to be a powerful storytelling method.

There's a stylistic cinematic relish

in how you introduce Character A and Character B.

And then you look forward to the inevitable moment

where Character A meets Character B, interacts

with Character B. And then you, I think, as a filmmaker,

as a screenwriter, you have fun with that.

And as actors, you have fun with that.

And typically, where the characters are going to wind up

is not where they are initially.

There's the classic sort of, you get two characters together

that you know are going to be together later

and you create conflict.

And there's an art to that because the audience

can smell that a mile away if that conflict feels forced,

like the screenwriter really needed them to fight.

So put a lot of obstacles in their path.

And if it doesn't feel authentic and it

doesn't feel natural to the situation,

it feels overblown, the audience goes, yeah, predictable,

I knew that.

If you're doing a character from a certain period,

a historical period or a certain specific situation

that you're dramatizing, do your research.

Learn everything you can about that world.

And if it was a real person, learn everything

you can about that person.

Ask yourself what was really going on.

Because we can't even get the facts right

in a news story about something that happened the day before.

And different outlets will argue with each other

over what actually happened and what it means.

Now imagine history as a distillation

of a little bit of coming down to us of, basically, a bunch

of news stories from back then.

How much can we trust that?

So as you go into history-- and I found this on "Titanic"--

you have to ask yourself questions about like,

what was really happening?

Who was really doing what to who here?

So you got to do your research.

You got to understand the character,

if it was a real historical person, really understand them.

If it's a made-up person in a real historical setting,

what would the forces be at work on that character?

What would expectations of them be?

How is this character unique?

What makes this character interesting?

It's relatively easy, in a sense,

to write outstanding women outside of the present time

because they were always misunderstood and dismissed.

And audiences hate it when they're

investing in a character and that character is dismissed,

or misunderstood, or judged harshly, or not

seen for how great they are.

So these are all techniques for getting your character

to be interesting.

Ultimately, what's important is that your characters

come to life in your mind.

And then they're going to come to life again when

you cast the film.

How you imagine that character is

going to find its final expression through a living,

breathing human being who has a look, has a physiognomy,

and has a skill set.

And they are going to change that character.

The key to it is to get the actor to a safe place

where they can explore and they can feel empowered to go

as far as they feel like going.

Maybe later in the cutting room, you

say that might be a little bit too much.

Or maybe on the set, your own instinct kicks in

and you say, you know, maybe let's try muting that.

And let me feel that that crazy energy is going on in your mind

but there's something holding you back

from saying it quite that way.

And let's feel that tension.

I mean, after a while I think one

learns to speak a language that actors can hear.

Because I think the most sacred part of the job,

ultimately, is to help the actor achieve their best work.

I like to have done rehearsal so that we can talk through ideas,

not lock them in, but stand them up.

Try it, workshop.

But I think of it more as sort of work-shopping the script.

And often I'll find the dialogue shakes out.

Because I'll say, all right, just

forget about the written word.

Forget about the page.

Just improv the scene.

This was very helpful in "Titanic"

because some of the language was a bit stilted

because it was of its period.

And I wanted these two young actors

to get a sense for, well, just play

the scene the way you'd play it now in your current idiom,

the way you would speak.

And so they just played it as themselves, essentially.

I mean, the sort of halfway between the character

was the character, but interpreted

through contemporary language.

And some interesting ideas came out of that.

An interesting dynamic came out of it.

I said, all right, I'm going to go off

and I'm going to rewrite the scene.

And I'm going to put it into the idiom of the time.

But it'll be these ideas.

It'll be these things that we discovered in rehearsal.

I mean, a really good example that I think really

added value to a particular scene in "Titanic,"

we were rehearsing the scene where Cal, her fiancee,

grabs her arm and tries to drag her aboard the lifeboat,

tries to control her, not listen to her, as usual.

And the way I had written it, she

pulls a hatpin out of her hair and sticks him in the arm,

forcing him to release her.

And she runs away into the crowd.

But then we were talking about the hatpin

and Kate said, well, why don't I just spit in his face?

And it was so brilliant.

I don't even think she realized how great it

was because it was a callback to a previous scene, the scene

in the film where Jack--

Leonardo's character-- teaches her how to spit like a man.

So it was a perfect closure of the ellipse.

It was something Jack taught her how to do.

And she used it in that moment to break,

to end the relationship, or at least she thought so, with Cal.

Where are you going?

What, to him?

To be a whore to a gutter rat?

I'd rather be his whore than your wife.

No.

I said no.

WOMAN: Rose, please stop.

It was perfect.

It was like it was like a moment a writer would go aha,

this is great.

I've solved the problem.

And she solved it.

So that's how we did it.

Now, poor Billy Zane didn't particularly

like having a big old loogie shot into his face 50 times.

By the time we were done shooting that scene,

he was well over the idea.

But I think it turned out to be a nice moment.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

JAMES CAMERON: The first moments of a character

should somehow resonate with the entire rest of the film.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

So we talked about character introductions

and a few different ones.

I love stylistically interesting cinematic introductions

of main characters or main adversaries.

So here's one that I'll use as an example.

This is in "Titanic."

And let's say we'll start with this shot.

It was a big crowd getting ready to board the ship

and say goodbye to the people that

are already boarding the ship.

And so a thousand extras, and the camera's coming down,

and we're coming on to a small group of people.

And then we see this little girl.

