SmartLess - "James Cameron"

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

It’s raining Skittles this week, as the ultra-cool James Cameron shows us how to swim. We dive into the abyss of invented reality… a world of deep sea chicken, where Roombas order Chinese food, and you never need to bail out your dog. Come with us if you want to live - it’s SmartLess, baby.Please support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

guys I can't I can't breathe I'm like I'm on the top of some mountain and I have all I have is me and my altimeter and it says I'm super super super high and I'm I'd be really really nervous I am oh wait a minute I'm I'm at the top of the Beverly Center shopping mall nevermind welcome to smartlist wait first of all Jay tell us how it's going you're started your film yes I do good you don't want to hear boring work crap I appreciate you asking but I can I just thought about directing is that bug grabbed you yet he's coming with gas today let's buckle up yeah it's how's your work you're getting ready to start

your rehearsals yes all right stop not for six months but listen I'm back to you for a second nice deflection back to you but I'm excited you're doing a movie with Taryn Edgerton right and what's it are you a fan it's called Harry on it started this week I saw I spent the day with Danny D's today okay let's talk sweet Pete Giles Danny D's and and our good friend what golfing Rob low yeah oh yeah hey guess what I tried pickleball for the first time did you yeah did you my neck is snapping all over the place let's just keep switching subjects oh wait a minute but did you play golf with them well yeah I sure did yeah so I

played pickleball I think at the same place you guys play golf probably not and they wouldn't dare oh really okay it's fun it is who'd you play with who'd you play with Kevin carry who you know oh yeah sure they're nice peeps and like Kevin carry yeah and our friend I just don't like the sound it makes I there's such a great sound to a tennis ball hitting a tennis racket right in the middle of the strings yeah but that wiffle ball hitting a wood it's I don't mean to sound like a purist a lot of communities on the east coast are now not letting people build pickleball courts at home because they're too loud huh

they're too loud yeah it's just like hitting a wiffle ball pink now yeah speaking of speaking of noise pollution and the west coast versus east coast I hear that here on the west coast they are outlawing gas blowers for leaves that you can only use an electric one now is that what you're gonna use yeah I mean it's I just redid I just rebuilt the engine on on my last one but and you know gas is getting so expensive so this is gonna be good but I'll be upside down for a while okay good oh I miss her I was thinking about I was thinking about pros who hang around gas stations you've heard blow and gas and

everything yeah listen you've got it you've got a Saturday record here and you got it and it's a 430 start late in the day everyone's a little punchy yeah but wait Jason so do you still you fly home every weekend from the shoot I do wow yeah doesn't that isn't that exhausting well no you sleep on the plane and you know the excitement and the love that you feel approaching your family supersedes any fatigue Sean sure sure and get ready how is that how is the flight it was good it was good do they serve a meal on that well no you gotta pay extra for that and if you want to if you want Wi-Fi or you want to

watch a movie or something like that so what I do is I just bring on my sleep mask right and you've got a neck you've got a neck pillow I got a neck pillow that's got blinders on it too so it just sort of sends up a signal yeah please don't speak to me I've got I've got sleep issues Sean this I wanted to know right behind you is that's a television that's a television yeah yeah and that's your desk in your office right at your home office yes mm-hmm so what's the point because I was podcasting off my dining room table don't say podcasting I was doing this it's not a verb okay here you go ready oh here we

go no you need to start why are you letting I'm just saying that that TV I mean it's pointed at the back of your head well I would turn around I'm on a swivel chair I would turn around or I would sit on the couch behind me that you can't see it's never happened it happened what it happened once and having one well why aren't you wearing white what happened usually well because you know I wear white often when we do them in the morning I wear like a long sleeve white t-shirt around the house and to bed and stuff you know that you know why do you wear long sleeves because I wear a long sleeve t-shirt

because that's a new thing it's like the last 18 months because my room to be very cold but I don't want to have this sheet the covers on me you don't want your elbows to get chilly yeah hey Sean hang on listen what's in your cue to tap in on the conversation I found somebody that I that gets that yeah so that's exactly right it's a new thing I'm learning all these things like I feel like I'm I'm firmly getting older because I'm like yeah I'm happy with this yeah I'm happy doing it like this this is the way I like to do it now you're talking to guys who are wearing pajamas for the last I know I know I can't believe that

you would pass judgment on anybody yeah I'm not it's not past judgment I'm wondering if I can welcome you into my you know what I've got on now because we've entered fall I'm now well this is this is basically this they're the flannel pants yeah and I've got now I've got my berks on and socks yeah you're in no position no I was just I was wondering if I can welcome you to granddad land yet I guess I'm wearing it but I was out so I'm not wearing white because I just like I said I just got back from playing golf I wasn't looking for four minutes on this okay wait let's go let's go wait I don't let's go

here we go all right let's start podcasting right we got it we got our set up but now we're podcasting let's get podcasting okay come on ready here we go come on okay I'm super excited you guys this this one's big today oh fuck sorry did I fucking be your opening line I keep all no it's big excited this is big I'm super excited this guy I want to pick this guy's brain he's been on my smart list list since the day we started he's also been on my personal list of people I've always wanted to meet and work with since I was a teenager Contravolta will he's from your homeland which means he's nice and probably ice

skates let's see guys we're dealing with a major player here in Hollywood so a holdoff on all his credits because you'd get you'd guess in two seconds I'll just say he worked as a janitor before making him in the film industry he also lived in his car while creating a very famous film he loves the ocean so much that he built his own submarine and he may have written dialogue such as I'll be back from his car he's responsible for directing two of the three highest grossing films of all time Cameron it's the brilliant James Cameron what's up guys this is a mistake what's up guys I'm gonna put my glasses on so I can see

