JAMES CAMERON: Inside the Mind of One of the Most Iconic Filmmakers in History (Greatest Risks, Biggest Failures, & His KEY Principles to Success)

Today, Jay welcomes the legendary James Cameron. Award-winning filmmaker, explorer, and innovator known for pushing the boundaries of storytelling and technology, to explore the inner world behind one of the most influential storytellers of our time. The conversation extends beyond filmmaking to an exploration of imagination, purpose, and the courage it takes to follow your calling before the world validates it. James shares how his childhood fascination with science fiction, nature, and drawing became a refuge for creativity, long before success ever entered the picture. From sketching imaginary worlds as a child to trusting his instincts without formal film training, he reveals how curiosity, solitude, and relentless self-belief quietly shaped a life of visionary storytelling. James reflects on failure, rejection, and the unseen moments that nearly ended his journey before it truly began. He opens up about being fired early in his career, the constraints that led to creating The Terminator, and why commitment often requires choosing conviction over comfort. Through stories of sacrifice, creative pressure, and building teams that feel like family, James reveals that success was never about money or recognition but about honoring the responsibility of meaningful storytelling. In this interview, you'll learn: How to Trust Your Creative Instincts Early How to Turn Failure Into Fuel How Constraints Unlock Creativity How to Lead Without Losing Empathy How to Balance Solitude and Collaboration How to Create Work That Moves People How to Stay Purpose-Driven Through Success How to See Others With Deeper Understanding Every challenge you face is a lesson in resilience, empathy, and courage. The world doesn’t need perfection, it needs presence, honesty, and people willing to care deeply. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty Join over 750,000 people to receive my most transformative wisdom directly in your inbox every single week with my free newsletter. Subscribe here. Check out our Apple subscription to unlock bonus content of On Purpose! https://lnk.to/JayShettyPodcast What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:43 An Early Fascination With Science Fiction 04:44 Inspiring the Next Generation of Artists 06:34 The Solitary Nature of Creative Work 08:44 When Storytelling Becomes a Calling 12:16 Finding a Market for Your Imagination 16:33 How to Capture and Record Your Dreams 22:42 Different Approaches to the Creative Process 24:17 What is Your Creative Vision? 29:29 Lessons on Family, Community, and Belonging 32:01 Why We Only Protect What We Love 38:58 Can AI Ever Develop Consciousness? 39:14 What Creation Really Requires 44:33 How to Bounce Back After Failure 47:16 Creating Within Constraints 51:28 Learning What You Can Negotiate 53:34 Are You a Risk Taker? 01:01:32 Recognizing Consciousness Beyond Humans 01:04:15 Exploring the Depths of the Ocean 01:09:57 Letting Go of the Work You’ve Created 01:14:41 The Deeper Message Behind Films 01:21:28 Humanity’s Natural Capacity for Empathy 01:24:14 James on Final Five Episode Resources: James Cameron | Instagram James Cameron | Facebook See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Jay Shetty?

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• 1:12Jay Shetty?

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• 1:55Jay Shetty?

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• 2:26Speaker 02

  Opportunities come along and they're fleeting. And that door will open for a moment and then it'll slide closed. When that door opens, the critical thing is to understand it's not an example of an opportunity. It is the opportunity. You either take it or you don't.

• 2:42Jay Shetty?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose. Today's guest is someone I'm deeply excited to interview. His life is truly movie magic in so many ways, but it is filled with lessons, insights and inspiration that you can take into your own journey to chase your passion, to pursue the career that you love, to bring your art to life, to bring your magic to the world and offer it as a service. I'm sitting down with the one and only James Cameron, one of the most influential storytellers of our time, filmmaker, explorer and visionary, who has redefined what's possible on the screen. From The Terminator and Aliens to Titanic and Avatar, his films have shaped global culture,

• 3:26Jay Shetty?

  pushed the boundaries of technology and sparked entire generations of imagination. James is a deep sea explorer, the pioneer of performance capture and a director whose work continues to challenge, innovate and expand what storytelling can be. The highly anticipated new chapter Avatar: Fire and Ash that I got to see last week comes to theaters December 19th. Make sure you book your seat, go and watch it with the whole family. You won't regret it. Please welcome to On Purpose, James Cameron. James, it is such an honor.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Can you just travel around with me for the rest of my life and do the introduction? No pressure, by the way.

• 4:07Jay Shetty?

  Well, you had to build it, you had to live it.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  I gotta live it. I have no choice. There's no backing out now, right?

• 4:14Jay Shetty?

  Well, you've had to live it for all these years and create all these iconic films that we all have fallen in love with and still talk about to this day and so many new ones to come in the future. But I wanted to take us back to your childhood.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:28Jay Shetty?

  Because I feel that so much of who we become is defined in those early years, as you and I both know. And I was wondering, do you remember the first character or world that you ever imagined, even if it wasn't for a movie or a film or a idea, but just a world that you lived in when you were younger?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Well, I was totally enamored as a kid with anything fantastic or science fiction, anything I saw on television that was fantasy and science fiction. But I remember one, one sort of, I think there was a moment where something inspires you to, to take your own action, to do your own art. And I remember, and this may not have been the first, but this is what pops to mind. So seeing Mysterious Island, which was a Ray Harryhausen film, I probably would have been seven or eight. And coming home and wanting to do my own version of Mysterious Island, so I started to draw essentially a comic book. And, but

• 5:30Speaker 02

  it was my own story. The animals were different. They wound up cast away on a raft as opposed to in the movie, it was a balloon. And I just started telling my own story. So technically, that would be the first case I can remember of world building inspired by something else, but not copying that thing. And of course, Ray Harryhausen was always inspiring to me as a kid, you know, I mean, the technique that he used of stop motion animation is considered quite quaint now, you know, and, and we can do things that are far more realistic. But at the time, there was nothing like that in terms of, of his art, his craft. And that blew my mind at the time. And, you know, look, it doesn't take much to inspire.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Kids are imaginative, you know, and and when you get something that impacts your imagination and and triggers it, and then you start to draw, all of a sudden my hand's going. You know what I mean? I'm drawing, I'm I'm choosing colors. What what color do I want the giant turtle to be? I picked green. No big surprise there.

• 6:34Jay Shetty?

  Did you ever get to share that with the director or anyone in the cast?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I did talk, I talked to Ray. Later in his life, he was pretty retired. He hadn't he hadn't done any stop motion for some time. But, you know, I shared with him some of these early stories and the impact he had on me and so many other filmmakers. He was absolutely the most fantastic of the fantasy filmmakers that were out there for many, many years.

• 6:58Jay Shetty?

  I can't imagine what that felt like to him to hear that something of his that inspired you to go on to see what you did.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  I think he was just kind of dazzled by where we where the next generation and the one after that had sort of taken it into CG and so on and things that he couldn't have imagined the technology, but he certainly could have imagined the design and the storytelling, you know, that were possible with those those new tools.

• 7:25Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, I think that's the power of art. As I'm listening to you, I'm thinking just how many young kids are going to go and watch Fire and Ash and that becomes their version of that movie that then inspires them to go and bring their art into the world, whether it's film and TV or poetry or music or whatever it may be and how how important it is because I he probably didn't imagine that, you know, James Cameron as a seven or eight year old was watching his film.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Oh, how could he have? You know, I mean, he was just following his muse and and we all do, you know, but I I'd love to think that stuff that I've done has inspired inspired, you know, I don't I want to say kids, but you know, it could be anybody that wants to be an artist at at any age. And, you know, I have this art show that's touring around in in Europe. It's in actually in Istanbul right now and it's a lot of drawings that I did. And paintings that I did when I was in high school and in college, I didn't know I was gonna be a big shot filmmaker someday, you know, how could you possibly know that, you know, I was just, the ideas in my head, I just had to draw them. I mean, I had to draw them. And I always say artists, artists are the people that can't not draw, or can't not create. It's like, it's

• 8:35Speaker 02

  not like you force yourself to create, you have to force yourself not to, you know, and if that's flowing from you, if it's flowing from your fingertips, or if it's voice, or if it's music, or whatever it is, if it's flowing from you, and you can't stop it, guess what, you're stuck, you're an artist.

• 8:52Jay Shetty?

  And you feel compelled.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And you don't question it, that's the crazy thing. At least I never did. You know, I'd, I'd sit on the quad at, at college, and I'd just have my math notebook, or whatever, and I'd be sketching some girl sitting under a tree, or some guy, or my own hand, or, you know, I mean, it was just always drawing. I couldn't imagine not drawing.

• 9:16Jay Shetty?

  Was, was there a part of you that felt out of place as a kid, but now that same skill is essential to who you are now? Or did you always feel that you...

• 9:24Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah. I mean, look, you can get very solitary, the creative act, especially when you write, because you really have to just, you know, isolate, and you need to be in your own headspace, and be comfortable there for long periods of time. So it can be isolating. I, I remember, and, and you know, I mean, our memory of our childhood is always tainted by the stories that we tell ourselves, and we don't remember the event, we remember the story.

• 9:51Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Right?

• 9:51Jay Shetty?

  Very true.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Because memory is an interesting thing. We don't really, we're not video cameras. There isn't enough storage in this three and a half pound meat computer to last a lifetime. It'd be million petabytes of data, we just don't have room for that, right? So we don't remember the event. Like a videotape, we remember the story we tell ourselves.

• 10:09Jay Shetty?