And meanwhile, we hear a horn honking.

And she turns and looks.

And here comes this beautiful, glittering, otherworldly car.

And then the doors open, and we see a figure.

A hand comes out, and then a foot comes out,

and then a hat comes out.

And then the hat wipe reveals Kate Winslet's face as Rose.

And then we hear her first line of dialogue.

KATE WINSLET (AS ROSE): I don't see what all the fuss is about.

It doesn't look any bigger than the Mauretania.

Which is very sort of blase and diva-like.

(STUFFY ACCENT) "It doesn't look that big."

You know?

Kind of dismissive.

And she sort of immediately sort of

declares herself as a bit sort of posh and above it all.

But we also get to see her entire ensemble, which is

beautifully pulled together--

Edwardian day coat and her gorgeous hat.

So she's kind of defined very, very, very quickly.

But the cinematically interesting thing

is the first thing we see of Rose is her car.

And we see it from the perspective

of a little girl who's a steerage class passenger.

And to her, it's like a fantasy.

What she sees is the fantasy.

She sees the princess.

I've gone from the wide shot with literally, I don't know,

it might have been 1,200, it might be 1,500 extras

that were on call that day.

And we built this huge set.

And we come down with the crane, across the entire crowd.

Everybody's waving.

And then we introduce little Cora.

Daddy, it's a ship.

And just a relatively inconsequential line from her.

It's not important.

But she creates a subjective point of view.

And then here comes the car.

The car honks.

It's clearing a path.

And now we see it from Cora's perspective,

the beautiful, golden glittering chariot.

And not just one car, but a fleet of cars that show up.

And this is a very long lens shot.

This is probably a 150 millimeter lens shot.

And it's designed to stack the frame.

Now a lot of this sequence was shot with long lenses.

And it's hard to imagine "Titanic"

as being a low-budget movie.

But if you looked 10 degrees over that way,

or 10 degrees over that way, it was Baja, California.

We were down in Rosarito Beach.

So we had a piece of backing that

was supposed to look like the city of Southampton

at the Southampton docks.

And if I moved off that backing, I

was looking at scrub brush and hills.

So not exactly a low-budget film,

but every film has its limitations.

Now we're creating an anticipation.

Somebody's coming.

Who is it?

Somebody-- the door is being open.

We see a hand come out.

So Rose's introduction is her hand, her calfskin glove hand.

And her foot delicately comes out, and her little parasol,

and her hat.

Right now, she's a hat, you know, in the same way

that [INAUDIBLE] you know, the [INAUDIBLE] principle

that the character is reduced to an object that

represents that character.

It's a highly fashionable hat.

It's a rich girl hat.

It was a very expensive hat.

It was probably a unique hat from a couture designer

in London.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

And then we meet her.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

And she's absolutely gorgeous.

And I think for the average audience member,

this is a moment that says, okay, she's the character.

She's the one I'm going to follow.

We also have a foreknowledge.

We've seen this character.

We've seen her at the age of 103 in sort

of the prologue of the film.

And we've been taken back in time through her narrative.

She's the storyteller.

So what did she look like when she was 19?

You know.

We've seen her as the old lady.

Now we're going to go back and see her at this age.

And so there's actually a few layers playing

at this exact moment, even before the hat

reveal takes place.

And there's just something quite elegant about that hat reveal.

And, of course, it was a fair number of takes

to get the crane move just right and landing at the right time,

and Kate's timing, and what she looked

at with kind of interest, and how she kind of hit that pose.

And so, to me, maybe it's a little too classic.

Or maybe it's just classic enough

to set a tone for this film, which

plays by very classic rules of cinematography.

It's not an iconoclastic film in that way.

It's not trying to play by some very stylized rule set.

It's trying to use classic cinematic technique

to tell the story.

We cut away to something else.

We cut away to two of the shots.

We introduced Cal, that's important.

He is, in a way, the adversary, or one

of the adversaries of the film.

And then we come back.

We come back to Rose, and she speaks.

It doesn't look any bigger than the Mauretania.

JAMES CAMERON: And she's a spoiled little brat.

In a way, almost off-putting.

She's not very nice.

(STUFFY ACCENT) "It's not that much, is it?"

You know, she's above it all.

Yeah, okay.

She's a spoiled little rich girl.

I get it.

I know who the character is.

She's not the character I've already met.

She's not that 103-year-old lady.

All those years that have intervened have changed her.

And she speaks with kind of a spirituality

and a deep wisdom in the scenes that we've already met.

That's not the girl that we're meeting right here.

So, to me, in just a few shots, we've

learned a tremendous amount about the character.

But we also haven't learned the most important thing about her.

She's that desperately unhappy, depressed woman

that looks at herself in the mirror and says to herself--

you can see it in her eyes.

Kate doesn't say it out loud--

what the hell?

I'm in hell.

And then the next time we see her,

she's running down the deck, getting ready to climb over

the railing.

She's impetuous.

She's impulsive.

These are things that are revealed.

So obviously a lot of time in the writing,

a lot of time in the casting, and the rehearsal, then

the production design, the design of the hat.

A lot of things go into the creating of a character.

But I do think there's something sacred and important

about the way you introduce a character.

You could be blase about some things, Rose,

but not about Titanic.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

I don't really love the term "villain."

Because I don't think people ever

think they're villains, even people that are doing

horrific things, cruel things.

They have their own rationale.

We may not agree with it.