who's talking wait that really doesn't matter yeah that did that did shit that didn't help at all it doesn't matter hey can we swear on this thing yeah are you kidding me do we just beat it out later good no James Cameron you really have been on my smart list list since the date we started you've been a part of my nerd childhood from Terminator to Aliens to the abyss which is one of my favorite movies Titanic of course and now my adult nerd nerd adulthood with Avatar in the 17 sequels so thank you for being on today this is huge for us I've just been a massive massive fan from my whole life well thank you welcome

to to welcome to podcasting thank you yeah yeah I've never done it before it seems pretty straightforward you just sit around and and drizzle on about inconsequential bullshit I got it I got it okay it's kind of like directing right yeah exactly a little bit except not at all you look very healthy and rested for a guy who's been doing the some of the toughest work the town has to offer for the last 30 years yeah yeah we're in the home stretch of five years of continuous production right now yes Sigourney was just on and oh cool about that and remind me you're not shooting all five avatars at the same time

correct now the thinking was to be semi sane and shoot the first couple and then if that actually worked finish them out but it's also we have a young cast and they would have aged out of their characters if we had waited to kind of just do them a couple years apart right so we shot all their bit well but with the you're talking to a real moron here but the because it can't stand but it's Jason talking if he if he or she starts to age out can't you kind of offset that a bit with some of the computer manipulation that you're doing anyway with their faces or no you're at 100% right except that I've got one young

young character who's supposed to be 15 16 in the story and he's a human kid who's in with the Navi kids and we shoot him photographically but you're right some of the Navi kids they could come back at 22 23 and still do their 17 year old character because the character doesn't age unless we age the characters right yes yes it's fascinating your brain is fascinating okay so try living in it yeah I do your Canadian that's you learn a little something every day so I wanted to get into your Toronto right I'm from Toronto where you from yeah Chippewa Niagara Falls oh fantastic okay so very close yeah how

long what year did you sort of move from Canada do you leave Canada I live with my parents at 71 I was 17 and rocked up in Orange County then later obviously moved down to LA proper and you know that was 47 years ago 48 years ago do you feel any connection anymore to Canada in that way or yeah yeah you do yeah we have we have a couple of businesses in Saskatchewan so I mostly get back to Canada to work on that stuff like running booze or what yeah right we grow we grow yellow peas and fava beans and lentils and we do plant-based protein we built a factory there for plant-based protein so so why me do this so you're

you're you're a young guy who grew up in in the Niagara Falls area so that's not that's not New York that's not Buffalo it's close to it there's a good Niagara Falls and a bad Niagara Falls the good one just happens to be in Canada that's right I got it so there's plenty of falls to go around you should learn some stuff but so you know so you're there so you grew up in Ontario near Niagara Falls Ontario how at when you were a young man living there did you have aspirations to be a director at that time was there something that grabbed you and said I want to do this when you were living there yeah I like movies and

I was making little films just with a super 8 camera stuff like that but the idea that I could actually go and do it for real was so alien and bizarre it never really occurred to me but when my my parents asked me if I wanted to move to Los Angeles because my dad had gotten the opportunity to do a transfer there I said isn't that near Hollywood and my my mom my mom said well we're not really sure sweetheart but we think that that Hollywood is actually in Los Angeles I said I'm in do you remember the moment that the technology that that that is specific to some of the parts of moviemaking really grabbed you

and you're like oh I'd love to incorporate that into some of the more traditional sort of filmmaking techniques and stuff what was it wasn't like that why you tell me I was just fascinated by all of it you know just grabbing a camera running around town shooting neon signs and cut that together in all kinds of crazy ways I mean all the stuff you do as a film student you know just trying to express yourself figure out what you have to say if anything sure you know but I remember 2001 a space Odyssey which I saw in 68 really kind of just tweaked my brain yeah about what was possible and then

after that I got really interested in how things were done you know on the on big movies sure and you worked at you know when you were what did you do on escape from New York which I love that movie John Carpenter great movie yeah weren't you like the visual effects yeah photographer or something I was the co-supervisor of visual effects with another guy named Robert Skotak who is a pal of mine back then and we did it all really old-school stuff paintings on glass and things like that that's so cool Ernest Borgnine was in that yeah yeah do you know Jason has a real connection with Ernest Borgnine yeah do you have

any you have any ability to prove the fact will's got a theory that Ernest Borgnine not there he gave an interview yeah Jason lives in Ernest Borgnine's old house wow and and will has convinced that not convinced he said in a couple interviews that somebody asked what was the key to his longevity and he claimed that it was a ritual of daily masturbation and I said Jason when you're in your house do you imagine Ernest you know in different parts of the house just kind of leaning over the banister up against the wall in the dining room whatever performing this act in in in an exercise standing up why

because he's trying to stay older he's trying to live longer anyway James Cameron is here I think it's a good plan yeah the beauty of his plan is there's no downside you either live longer or you don't but at least you're enjoying it every day that's right they say live for every day right so there you go there you go thank you for that and it's also also it's a victim now did I see him wanking on the set now yeah I can't help you with that right you never came back you never came back to base camp and cut Ernest Borgnine snapping went off hey James just saying God I wish I was at home hey so I wanted to ask you

sorry I wanted to ask you so was and please do correct me was the first film that you directed piranha to oh I was gonna say Terminator or piranha to right well the first bit it was the first big budget big studio movie you did so here's here's to clarify the first film I got hired to direct was piranha to I got fired about eight days into shooting wow because the producer just wanted to take over here that was his plan the whole time I was like I was like a sacrificial lamb and the first film that I actually fully directed was the Terminator so that's that's the only one I put on my resume that is that true