  Thank you.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  The story I tell myself is that I spent a lot of time on my own in my imagination, in the woods, connecting with nature, finding animals, finding bugs, collecting butterflies, tadpoles, whatever it was. A lot of time on my own drawing and just thinking and creating. And a lot of time with other kids, organizing and doing fun collective projects. You know, the one in the neighborhood that always said, hey, guys, let's build a fort. You know, hey, guys, let's build a go-kart. Hey, guys, let's make an airplane out of wood and hang it from a tree and fly. Which we did until the rope broke and, you know, it crashed. But, you know, so there was an alpha social component, which is now critical.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  But there was also a quiet, creative and introspective component to it. And I think it was, if I look at my life now, it's my comfort in both of those zones that allows me to do what I do. Because a lot of people are good writers, are good creators, good artists, but they don't have the social organizational component to motivate people to do things, you know, and to leverage their creativity. And so that's a big part of it, that sort of alpha component, if you will.

• 11:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's fascinating because you hear about this passion in your childhood, the flow to draw and create and to be fascinated with nature. And it almost makes sense, but then you become a truck driver. And so walk me through that arc of your life, because I feel so many people, kind of up until 10, 11 years old, may even have these passions and dreams and ideas and creatives, but then their life takes a different.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  I never went to university per se. I went to the Fullerton Junior College, which is part of the junior college system. I was intensely curious. It was the first time in my life where I was surrounded by people who actually wanted to be there. You know, as opposed to high school where people didn't want to be there. They just had to be there. And, you know, and most of them sort of rejected the learning process. I was always hungry to learn, not necessarily what they were, what they were teaching, but, but, you know, lots of new things. I got to college and I was surrounded by people that actually wanted to be there and wanted to learn. And, and there was, people were having arguments about philosophy and, and, and English and storytelling and, and art, and it was very exciting.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  But it was unsustainable for me. I couldn't afford to do it continuously or endlessly. And so I had to work and I worked various jobs, all blue collar jobs, right? And I didn't mind working. I didn't mind just sort of being, you know, and I got married at a very early age. I had a little, a little pink house with a white picket fence and a dog, you know? And it was kind of, you know, kind of comforting. I was very, very limited and, and simple. But at the same time, in my after hours as a truck driver, because it was a, you know, nine to five or an eight to five job. I was painting, I was drawing, I was storytelling for myself. My wife didn't understand that. She was a waitress.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  And she, she liked the me that was social and with her, but not the me that was off, you know, creating all these, these worlds. And so I was still trying to reconcile, you know, that kind of social facing versus the, you know, uh, landscape of my own imagination. But I've always been comfortable in my own head that way. Uh, dreams are a big part of it. Dreams are a big part of my creativity and source of imagery, source of little, um, bits and pieces of narrative, you know, because it could be quite chaotic and jumbled, but still within that, there could be some interesting ideas. And, uh, so I, I think it was all just building up, building up a pressure to the point where I had to do something about it.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Um, and that was in my, my mid twenties. And so I was kind of a late starter. I never went to film school. You know, my film school was the drive-in movie theaters of Orange County. You know, so no formal training in film aesthetics or, or film history or, or any of that stuff. But it was just kind of building up that, all right, you know, it's that urge to, when you can't not draw, when you start thinking filmically. And in terms of storytelling, it's like, well, you can't not tell a story. You've got to tell somebody the damn story. You know, and I think anybody out there that, that hears this, that feels that way, you're stuck. You don't have a choice. You're probably going to be a filmmaker or a writer or whatever it is, you know, just accept it.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  You know, you might never be rich because, you know, it's, it's a difficult task and, and, uh, there's a lot of luck, I think, involved in getting to be a, a successful storyteller. But, um, I just followed it. I didn't, I didn't question it. You know, I just quit my job one day. No ranker, just guys, I got stuff to do. I'll see ya. To my other dri- the other drivers and they're like, what? Where are you going?

• 14:58Speaker 02

  You know.

• 14:58Jay Shetty?

  I mean, it feels like a bold step looking back because without film school, without having made a film.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:04Jay Shetty?

  Without any of that background to watch Star Wars, I believe in nineteen seventy seven.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  That was.

• 15:09Jay Shetty?

  And for you to then go, I need to go and become a filmmaker, even though you love drawing. And it it feels like a bold step. And I think about all of our listeners in our community who are all thinking something similar. I think a lot of people in my generation and the generations after me, maybe studied something at school that wasn't the thing they wanted to be. They have a dream inside of them. They have a story and they feel a pull, but they're scared to take that final step. What gave you that conviction? Did was it conviction or what was it? Was it?

• 15:40Speaker 02

  I think it was a conviction. I'm Star Wars helped. And I've talked to George Lucas about this. I said, I they're untold people that that you've inspired, George, but I'm one of them because. But in a way, I don't, I don't think he was quite wanted the answer that I that I gave, which was, I was already seeing all that stuff in my head. And when I saw Star Wars, I thought if that could be the highest grossing film in history, then the stuff that I'm seeing in my mind, when I listen to fast electronic music and imagine space battles and all this crazy stuff, it's like, I should be doing that. You know, there will be, there will be a market for it. There's a market for my imagination. And that's maybe the boldest step is the step you take internally.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  You know, where you give yourself permission to at least go try it, you know. And and you've and when you make that commitment, you have to go in wholeheartedly. You can't say, OK, I want to be a filmmaker part time, but I'm going to sort of keep a foot in like medical school. It's not going to work. You got to go. You just got to jump out of the plane and and and hope you're wearing a parachute. You know, so I always tell people that. Opportunities come along and they're fleeting. And that door will open for a moment and then it'll slide closed. And you've got to be, fortune favors the prepared mind. If it's really something you love, read as much as you can. Prepare your mind ahead of time. Be ready, because when that door opens.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  But the critical thing is to understand, it's not an example of an opportunity. It is the opportunity. You either take it or you don't. You don't use it as a time to think about, well, when the next one comes along, I may or may not. You know what I mean? That's not how it works. You go, you launch, you know? And that opportunity for me was that a guy that I was working with on learning to sculpt and make molds, who was a little bit ahead of me in the sort of fan curve of actually knowing how to do rubber armatures for stop motion, and I was pretty fascinated by that. His sister was dating a guy who was a carpenter on a super low budget Roger Corman science fiction film.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  And I just said, introduce us. And so she talked to him, he talked to them. We got an appointment and we went in and showed our little models and our little things that we had. And I had this film that I had made with some friends. And we both got jobs on a Roger Corman film. And we thought we'd died and gone to heaven. Because now we were getting a paycheck on a real movie. That was a total piece of crap movie. It was a little tiny movie. You know, it was actually the biggest movie Roger Corman had ever made. It was like a million dollars or something like that, which was huge for him. He usually made movies for like $200,000. But, and then all of a sudden I'm on a movie. And then the rest just sort of made sense after that. It's that prepared mind thing.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  You know, I had read everything I could possibly read. I had schooled myself on how visual effects were done, all for no money, all not at university. Just, you know, over that sort of two or three years that I was driving trucks and working blue collar jobs. So I guess in the back of my mind, I must have thought, I'm going to do this for real at some point. Because I was clearly preparing myself, but I had no entree.

• 18:59Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  I didn't know anybody that knew anybody that knew anybody that worked on a film. Even though I was in Orange County, it's not that far from here, not that far from the center of the film industry, but it might as well have been Montana. You know, at that time, certainly.

• 19:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Did you, do you record your dreams? How do you note them down? How do you capture them?

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes I'll wake up and I'll just write it down, you know, or I'll type it out on my laptop, whatever.

• 19:25Jay Shetty?

  How long have you recorded them for? Like, when did you start?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  It's sporadic. I mean, you know, I mean, it's a constant sort of streaming channel that's running all the time. And they're not all necessarily worthy of, but every once in a while I'll get a corker. It's like, oh man, I gotta write this one down. You won't believe this.

• 19:41Jay Shetty?

  Did you ever follow the curiosity of where they come from or how they originate? Or what have you, wherever you found, where do you think you get them from?

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I look, I've read a lot on the theories of consciousness and dreams and what purpose they serve. And, and there are some researchers that think they have deep psychological meaning and others that think they're really just, the brain just kind of resetting itself and reshuffling memory and, and, you know, kind of cleaning house. And it doesn't really have any meaning. I happen to think that they have, they have meaning to you. Now, my wife, Suzie, believes that she has, and I, I believe she's right, has received premonitory dreams about events in her life. And she's documented this in a way that I find quite compelling. I'm not a hundred percent convinced, sorry, baby, if you're listening, not a hundred percent convinced,

• 20:32Speaker 02

  but she's given me evidence that gives me pause. And I'm a pretty hardcore empiricist. I'm not a mystic. I don't, I don't follow all of the, the various winds of the spirituality fads and things like that. That's not how I roll. I'm very science oriented. You've got to show me, you've got to prove it. It's got to be peer reviewed, you know, and that sort of thing. It's got to be the subject of double blind studies and it's got to be falsifiable and all the, you know, empirical stuff. But I've seen some things I don't, I can't explain. And she's demonstrated some things to me that can't be explained by my not, my understanding of science, you know, I mean, I'm not a scientist, but I did study physics. I studied astronomy and I, I keep pretty current.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  In the sciences. So there's clearly stuff out there that's not well explained, or explained at all, right now. Doesn't mean it won't be someday, using empirical methodology. I don't know quite how I got off on that, but we were talking about dreams, and dreams are not well understood, even by neuroscientists and so on. What is, what is the brain doing, you know? I personally think that we're kind of, we're like, um, large language models. You know, so all the training data of our life, it just goes into a kind of diffusion state, which is how generative AI works. It goes into a kind of a very noisy state, and then out of that coalesces new things.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  And I think the brain is just constantly creating in the way that a generative AI works. And, but who's creating it and who's it being created for? So you're simultaneously the creator and the watcher, which is kind of amazing.

