James Cameron Quotes

Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality.Don't put limitations on yourself.Others will do that for you.

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.

I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.

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.

Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.

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

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

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.

James Cameron doesn't do what James Cameron does for James Cameron. James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is... James Cameron.

I set my goals way higher than the achievable. And when I fail, I fail at a very high level. That's my process. It's really demented, but it actually works. When you are aiming really high and doing something new, you must be also prepared to fail, learn from your mistakes and begin with a new plan. More motivated than before.

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.

There seems to be a lot of excitement around something that, to me, is a yawn, frankly.

I want to challenge all of you as people of deep conscience, people who are environment stewards of the earth and oceans ... By changing what you eat, you will change the entire contract between the human species and the natural world.

Your imagination can create a reality

There is a vast frontier that's going to take us a while to understand... it was very lunar, a very desolate place, isolated.

Here's my philosophy in life: If there's a fire, you put it out. If there's a flood, you fill sandbags and you build a dike. You roll up your sleeves and you get to work.

A director's job is to make something happen and it doesn't happen by itself. So you wheedle, you cajole, you flatter people, you tell them what needs to be done. And if you don't bring a passion and an intensity to it, you shouldn't be doing it.

When you have the feeling that anything’s possible, sometimes you wind up acting on it.

But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration - because it's a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks.

What are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. It's the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world.

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

Avatar is the most high tech film in terms of its execution, dealing with essentially a very low tech subject; which is our relationship with nature...and in fact the irony is that the film is about our relationship with nature and how our technological civilization has taken us several removes away from a truly natural existence and the consequences of that to us.

Your only competitors are your past achievements.

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.

Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move.

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.

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.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff. Don't get high on your own supply. The hardest thing as a filmmaker is when you're watching a film that you've worked on for several years. You know every frame so intimately that holding lots of the objectivity of a new viewer who has just seen it for the first time is the hardest thing. Every aesthetic decision you make - and you make thousands of them every day, have to - in theory, must be done from you being a blank slate. You almost have to run a program, like a mind wipe, every time you watch the movie.

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.

Targets and timetables do matter. But there is a dispirited feeling that the U.S. just rejects multilateral target-setting for the time being.

Getting the audience to cry for the Terminator at the end of T2, for me that was the whole purpose of making that film. If you can get the audience to feel emotion for a character that in the previous film you despised utterly and were terrified by, then that's a cinematic arc.

Old Rose: It's been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used. The sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.

We have nightmares because our brain is running simulations to put us in jeopardy to see what we'll do or to acclimatize us to that idea that something bad could happen. It's just how human beings are wired because the entire time we were evolving we had to jump quick or the leopard would get us or whatever it was. It's Darwinian.

You can't be an environmentalist, you can't be an ocean steward without truly walking the walk and you can't walk the walk in the world of the future, the world ahead of us, the world of our children, not eating a plant-based diet.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff; work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind each time you watch your film.

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.

I've sworn off agnosticism, which I now call cowardly atheism. I've come to the position that in the complete absence of any supporting data whatsover for the persistence of the individual in some spiritual form, it is necessary to operate under the provisional conclusion that there is no afterlife and then be ready to amend that if I find out otherwise.

I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.

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.

So my message is in whichever realm, be it going into space or going into the deep sea, you have to balance the yin and yang of caution and boldness, risk aversion and risk taking, fear and fearlessness. No great accomplishment takes place, whether it be a movie or a deep ocean expedition, or a space mission, without a kind of dynamic equipoise between the two. Luck is not a factor. Hope is not a strategy. Fear is not an option.

When the ship docks, I'm getting off with you. This is crazy. I know it doesn't make any sense, that's why I trust it.

Everybody's going to do the 3D slightly differently the same way that people are going to deal with color differently. Some movies downplay the color, some color is very vibrant. Color design is very different. We've got to think of 3D like color or like sound, as just part of the creative palette that we paint with and not some whole new thing that completely redefines the medium.

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

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.

It's important for me to have hope because that's my job as a parent, to have hope, for my kids, that we're not going to leave them in a world that's in shambles, that's a chaotic place, that's a dangerous place.

It’s not a requirement to eat animals, we just choose to do it, so it becomes a moral choice and one that is having a huge impact on the planet, using up resources and destroying the biosphere.

Action is a way of externalizing an emotional state. You might not be running, leaping, climbing and doing all that. But, the way you create that emotional state in a movie is by having the characters have physical jeopardy that they have to work against.

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.

Broken Horses is an artistic triumph. Beautifully written, acted and imaged, this film wraps slowly around you like a king snake and squeezes.