James Cameron is a Canadian filmmaker well known for his expansive vision and innovative special-effects films, most notably Titanic (1997), for which he won an Academy Award for best director, and Avatar (2009). In 1971 his family moved to California. After studying physics at California State University at Fullerton. Following Titanic’s unparalleled success, Cameron took a break from feature films. He created and coproduced Dark Angel a science-fiction television series. Below is a collection of Insightful James Cameron Quotes on Hope, Success & More.
James Cameron Quotes
- “Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.”
“The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.”
- “The nation that leads in renewable energy will be the nation that leads the world.”
- “Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own.”
- “Failure is an option, fear is not.”
- “Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move.”
- “Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.”
- “Your only competitors are your past achievements.”
“Your imagination can create a reality.”
- “People call me a perfectionist, but I’m not. I’m a rightist. I do something until it’s right, and then I move on to the next thing.”
- “What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?”
- “A woman’s heart is an ocean of deep secrets.”
- “Go home, pick up your video camera, and make a film.”
- “Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.”
- “I love it when I have a nightmare to me that means I got my money’s worth out of that eight hours.”
- “Old Rose: It’s been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used. The sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.”
- “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…”
- “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.”
“The magic doesn’t come from within the director’s mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.”
- “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 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.”
- “The universe is like a giant bank vault lock, where the tumblers are constantly moving and once in a while the tumblers line up and you have to listen for the click. So you must be prepared in that moment to step through the door.”
- “I dreamed I was a soldier who could bring peace. Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up.”
- “When the ship docks, I’m getting off with you. This is crazy. I know it doesn’t make any sense, that’s why I trust it.”
- “Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It’s like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they’ll crystallize into a pattern.”
- “I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.”
- “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.”
- “When you have the feeling that anything’s possible, sometimes you wind up acting on it.”
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- “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.”
- “I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.”
- “So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We’ll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that 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.”
- “I don’t look at scripts. I just write them.”
- “You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything.”
- “If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.”
- “It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth.”
- “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.”
- “Nature’s not our enemy, it’s our sustenance; and we need it – and we need nature healthy for us to be healthy and to survive long term.”
- “You can’t really call yourself an environmentalist if you’re still consuming animals. You just can’t.”
- “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.”
- “Don’t get seduced by your own stuff; work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind each time you watch your film.”
- “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.”
- “God wears white flannels.”
- “If it was up to the studio, everything would be shot with a camcorder.”