that you were living your car when you wrote it and all that not really I had an apartment in Tarzana but I used to go out to do pars on Ventura Boulevard late at night 3 a.m. and just right you just rock up in a booth and just right you know just to keep that kind of kind of dark film noir turn that into a Sephora now it's a Sephora yeah right oh baby yeah that's where did you get the idea like the idea is so incredible about sending somebody from the future in the back to stop somebody before they get before they you know the whole thing is so it's amazing where does that come from I kind of backed into it because it

was like all right what kind of film will they let me direct it's got to be something I could shoot on the streets of present day LA where I live it's got to be a little budget we can't do a lot of stuff maybe we can do it and they know you've just been fired off the fish movie so I had to factor that in too so it wasn't going to be a big budget so so then I thought all right so how can I get an extra but I wanted to also sort of make it up make my unique skill set valuable as an effects guy so I thought all right so what kind of effects science fiction story can I tell in the streets of LA well there's

only two ways to get something extraordinary here that's either from space or from somewhere else in time right so now all of a sudden boom okay it's a time travel story something comes for the future why okay and then you go into the grandfather paradox and and figure out you know so it kind of it just kind of dominoed from the kind of parameters of my life and what I needed to do yeah I mean because it none nothing of it looks low budget by the way I mean especially at the time and I heard and I haven't seen it lately but at the time it was like pretty incredible and and and I read somewhere

that you like you kind of you didn't have permits and you kind of shot stuff illegally and like yeah what does law enforcement say to James Cameron before he's James Cameron yeah yeah we so we're out in the desert doing the final shot of the movie and you know we got a little wooden platform set up it was me my wife at the time actually we weren't married at the time Gail heard who produced it and her secretary and we had built this little camera platform to shoot the plate for the last shot and there's not nothing visible for 20 miles in any direction and this little glint on the horizon pulls up and it's a cop

I'm like you gotta be fucking kidding me and he he walks up to it says you have a permit to be doing this and I said no but I'm just a student at UCLA I think I was 29 at the time I said do we need a permit I didn't know that he goes well get that get that off this off the road we were on the road by like a foot and he drove away so that was it I just bullshitted my way out and so you cast and your cast is of course Arnold Schwarzenegger who at the time had been doing the Conan movies and stuff he wasn't like he wasn't this huge Conan international Conan whatever it is he wasn't this huge international

superstar that he ended up becoming Terminator was really the sort of seminal role in his career at that point that was the thing that really shot him forward what was that like as a 20 young year 29 year old you know young filmmaker who's trying to make his mark with a guy who's coming from doing these films that weren't necessarily mainstream and big movies did you see was it like the perfect combination in a lot of ways for you guys yeah we clicked right away I mean Arnold Arnold is just all about discipline and all about you know perfection and trying as hard as you can mentally and physically and he saw

kind of kindred spirit in me because you know we were trying to move mountains to make this movie he loved the film I mean they had the axe all sharpened up and poised to chop me off on day two if I if I tripped up they had another director waiting in the wings and and Arnold really kind of had my back on that movie that's great that's amazing wow and we will be right back people often ask me they say will they say what sets GMC trucks apart and I tell them it's not just the announcer in their commercials okay even though that guy is absolutely tremendous and he happens to be professional grade you know what it

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just voiced like a like a nightingale who ain't like a pound of gravel GMC Sierra EV Denali Edition 1 available in early 2024 by reservation only Sierra EV Denali available spring 2024 SmartList is sponsored by BetterHelp so I talk about therapy a lot I know you guys are used to that and I hopefully you're taking advantage of BetterHelp because it really really helps but like for example I have a lot of stress as you know as I openly share with you guys and you know part like this sounds so stupid but on my right pinky I have tendonitis and as you know I play the

piano and it's freaking me out I'm stressed out there's a lot of pressure and stress coming up with the show I'm doing a Broadway and so I was the first thing I talked to last time in therapy I was like how do I cope with this you know calm down first you got to take a step-by-step and she helped me walk through especially when you get that stressed out you can't take on the whole world all at once and all your problems all at once it's got to be step-by-step day-by-day inch-by-inch so you can feel like you can control it and attack it with the right plan that works for you and that's just stuff I learned through

therapy if I don't work on this on my own I'd be lost but but because me and my therapist are like more of a team it really really helps and I know I I know it's somebody that can count on who's gonna listen to me and give me the right advice just not something I want to hear right as the world's largest therapy service better help has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available 100% online plus it's affordable just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with a therapist if things aren't clicking you can easily switch to a new therapist anytime it couldn't be simpler no

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smart list again that's athletic greens comm slash smart list to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance and now back to the show how far do you think we are from completely replacing actors with computer-generated people because they're kind of doing that or or well they are doing that on online right with deep fakes and stuff like that are that are really really convincing is that not that you know I'm looking to get actors out of movies being one but but I'll bet you that there are moments like if you need to fill in crowds and stuff like that there's already that you know

the tiles yeah yeah but like actually actually putting somebody in the foreground on a mark saying lines you know you're doing that to a certain extent when you're no it's not what we do like with the Avatar films it's a it's a very actor-centric actor-driven process yeah we're not trying to replace the actor we're trying to to perfect what they did in a character that doesn't resemble them as much physically right so in a sense it's more like makeup it's a hundred percent actor-driven and we always honor the performance and the nuance of that performance and you'll you'll see it in the new film that's my