• 22:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  I'm creating a simulated experience for myself, one part of my brain is, and another part of my brain, let's call it the ego locus or whatever, the, the person taking the ride, the kid, the, the kid in the roller coaster, is going on the ride, which is kind of the filmmaking process.

• 22:30Jay Shetty?

  That's fascinating.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Because I'm making a story, I'm making up a story for my kind of simulation of the audience mind, the group mind, right? So part of my brain is making up a story for another part of my brain. That part of my brain is sitting in a movie theater with hundreds of other people and receiving it, and judging it, like, okay, this is cool, I like that, you know? And, you know, you try to drill down on the creative process. I'm a writer, I'm sitting there, I'm looking at a blank screen. Where do you start?

• 23:01Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  You know? And a lot of writers do it in very different ways. Some start, you know, page one, you know, Bob walks down the street, you know? And then it just goes from there, in a linear fashion. For me, it coalesces, probably almost in a diffusion model kind of way. I start writing notes, and little images come to me, and I start putting the notes together. And for the Avatar sequels, for example.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  I wrote over a thousand pages of notes, just little fragments.

• 23:31Jay Shetty?

  And dreams and images.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  And sometimes dreams play a part in that, and sometimes just the daydreaming process, that creative engine, because I think that same creative engine that runs at night, out of control, nonlinear, chaotic, montage style, is actually more functional during the day and can be kind of directed to stay on a topic and follow it through.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  You know, so maybe I'll be thinking about a character and then something will pop into my mind, you know, and then I'll start writing about that. And it does, I'm not trying to tell a linear narrative at that point, you know, and it becomes a bit of a dialogue. So I remember the time I was sitting there in my writing office and I said, well, what if there was a kid that was, you know, a kid that was born on the base? And what if he was out in the forest with his Na'vi little kid friends and his mask got messed up? And, you know, they had to save him. He was running out of, running out of air and it became a whole thing. And so I imagined this whole thing about a race against time to get him, get him back to the base. And I thought, okay, that's a pretty good story. Now what if, what if that kid was Cora's son?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  And then I wrote, literally wrote, nah, nobody would believe that, you know? And then I'm going on, writing more notes and about three or four pages later, it's like, yeah, but wait a minute, it would be really cool.

• 24:51Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  You know, and then I just started to riff on that and then it became, all right, well, what if he was Cora's son? And the human Cora dies in the first film. Now he's orphaned, his mother maybe dies as well, if she was part of the military group that, you know, Jake was opposed to. And now he's an orphan and he's, he's being raised on Pandora and he's got Na'vi friends. What if his Na'vi friends were Jake's kids? What if, what if, what if, what if, right? That's how the writing process works and then it just, and then all of a sudden ideas just, you can't turn away from them.

• 25:32Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need the most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for, like skills, certifications, or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast.

• 26:15Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected, and more engaged with your drive, so you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand.

• 27:00Jay Shetty?

  Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit mazdausa.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one-hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle, with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangestory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply.

• 27:45Jay Shetty?

  See webpage in studio for details.

• 27:57Jay Shetty?

  Do those creative ideas, do you find a set of systems or rituals or processes that help you access that? Or is it more organic and?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  I know all, every writer's got their own process. Some, you know, I'm up at 5am, I run, I run two miles, I have a cup of coffee, I sit down, I write 18 pages and then I call it a day. For me, it's a slow boil. I noodle around for most of the day. I get to the point toward the end of the day, maybe four or five o'clock in the afternoon, where I've been playing, maybe I've been doing notes. And then I'll just say, okay, time to write some pages. And then usually for about three hours, I'll write pages and I'll, I'll get four or five pages. It'll, it'll come fast at that point, you know? And that's when you hit your stride in screenwriting.

• 28:41Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, you, you can see that the way you're describing the scene with Quirja's son, because there's almost like three different storylines kind of

• 28:52Jay Shetty?

  connecting in that moment around that one thing that you just pointed out.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:56Jay Shetty?

  But there's so many other things going on at the same time.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I usually come up with way more ideas than I could conceivably pack into a movie. And then I'll, I'll winnow that down, I'll winnow that down to a big old fat screenplay that's unshootable. And then I'll winnow that down and then I'll make a movie that's four hours long. And then I'll winnow that down. And then what you get is the end result is the distillation of the distillation of the best ideas. And then that's what winds up in the lean little tight indie film that I like to call Fire and Ash. Only, only three hours and seven minutes long, you know?

• 29:32Jay Shetty?

  But, but what's incredible about it, when I watched it, I was so grateful that you allowed me to go see it last week. And as I said, when I was there, the gentleman in the theater who was playing it for me, he told me which seat you'd like me to watch it from, which I thought was a beautiful experience to have. I said, I said, yes, I want to sit in the exact seat. And then.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Well, no, it's good that you moved back though.

• 29:52Jay Shetty?

  I did, he told me I had that option, he said.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  I did that to, uh, uh, today, actually. Uh, for the first time, I watched from the seat behind. Now, normally that's my working seat when I'm reviewing, because you could see that there's a, a desk there with an abbot and so on. But I thought, well, let me see, let me see what it's like from there where I, it doesn't fill my peripheral field. And I've got a little bit more of that sense of control that you have when it's a proscenium. You know, and I thought, oh, this is actually pretty good.

• 30:22Jay Shetty?

  It was spectacular, but more importantly, three hours and seven minutes flew by. There was never a moment, I didn't, I was, I didn't look at my phone once in three hours and seven minutes. To me, that's the test.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Great.

• 30:33Jay Shetty?

  Today of having your engagement, attention and awareness.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Right, so we passed the most critical test.

• 30:38Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and the most magnificent thing is that so much happens.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:44Jay Shetty?

  Like you're just on the edge of your seat, wondering what's gonna happen next, and so much is happening.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:48Jay Shetty?

  And to do that for three hours and seven minutes in your indie movie is, uh, is pretty, it's just an incredible feast for the eyes and ears and like, I felt like all my senses are engaged all the time, which is such a beautiful experience to have. Where just every time a new scene opens, you're just totally captivated and it's,

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Well, thanks.

• 31:09Jay Shetty?

  It's, it's so hard to do that for that long, especially with, I, I consider myself to have good presence and attention, but even then, I can turn off something in thirty minutes when you, you know, and so to have your engagement, not just on a story level, but on a sensory level and, uh,

• 31:24Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, I think you're on to something there in describing, as you're saying, and I'm thinking, well, what are my goals creatively? I wanna tell a great story with good characters that I care about, and I, I care about how they interact with each other and how their relationships evolve and, and how they resolve their own conflicts, you know, in a, in a way that moves me, you know? Cause if I can't move myself in a story, how do I expect to, to move, move an audience emotionally, right? But then the layer on top of that is the sensory layer, which is color, composition, all of those artistic things, you know? Cause I also started as a, an artist, you know, figuratively, but I, I could draw, I could paint.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I knew the rules of, of composition, I knew, you know, I, I learned all the art history, Renaissance lighting, composition, all that sort of thing. So there's a aesthetic level to it that I like. There's the world building level where every plant.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  You know, either looks real and/or has a purpose. You know, and we spend an awful lot of time. Fortunately, you know, we're blessed with good budgets and good, good time to sort of let these ideas marinate and, and justate, right? And I've got great designers. It doesn't all flow from my consciousness. It comes out very out of focus, if you will. And it's an act of working with other people to bring it more and more into finite detail. Right? I've got the, I call, I call it, uh, my role is to create the grand provocation for the other creative people. And I got that term from my wife, Suzie, who's an educator. And she says that the school provides the provocation.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  The kids provide the investigation and the curiosity and the passion to- That's brilliant. Right? And I think it's very, it's very good. It's the basis of her school. She can do all that stuff better than I can. I'm just a bystander to that part of it. But I think about what I do. I come in and I say, guys, we're gonna do the coolest woven tropical village, overwater village. Now, but what is that? You'd think that they could create that in a week or two weeks. No, it took a year. And because, because part of the provocation was, and it all has to be intention. Nothing is built with rigid cut lumber, the way we would do it. Where we create posts that are, that are in, um, um, compression, right?

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Everything's intention. It's like a spider web. It's all woven between these big structures like the mangrove roots. And so they were actually sculpting with pantyhose to get the right degree of elasticity, to put it all on tension. They sculpted the village with pantyhose. This is, this is absolutely true. And then they, they wove these little structures that later became the, the homes and the walkways and all that. And then they developed it from there. And then eventually we started building full scale, not full scale, but say quarter scale models of these woven structures. And so when you walk through it, you don't really get a chance. I always want to give a little more than you can fully perceive. Cause isn't that what daily life is like?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  There's always more going by than you can fully perceive, you know? And so the brain becomes selective. Okay, what- What's narratively important to me in the moment?

• 34:43Jay Shetty?

  No, and talking about the emotional nature of the characters and the story, my wife always says, my wife always says, I think James Cameron and his team have been to other planets. That's what she always says. Whenever she watches one of them, she's like, he's been to other planets in other lifetimes. Like, that's what she'll say. She'll be like, how, how is it that, you know, you could, and, and you feel that because you feel the depth of the relationship the characters have for each other. You feel that. You, you fully believe this is real. It must exist somewhere.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 35:13Jay Shetty?