And it may be warped or delusional.

But they have their own rationale.

They don't think they're villains, for the most part.

So I like the term "adversary."

So an adversary can be nature itself.

It could be the tornado in "Twister," for example.

But generally, we like human adversaries.

Because, first of all, they're more fun.

And we see interesting interpretations by actors.

So you can go from a relatively simplistic adversary,

like the Terminator, who basically is just death.

He's just unstoppable.

He's just very clear.

And you take a very simple concept

and you execute it in a disciplined way that

becomes extraordinary, because of the perfect synchronicity

between the actor, Arnold, and his character,

and the way that that was realized,

and the fact that he's an unstoppable force.

And it's stated by one of the characters.

It can't be bargained with.

It can't be reasoned with.

It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear.

And it absolutely will not stop--

ever-- until you are dead.

JAMES CAMERON: You've just made him

a very, very simple character.

So that's kind of the opposite of subtlety.

That's simple in extremity, which is kind of terrifying.

Because humans are complex, and there's always the chance

that we could maybe talk our way out of it,

or we could negotiate, or we could buy them off,

or something like that.

Not going to work with the Terminator.

When I got the great opportunity to direct the sequel to Ridley

Scott's classic film, "Alien," where I went for the detail

was the Alien Queen.

The Alien Queen was not quite so simple a character.

Because there's an interesting scene

in that film where Ripley does negotiate with the Alien Queen.

[SNARLING]

JAMES CAMERON: She says, I've got the flamethrower.

There's a lot of eggs in this room.

I know you care, because you're a mother.

So already, that simple character

was made more complex.

Even though we never heard the Alien Queen utter

a line of dialogue, we knew exactly what

she was thinking, which was interesting and fun.

Who was the villain in "Titanic?"

The fiancee?

I mean, I think he was an interesting character.

There were a number of people who were adversarial

to our main characters.

But really it was fate.

It was circumstance.

It was destiny.

So to say that there was a "villain" in that film,

I think the villain was death.

[BELL RINGING]

The villain was the death that you

knew was there from the beginning from the moment

you bought a ticket to go see a movie called "Titanic,"

where thousands of people died.

You could say, us against nature, but it was really--

nature wasn't the enemy.

It was human mismanagement that created a catastrophe.

So that's a villain in its own sort of category.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

The introduction of the adversary

is I think as important as the introduction

of the protagonist.

We need to invest in the adversary, as well.

We have to imbue that adversary with power.

We have to feel that they are a worthy adversary, that this

is someone who can be very threatening-- maybe threatening

to everybody, or maybe just specifically

threatening to our character.

If we don't believe in their power, their lethality,

or their ability to do harm to our character,

then we're not invested in the story.

So we have to spend time with them.

And I believe that any character you're

spending time with in a movie should be interesting.

They should be unique.

They should be different.

They should be quirky.

Or they should be fascinating in some way.

So Arnold's Terminator character was introduced essentially

appearing in a ball of lightning from somewhere else.

Just-- [POP NOISE] --he's just there.

And he's crouched in this kind of almost Greek God

sculptural way in a cloud of smoke, rises out of that,

and all of a sudden you're interested.

Like who is this guy?

Why is he naked?

And who is he?

What's he do?

And then he walks forward, and he looks out over the city.

And there's-- to me, even that shot is an implied threat.

He's about to go out there into that city

and do something harmful.

You just know right away he's there to do bad.

And then that question gets answered within the next minute

or so, where he encounters these guys hanging out

up at Griffith Observatory and kills them

all for one simple thing--

Your clothes.

Give them to me.

Now.

JAMES CAMERON: He needed their clothing so he could blend in.

So he could perform his mission.

So you start to very quickly declare that he's relentless.

He's mission-focused.

He has-- he kind of stands out.

He doesn't blend in.

So his attempt to basically kind of camouflage himself

is always going to be challenged.

I think the more an actor tries to make a villain "scary,"

the more they fail.

Sometimes it's the absolute banality of how they talk

and how they express themselves, and the fact

that they seem real, they seem to be

a real person makes it scarier.

Because it seems more plausible.

You know?

I think that it's important to resist the desire

to do Dracula, or Darth Vader, or the Terminator

unless you're really confident that you

can sell that in an extraordinary way that

hasn't been seen before.

I think quirkiness, nuance, detail, humor--

you create an adversary that's humorous,

now you're getting conflicting signals.

Because you innately like funny people.

But wait a minute?

This guy's a killer.

You make them compelling.

You make them not necessarily subtle, but detailed

and a little bit against the simple expectation.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

With the Terminator, I think you knew what was on his mind.

You even went inside his mind.

We did an interesting thing there,

which is we literally go inside the Terminator's processing.

You see what the outside world looks like to him.

And you see all the graphic overlays

of the processing that's going on.

So it's a metaphor for how his mind works.

He's working from a visual basis.

He's processing it.

He's identifying targets.

It's sort of printing out what his analysis of that target is.

And people were interested in that.

So once again, it's engagement.

It's making the villain subjective for a moment.

You're briefly in the Terminator's reality.

You're in the reality of a machine killer for a moment.

And I think that that's a very powerful tool.

Put your audience subjectively in the reality

of the adversary, and the adversary becomes real.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

In the case of the Alien Queen, I

was trying to create a character whose motivation I understood,

but who was terrifying and very other--

other from us-- and dangerous and terrifying in a very almost

subconscious way because of that.