pitch I'm done but the but the kicker is I would have said never when I made the first film today with what I know about AI and and the developments in artificial general intelligence and all the work that's being done I would say if you converge the toolset that we have created for Avatar and focused it literally put money into that and focused it in terms of getting it closer to a real-time process and you added AI to that you could fake anything you just can't do it yet you can't do it in real time you can do it with a one month or five months lag right now perfectly which is kind of what we do we had 3200

shots in in Avatar 2 that prove that but do you think there's any do you think there's any value in pursuing that in going down that direction I think that it has more to do with do we want to have photo real avatars that we can we can wear or project within into a metaverse type environment or a gaming environment right I don't think it has any anything to do with how we would create our entertainment it's still just so much easier and by the way more fun to just work with actors yeah what about for like a little reshoot though you know like I say your actors gone off and cut their hair and you got to do a

little a little yeah right yeah but you still do it with the you'd still do it with the actor see so like we got a this human kid and our story if I need a pickup with him for Avatar 3 he's already aged out of the part my miles you know he's he's a foot and a half taller he's two octaves down you know we can repitch his voice but we can't change his body and face aging so if I need that pickup I'll have him come in we'll capture it we have his model and we'll basically just put him in the movie as a human huh all right so I have like a little bit of a long so hang in there this is what I love about you James

Cameron Jim now now we can call you Jim right easy yeah so what I love about you is you're a total like a figure it out or right so really quick super fast story when I was my production company we made a show called grim and I remember pitching grim for like seven years over and over we'd pitch it people wouldn't like kind of not get it we'd put it on a shelf we'd pitch it again and I was in this one meeting at this one network and this high-level executive was like gosh because there's a lot special effects in it they would say they said to me gosh that seems so hard to do that seems really really hard to do every week in

episode episode to which I sarcastically replied well then let's just not do it like meaning everything is hard right so so for you which I'm this is what blows my mind about you where did the ability come from to because movie after movie after movie is like where did the ability come from to trust your ideas so deeply that you're seemingly willing to sacrifice almost everything to see it through like for example I remember reading decades ago about the studio writing check after check for Titanic because somehow you convinced them that all this is gonna work and obviously it did but you succeed in this philosophy

over and over again where do the balls come from to just be like trust me I got this you know well I think there's a thing of when you see it in your head it's kind of like you're watching the movie so you kind of know then that the movies good or not good right I mean within with some degree of accuracy and secondly once you're down the path and you find out how hard it is you know you can't really pull out I can't pull out studio can't pull out so we just got to play it through and then I think there's something that happens that all right well your standards of excellence better go up then because you can't screw this

up yeah I think that's part of it you know but look every every artist of any kind actor a figurative artist whatever has to have the confidence in what they have to say to call themselves an artist in the first place and if they get positive feedback yeah with their first few works that are out there then that confidence goes goes up right yeah you learn to trust your instincts you also have such a such a full understanding of what is possible through technology as well in other words you know you can pitch something in a studio head might say well that sounds really expensive no no we can do that with computers blah

blah blah how are you able to stay current with what is possible and cost effective based on how easy it is for that technology to be accessed etc. are you the one that's that's actually driving what is now possible technologically as opposed to making sure you read the right article to make sure you stay up to date on what's possible yeah it's both I mean when we evaluate a project going into it we'll look at what the state of the art is and we'll identify the areas where we have to you know up the game and that's where we'll put our R&D money and we'll look at the we'll look at our schedule and say

all right we got two years to come up with water simulations you know computational fluid dynamics sims for ocean water we've got X amount of time and it just becomes a budget line item so do you then have do you have people who are writing code for that who work for you yeah yeah so and you're and you're directing them saying okay guys this is what we want to do we want to do the water thing or whatever it is and they go great and they start to model it out and they start writing code for it and which really yeah and then the studio and then the students are sorry Sean the studio then is financing the

the R&D the making of that for that one film are they then not to get in the weeds of all this stuff I apologize but are they then in line to reap the profits of that technology going forward for other projects at other studios kind of yes kind of no it works like this if we develop something for avatar and usually that's in the form of an asset like a creature or a setting or something like that that exists digitally it sits in a server they can reap the benefit of not having to recreate that every time so the movies have a kind of economy of scale over the over the greater arc you know which is

why a scene doc yeah exactly it's like a digital scene doc it's exactly that and and your creatures and and so on you know you can just call that stuff back up so that that's part of the argument for doing you know three or four films kind of back-to-back for the technology that you would use let's say for to make water better today than it was five years ago let's say Studio X funded that movie during which you developed the code that made water better now in five years or a year later you know Universal does something that has sure they need to use it now does Studio X get reimbursed for that for that having

developed that code not really no they just kind of they they spend the money to make that movie the thing is we're leaving out an entity which is the visual effects company right so we work very closely with what a visual effects right down down here in New Zealand where I'm right now they will develop they'll develop that code now they'll use some of the money from what we pay them they'll use some of their own internal resources to do it and then we can go back to them anytime we want and and take advantage of it and it's proprietary for them yeah exactly yeah yeah I'll explain it to Jason later let

me ask you about me out a lot today well thank you well we could have just done it in a second so Jim let me ask you this can you can you did you play well today I did not think you did I had a grumpy day so so Jim did you I hate that you know that Jim can you tell me what happened when you got into all this stuff with actual underwater stuff when you were in submarines and doing all that kind of stuff I mean I had like a nine-hour list of questions about all that yeah now I love that stuff that's I mean I sort of reached a point when I made Titanic where I was making the movie because I wanted to dive to the

wreck I had done a lot of I had done thousands of hours underwater by then on scuba right but I hadn't done anything with submersibles I'd made a movie about subs and about ROVs called the abyss but and we built all the stuff for the movie but we never took it in the ocean so I wanted to go do something for real with with deep diving and then so Titanic was a way of kind of serving both of my greatest interest someone project and worked out great made a bunch of money and then I spent eight years doing expeditions building robots building underwater cameras building submersibles and just kind of turned my back on the