  Because how can you feel so deeply for people who look different to you and feel different to you and have different experiences, but we feel it.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  That's a goal, right? So the goal is, all right, these people look different. They're physiologically different. They live in a different place. But doesn't that give us permission to step outside ourselves? With our petty little differences between race and culture and religion and, and politics and all that stuff, step well outside ourselves and see kind of universals of human behavior and the things we care about. Whether that's a sense of duty and love that a parent has for their, for their child. And that's why these films travel, I think, you know, why they, they resonate in, in China and India and Europe and Africa, wherever they go. Because I'm trying to deal with universal stuff. But, but I'm not trying to make stuff up, right?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  So with the sequels, Way of Water and Fire and Ash, and beyond that, if we get to make some more, I don't know if we will or not. We have to make some money. You know, I mean, it's a business also. But if we do get to make some more, the stories are about a family. And so I couldn't, probably not only couldn't, but probably wouldn't have even tried to write them if I hadn't been in a large family and gone through all that teen angst and that issue, the father issues and not being seen and all those things. And then having been a father of teens, we've got, Suzie and I have five kids. And so, I mean, artists are just working out their stuff.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  You know, their lived experience and projecting, and, but taking that to another world and putting it in another context allows everybody to share in it and/or recognize themselves in it, either in a Aspirational way like, wow, I wish I was part of a family like that. My family, not so great, or maybe I don't have a lot of siblings, or maybe I wonder what that would be like. Or maybe it's like, I'm exactly that kind of family.

• 37:11Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  And I wish I wasn't sometimes, you know.

• 37:16Jay Shetty?

  I, I, I've been repeating to my wife, I'm saying this in reaction, in response to what you just said. Now, I've been saying to my wife all week, we need to have, we don't have kids yet, but we plan on having them one day. And I said, when we have kids, we need to have mantras and affirmations as a family. So I keep saying to her, Sully's never quit. Like, I'm like, I just keep saying that to her. I'm like, I love that statement. It stuck with me. And I was like, to see the little child's like courage in that moment.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:40Jay Shetty?

  Where they're in so much danger and so much pain, but they remember that their dad told them that Sully's never quit.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Right. And then when she says it, when she says it later, she basically saves the world. With one thing, where she says, you know, come on, we can do this. Sully's never quit. And you're like, go took.

• 37:59Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, exactly. And that's that feeling of, I'm like, to see that courage in a young person and how these simple, universal messages are things they hold on to in a child's mind. And then even the storyline with Pycon, like for me, that, oh my, I mean, from the second to the third, because when I watched the second movie, for me, that fully just made me fall in sea life in a way that I hadn't before.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:25Jay Shetty?

  And, and, and got a, I was like, wow, this is genius in how you're sharing a message around, you know, water wildlife that we just don't treat well anymore.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  We won't protect what we don't love and care about, right? And so this, I'm, I'm working on a very small part of a much bigger project that's being run by a marine biologist named David Gruber. And he's, he's working with people who are, are in AI and machine learning kind of more side of AI. But they're using some large language model technology as well to decode whale.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Whale vocalizations. So they've got thousands of hours of sperm whale vocalizations. And they've got some context footage of what socially they're doing. And they're decoding their clicks, which are called codas. And their click sequences. And they're finding that they have verbs, they have syntax, they have complex language, at least as complex as human language. Which is kind of amazing. But it all sounds like, if you could actually hear it, it sounds like

• 39:34Speaker 02

  that's like a whole paragraph in sperm whale. You know, and it's taken years and years and AI tools. So, yeah, nature is far more complex than we understand. Consciousness is clearly shared by some of the higher mammals, even some birds, you know, that have true consciousness, you know, that they recognize themselves in a mirror. And that's one of the key signs that there is a higher form of consciousness. Like a dog doesn't recognize itself as an individual in a mirror. And we think of dogs as conscious, and of course they are. And they're emotive and they're empathetic. And they're very much like us emotionally. But they don't have a consciousness high enough to recognize their individual selves in a mirror.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  But an elephant can, a chimpanzee can, and a dolphin can. And I don't know if they've done that. I think they've proven that a beluga whale can as well. But I don't think they've done it with the great whales. It's just a little difficult to do because you can't put them in a tank and study them like some of the smaller toothed whales like dolphins and belugas. But anyway, there's even a parrot species in New Zealand that is intelligent enough to recognize itself as an individual. Most birds can't. So, you know, you've got these glimmers of emergent consciousness besides us, you know. And now we're going to have machine consciousness emerging in the next. decade or whatever it's gonna be and that's gonna be a whole new

• 41:00Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  set of challenges for us as well. We don't even understand consciousness yet in ourselves. And now we're gonna have to to start relating to this alien consciousness that we that we create.

• 41:11Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's almost like I was I was speaking at a conference about AI and consciousness recently. And someone asked me if I ever believed AI would ever have a soul. And my response was, I'm not qualified to answer whether AI will ever have a soul. But I really hope the people building AI have a soul.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 41:30Jay Shetty?

  Because it's so much of

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Bingo, or our conscience.

• 41:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, more conscience, that's what I meant, yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  I think you can have a, if you if you believe in some kind of animus or spirit or soul or whatever it is that's persistent beyond the biological framework. I personally don't, just saying that upfront, but if you but I also, I I won't bet completely against something that just hasn't simply been proven yet. But but I but I also only, I believe in believing in things that have been empirically demonstrated and being kind of agnostic or fluid about everything else, right? But but if you do believe in that, then a machine couldn't possibly have that, now could it? Because we didn't create that in the first place. And if we think we can create a machine that that can have it, then we can't.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  So now you get the sort of the soulless, the soulless Frankenstein kind of

• 42:23Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  mythology around that. On the other hand, if you believe that consciousness is this kind of field of of of operations that is almost infinitely complex, but but can be understood as a real, a real world thing based in matter.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Then theoretically, a machine intelligence could be as soulful, as empathetic, as emotional as us, although it might be very, very, very different. And then you get into the quantum physics of consciousness, where you've got observer effect and things like that, where there seems to be some link at a quantum level with consciousness, and then all bets are off.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  You know, and I've had, I've had some strange experiences with one, one practitioner in particular that believed in quantum consciousness and could do things I can't explain to me, to my mind.

• 43:16Jay Shetty?

  What do you mean?

• 43:17Speaker 02

  And I'm, well, could actually, actually create a state of consciousness in my mind by sitting across from me, just like you are right now.

• 43:24Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  And I am not, I'm not hypnotizable. Nobody's ever been able to hypnotize me. I'm pretty resistant to any kind of suggestibility, but this particular individual was able to do something.

• 43:37Jay Shetty?

  What were you, what were you experimenting with that you even sat across someone like that?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  My wife, Suzy, had met this guy and worked with him, workshopped with him a lot, many, many years earlier and said, you really need to meet this guy. His name was Carl Wolf. And I was very skeptical. Like I said, I'm, I'm, I'm an empiricist. You gotta, you know? And I said, all right, I'm skeptical, but I'll, but I'll, I'll do it for you, baby. And something happened and I can't explain it.

• 44:08Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Something happened. Now, what was it? I don't know. Carl had hypotheses. I don't know if his own hypotheses were accurate. I'd love to ask him, but unfortunately he, he died tragically in a, in a car accident. And, cause I wanted to like, can I just spend millions of dollars studying your mind, please?

• 44:25Jay Shetty?

  Fascinating. I mean, what's beautiful about all these worlds you create? And when I was researching your story and learning about just how many failures and moments you've had to quit and give up. And again, I think about our listeners and I think about them.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Sally's never quit.

• 44:42Jay Shetty?

  Sally's never quit. There you go. And, and even what you just mentioned right now about your own experience with your father and then becoming a father and what that looks like was, are the worlds you create worlds that you didn't have or did have for you?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  I think both.

• 44:56Jay Shetty?

  Both.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Right? Thing, I mean, the thing that I've tried to do in the Avatar films is create a dynamic range of experience from ecstatic to terrifying to heart wrenching.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  From despair to to joy, all of those, all of those things. I think movies are pretty good at creating a state, maybe a state of dread or something like that. But I don't think they're good at taking you on that roller coaster ride that more is the way our our real existence is. So I wanted to have amazing moments of beauty. I think beauty gets forgotten in movies these days. You know, everything is about threat and conflict and all that. But I also wanted to take you on an emotional journey where you get to places that are that are that are either terrifying or or heart wrenching through loss or whatever. And that's all dependent on performance, you know, that's

• 45:50Speaker 02

  all dependent on the actors. The actors are our our path through this, our conduit. We we see it all through through their eyes, you know. So for me, the the real act of creation, everybody is quite enamored of the world building because that's what they see. They see the end result. But for me, it's about getting those characters down on the page, bringing it in with my actors. And and the beauty of the of the two sequels is that I was writing for for actors I knew, and I could hear the way they'd say it. And I didn't feel the dialogues right until I knew that slang Stephen Lang, who plays George, would say it that way, you know, or Sam would say it that way, or or Zoe would

• 46:33Speaker 02

  say it that way. And then, of course, I threw a new element in, which is Una Chaplin, who, you know, who plays Arang, who is, you know, pretty, pretty terrifying character. For sure. At times. And I was making her up out of whole cloth, obviously. I didn't know who the actor was that was gonna gonna play her. But that's the part where I think that engagement that you were talking about, it's not just sensory and visual, it's also heartfelt. Mm hmm. Right? Yeah, I would have to agree. And we bring our own human experience to it every time we walk into a movie theater. And I also think a critical part of the engagement is the theatrical experience. So a lot was made, you know, during when during the rise of of like DVD and Blu-ray and all that.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  A lot was made about the fact, "Oh, well, you don't have a screen that big. Your sound isn't that good. The theater is a better experience." But we're at the point now where you're probably your home TV set and your home soundbar and everything isn't as good as what you're gonna see in a movie theater. So that goes away. So what's left? What's left is, in our day-to-day life, we're very fragmented and scattered and distracted and multitasking and we're scrolling and, you know, and we're typing and we're connected and, you know, multi-channeling all simultaneously. Very rarely do we just sit in a meditative state and just focus.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  You know, people who practice mindfulness and yoga and things like that, they know how to do that, and they do it to clear their mind. But what, how often do we do it where we focus on a received experience? You know, some people will sit and read a novel for hours and hours. I think they're a dying breed, unfortunately. But the movie theater is one of the last bastions of a focused entertainment, where we make a deal with ourselves before we go there, before we leave our homes. We make a deal with ourselves that for two or three hours, we're gonna be undistracted. And then all of a sudden, it's like the world goes away and you're on that journey and nothing else matters for that brief period of time.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  And I think that's the real magic of the theatrical experience. And it boils down to one simple thing: you don't have a remote. It's that simple. You can't pause it. You can't go order a pizza. You can't pause it, go to the bathroom. You can't be in a room with other family members who are talking and you pause it so you can hear their lame comment.