So the Alien Queen, following on the motifs of the first film,

doesn't have eyes.

She's all mouth.

She has no eyes at all.

And so we think of the eyes as the window of the soul.

We think of the eyes as being an incredibly expressive part

of the face.

But the mouth is the way we communicate verbally.

And so much of our expression, really more so than the eyes,

is in our mouth.

So the Alien Queen had an exaggerated mouth.

She even had a mouth within her mouth that extended out.

So she didn't use language, at least not

a language we could understand.

Although, presumably, she had a way

of communicating in complex symbolic forms

with her other Alien warriors.

Because she basically hisses at them, and they understand what

she means.

Now when my mother used to hiss at me,

I understood what she meant.

But I think the implication was there was probably

some high frequency coded data in that hiss, and/or, who

knows, a telepathic connection.

Whatever.

But the point is we couldn't understand what

the Alien Queen was saying.

But it didn't matter.

[SNARLING]

[HISSING]

[NERVOUS EXHALE]

JAMES CAMERON: When the term is a computer-generated character,

there's the impression that the computer's

creating the character.

Computer's not creating anything.

Computer is doing the number crunching to generate an image.

But character is being created by the actor.

It's not animation, it's performance capture.

We've talked about low-budget filmmaking.

Now we're going to talk about the opposite end

of the spectrum.

In "Avatar," we were-- it was a highly experimental production.

So one of the things that's unique about it

is that we went into it starting years before the release.

We started in 2005, and the film came out in late 2009,

not knowing exactly how we were going

to solve most of the problems.

We had a general idea of how to do things.

We were pretty thin on specifics.

And I had actually written "Avatar" in 1995,

as a challenge to my digital effects company,

Digital Domain.

And they said, we can't do it yet.

We don't have the tools to do the muscle

rigs, and the facial muscle rigs,

and the eyes, and the hands.

And we can't do it.

It's too much.

It's beyond us right now.

I said, all right, I'll just put it--

I'll just put it in a shelf for a few years.

And I waited, and I waited, and I waited.

And then I was watching "The Two Towers."

And there's the scene where Gollum talks to himself.

And he's in two places at once.

And he's having this kind of schizophrenic, out-of-body

experience.

And it's highly expressive, highly emotional.

It goes on for several minutes.

And it's 100% CG character.

And I said to myself, if they can

do that, I can make "Avatar."

And that's what set me down the path of making the movie.

So I was inspired by the work of another filmmaker.

I was building on what Peter Jackson had done

and what WETA Digital had already done.

So I came in with a whole new set of challenges

and a new high bar they had to get through.

And they loved that.

They loved that challenge.

We just studied a lot of close-ups, really

big close-ups of men and women and looked at them

in different kinds of lighting and said, well what do you see?

What do you see about the way they move?

What do you see about the way they take the light?

What do you see about the skin pores?

What do you see about the eye?

You know?

And one of the breakthroughs was the eye is not dry,

the eye is wet.

That's kind of obvious.

But it also means that the upper part of the lower eyelid

is actually a wet surface.

And there's a little meniscus of tear fluid between that eyelid

and between the eyeball.

And it catches the light.

And there's a little glint there, and it's always there.

But if you're not looking for it, you'll never see it.

The second we put the meniscus in, the eye came to life.

I know, it sounds like a little tiny thing, something

you'd never think about.

But when it's missing, you sense the lack.

And I always felt that CG characters fell down

around the movement of the mouth.

It always felt mask-like.

It always felt sort of too thin at the corner of the mouth

and not interacting properly with the teeth.

It didn't feel like those muscles really exist,

like the dimensionality of the mouth

and the face really existed.

So we spent literally a couple of years figuring out how

to do this with WETA Digital.

And WETA Digital did the heavy lifting on this.

And it was iteration after iteration after iteration

and coming up with little things.

So the most critical thing about all visual effects,

and certainly any kind of CG character design,

and especially if you're trying to emulate photo reality,

is to observe.

Observe, observe, observe.

In a nutshell, the methodology was

that we're going to capture the performance using

a collection of data.

The idea of motion capture where we

capture the body movement of a character had been around--

I used it on "Titanic" for some of the crowd scenes.

So that had been around for a while.

It had been around for at least 10 years.

The idea of how you were going to capture

the specifics of a facial performance, which

is where you see the majority of the emotion in the eyes,

the mouth, all the many, many muscles in the face.

So it's almost it's own separate world

from the full body performance.

People that have tried to do this in the past

tried to do it by using markers that they put on the face

and capturing the face the same way they captured

the body, with a bunch of motion capture cameras and a big array

around it.

But the detail wasn't fine enough.

They could only work in very small volumes.

It really limited the action.

It limited how they were going to-- you

know, the type of action that they could stage.

And it was very--

I mean you had to literally glue like 80 little, tiny glass bead

balls onto the actor's face.

It was horrible.

Actors didn't like it.

The end result wasn't that great.

So we proposed a completely different solution,

which is to take something that looked a lot like a boom mic

for a singer in a concert and put a little tiny video

camera out on the end of it on a pretty wide lens

and shoot the face, film the face, or video the face,

while the actor is doing the scene.

And it's knolled out to them.

It stays with them wherever they go.

And it's getting a 100% recording, a close-up

recording, of their performance, their facial performance.