whole filmmaking thing for about eight years that's amazing and then you come back to making the films and doing this like super ambitious stuff with the avatars but but is there part of you that's like I do you prefer one to the other do you wish you were just doing more exploration or yeah sometimes the filmmaking just kind of subsidized that in a way yeah kind of I mean it has so far it's worked out that way you know avatar made a bunch of money so then I built a sub to go to the you know the deepest places on the planet and worked on that for several years after after avatar made those dives in in 2012 so

yeah for me it's a full life it doesn't really make sense to a lot of people looking at it from the outside because in the entertainment business we always put that first like it's the most important thing in the world and everything is all very self-referential within that reality bubble but I was on the NASA advisory council I've been in lots of environments where they don't even think about movies we don't even exist for them maybe on a ship maybe on a ship when you're out doing something really important somebody will throw in you know a VH a VHS you know of some comedy that's all that's not the

Senate well luckily it's not for me either because I've only made really bad movies and TV shows and everything's been canceled but it's okay I'm not successful in that way but I'm good at a dinner party gym keep that in mind it's so fascinating that it just occurred to me that you are incredible at creating fake life and you are incredible at exploring the real raw you know building blocks of real life you know checking out like you know the depths of the earth yeah where the the the the the boring stuff I guess in comparison the stuff in the middle the stuff where we the rest of us live right domestic sort

of life how did you are you comfortable with the amount of time you spend in that lane as well you are well I got five kids yeah and that that's wow that's its own whole epic journey right you guys have kids right yeah yeah yeah I've got three Jason's got two yeah yeah I got a dog yeah well it's similar yeah they scream and shit everywhere yeah except you never have to come down and bail out your dog yeah but that's yeah that's it's such an interesting you're you're so incredible both of those polls and we just never hear about how awesome you are right there in the middle but I'll bet you but that's where we live

that's where we really live right so the new then with the new avatar sequels I thought like the way I brought that around yeah I wanted to talk about the shit that I'd been living for years as a father as a husband and all that sort of thing and the dysfunction in families the the power and the strength that comes from being in a family and what that all means and then put that back into you know what I do as a director in the same way I wanted to bring the underwater stuff into the directing which I did on prior films I wanted to do family so that's the so these avatar films are about family told from the

parents perspective and from the kids perspective yeah by the way you can talk about avatar all you want I'm one of my favorite I'm obsessed I can't believe I'm talking to you all right so you've been to the deepest part of the ocean first of all where did the love of the ocean come from why are you why are you obsessed with it and is it true that you went down you've been down deeper than any other human is that true I've been down as deep as a couple of other humans like seven miles yeah it's almost seven just one more foot yeah well the problem is that when you get that deep it's actually hard to know how deep you

really are with great accuracy like to within a foot you can't do it within a foot you can do it within kind of 30 40 feet something like that yeah and it was seven miles you say it's almost seven miles 35,000 35,000 800 I know how in the world did you how in the world does something exist that can survive the pressure of that we built it yeah built it we built it yeah you went so deep and then you got to get a question from somebody who's so shallow Jim Jim can you can you there's a clip there's a clip you do a lot of so you've made a living doing a lot of these great things and of course you've done with no

because the deep sea and you do all that and a lot of I guess I hate to use the term science fiction because it feels almost too broad or it feels good but is that what interests you if you're gonna watch something if you're on a long plane ride down to New Zealand for instance I imagine you work all the time but if you were to take the moment to watch other films and watch or those things you do you watch science fiction or do you watch yeah dramas or do you watch comedy everything everything everything yeah I probably lean more toward drama science fiction historical fiction that sort of thing comedy more

when I'm with the family sure cuz I don't do it you know but there's always that aspect when you watch a movie and you get really enthusiastic about it you know you're learning something that you can apply back to your own art I'm gonna pitch you a really great comedy series about a guy who's got the bends but we'll get into it later where do you land on that be sure to be very short it's very short it's very sad actually they got a very sad where do you land on documentary because I'll bet you've got a lot of footage of just your expeditions that yeah that you've played with well you do you have one that was

they were all funded by the doc like so the documentaries help pay for the expeditions right so I think I've done right now as as producer and or director somewhere like 11 or 12 documentaries yeah and you know one of the best ones called deep sea challenge where that's the one where you built your own submarine yeah I love deep sea challenge and then there was a ghost to the abyss which was about Titanic but but you know 3d documentary about the wreck and so on stuff like that do you enjoy sort of again the polarity of you know sitting in an editing room and seeing what you got and shaping something from that yeah

it's more the typical documentary experience and and then in in avatar you've got to not only have a script but you're you're creating a lot of things digitally so the amount of planning where there is right almost zero surprise about creating in the editing room I would imagine in comparison to the process of documentary filmmaking again like where is that middle lane do you have any interest in that you know well I love I love editing yeah and I think I learned more editing documentaries than I did from editing features but I think what I brought back into editing let's say on avatar 2 is it's an exploration

just because you got all this footage doesn't mean you're a slave to it you know and the story will reassert itself in the editing process it's almost like a new draft of the script if you will yeah is it ever tempting as I hear they do an animation to completely recreate a scene an act as opposed to going back rewriting reshooting you can almost take an animated approach with it I'm asking now not what we're doing I mean Pixar could do that all day long but once again it's an actor-centric process so I'd literally have to rewrite the scene get the actors back together you know capture it again gotcha now I