• 49:07Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  I'm kidding. The kids don't make lame comments, but they do comment during the movie and I'll pause it and I'm like, "Yes, you were saying..."

• 49:17Jay Shetty?

  That's so funny.

• 49:28Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the chance to step outside of our routine. Travel is a way of slowing us down and shifting our perspective. And with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, every journey becomes even more rewarding. Earn four times the points on flights and hotels booked direct. Enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges. Three times the points on dining and reserve exclusive tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank. NA Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply. This episode is brought to you by Amtrak.

• 50:12Jay Shetty?

  You know that feeling when you're already tired and you haven't even gotten there yet? That's where Amtrak comes in. Leave the driving behind and settle into a comfortable seat with plenty of room to stretch out. Catch up on work with wifi, grab a snack at the cafe car, or just sit back and enjoy your favourite podcast. Choose a seller or North East Regional and get there without the stress of getting there. Visit amtrak.com to plan your next trip. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. We talk a lot about intentional decision-making, and that extends to the practical stuff too. Like making sure your coverage actually works for your life. State Farm is there to meet you where you are and they know how sweet it is to feel good about your decisions.

• 50:56Jay Shetty?

  Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbour, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

• 51:23Jay Shetty?

  Do the kids ever look at the movies and go, Dad, you just made a character out of me? Like, is there ever that?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  I think they see that there was a moment in time 10 years ago where, who I believed they were influenced the creation of a character. But I think for them, it's all a big laugh. Because they say two things. One is, that was 10 years ago. And two, even then, you didn't really know who I was.

• 51:49Jay Shetty?

  That's brilliant. I want to come back to depth of character, but I wanted to talk about failure because you've told this story before, but the part I wanted to ask about was, before you made Terminator, you actually lost a job.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:02Jay Shetty?

  And we won't mention the film because I heard you didn't mention it. But like, for anyone who's finally found their way, you went from truck driver, starting to make films, made this small movie, you get fired off a job.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:16Jay Shetty?

  That almost feels like, alright, well, this is the end of the road. You said you felt that way.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  It felt that way. And it felt like there was, going into my first directing gig, that I did get fired off of after, I think, six or seven days of shooting. And not for incompetence, it turns out. It turns out that I was being set up the whole time. And when I found that out later, it sort of put it in perspective. But I believed at the time, I internalized that I was not doing it well. You know, and I thought, oh crap, now I'm worse off than if I hadn't taken the job in the first place. Now I'm at negative 10. I could have just been at zero. Now I have to dig out of a hole to get to zero.

• 52:55Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  You know? And so then I knew I had to do something extraordinary or something different. I couldn't wait for a directing gig to come to me. I had to create it for myself. And that's when I wrote The Terminator. I thought, I have to write something original, something that I could plausibly make, that wouldn't have an enormous budget. And it was scaled to, you know, conventional locations, present day, city streets, that sort of thing, so that we could do it relatively cheaply. But I also thought, alright, but I've got to inject into it. It can't just be, you know, a simple drama. I've got to inject into it something that I bring as expertise. So my expertise was in design and in visual effects. I thought, alright, so I've got to... Create a careful balance here.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  The visual effects have to be very limited, but they have to be powerful. So that it's not a ridiculous budget like a Star Wars movie that I knew we couldn't afford, or nobody would hire me for. So then I came up with the idea of a futuristic technology that gets injected into the present day, time travel, right? So there was a logic to the story elements that I was playing with. That was based entirely on being practical and trying to get a gig. So what I have come up with that story, if I didn't have those constraints, I don't know, maybe not, you know, but it all worked out. So I thought, all right, I want this extraordinary thing that requires, you know, animation and design, this Terminator, but I'll have it come from the future, which I don't have

• 54:25Speaker 02

  to see, and I'll just see present day. You know, we could just use available light, street lighting, and that sort of thing, which is kind of how we did it.

• 54:33Jay Shetty?

  That's such a fascinating point you just made, though, that constraints actually led to brilliant creativity. It wasn't the other way around. And often we get lost in the trap of, when I have resources, I'll make a masterpiece. And you made something that's timeless.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's really good. I mean, you know, the resources will come eventually, and that brings its own curse, because now you can do anything. And when you have infinite choice, you could get paralyzed, right? And an Avatar movie is an exercise in limiting choice, because when you work with performance capture, I get a great performance, but then I can put the camera anywhere I want, I could cut it anywhere I want, I'm not constrained by just the footage that we were able to grab that day before the sun set. It becomes a kind of a problem of infinite choice. I think it makes you a better filmmaker, because now, why is the camera going right here? Not because that's the farthest back I can move before my ass hits the wall, and that's the widest shot I can do. Why is it here?

• 55:32Speaker 02

  And not back there, or not over there, you know? And so it forces you to become quite rigorous about your aesthetic, you know? That's a separate problem from getting great performance, by the way. And the weird thing about an Avatar movie, it's a little weird, is... We separate performance from cinematography. We do all the cinematography later. I don't even think about it. I don't think about the camera angles when I'm working with the actors. I know I'll be able to shoot it. I don't know exactly how I'll shoot it. But I'm just, I just care about the heart and soul and the authenticity of the moment with the actors. Now I'm done with them. Now they're all working on another movie. Now it's like, okay, am I a wide shot? Close shot? Am I a long lens? Short lens? Is the camera moving? Is it still? Is it raining? Is it not? You know, is it night?

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Is it day? You can make all those decisions later with that nucleus, that sort of beating heart of the performance, but you can interpret it many, many different ways. So that, that idea of, you know, infinite choice, it can be paralyzing or it can make you more rigorous and, and it forces you to define to yourself and to the others you're working with, other editors, other designers, um, why you're doing it that way. And sometimes I just, I just talk. It's like, okay, you know, it's like, I'll talk while I'm working. It's like, okay, I can be here. I can be there. I can put the camera here. What do you guys think? You know? And they're like, well, I like the water shot. It's like, okay, let's do the water shot. It gets more inclusive in a way. Not that I'm doubting myself, but it's like, why not?

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Why wouldn't you be inclusive?

• 57:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and you were so committed to that, that you sold it for $1 and rejected all of these amazing studio budgets because they wouldn't let you direct it.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  This is going back to The Terminator and you're talking about the fact that I, I made a rights deal with Gail Anne Hurd, who was another up and comer in the same super low tier as I was. And, uh, you know, she had the eye of the tiger and I recognized in her the same thing she recognized in me, which is that we could, we could get this done. We could make something happen together. And so I sold her the rights for a dollar in exchange for a promise. And that promise was worth a lot more than a dollar to me, which was you will never proceed with this movie. I mean, I could have written a 20-page contract to do it. But it was like a blood oath, almost literally. I don't think we actually cut our hands,

• 57:57Speaker 02

  but it was pretty much that. And this is before we were romantically involved. This was just us, you know, a nascent producer and a nascent director. I said, you will never make this movie without me as a director, and I will never make this movie without you as the producer. And man, they tried to split that team. They tried to get her in the rights and not, and get another director, you know, and there were times when Gail was beating them up so much on the budget, they took me aside and said, look, we'll make the movie with you, but we gotta get rid of her. And I'm like, nope, that ain't gonna happen. And she said, nope, that ain't gonna happen. So in a way, everything else flowed from that first film. And so that was, you know, that was a dollar well spent.

• 58:38Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's, I love that story. Just every time I hear you tell it, from when I was doing research and listening to you tell it, and even hearing it now, I'm just like, there's such a, today, there's such a fixation on getting what you deserve.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:52Jay Shetty?

  And demanding what you deserve. And I think sometimes it sets you up for failure, because you could be waiting a long time for someone to give you what you deserve.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:00Jay Shetty?

  And your career is this constant, well, I'll build what I deserve, or I'll take it myself.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  The simple answer is you don't deserve anything. It's just a question of what you can negotiate for yourself and what you can prove, prove to the world, you know, that you're capable of, right? And then, and then, then the money will flow from that, and the, you know, all of those things will flow from that. I never was in it for the money, in a sense, I'm still not, you know. It's a consequence of doing the job well and reaching people and communicating, you know. I am a commercial filmmaker. I don't try to do something that's intentionally obscure, or intentionally so kind of intellectual that, you know, that it doesn't connect for the majority of the audience. I'm a bell curve guy, you know, it's like, I wanna, I wanna hit that sweet spot in the middle of the bell curve where

• 59:50Speaker 02

  the, where I'm communicating with the greatest number of people. And there will be some people for whom it is, it is beneath them to even consider enjoying an avatar movie, and there are some people that just don't get it. On the other end, you know what I mean? But I'm looking at that bell curve. And I think there are some filmmakers that that want to indicate that they're smarter than the audience and that challenge them to try to keep up and pirouette their intelligence. Not to say they're not intelligent, but come on, guys, that's entertainment.