So now you've got a video data stream coming out of the face,

and we called that image-based facial performance capture.

Right?

And that set a trend that's still in motion to this day.

A lot of other people have used it.

Different people have brought different refinements

to the process.

But it hasn't fundamentally changed since 2005 when

we first launched the concept.

So now you have two data streams that are recording the actor's

performance.

You're getting the body performance

off a standard motion capture system

with a lot of really tricky bells and whistles

on it to make it better.

And you're getting the facial performance

from this little camera that's on this little camera boom.

Here's me with my virtual camera on "Avatar."

And I'm working with the actors in their capture suits.

You can see that they have marker suits.

We're just in a big lit stage.

There's no jungle there whatsoever.

They're running on a log.

So I think these are probably more stunt

doubles than anything.

And they're running on a log.

They're just running basically across the floor.

It's very safe.

And I'm looking--

I'm not looking at them with the camera,

I'm looking at the characters that they're

playing in real-time in the world,

in the CG world all at low resolution.

It almost looks like an old, crappy video game

from the '80s.

JAMES CAMERON (ON VIDEO): (SHOUTING) And 6.

And 7.

And 8.

We're much better at it these days than we were--

this is all, you know, obviously 11 years old.

Here's me.

And, once again, I'm not looking at them.

I'm looking at my image.

But I'm near them, so I can talk to them.

And I'm seeing what they look like in the world.

And then here's me playing back.

And what I'm seeing is they're up

on what we call a vine bridge in between two floating mountains,

and they're 1,000 feet above the ground.

But, of course, because the characters

are very mountain goat-like and can run around

1,000 feet above the ground, it was okay for them

to not be scared and balancing and wobbling along.

And it was completely safe.

And so we're creating a fantasy image

and using relatively simple setups to do it.

And basically, we found out that it worked very well.

You could do just about anything.

You could run, you could jump, you could ride a horse,

you could have a big argument.

You could even, if you were careful,

you could drink a beer.

You could do whatever you needed to do.

The only thing we couldn't shoot using the system

was a kiss, for obvious reasons.

Because the two booms would be in the way.

So we had to use a different kind of harder technique that

was more labor-intensive to do the kiss scene and a couple

of other moments.

But for the most part it worked for I'd

say 99% of what we were trying to shoot.

We had a lot of proof of concept.

We spent a fair bit of the studio's money--

the studio being 20th Century Fox--

to prove that we could do it.

And to do that, we did a test.

We did a 1 and 1/2 minute test.

Boy meets girl in the jungle.

And they talk.

He only come and make problems.

Only.

MAN (AS JAKE): Okay, fine.

Fine.

Fine.

You love your little forest friends.

So why not just let them kill my ass?

What's the thinking?

Why save?

MAN (AS JAKE): Yes.

Why save.

You not fear.

You strong heart.

And it was compelling enough that Fox was willing to pull

the trigger on a $200-plus million project that then went

somewhat over that budget.

And it was three years later that we

had the first shot that really proved that we could do it.

So think about that.

We had our proof of concept done in 2005.

We got the first shot that we could actually

use in the movie in 2008.

And everything in between was a gigantic leap of faith.

And it's easy to look back on it and say, oh, it

was all a no-brainer.

Come on, that world building, those great designs,

all that stuff.

Yeah.

That's true.

World building was a big part of it.

This was the most important part,

because the audience enters the film through the eyes

and hearts of the characters.

So we had to have the characters.

The key for me is, if the actor did the performance,

we've captured it, it's going to be in the character later.

If we want to run a little splitscreen here

where you can see Zoe Saldana in one

of her big emotional moments in the film with Sam Worthington.

Emotional moment for him, too.

I trusted you!

Trust me now.

Please.

[SPEAKING IN NA'VI] That is why you not Na'vi [INAUDIBLE]..

(ANGRILY) You will never be one of The People!

He tried to stop them--

ZOE SALDANA (AS NEYTIRI): [SPEAKING IN NA'VI]

Neytiri, please!

Please!

JAMES CAMERON: So she's freaking out,

and it's the end of the relationship.

But I think what's interesting here

is to look at how closely we were

able to capture her expression.

It's not perfect, because her character is not exactly

physiologically identical to her.

Her nose is very different.

Her eyes are very different.

Her forehead's very different.

But her mouth is very similar.

And you can see that the performance capture technique

captured what she did.

It's an actor-driven process.

Everything that she does, everything that Sam does,

translates into the character.

And this is what we hope for.

This is what we worked toward.

And, of course, this is the head rig.

And this facial performance is being captured by this camera

and by a video feed, a live video feed,

we broadcast it off the body to a record deck.

So you can see that he blinks, his lips are pulled back

in that exact moment exactly the same way.

It maps through frame by frame by frame.

And we don't take liberties with this.

It took us a long time to figure out

how to create the neuromuscular rig, which we now

call the algorithm for Zoe.

Because Zoe's face did a lot of things

that a lot of people's faces don't do.

The way in which her lips would curl out,

and her-- the tension, and the way her lips

would thin out over her teeth in a very feral way.

It's a very expressive face.

And we needed to figure out how to get the pseudo-muscles that

exist entirely mathematically to do that.

And that was our goal.

And that's what the technical teams at WETA were able to do.

But the hand motion, everything, you

can see how it maps frame by frame.

And there's absolutely zero compromise in that system.

You have to get the performance in the moment.

You can't make it better later.