could take a line from another scene and I could recreate the setting that I need and drop that line drop that actors performance if it worked you know you'd have to do it and we've done that a couple of times but the fun with the CG is I could take a scene that was shot supposedly as a as a day scene and make it night and make it rain just like in like that okay guys we're making that scene night I love to skip night Sean he could Sean he could Sean he could shoot a scene with you and he could probably paint out the Skittles so they wouldn't be in your yeah you're right next to you can also make it rain Skittles which

would make it rain you know it's interesting you use all this technology not only you use the technology you're an innovator when it comes to technology and it's funny that Terminator and the Terminator films are about a sort of a cautionary tale of technology gone awry if you will are you afraid of the machines oh absolutely well I'm not afraid but but I'm certainly pretty pretty concerned about the potential for misuse of AI yeah I think AI can be great I also think it could you know it could literally be the end of the world I mean you talk to all of the AI scientists and I know a bunch of them

and they every time I put my hand up at one of their you know their seminars or something they just start laughing oh that's that's guy that guy yeah sure we really want to hear from you and you know the point is that no technology has ever not been weaponized yeah yeah and do we really want to be fighting something smarter than us that isn't us on our own world I don't think so I mean look at AI could have taken over the world and already be manipulating it and we just don't know because it would have control over all the all the media and everything and what better explanation for how absurd everything is right now

nothing makes a damn bit of sense to me I don't know about you guys that's exactly right well yeah I mean you're you're there but as you know here we're living in a place that where it just seems very upside down and people are believing seemingly everything and it's a great point which is potentially if the AI is smarter than us and has the potential to be smarter than us why would it let us know that it was beating us because that would be that would be foolish of it to do that that's right be so easy to cover up it would be so easy to cover up but do you feel a responsibility have you ever felt or do

you feel increasingly a responsibility to to have more of a message I was gonna say I don't know in your films do you try to yeah yeah well I mean that the Avatar films are about the environment I'm not dealing with AI you know if I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try to try to launch that franchise again which is in discussion but nothing's been decided I would make it much more about about the AI side of it then then kind of bad robots gone gone crazy please I would watch that because the AI thing not not to put the audience to sleep because I've done that before talking about this subject

but it just for clarification for me because you you know this answer I'll bet you AI is it's about a computing speed right it's an ability to absorb a bunch of information process it and spit it back out I think it has more to do with with understanding human consciousness so that we collectively human technologists can create an intelligence that functions the way we do meaning they call it generally they call it aid AGI artificial general intelligence that it's not just designed to play chess and beat your asset chess it's designed to solve all kinds of problems so it it needs more of a

consciousness the way we view and react to the world and that's made possible just because it's able to absorb so much information fast amounts of data yes you're right so so there's AI and there's AGI so AI learns AI is more simple more more directed functions and what they do is they just show a whole bunch of training data into it all the books in the world yeah kind of or all the or you know all the YouTube all the all the Twitter you know everything and they just they just force-feed it vast amounts of what they call training data right and from that training data they pose it a problem and says all right

try a million different things and see what works better than what and then try another million things and it basically is just throwing processing time at the problem well and then there's so much computing power you know and in all our devices I'm Sean probably doesn't want me to tell this but his his Roomba has been listening to a minute just ordered Chinese food last night it's learning yeah well you know who's gonna be vacuuming the room in about five years ain't gonna be Roomba no it ain't gonna be Roomba it's gonna be us for the cam for the machines yeah we'll be right back smart list is supported by

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about creating a robot or an AI that actually figures out how to mimic everything that is human so that the human is fooled well what they say to you know people that are on the spectrum to say fake it till you make it you know it's like it's like just figure just watch behavior and then learn from it and then you'll fit in better you know and that's just what they'll do that's what AGI will do I heard somebody told me a couple years ago that and maybe you probably heard that you've been at a lot of these these conferences and symposiums and whatever gatherings yeah that that this is at least two years

ago this person said to me that somebody at alphabet or Google or whatever had said to them that they were not concerned but they said it is the the algorithm is already doing things on itself that they don't understand how it knows how to do that's right and that's the big problem with using AI to solve any problem is you may get a good result but it can't tell you what it did right because because it's just randomly problem solving hundreds of millions of times and then just course correcting within that and it doesn't necessarily know why it's better to do it this way versus that way it just knows

that it is and so it'll just keep doing that and iterating so it can't tell you I can't tell you how it's solving the problem because it doesn't know that's crazy it's gonna start making movies Jim you've taught it to make movies now it's gonna start making movies and it's not gonna know why what me man what about crypto I want to know because do you believe in crypto no no good for you with all of this intelligent stuff it do you do anything that's real dumb ass what's what's the stupidest thing that you do I could I could tell you some really stupid things but it'll get back to my kids and then see that what

about like a dumb hobby like I do you love playing marbles bowling bowling bowling yeah you and Mookie bets yeah Gene Simmons of kiss taught me to bowl at his birthday party about 30 years ago and I actually enjoyed it it's like who knew bowling was what have you bowled a perfect game yet no have you gotten close I have gotten real drunk bet everybody like a lot of money that I would throw a strike and thrown it and then walk down of course that was a mic drop because I knew I could never do it again do you are you a sports guy do you follow any sports at all no not interested I have limited Ram and I need to use it for

what I need to use it for do you do you think it's a waste of time I watch a lot of sports am I wasting my time if you haven't fun you're not wasting your time okay now how do you like it what are you doing down there in New Zealand you still working on the on the movie we're just finishing up we're we're mixing the last couple reels you know as we speak finishing up we started out with thirty two hundred and fifty shots I'm down to twelve so yeah exactly how do you how do you zoom out and have like perspective and on something like that I'll get back to you on that when is the first one coming out okay so so avatar the way