• 1:00:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  It can have deeper meaning. I mean, I like to have thematic layering, you know, and I like to have things that mean something to me. And if people pick up on it, great, but I won't make the story hinge on that, you know? So I don't know. Maybe it's that drive in movie, you know, College of Cinematic Knowledge, the drive in movie theaters of Orange County paying off.

• 1:00:49Jay Shetty?

  I feel like everyone looks at you and even these examples you're talking about, there's such a, people would say, you know, James Cameron's a risk taker. He takes big risks and but do you see yourself that way? How do you? I feel like it's something more than that.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  Well, I think I think it's not a question of taking risks for risk's sake, but I do think the biggest risk as an artist is to not take risks because then you're just doing what you've done and what you know and and or what other people have done, which is even worse, you know, just in being in a in a kind of a comfort zone of mediocrity. So, yeah, I think I think you do take risks, but having taken that risk, you then do everything within your power to make sure that you are communicating that it is working, that you're not jeopardizing large amounts of other people's money by doing something foolish, you know? Titanic was a risk, you know?

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  It was a very, very expensive film in which basically everybody dies, you know? And it was a period piece and it was three hours long. The only successful film previously that had been three hours long that was a commercial film was a Best Picture winner, which was Dances with Wolves.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  I always pronounce it Dances with Wolves because it was a name. So yeah, I always imagined it hyphenated, not Dances with Wolves. Which is what most people say. But I don't know if that's accurate, and you know, I never asked anybody, but probably is.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  But, and so we were in uncharted territory. I mean, we went in knowing it was going to be a long film and that it's a tragic film and that it's a tragic love story. Pretty risky in a sense, you know. It certainly didn't follow any of the commercial paradigms of the time. And we reached a point after we went over budget, even though the film was looking pretty good in the dailies and in the rough cuts. We reached a point where the studio was utterly convinced it was only a question of whether they were going to lose $50 million or $150 million. And they were so dead set on an outcome, they almost manifested the outcome they dreaded. Because of their lack of faith in the film.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  I even almost in a way lost faith in the film being commercial. But I never lost faith in it being artistically correct. And that's when I, the story's been told, but it's actually true. I literally had a razor blade taped to my Avid screen with a little sign that said, "Use in case film sucks." Because I knew that the only way out of this was through. And the only way through was to make the best possible movie you could make. Even if I didn't make a dime off it, even if it failed commercially, it had to be good. And it had to deliver on those artistic principles that we went in with. I knew I had a great cast, I had great performances, you know.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  And it turned out, from the moment James Horner played the first, he had, he wrote three themes and just reiterated them throughout the score.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  He wrote three themes and he played them for me on his piano in March of nineteen ninety seven, and that's when I knew I had a movie, because I cried on all three themes. First one, it's just like, holy shit, dude, it's amazing, you know, and I said, we've got a score. He said, I haven't written the score yet. I said, we've got a score. And I wasn't wrong. I knew from that moment that it was gonna be great. And yeah, sure, he, he, he wrote it, he orchestrated it, he went out, he recorded it with a hundred piece orchestra. But I knew from that simple piano melody that we were good. And, and I think at that point, I started to have some faith that the movie itself would deliver on what I

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  intended it to deliver. You know, there's a funny point in movies. It's okay if I just kind of I love it. Please, that's my favorite bit of podcast. Okay. Please. There's a certain point in making a movie where it's not your movie anymore. I think it's my movie when I write it. I think the second I cast it, it's not my movie anymore. And the second I'm working with designers and we're building sets and all that, now it's got its own momentum, it's got its own life. And there's a point in post-production where it's being received. And I don't mean that necessarily in a mystical way, although it might be, I don't know. But it's being received from the group's creative energy, what the actors did, what the designers did, what the camera operator did, you know, what

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  the DP did. And it's just up to me to, to, to see it and see it emerging and then help, assist, you know, clear, clear the debris out of the way, get it to, to kind of emerge. And, and I felt that more so, especially on these last two Avatar films than I've ever felt before. You got a long film, it's half an hour longer than it could be, you've got to take stuff out. So you're paring away and, and themes are emerging and getting stronger. And it even got quite snakey on this last one. Because I felt the themes emerging so strongly that I actually wrote new scenes and asked the actors to come back and reshape the whole thing. For example, there was a scene in the script which we captured

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  where Jake teaches all the Navi how to fire machine guns. I was wrong. I didn't want, that's not what the movie was supposed to be saying. And so the power, the dark grim power that comes from when Korra charms the Ash people and you see them lift those weapons up and you say, oh my god, this whole thing's going wrong. I can't have Jake be doing the same thing, but somehow I didn't see that in the writing. But I saw it as it was unveiling itself to me and I called everybody back in. I said, guys, you gotta come back. And the beauty of performance capture is you can recreate the set almost instantly in like an hour. So we just were able to go back into it and I did something else instead, which is I had Jake go get the Toruk, which was also not in the script.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  But when you see it, you think, how could that not have, how could that not have been there? That's one of the most epic moments of the whole. Exactly. Well, I had put that in movie four, but I realized I was playing too long a game, you know. You know, the scene with him and Spider, which I won't go into the details of. But after that, you know, when Nate Derry says, then we will find another way. That's the only way he's got left is to do the thing that he dreads the most. That he absolutely knows will take something out of his soul. But he has to do it. That's the only other way. And so, you know, sacrifice is a theme that I deal with a lot. Duty, because you can't have love without the fear of death, the fear of loss,

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  without the need for sacrifice, without a sense of duty. What will you do to prove yourself in a loving relationship, you know? Played with that on Titanic, played with that on Aliens, you know, played with that on Terminator 2, right? And so these last two Avatar films are the same thing. What would Jake and Nate Derry do for their children? What would they do for their people? And what happens when what is right for the children is not right for the people? If you're, if the right thing is to go to war? And I know that you, you're, you're all about peace and, and purpose and all of that.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  And I agree with all of those things because I think empathy is our great human superpower, which will get us through this somehow. But I do believe there are times when you do have to fight. And I'm not a total pacifist. And I think in my lifetime, there has not been a righteous war that the US has been involved in. But World War II, when you have a predator that's destroying everything that, that is of value to people? Yeah, you have to fight, you have to fight for your survival. So we could have a whole conversation just about this.

• 1:08:48Jay Shetty?

  I know, I was just about to say that the, well, I was about to say that.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  I'm flipping the script here, by the way, in case you didn't notice.

• 1:08:54Jay Shetty?

  No, I was about to say that the spiritual text that I practice and teach and follow is based on a battlefield.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Jay Shetty?

  And it's God or the divine telling the greatest archer of his time to pick up his bow and fight.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Jay Shetty?

  For righteousness and duty.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  For righteousness and duty.

• 1:09:10Jay Shetty?

  It's, it makes a lot of, it, it definitely resonates what you're saying that.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Jay Shetty?

  There is a need.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm an action filmmaker, so I'm, you know, action? I mean, if you think about it, action is just a, a candy coated term for violence, right? When it's righteous violence practiced by the good guy in, in defense of good people and so on. It, you know, we spend a lot of time justifying it to ourselves. And I think a lot of the classic cinematic justifications aren't really sufficient. Which is why I went down the road of having the Tulkuun be utter pacifist, where they have rejected any kind of violent confrontation up to and almost including their own final destruction.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  But they, at the very brink, they decide that there is something that they have to rise up for. And when they see the horror of what's happened to Tonok and Pygon's clan and all that, which I think is quite a heart-wrenching scene, even though-

• 1:10:10Jay Shetty?

  That's like, yeah. When you make me feel for Pygon, I'm like, that's like, you know, because now you're not even feeling for something that looks remotely human.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. But we're able to see consciousness in others, in the eyes, you know, in dogs, in the great apes, you know. I think it's a little harder in birds, even though they're pretty damn smart. Whales, though, have a soulfulness. And maybe to some extent, we project it onto them, but I don't think so. There's something very calm about whales, you know. They've been greatly injured on our planet. So I think, you know, what I was trying to express there is, look what we've done to them, and they don't seem to hate us as much as we would if that was done to us.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  Although there are pods of orcas near Gibraltar and off the Azores that are attacking sailboats now and ripping the rudders off and leaving them adrift.

• 1:11:10Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  So it's like, are they learning? Are they learning that we're actually not so great for them? Yeah. Orcas have a matriarchal society, and the mothers teach the sons behaviors. And so the question is, is this being handed down? Because it's been happening a lot in the last few years, and it's the same group, the territorial group.

• 1:11:31Jay Shetty?

  All of this you're talking about, you spent around 10 years just studying the ocean, right? Like, while you weren't making films at that time, you literally went deep into-

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  Literally went deep.

• 1:11:41Jay Shetty?

  Everything that you're sharing right now.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  I went as deep as you could go.

• 1:11:44Jay Shetty?

  Mind blown. Did you just put everything else away?