There are a couple of times where

we tried to alter a moment slightly,

maybe to have a tiny bit more of a smile or a little bit

more fear.

[SCOFFS] It was a horrible failure.

It has to be the actor has to do it.

And then it's just up to us to honor it

in the downstream pipeline, which takes about a year.

From the moment you capture it, you're at least

a year away from seeing a shot, which

is a thing in and of itself.

I don't recommend making a movie like "Avatar,"

but it's good for people to know,

even if they're just starting out, what can be done.

If you're shooting a scene with camera, a photographic scene,

you're going to shoot a master, some kind of wide shot.

And you're going to probably shoot some kind of a two-shot,

or a closer shot that ties both actors in.

And then you're going to shoot an over-the-shoulder.

And then you're probably going to shoot either a tighter over

or a tight single on this side of it.

Then you're going to turn the lighting all around,

you're going to come around over here,

then you're going to shoot the corresponding tight over,

and then probably a tight single.

That's classic coverage.

A lot of filmmakers don't like to do that,

because it's too classic.

But it works.

And there are reasons why it works,

and people still do it all the time.

But let's just take that as an example,

because it is classic coverage.

So that's six setups.

Across those six setups, maybe you do five takes of each shot,

just for the actors, just to figure out in the master what

you're doing, figure out in the two-shot the timing,

figure out in the close-up the emotion,

the moment that somebody is going

to cry or have some big reaction or whatever it is.

The actors need time.

They need to work their way to it.

And so let's say five-- let's say five takes.

So that's six setups times five takes.

That's 30 times that the actors have to do it the same way,

so that you can cut it together.

On the other hand, I could do--

I think I did seven takes of this scene.

And none of them were the same.

But it didn't matter, because for this scene--

I'm gonna show you something really interesting here.

And this is the fundamental difference

I think with the performance capture.

All right.

So we start in a fairly tight two-shot.

They're both barely in frame with each other,

but it emphasizes the way he's trying to hold on to her,

and she's pushing him away.

All right?

Now we're going to cut to her close-up.

All right?

That's a separate set up, right?

Then we're going to briefly be on that two-shot

again while she slams him away.

Then we're going to continue with her

in a slightly looser close-up.

And then we're going to cut to his reaction

as he tries to explain it.

And then we're going to cut to a medium shot,

so that we could see her hand and her gesture

as she pulls away.

Again, I went wider here to suggest distance.

She's already pulled away from him.

We see a little bit of her mother.

Her mother tries to stop her.

She pushes the mother away.

Guess what?

It's all from the same take.

All those shots are from the same take-- take seven.

I happen to remember that, because I was very happy when

I realized that there was one take that had everything in it

that I wanted, where Sam was great, Zoe was great,

everything was great.

We had good reference coverage.

So all of those shots were extracted

from the same captured take.

Now we had done other takes.

I didn't like them as well.

And so I didn't want to shoot my virtual camera

coverage from those takes.

I did it all from that one take.

We don't always do that.

But it shows what's possible.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of curiosity.

I think curiosity is how you're going to find your stories.

Curiosity is how you interact with the world

and observe how people are.

Before you can make a film, you have to have observed life,

you have to have lived some life.

And you have to have to have been in relationships,

and you have to have noted things about people

and found people just endlessly fascinating.

Before you can radiate, you need to absorb.

You know, it's the law of thermodynamics.

It's the creativity law of thermodynamics.

So, you know, you have to get good people.

So all right, so you want to understand

the basic technologies of computer animation.

How does it work?

What are the steps involved?

It doesn't just spring full blown.

You're going to start with ideas.

You're going to start with design.

Sometimes it's character design, sometimes it's creature design.

Sometimes you'll go through performance capture.

Maybe someone is playing a creature or a character.

You need to know how to integrate these things

with live action elements if you choose

to go down that path of doing highly

effects oriented filmmaking.

It's really-- I don't want to say it's a separate art form,

because there's a lot of--

it's a gradient.

You could be making the most humanistic simple drama,

but in order to create that scene in 1954

that you want to do, suddenly you're in the effects world.

So how are you going to learn about that stuff?

Well, to start a lot of the tools are readily available.

You can work relatively cheaply in some

of the newer visual effects apps,

so get some nerdy friends to come in

and show you how to do that, or just sit and watch

over their shoulder while they do something

and learn the language.

Personally, I think it's really important

to understand all the jobs on the set and all the jobs

associated with making a film.

So as one is coming up and trying

to find your place in the ecosystem of filmmaking,

I think it's a really good idea to try a bit of everything.

Be the boom operator for one of your friend's films.

Understand how cameras work.

Learn to understand how lenses work.

Don't, I think-- don't fall into the trap

that a lot of filmmakers do early

on when they come to it from, let's say, writing,

or they come to it from acting.

You know-- because there tends to be this sense of dividing

the process of filmmaking into the humanistic, empathetic,

sort of internal--

you know, actor and writing kind of side of it.

And then there's all that technical stuff that people do.

I think it's important to remember that first of all,

it's a fusion of both of those sides.

And you have to inhabit that dualism

where you can speak to the actors,

you can talk to the writers, you understand the inner landscape

of all the characters.

And at the same time, you can ask for a certain lens

and know what it'll do.

You can talk to the DP about a backlight, you know, a desat--

you know, whatever it is, whatever stylistically you're

trying to do.

