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.
I am king of the world!
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.
It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth.
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.
When you have the feeling that anything’s possible, sometimes you wind up acting on it.
Your imagination can create a reality.
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.
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.
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.
Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own.
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.
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.
Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move.
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’m hopeful that we’ll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.
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.
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...
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.