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Not really. I kind of kept my hand in. So after Titanic was a big hit and I was questioning, you know, is this even important? Is Hollywood even important? It seems like such a glitzy game and it seems kind of quite fatuous. And at about that time, I wound up on the NASA Advisory Council, believe it or not. And I looked around a room full of people who were very intelligent, most of them, all of them really, better educated than me, with a strong sense of purpose, right? That they were doing something extraordinary. They were exploring space. And none of them cared about Hollywood. They didn't even know what was happening. They, oh, the Oscars, what's that? Oh, yeah. You know, that's what they... And I could name a movie star

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  they wouldn't even recognize. I mean, sure, there's always little movie fans here and there, but it just mattered to them. It didn't matter to them at all. They were doing something far more important. And that was a real bucket of cold water. It's like, oh, all these things, we live in this little self-referential bubble that we think is so important, and it just isn't. And so I thought, you know, maybe I'll just explore around a little bit, just in life, you know? And because I had gotten to do an expedition to the wreck site, where I was really now becoming conversant with real deep ocean technology, I thought, why don't I just go down that road? I know everybody. You know, I know all the scientists

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  and researchers and submersible people and everything. So I just started creating expeditions and building new tactical systems, cameras and lighting systems and exploratory vehicles. And the other thing I liked about it is, the ocean is unforgiving. Either your math is right or your equipment fails. It'll implode or the electronics will flood and it won't work, and you'll come back with nothing. And that's not a critic's opinion. You know, I came up with this idea, this principle that, you know, the second law of thermodynamics is not an opinion. It's a law. It's not some critic's opinion, it's not some journalist's opinion, it's not even a fickle audience member's opinion,

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  or some, you know, some bloggers trolling opinion, you know. It either works or it doesn't. And I really enjoyed immersing myself in a world of hard rules. You succeed or you fail not based on your art or your creativity, or somebody else's subjective opinion of your art. Because the two don't exist without each other, that's the crazy thing. So as an artist, you bury your soul and you can be utterly rejected. You know, but ultimately, the point of art is to communicate with other humans. They may hate it, you know, so you put yourself at risk. I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna go into an empirical world, a Cartesian world, where it either works or it doesn't,

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  based on good engineering. And that was good. And I learned some really important human lessons in that world as well. Because when you're offshore with a small team, it's all about respect and cohesion and that bond. And when you come back to shore, you can't even explain to people how hard it was, or why it worked, or what it took. You know, but that bond exists between those people. And then I realized, okay, we're only as good as our team. And when I, after Titanic, I put together a team to do the impossible, which was Avatar. Nobody had ever made a film like that. It was a new form of cinema. And I remember, we fell on our ass. Some of the first things we tried, we were face down on the ground. And we'd stop in the middle of a production day, and pull out a table and sit around it,

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  and there'd be a bunch of glum faces because it wasn't working. And I said, guys, this may seem like the hardest day of the production, this is gonna be the day you remember. Because this is the day we write page thirty-eight of the manual that tells the rest of the world how this stuff works. And we're gonna do it, and we're gonna figure it out. It was like, you know, Sully's never quit. But and then we did and we figured it out. And then there's such a feeling of pride and cohesiveness in the group after that. And you start to feel like, okay, bring the next challenge. We'll figure it out. And the team spirit and the team morale is so high now. This was nineteen years ago in two thousand and six. The team spirit and the and the cohesiveness is so high now.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  People really they they hated when it all came to an end here a few months ago as people dropped off one by one as the project was winding down. And everybody just can't wait to get back to the next one. Now, I don't know artistically as a director if that's something I want to do right away. Next, there's a pretty strong, I feel a strong pressure on my shoulders to do it, to bring that team back together because it's so important for them, you know? And that's not a bad reason to do something at all, you know? To make other people happy is not a bad reason to do something or to make other people feel fulfilled. But I also have other things I want to do as well. So it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of going off a cliff.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  I I've I've told Suzie, my wife, that I feel like I'm Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon and I just ran off the cliff. I haven't hit the ground yet. There's that moment where my legs are pinwheeling in the air, you know? But that's okay. That's okay. The scariest moments are always the moments of the greatest opportunity, I think.

• 1:17:21Jay Shetty?

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• 1:18:49Jay Shetty?

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• 1:19:38Jay Shetty?

  When you're building a universe with people, you're building lives and hearts and worlds that connect on such a deep level. I feel like when I'm listening to you, I'm like, everything you do is highly emotional and emotive and heartfelt and deep. And you can't help but cry when you're watching your work. You know, maybe not Terminator, but what follows, or maybe, maybe.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  No, Terminator 2. When the Terminator goes, come on, when he goes down, when he goes down into the steel and his POV goes to nothing. Come on, people tear up.

• 1:20:11Jay Shetty?

  Yes, yes, no. And so you see that and I'm like, it feels like the emotion of creating it. Whatever we're getting out of it is because the emotion that's creating it is going into it.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:22Jay Shetty?

  And this team that you are curating is bringing all of that emotion, as you said, whether it was the Pantheos that are building the, you know, the physical buildings in the movie, or whether it's the emotion that the characters are feeling and Tuukka is feeling and et cetera. How do you even start to detach from that as a team when you've been immersed in it for decades at this point?

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Maybe you don't. Maybe just keep going. I don't know. Well, look, I mean, there are a number of milestones here that have to be met. First of all, the film has to succeed financially, and that's not a given. Everybody just assumes it's a no-brainer, but the theatrical marketplace has been dwindling and collapsing about thirty-five percent and hasn't rebounded. And people's habit patterns have changed. And so the thing that I grew up and love and feel such a strong sense of passion for may be becoming obsolete, maybe, and the cost of making movies is continuously going up and the demand is falling. So that's a little bit of a death spiral right there, you know?

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  And so maybe it's, maybe it's going to be okay. We were sort of successful. If we can do the next one cheaper, we can continue, right? And then there's also that wild card. You know, there are other projects that I have that I've been sort of sitting on in the, in the background. And there's a thing that I want to do about Hiroshima. I bought a book recently, but it's a story I've been following and, and, you know, excavating and researching for really my whole adult life. It's something that I really feel strongly I need to do at some point. It's not a big film. Sounds like it would be, but it's not a big film in the sense of an Avatar film. It's not a four-year commitment. It might be a one-year commitment. So I need to do that and so, you know.

• 1:22:10Jay Shetty?

  Why, why is that so meaningful to you? What about it?

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  I just think that we live in this world. I mean, I think Catherine Bigelow's film title is, it's kind of growing on me. The House of Dynamite. It's like we live in a house. Imagine you live in a house and you feel perfectly normal and you go about your business and you're chopping onions for the guacamole and you're gonna watch your favorite show, but the basement is filled with dynamite and it could go off at any moment. That's the world that we live in, you know, and that, it hits that metaphor. And so, uh, it's not a metaphor, it's, it's our world. So I, I feel that we have a, a kind of a systematic forgetting of history, you know, just at that remove, and we're enough removed from the event of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think people need to be reminded what these weapons really are and what they really do.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Of course, the, the punchline of the movie is gonna be the card at the end that says, "There are 12,000 nuclear warheads deployed in the world today. Each one is 100 to 500 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima." And you're gonna witness it and you're gonna go through it with the main characters and it's not gonna be pretty. It might be a hard film to watch. In fact, it might be my least successful film, but I just feel it's, it's that, that's that thing of duty, you know? You're all about purpose. We define our own purpose, you know? We choose purpose for ourselves and it doesn't all have to be, you know, obviously benevolent like, you know, maybe helping out a soup kitchen and, and easing the pain of others.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  It might be something that's more of a warning that helps, helps guide us away from the rocks of, of destruction of civilization. As an artist, I think it's important to consider these things, you know, and not feel powerless. Cause it's easy in a, in a world of eight billion people to feel powerless. And yet empirically I can look at it, "Oh, I'm reaching millions of people. I'm reaching hundreds of millions of people." With a movie like Avatar, you know, maybe I won't reach as many people with a movie like Ghosts of Hiroshima, but I'll reach some, you know? And you never know, you never know that the causal chain that, that puts a person at a moment where they've been influenced by something.

• 1:24:21Jay Shetty?

  But you have it even in Fire and Ash. I mean, that, that scene that you were referencing, without giving too much away, of Quarridge actually arming. You know, and there all of a sudden you see the becoming of terrorists, like that idea of the government, you know, all these messages are just, I, I feel like there are so many deep layers to the movie. You could keep going, whether it's family, whether it's racism, whether it's equality, whether it's equity, whether it's, you know, whether it goes down all the way through to governmental politics that we're seeing today. I mean, the, the movie is filled with so many powerful messages.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  And just seeing each other, you know, it all ultimately, it all goes back to connection and.

• 1:25:00Jay Shetty?

  Is that the root?

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. You know, there are two moments in the film where people say they see each other and they understand each other. And one gives you this feeling of vast dread when, when Varong says she sees courage and she sees this vision of destruction and for herself, you know, she's, she's like, you know, Kali.

• 1:25:23Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  Right? And then when Niti sees spider, you know.

• 1:25:30Jay Shetty?

