Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

James Cameron, fully James Francis Cameron

Canadian Film Director, Film Producer, Deep-sea Explorer, Screenwriter and Editor who first found success with "The Terminator"

"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."

"A woman's heart is an ocean of deep secrets."

"Basically because I had told the story. To make Terminator 3 was to make a 3. - [about his reason to decline Terminator 3]"

"Clearly, the dental patient was a sole crew member on a one-man ship. Perhaps his home-world did know of his demise, but felt it was pointless to rescue a doomed person. Perhaps he was a volunteer or a draftee on the hazardous mission of bio-isolating these organisms. Perhaps he was a military pilot, delivering the alien eggs as a bio-weapon in some ancient interstellar war humans know nothing of, and got infected inadvertently. [on the possible origins of the Space Jockey (or the dental patient as he calls it) in "Alien" an idea explored in "Prometheus"]"

"Curiosity - it's the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality."

"As much as I love Star Wars (1977) and as much as it's really revolutionized the imaging business, it went off the rails in the sense that science fiction, historically, was a science fiction of ideas. It was thematic fiction. It stopped being that and became just pure eye candy and pure entertainment. And I miss that. With Battle Angel (2017) I'm going to flirt with that darker, dystopian message as much as I can, without making it an art film."

"Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality."

"DONALD LYDECKER: Alcoholism is not a disease, it's a failing. You've turned it into a church. You worship the altar of self-pity. I come to these rooms for one reason, to remember what I don't want to become... helpless, impotent, and weak."

"Every time I start a film, I have a fantasy that it will be like a big family, and we'll have a good time, and we'll have all of these wonderful, creative moments together. But that's not what filmmaking is; it's a battle."

"Guillermo del Toro is one of my best friends and we've never really worked together. I mean, we always feel like we're working together because he gets all involved in my stuff, I get all involved with his stuff, but not in an official capacity."

"How about another Dirty Harry movie where Clint Eastwood looks the way he looked in 1975? Or a James Bond movie where Sean Connery looks the way he did in "Dr. No"? How cool would that be? There's no way to scan what's underneath the surface to what the actor is feeling. If Tom Cruise left instructions for his estate that it was okay to use his likeness in Mission Impossible movies for the next 500 years, I would say that would be fine. You could put Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart in a movie together, but it wouldn't be them. You'd have to have somebody play them. And that's where I think you cross an ethical boundary. [on CGI technology]"

"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."

"Failure is an option, fear is not."

"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 came to filmmaking in the early '80s, and it was a time of deep economic recession. It was a time when VHS home video was taking money from the theaters. The film industry was depressed. That's what I knew - a state of upheaval and change. It all sorted itself out. These things always sort themselves out. The fundamental question is: is cinema staying or is it going away? I think it shows no signs of going away. I feel quite confident you (Peter Jackson) and I are going to make the kinds of films we love 10 and 20 years from now."

"I can't think of anything that I see on a screen these days without thinking how much better it'd look in 3-D! If I see a movie I really like...Like, I'm watching "King Kong" I think, "Man! That'd be great in 3-D!" Everything's better in 3-D! Everything! A scene in the snow with two people talking...in 3-D...It's amazing! You're in the snow! You feel the snow."

"I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have."

"I didn't want to raise [my children] in that poisonous atmosphere. There's a climate of materialism in Los Angeles. We're all vegan, we grow our own organic food at our ranch in California, and we'll continue to do that in New Zealand. You want your kids to grow up with a certain set of values."

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

"I don't have a TV. I took it out of the house. I was watching too much TV, so I took it out."

"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 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 kind of turned my back on the Terminator world when there was early talk about a third film. I'd evolved beyond it. I don't regret that, but I have to live with the consequence, which is that I keep seeing it resurrected. I'm not involved in "Terminator Salvation". I've never read the script. I'm sure I'll be paying 10 bucks to see it like everybody else."

"I don't think anything resembling "The Terminator" is really going to happen. There certainly aren't going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now. The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that's why people key into them."

"I do think Hollywood movies get it wrong when they show women in action roles - they basically make them men. Or else they make them into superheroes in shiny black suits, which is just not as interesting."

"I enjoyed "Prometheus"; I thought it was great. I thought it was Ridley returning to science fiction with gusto, with great tactical performance, beautiful photography, great native 3D. There might have been a few things that I would have done differently, but that's not the point, you could say that about any movie."

