James Cameron Quotes

The magic doesn’t come from within the director’s mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father’s respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things.

I mean, you have to be able – you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can’t do it by yourself.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We’ll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.

I’m a storyteller; that’s what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven’t been and returning to tell a story they haven’t heard before.

The film industry is about saying ‘no’ to people, and inherently you cannot take ‘no’ for an answer.

I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.

There are many talented people who haven’t fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.

I’ve tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don’t like it when people are deferential to me because I’m an established filmmaker. It’s a blue-collar sensibility.

The films that influenced me were so disparate that there’s almost no pattern.

Nature’s imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.

I lived in a small town. It was 2,000 people in Canada. A little river that went through it and we swam in the – you know, there was a lot of water around. Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away.

There is a hugely underserved population out there… those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.

If you wait until the right time to have a child you’ll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it’s bad.

Inspiration can hit you in the head at any time in any context. It could happen in a conversation. Talking to someone at a party, you can get an idea. But you’ve got to remember those inspirations.

What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?

The future of 3D will be defined by TV.

You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything.

I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.

People call me a perfectionist, but I’m not. I’m a rightist. I do something until it’s right, and then I move on to the next thing.

Every time you dive, you hope you’ll see something new – some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn’t.

The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there’s an alien world here on Earth.

I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.

It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.

I blame it on Walt Disney, where animals are given human qualities. People don’t understand that a wild animal is not something that is nice to pat. It can seriously harm you.

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It’s like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they’ll crystallize into a pattern.

I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.

You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they’ll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.

People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn’t really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things.