I think it's really critical to not sort of categorize

oneself going in as a technical filmmaker

or humanistic filmmaker, but understand that they

are two sides of the same coin, and you really

can't be operating in the role of filmmaker

without understanding both sides of those.

And that's one of the things that I believe in and try

to do in my own life-- not get too drawn

into the technical side of it.

So the more you have of the technical expertise--

it doesn't have to be expertise like you're

going to go out and offer yourself

to the industry as a top sound person or a top dolly grip

or whatever.

It's enough to be able to speak the language,

because the art of film directing

is the art of making it happen in real time,

at that moment, when everything has come together.

I think people who are coming in to film these days

are shocked to find out how much is really

a visual effect these days, how much of maybe

the view outside the window is entirely

done with green screen, wasn't there at all.

So you really can't be--

this is going to be a sweeping statement,

and there will be people that reject it--

but it's pretty hard to be a filmmaker these days

without being conversant with simple visual effects,

putting something outside a window,

putting something outside a car, that sort of thing.

So you really need to understand--

you know, like right now, it may not look like it because I

don't know what they're going to do later in composite,

but I'm sitting on a green stage where they can put anything

they want behind me later.

So maybe you guys can switch that off, we

can see that it's just a blank green stage.

And then you can switch it back on and show what it's like,

and maybe you didn't even know that was happening,

or you suspected it.

And I think it's important to know what level of realism

is required.

It's important to find good visual effects people.

It's important to speak their language enough that it doesn't

sound like Greek to you when they're talking about,

you know, what they're going to use as a key-in color.

Is it going to be green?

Is it going to be blue?

How does that affect your lighting?

What are they going to need in terms of the on-set lining

up of the shots, because you're going

to be putting things in later that

have to go in the right place.

So you become very reliant on those people.

And if you're not-- if you haven't come up

in the technology of visual effects, like I did,

for example-- because I come from the technical side--

you need to find good people that

have done good work on the type of film

that you're trying to make.

I've heard filmmaking described, I think best,

as you're laying track in front of a moving train.

The train is not going to stop.

And so the decisions that you make in that real time

are going to be the sum total of everything

you've learned along the way and your instinct, which I've which

I've already talked about.

And to a large extent, they're kind of irrevocable.

And it's important to come prepared.

Fortune favors the prepared mind.

So what's your preparation-- well, you're storyboarding,

and you're writing, and you're pre--

I'd don't want to say pre-visualization,

because that's a process and it's a process

shared with other people.

I'm talking about your pre-imagining of the scene.

Run that scene in your mind.

Imagine what it can be.

Once you're cast, imagine it with those actors.

Maybe you don't have to imagine it.

Maybe you do a fair bit of rehearsal,

maybe you even tape some of the rehearsals.

Maybe you tape the auditions and actually cut

the scene ahead of time.

I've done that as well.

Cut the scene, understand your scene before you go into it.

Know what your important scenes are,

make sure everyone else is prepared.

And I'm not just talking on the technical side.

I'm talking with the actors.

Make sure they're prepared mentally and emotionally

for that scene and they have whatever they need.

They've had the rehearsal time that they need

and that they want.

And so the more you understand the trades, the more you

understand the craft of it--

work with a DP or become a DP on a low budget film.

Understand lighting.

So this is all the craft.

This is the technical craft of filmmaking.

And I think there are lots of great books on the subject.

You can read "American Cinematographer,"

which is a good source.

And there are other magazines, trade magazines,

on cinematography.

Absorb it.

Be a sponge.

Learn it all and make friends with people

who are interested in those specific aspects

of the art, someone who is an aspiring cinematographer.

Make friends with that person and say,

hey, let's make a film.

Doesn't even matter-- let's just make up a story real quick

and go make a film and experiment around,

and get other people enthusiastic about that

and come in.

The only way to learn it, really, is by doing.

I think the thing that's important to remember

about film is that it's a collaborative meeting--

so it's a team, a bunch of people.

But somebody needs to lead that team in real time.

So the director is kind of like a war president,

you know, in the sense that you don't have time

to take it out of committee.

You're dealing with stuff that's coming out you,

1,000 questions a day, 1,000 little decisions

a day-- do another take, don't do

another take, do this, do that, red wardrobe, green wardrobe,

whatever.

So it's a system that sort of rewards,

in a sense, a kind of autocratic system.

And for me personally, my journey

around the leadership of how you do this

started with me being you kind of a tin pot

dictator, because the movie was the most important thing.

And everything, everybody serves the movie.

And I was the representative of the movie.

And so I think I was rough on people.

I don't think I was cruel.

I was just rough because the pace of events

demanded it and all that sort of thing.

But what I've learned over time is

that people don't do their best work

if they're not respected and appreciated and have a voice.

And so if I've learned one thing that I

would like to go back and do differently,

It's not necessarily the choice of lenses

or the choice of dialogue or anything

within the films themselves.

It's the nature of the working relationship.

I could have listened more.

I could have been less autocratic.

I could have not made the movie more

important than the human interaction of the crew.

And it shouldn't be, because I think when we start out

as filmmakers, we tend to think that the movie's the world,

and it isn't.

And years later, you realize, well, I'm still here,

and all those people are still around, and the movie is--

everybody's forgotten it.

You know, I think somebody like Ron Howard, who

is innately a team player, who came up

in the culture of a television show

from the time he was a kid, he's great at it.