"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. - [about his favorite movie he directed]"

"I have Ripley specifically telling a member of the inquiry board, "I already told you, it was not indigenous, it was a derelict spacecraft, an alien ship, it was not from there." That seems clear enough. Don't ask me where it was from... there are some things man was not meant to know. Presumably, the derelict pilot (space jockey, big dental patient, etc.) became infected en route to somewhere and set down on the barren planetoid to isolate the dangerous creatures, setting up the warning beacon as his last act. What happened to the creature that emerged from him? Ask Ridley Scott. As to the purpose of the Alien... I think that's clear. They're just trying to make a living, same as us. It's not their fault that they happen to be disgusting parasitical predators, any more than a black widow spider or a cobra can be blamed for its biological nature. [on where the creatures in "Aliens" came from]"

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

"I haven't paid for lunch in two weeks. [When he was the new hot screenwriter in the mid-1980s]"

"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."

"I push people to get the best out of them. And the same applies to me. If I come home at the end of a day of filming and my hands are not black, I feel that was a day wasted."

"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 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 it when I have a nightmare to me that means I got my money's worth out of that eight hours"

"I love you Jack. A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets. Jack, this is where we first met."

"I spent all my free time in the town library and I read an awful lot of science fiction and the line between reality and fantasy blurred. I was as interested in the reality of biology as I was in reading science fiction stories about genetic mutations and post-nuclear war environments and inter-stellar traveling, meeting alien races, and all that sort of thing. I read so voraciously. It was tonnage. I rode a school bus for an hour each way in high school because they put me in an academic program that could only be serviced by this high school much further away. So I had two hours a day on the bus and I tried to read a book a day. I averaged a book every other day, but if I got really interested in something it was propped up behind my math book or my science book all during the day in class."

"I think from the standpoint of the Hollywood mainstream, they got up one morning and opened the trades and went, 'What the hell is this movie that's number one this weekend?' And, by the way, it was number one the next weekend and the weekend after that. It dominated the Thanksgiving weekend against a couple of big pictures, like "Dune", for example, and "2010", which were big studio pictures. Actually, 2010 was a big studio picture and Dune was a high-end independent film. But these were mega-buck movies and Terminator just steam rolled over them. And it had been done by these nonentities."

"I see a very similar pattern, in a sense, between "Titanic" and "Avatar". Not that they are similar films because they are not - totally different subjects - but in both cases, you have people coming back over and over to see the film."

"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 clich‚d. 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."

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

"I wanted someone who was extremely fast and agile. If the T-800 is a human Panzer tank, then the T-1000 is a Porsche. [on Robert Patrick's casting as the T-1000 in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day"]"

"I was talking to him back in fall about a new Terminator film and quietly advising on that. I was trying to be as encouraging as possible. Frankly, at that time, I thought it needed to be more about him. I told him he should not do it until it's focused on his character. I think there are some great stories that can be told about that character that haven't even been thought of yet. [on Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator"]"

"I was petrified at the start of Terminator. First of all, I was working with a star, at least I thought of him as a star at the time. Arnold came out of it even more a star."

"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 was stunned, absolutely floored. I think it's the best space photography ever done, I think it's the best space film ever done, and it's the movie I've been hungry to see for an awful long time... What is interesting is the human dimension. Alfonso [Cuar¢n] and Sandra [Bullock] working together to create an absolutely seamless portrayal of a woman fighting for her life in zero gravity. [on "Gravity"]"

"I tried to buy the book rights and he beat me to it by a few hours. But when I saw the film, I realized that I was not the right person to make the film, he was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been "Aliens" with dinosaurs, and that wouldn't have been fair. Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I'd have gone further, nastier, much nastier. (On Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park")"

"I went from driving a truck to becoming a movie director, with a little time working with Roger Corman in between. When I wrote The Terminator, I sold the rights at that time - that was my shot to get the film made. So I've never owned the rights in the time that the franchise has been developed. I was fortunate enough to get a chance to direct the second film and do so on my own creative terms, which was good. But that was in 1991 and I've felt like it was time to move on. The primary reason for making a third one was financial, and that didn't strike me as organic enough a reason to be making a film."

"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."