of water is coming out in December and then two years later avatar three you know we haven't officially picked the title yet yeah comes which you've already shot we've shot it and we're post on it I've seen a cut of the film but we still have to finish all the effects it's that three thousand shot thing starts again is that is that what's driving the two year gap between it or was that intentional to have it be two years yeah it's just the finish work it takes us about two years to finish a movie that's otherwise all shot and edited yeah are you are you are so are you kind of guy it strikes me that you

might be that you're up at sort of 5 a.m. looking at stuff you're working all day you sleep a few hours and then you're back you wake up because you're bothered by unfinished business sometimes I'll wake up with the answer to a problem I don't usually wake up because I'm bothered by it but every once in a while there's a eureka moment right yeah but I know I get up at 5 every day I work out a noodle around for a while you know family stuff and then I you know go to work at 8 and work 12 hours where do you do your best thinking are you a walker are you are you stare at a wall do you what where do you know like on

planes some people really see clearly at a wall yeah planes are good walks are good you know dreams are good yeah dreams are good yeah I do a lot of work in in dreams and it's not any kind of trained kind of lucid dreaming just it's just sometimes solutions just work themselves out really you'd be a great person to take us into that that that unknown place you know what what dream where they come from where I think it's amazing yeah why don't we do that next please do that I was trying to answer a question another filmmaker had asked me in one of these kind of staged interview things in a magazine like you know about the

screenwriting process and I said we're everybody is screenwriting every night yeah we've got an engine in our head that tells a story in the form of a dream every single night you know it's like I think when we're screenwriting we're just formalizing that process or giving that engine you know more more power or more dominance over our consciousness yeah have you have you have you have you ever actually legitimately had a dream and you've written it down and it's become the nucleus of like an idea of a natural film really absolutely a terminator yeah terminator I had an image in a dream of this metal skeleton

coming out of the fire like boom wrote that down avatar you know I saw the luminous forest in a in a dream with the little spinning lizards and all that stuff drew it I didn't write it down I drew it I painted it and I was thinking I was 19 when yeah yeah really yeah and so that way so avatar was something that was always there kind of in the back of your back of your mind it was this thing that you this for years yeah this thing for years he wanted to yeah for for how you know I mean at this point that was half a century ago but it wasn't in the form of avatar wasn't in the form of that story it was just random imagery you

know and so the way I write I don't know how you guys write but the way I write is I start going forward from character and I start working backward from just shit I want to see and then and then there's all the middle bit where I get the characters into the places that I want to see right no way really that's pretty much fascinating yeah that is fascinating sometimes I felt like mature which was doing that unrest development he'd think up like the most genius sort of crazy stuff you just write backwards and make a plausible that we would arrive at that point yeah exactly well if you know you're ending you can just write the

whole thing right yeah so now I want to just we gotta let you go like in just a couple minutes but and I'm sorry to go way back but I did have tons of questions about the ocean and I knew because I'm I think it's just as fascinating as space I don't ever want to go down the ocean I mean it scares the shit out of me but because I've seen too many movies I do I just I can't swim so there's a whole thing hang on what do I know that that I can't swim well I went to the ocean with you a couple months ago but I but we only only went up to our waist like I don't want to go in but did we have we had this conversation you truly do not

know how to swim I don't kind of know how to swim no not really what and I'm colorblind okay so French bulldog you just go right to the bottom huh let's just all list all the stuff we can't do and our deficits well hang on I know I mean it'll be so cathartic it'll be so cathartic they named the Rolex watch out of him he goes so deep you know I mean okay wait a minute I do have this question so because I read in in anticipation of this I don't know the story I read that you took a chicken in a cage when you went down to the bottom when you did that long thing a yb what happened oh a dead chicken not a live

chicken yeah now it was just a chicken right you know like a like a broiler from why did he need the cage it was he was outside the sub he was actually on a robotic lander and it was just in a wire Frank why do I feel so persecuted here I want to know I want to know what was the result did because we wanted to film this sucker getting ripped apart by these these little amphipods that live down there that are like like the deep ocean piranha and in a like a like a five-minute time-lapse they come in and strip it to the bone so if you've ever you know you've ever seen a burial at sea you know with the flag and the guy

goes out from under the flag he's a skeleton in about 20 minutes now can ask you can ask you why how did you arrive at a chicken did you just think well they're gonna freak out because they've never they never smelt or tasted anything from land in other words like why did you use a dead fish they'd ripped out of part two would you think chicken oh they're gonna love this they they'll eat anything they don't care because the proof the protein for them is like manna from heaven it just falls from above there's nothing really mutt that's very big down where they live and they just scavenge on whatever falls

out so sometimes it could be a whale or a dolphin or a fish or whatever I don't think they're very picky I read some occasional human you know sure or two or heaven help Sean Hayes if he ever gets out there he'll be right down there you're just hanging outside my door you have a pool at your house yeah how do you not swim I know like I doggy pat I'm gonna tell you that Jason I will pull together we're gonna put we're gonna get you some swim lessons you're gonna hold me up yeah Jim what what do you think at the when it's when you're all when you're done with all of this and because you've done so much that the

breadth of which is really pretty astonishing whether it's filmmaking or all this ocean oceanic stuff etc etc what do you want to be remembered for what do you what do you what's your legacy because it's pretty remarkable I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up I love that yeah you could qualify for a bunch of legacy things there what if you had to pick one I'm I think look Explorer filmmaker storyteller I think it explores a storyteller you go you go someplace and you come back and you tell the story right yeah so a documentary filmmakers a storyteller you know