When I first saw him work, I was dumbfounded.

It's like, wow, he takes a lot of time complimenting people.

You know, what's he on about here?

And I aspire to, even to today, to try

to be my inner Ron Howard.

Thanks guys.

Well done.

Fun, fun, fun.

And I've told him this, by the way.

This is no secret--

because I think that's how it's done.

And he's a great filmmaker, he's a fine filmmaker.

So the two are not mutually exclusive.

The other aspect of leadership is you have to inspire.

And you inspire by communicating.

If you're not passionate about it,

if you're kind of phoning it in or you

don't know how to express that, or you sit back

with a kind of a blank face, why are other people

going to be excited about it?

You've got to get people excited about it.

And you-- and I don't care if it's day 100 of a shoot.

And if you're starting out, you're

probably a ways away from that, but trust me, you'll get there.

I don't care if it's day 100 of a shoot.

You got to come in with that enthusiasm.

You got to have that lightness in your step.

You've got to see the wonder that's happening right in front

of you and be excited by it.

You know-- and run in.

I've run into a shot when the camera's still

rolling and hugged the actor.

You know, what you just did is fantastic.

You know-- oh, cut, by the way.

Share it.

Share the joy of creation.

And I think it takes a while to be secure enough

to be able to do that.

Film is about compromise.

It's all about compromise.

But it's not compromising from some crystal

vision that already exists.

I always say it's a process of working with a group of people

to get that picture to come more and more into focus.

So I can use the example of creating

elements for a fantasy world, or a science fiction

world, and a whole bunch of designs start to come in.

And you work with artists.

And you look at something and you

say, oh, that's interesting.

I hadn't seen it that way.

Let's pursue that idea.

And somebody else would come with a different try,

and say, well, that's kind of interesting too.

Let's pursue that idea.

At a certain point, one speaks to you

a little more than the other and you make a decision.

And ultimately, all those decisions are binary.

They're one or the other and they're forever.

You know, and you can't let the forever of it weigh on you.

You just have to make it a fun, kind

of vigorous creative process, because the second you bog down

on--

shit, what I just decided I'm going

to have to live with for the rest of my life,

you'll never get anywhere.

You just have to kind of keep your heart in the game.

You make it fun.

You encourage other people.

And you make decisions at a kind of instinctive level.

But that instinct is well cultivated over time.

It really consists of every film you've ever watched

and either enjoyed or didn't like,

but saw something in it that was cool--

every book you ever read, every dream you've ever had.

And by dream, I don't mean ambition.

I mean, the actual mental process

of stringing together random images and bits of narrative

in your head all night long every night.

And I think that's something that one

needs to learn to believe in, to listen to and believe in,

because it's really the sum total of all your inputs

and all of your likes up until that point.

It's people that are rabid scared and rigid,

and holding onto their storyboards

like this, that can't see the magic and can't incorporate it.

So you got to get past that.

Yes, you got to be prepared.

You've got to come in with a plan.

And sometimes that's the only thing

that keeps the day going along.

You know, go to--

we're doing shot five on the shot list,

it's right here in the storyboards.

And everybody's happy because they know what you're doing.

But it doesn't have to be that.

It's your film.

You can do anything you want.

You can take that out or you can do something different,

or maybe the actors come in with some really cool idea,

or something happens in rehearsal.

Rehearsal's a great, highly fertile time to see new ideas.

So you let the cast off their leash

and they'll come up with all kinds of crazy stuff.

And I've always been attracted to the actors that

are the most inventive.

You know, Bill Paxson being a very good example.

He'd come in, he'd have thought for months about the dialogue

he wanted to do.

He'd be constantly saying, I could do this, I could do that.

I'd throw out nine tenths of it and keep that 10%,

and the movie was better for it.

You know, when he says, what are we going to do now,

we're in some real pretty shit now--

you know, that whole rant that he does in "Aliens,"

he just kind of riffed that up.

You know, you got to keep your eyes open for the magic.

And I think the most important thing is every single day,

working with your actors, lightning is striking.

How do you bottle it?

How do you bottle that lightning?

You can't predict what an actor is

going to do or say, or just a little gesture that they do,

or color that they add to a line that was not maybe

the intention of the line at all,

but it comes out of left field and all of a sudden, that fits.

That fits.

That's better.

And when they sit around in film studies classes,

and you read all the cahiers du cinema stuff,

and they talk about all these brilliant things

that filmmakers do, they tend to forget the fact

that most of those movies didn't have very big budgets.

And people were just doing what they could do in the moment,

and something great came out of it.

It's not quite the highly precise process

that people think it is.

And a lot of the things that we applaud in movies

were basically happy accidents on the day.

And I don't want to say accidents.

I want to say they were moments of taking the opportunity,

seeing something happening, maybe

some particular configuration of where the sun was

at the location, at the time.

And instead of doing the shot that way,

you decide to move everything over to here

to take advantage of it.

All filmmaking is kind of combat in the sense

that you're going into a highly fluid situation.

Instead of having a defined enemy, your enemy is entropy.

Your enemy is that tendency of the universe

to go from a state of order to disorder.

But you can be prepared to the extent that you have confidence

and you have options.

You can switch, you can switch track, you can go around.

I mean, I think of filmmaking like water flowing inevitably

downhill.

It goes around rocks, doesn't go through,

so you've got to go around the obstacles.

You've got to be that flowing water.