Best 117 quotes of James Cameron on MyQuotes

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.

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.

All my films are love stories.

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.

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.

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

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.

Climate change is critical to me because I'm a parent; I feel a sense of responsibility to the future. I'm not going to be around to see its worst effects, which are going to be hitting in the 2030s, '40s, '50s, but my kids will.

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.

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

Everybody is always talking about droughts and sea level rise, but when human civilization, with more crowding and greater resource depletion, is under that much stress, it translates into wars and huge displaced populations. The Syrian refugee crisis is just a first taste of what it's going to be like. I don't want my kids growing up in that kind of world.

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.

Every time my cameras go out on a movie, we learn something new and then we take what we learn and we put it into the next generation of the cameras so we're constantly improving. It's kind of like building a race car, racing it, then running back to the shop and working on the engine some more and tinkering with it to improve it.

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.

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.

God wears white flannels.

Go home, pick up your video camera, and make a film.

Hate is a disease, and in 1930 I became sick with hatred.

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.

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

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.

I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt. It saves so much time.

I am king of the world!

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.

I certainly didn't think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football.

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

I don’t feel that I’m making movies for iPhones. If someone wants to watch it on an iPhone, I’m not going to stop them, especially if they’re paying for it, but I don’t recommend it. I think it’s dumb, when you have characters that are so small in the frame that they’re not visible. I’m trying to make an epic.

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

I dreamed I was a soldier who could bring peace. Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up.

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

If you faced a long hungry period with nothing between you and starvation but a bit of barley and a pig, you'd be better off turning the barley into beer and letting the pig starve.

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

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.

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

I guess Titanic because it made the most money. No, I`m kidding. I don`t really have a favorite. Maybe Terminator because that was the film that was the first one back when I was essentially a truck driver.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm a curious guy. I can't turn away from an investigative story, when it comes to the forensic analysis. I've done 33 dives, to the titanic wreck site. I've spent over 50 hours piloting robotic vehicles at that wreck trying to piece together what happened during the disaster. How the ship broke up, comparing the historical record with the forensic record. Documentaries are kind of my new life. I love documentary filmmaking.

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

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

I'm willing to engage or indulge real ideas, but if we don't do something [about global warming], we're all going to die! What's it going to take, a big f--ing disaster with all kinds of people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.

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.

In writing the new films, I’ve come to realize that AVATAR’s world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.

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 probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that's gone before that it's sort of like a fractal. It's gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you're a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations.

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.

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]