a scripted filmmakers a storyteller you know I don't know I mean I do I have to choose why don't know they'll do it believe me but it is it is really remarkable you haven't you discovered a species or two as well perhaps yeah yeah yeah really yeah yeah yeah well you you you see a lot of stuff no one's ever seen when you get down there I'll bet yeah mostly small mostly small stuff but but definitely you know Sigourney weaver said once she's you know because of all your diving she said they as a cast kept thinking I hope he survives to make another movie that's saying that's saying thinking about her career again I can't

imagine how difficult it must be to make your deal on all this stuff it must be so complicated I was just thinking about the lawyers of it all oh you just the risky things that he does I love the part that where they tell me I can't fly in a private plane or a helicopter and they forget to put that I can't take a sub seven miles down yeah that's my point is like you do all this stuff it's super risky and also like in the technology is proprietary and it's stuff that you're coming up with and you're you're like hey man we were what happened today like your kids might be like dad what'd you do while we were

shooting some stuff and I discovered three new species and I built a submarine the kids my kids couldn't care less is that I do during the day now how old are your kids what are the ranges 15 18 21 29 and 34 so but the teenagers they couldn't care less whatever whatever your parents are doing is not interesting by definition yeah no Jason and I know we have teenagers and they just couldn't I have a 14 they don't get away he has a 50 15 16 16 now your old girl our kids just do not care they're so non-plus humble yeah yeah god well you are the king of the world you really are you're a mark yeah until I walk in the front

door yeah exactly and every house put yours truly it's has been such a huge huge honor to meet you and listen to all of this today it's just I you are such a pivotal part of my childhood and my adulthood and just I just think you're incredible so you're 52 I'm 68 don't don't put that on you are though but I was growing up and I was like I would watch those over and by the way I can't not want by the you know my age more than my own father does but the but I can't believe yeah we got somebody we'd like to put in a submarine actually speaking of that I can do it yeah that's true I'm not gonna say that you're part of my

child I'm gonna say you're a tremendous peer I like consider you a peer I've had a good time hanging out with you guys say it's been great well thank you for doing thank you for all your hard work yeah you're remarkable you're a remarkable artist and adventurer and thank you for everything all right cool yeah this has been great with the film can't wait to see it all right thank you thank you all right take care all right back to the mix pretty cool wow you know what I kept thinking though is like it's just a testament to his tenacity to just believe and so that's why I asked that long-winded question about like how

do you not go just kidding like when when the when the dollar amount gets to remember when Titanic was the most expensive film ever made yeah and then Avatar was these two probably are I mean how does he convince when it gets like 200 million dollars which is what Titanic was at the time you was it how are you not like okay never mind just kidding like and then it was the first one to make a billion yeah right yeah what a roll the dice over and over and over again but then like you know you do something like Avatar and you you you he spawns like ancillary thing like a blue man group you know or think I'll

actually blue man group inspired avatar no they did what I was really hoping I would get you on that one wait what for two seconds I was like I don't remember reading that imagine if they just tried to sue Jim tell me but the part is even when they testify they don't say anything they're just drumming and shit and they keep suppose Mitch didn't give that line to David Cross and arrested like while he's all made up in the blue stuff he went in red for avatar I mean I think that there's some people are just wired differently and he is just he's just wired in a different way so did you ever see do you ever see the making of the

abyss or have you ever seen the abyss no yeah I love the abyss you got it I've seen the making of it like five times it's it's mind-blowing that he built this tank and then they forgot to put salt in it so it was all fuzzy or something like that and so then they had a it was problem after problem after problem for a year and a half two years and they only had so much time to breathe under water and then they couldn't see the faces so they put lights in the helmets and it was just not yeah the amount of knowledge he has to have like from from computer technology to like engineering to I mean just I don't know how you get it all in

there but Jay you know it's funny you say that I think that part of it must be that he's willing to to take a risk and he's willing to make a mistake mm-hmm yeah do you know what I mean like he's not nervous he didn't get it first try right stuff he came up with it would be trial and error and he seems to be the kind of guy who's has the confidence to go like yeah I don't know how to do it but we're gonna figure it out yeah that's and there's something there's a real lesson in that because we're all I I know I am you get nervous you have those moments where you're like I I don't want to fuck up or I don't want to look

stupid or whatever and truly you know creating great things comes out of these you know if you have the frame of mind of like I'm willing to fall on my face yeah and being able to be convincing and yeah articulate your your vision your plan and and lead yeah he's he's clearly one of our best I guess what if the Y was an I in that movie title oh here it comes get ready get ready well what would it would be I don't know what do you mean we'll be called the up by they're always the worst I know always just terrible because he always wants to go to buy and switch switch it's the same way that he

switched subjects just on a dime we're just getting somewhere we're having a conversation we're wrapping up talking about the incredible Jim camera and you and Jim camera mention mention chicken the ocean chicken in the ocean and you're like hey I gotta go find a deep-fried chicken somewhere you're just thinking about a bobbing chicken I had so many ocean questions I want that animator to do Jim taking a chicken down into the end down to do it seven right all right well listen happy Saturday happy Saturday love to you and yours is that by are we did we did we buy it out I think we I buy we abyssed we

have be we abysed listen I didn't think it was the greatest sign off but you know what I'm by yes that's just as bad what we've what we've done for the audiences we've done our own audio documentary on the making of a bite is that work smart smart less smart less smart less is 100% organic and artisanly handcrafted by Bennett Barbaco Michael Grant Terry and Rob I'm JARF smart loss our next episode will be out in a week wherever you listen to podcasts or you can listen to it right now early on Amazon music or early and add free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts or the Wondery app