James Cameron Quotes

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

I tried [being a mogul]. It bores me. I don't really want to produce other people's movies. Because they're either grown-up filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh or Kathryn Bigelow that didn't really need me - and I've produced both of them. It's fun to sit around with them and be collegial, but they don't need me. They can make the film without me. I make my own stuff. There are tons and tons of other things I'm interested in that have nothing to do with movies or are documentary projects.

I pick my feature film battles very carefully. They're going to be personal and they're going to take a lot of my energy. I'm not going to be some big production company and be Jerry Bruckheimer or something like that. It doesn't interest me.

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.

If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.

Your imagination can create a reality

It's about human imagination and curiosity. What's out there? What's in the great beyond? What exists at levels we can't see with our five senses?

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

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

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

To convince people to back your idea, you've got to sell it to yourself and know when it's the moment. Sometimes that means waiting. It's like surfing. You don't create energy, you just harvest energy already out there.

Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.

Jack: Rose! You're so stupid. Why did you do that, huh? You're so stupid, Rose. Why did you do that? Why? Rose: You jump, I jump, right? Jack: Right. Rose: Oh God! I couldn't go. I couldn't go, Jack. Jack: It's all right. We'll think of something. Rose: At least I'm with you.

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

I am king of the world!

Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.

I don't look at scripts. I just write them.

I'm certainly not a fan of conversion when you could shoot the movie in 3-D.

I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength. [From a 1986 Fangoria interview]

If it was up to the studio, everything would be shot with a camcorder.

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.

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.