James Cameron Quotes

James Cameron's sly, argumentative observations on power, technology and future feel like a speculative documentary voice.

24 quotes

1. The fabulous Eva, Government Glad-Hand Girl No. 1 of the extravagant political novelette that is Argentina.

2. That worst evil of long dictatorships: the loss of all political experience.

3. When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long.

4. 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.

5. Much of my life seems in retrospect to have been spent in the company of putative national leaders passing through the process of being denounced and imprisoned for sedition, as part of the inevitable progression towards the Prime Ministership and the ritual tea-party at Windsor Castle.

6. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Where else but in Texas would men set up to administer space?

7. The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask.

8. I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff 'pieces', when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.

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

10. “if you set your goals ridiculously high and its a failure, you will fail above everyone elses success”

11. Usually, when you go to a movie, your consciousness floats above the film. 3D sucks you in and makes it a visceral experience.

12. 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.

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

14. 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]

15. 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?

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

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

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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.

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