  Finally.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  And there's a bridge across the two species, across that divide, across that, because she becomes quite a racist in the film, and that's by design. It's like we take our most beloved character and we challenge you to really walk in her shoes and go the hard yards of what loss and grief can do. And I think about all these people and everything that they've lost in the world, whether it's in Gaza or Sudan or Ukraine or wherever. And how does that not generate just a hatred that will span generations? Well, that's the cycle that we have to break, right? You know, Loach says something at the beginning, and it's kind of like a little cheeky to actually say your theme out loud, you know, in the voiceover here. I'm going to tell you what the movie's about, okay? You know,

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  and he says that the fire of ash leaves, the fire of hate brings, leaves only the ash of grief. But he doesn't complete it, which is that from that ash of grief comes that fire of hate again, and the cycle perpetuates indefinitely. So how do you break it? Right? That's the challenge, I think, that's presented in the movie, you know, how do you break it? And how you, how do you know when it's not about, about hatred and revenge and when? You fight defensively for the things that you value, you know, as opposed to offensively going out after somebody to punish them for revenge, to take what's theirs, you know. And you see all of that happening in the world right now, all over the place.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  And you know, you wonder, this is, I'm gonna circle this back to AI for a second. The thing that will, the thing that the proponents of artificial superintelligence always say is, "Well, we'll manage the alignment problem. We'll align AI to our common good as human beings." But we can't agree on a damn thing. We can't agree on what's right and wrong, what's ethical, what's moral. You know, Republicans' idea of that is very different from a Democrats', a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu, you know, a Shintoist, whatever it is. Everybody's got a different opinion. And we can't agree on anything. So how are we gonna suddenly form this wonderful moral consensus

• 1:27:40Speaker 02

  so we can teach it to something smarter than us that we can't control? I mean, if that's not the biggest recipe for disaster I've ever heard in my life, what is? You know, now I am a science fiction fan, and it always goes into the darkest possible, you know, scenario, because that's where science fiction goes, because it's meant to be a warning to us about possible futures. But, okay, I mean, we're living in a science fiction world right now, you know. So I look, I look at you, I look into your eyes, I see your kind of soulfulness and your enlightenment, and what, all the things that you do and why you do it. And I think, all right, that's why we're gonna make it,

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  because there are people who are practitioners of empathy and connection, and they're out there, and they are legion. They just don't ever seem to get into positions of power and, you know, where it really makes a big, makes a big difference. It just seems like all the wrong people elevate. I don't know how you feel about that. I don't know if that keeps you up at night.

• 1:28:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, well, I I think that's partly why I try and do what I do because I think I saw that for a long time. And of course, what I love about the way you build character, which is true of me or anyone, is that no one's perfect, everyone's flawed and has

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:29:00Jay Shetty?

  multiple, you know, when you look at all of the characters in Fire and Ash, like, they're not just good and bad, like, that would be and hence the scene we were just talking about with Spider, like, that moment is so, I mean, I can't believe you went there. I was like, wow, this is like really testing

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Jay Shetty?

  you know, everything that I believe to be true about this family, and I'm not giving it away, hence speaking in

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Jay Shetty?

  broad terms, but so, so to be really clear, there's no one who's perfect or flawless, or, you know, and of course, I have all of those challenges myself, but I find that what I try and do by having this platform and by having these types of conversations

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:37Jay Shetty?

  with people like yourself and allow for these, we've, like, my vision, and I think you'll relate to this based on what you were saying, I love the bell curve too. So when I started this, my vision was to make wisdom go viral.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:50Jay Shetty?

  I said I wanted to find a way

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:52Jay Shetty?

  that hundreds of millions or billions of people would engage with themes

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:29:57Jay Shetty?

  that were at one point saved for the elite or niches.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, right, right.

• 1:30:02Jay Shetty?

  And we do that, we do seven hundred and fifty million views a month.

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:06Jay Shetty?

  about conversations like this, which is proof to me

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:30:10Jay Shetty?

  that people want this. And so I think we may, I agree with you, I don't think we'll do it through the traditional means.

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18Jay Shetty?

  But art and creativity and now the microphone belongs to everyone, there is an opportunity to to galvanize community and connect to these higher parts.

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  We have to do what we can do. Our our voice may carry not very far, or it may ripple outward very, very far. We have to do what we can do. And for me, what drives me is being a parent, you know, and knowing that there's there's a a legacy that's being handed to my kids by my generation. And I just want it to be the best that it can be. It's not gonna be perfect. It's not even, it might not even be that great. But everything that people like yourself and and hopefully I do can improve it incrementally. You know, um. And so anyway, you just, you just keep banging away at it, right?

• 1:31:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, well, I think, I think the stories you tell do that in the most

• 1:31:12Jay Shetty?

  Profound way and I think, I do think that art transcends so many things in the world, as you said, and anyone can sit in that room, forget their designation, or their seat, or their status, and watch a movie about humanity and connection, but...

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  Well, you're using the term connection, and I think of that as an extension of our impulse to empathy. We have a natural human impulse toward empathy.

• 1:31:41Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  I think we all have it, unless you're a psychopath, and that's 1% of the population. So 99% of the population has an impulse toward empathy. I think where empathy goes awry is that it's narrow and powerful, as opposed to more diffuse, right? So when we have an empathy for our family, for our children, for our friends, then everybody else starts to look like an enemy.

• 1:32:07Jay Shetty?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  And I think it's that narrow spotlight of empathy where it breaks down. On the other hand, we can hear a story about somebody in another state or another country, and all of a sudden, we're weeping for that person because our mirror on allows us to feel their pain.

• 1:32:23Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  Right? But we can't feel the pain of the world. But we have to. We have to. We have to be able to expand it. Not where it crushes us, but to where we don't see the other as an enemy.

• 1:32:36Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  But somebody who's maybe an equal victim with us of, you know, a kind of, a world that can go against you. And, you know, medically, in any kind of moment, you know, things can go against you. And there are people that are less fortunate, people that are more fortunate. But people never feel like they have enough. That's the problem. They never... It's not that they're greedy. It's that they never have enough to feel completely secure and safe for their family. So there's a certain point where you have to be willing to risk your own family, and risk your own comfort for the good of a greater group. And that's a very, very hard place for most people to go.

• 1:33:18Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  You know? But there's an image that I always wanted in one of the Avatar movies, which is seeing that world from orbit at night, where you see everything connected. You know, that those little glowing... You know, you you basically see the mind or the heart of Aewa of that connected connectedness. And so I managed to squeeze it in. I managed to squeeze it into this this film. And hopefully, people will resonate, you know, for what it what it means, what it's meant to mean, anyway.

• 1:33:49Jay Shetty?

  James, I have a warning from your team because you have to get off to events. I want to end with a final five that we do with every guest. I could talk to you for hours, and I hope we do get to talk more offline. But we end every interview with these final five. They have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.

• 1:34:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:34:06Jay Shetty?

  So, James Cameron.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  I can do a six paragraph long sentence.

• 1:34:10Jay Shetty?

  Okay, so we ask these to every guest. James Cameron, these are your final five. Question one, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  I had a teacher that said,

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  "You have unlimited potential."

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  And he meant it. And it changed a lot for me.

• 1:34:31Jay Shetty?

  It's a great answer.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Jay Shetty?

  Question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  Roger Corman told me to always sit down on set.

• 1:34:45Jay Shetty?

  Do you stand up a lot?

• 1:34:46Speaker 02

  I never sit down.

• 1:34:49Jay Shetty?

  That's a great answer. Question number three, what's the hardest thing you've learned about yourself that shaped your art?

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  The movie is not more important than the process of working with people to make the movie.

• 1:35:04Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  That took 40 years. No, maybe 30.

• 1:35:10Jay Shetty?

  The people are more important.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Jay Shetty?

  Wow, that's beautiful. Question number four, tell us the real reason why Jack couldn't fit on the door.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  Ah, you went there. Okay, this interview is over.

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  Because his chivalry demanded it.

• 1:35:32Jay Shetty?

  It's a great answer.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  He loved her and he would not take a chance that they could both survive if they could both die.

• 1:35:40Jay Shetty?

  That's a great answer.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and by the way, Romeo and Juliet had to die.

• 1:35:45Jay Shetty?

  But there's sacrifice duty in your themes, just there's so.

• 1:35:50Speaker 02

  Love, death, sacrifice duty, they're all related and they're all thematic in all of my films.

• 1:35:57Jay Shetty?

  Why do you think that is?

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:36:01Jay Shetty?

  You're still discovering that, still curious about that, where that comes from?

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  Can I speak in longer?

• 1:36:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, please. Yeah, yeah, that's a big question.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  I don't know, because I, these are things that I'm finding later in life, I actually am confronting and having to deal with. But in, but in early life, they just made sense to me, you know? I always say all my movies are love stories, but they're not necessarily conventional love stories. Duty and sacrifice are things that I, I don't even know if it's enculturated, it might even be just biological, it might just be innate. I don't know, or some combination. I think Canadians in general tend to be less selfish.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  But, you know, you can't generalize about an entire population and there were some real assholes in the town I grew up in. So, you know, I don't know where that comes from, but it's a belief system, definitely a belief system.

• 1:36:54Jay Shetty?

  I'm glad I asked you that question now, because we've got a, got an answer that just, yeah. Share so much more of your heart and where it all comes from. Our fifth and final question, we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  A law.

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  Wow. Legislative morality, that's a hard thing.

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  See the person in front of you. I don't know how you'd enforce that. Just see them.

• 1:37:32Jay Shetty?

  What does it mean to see?

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  See who they are, see who they are on the inside. You know, in the Avatar universe, I see you can mean I understand you. It can mean very simply, I see you, you're here, hello. It's like hello. It can be, I see something about you I never saw before. I understand you. It can mean I love you. Meaning that fullness of understanding another person that goes to a higher level. It's got many layers of meaning in Navi lore. It's very deceptively simple, you know. But it goes back to that empathy thing, goes back to the mirror neuron. It goes back to projecting yourself into their situation.

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  I also find that there's a little thing I do where it doesn't matter where I am, especially if I'm in a car or I'm just meeting some driver that's driving me from the airport or I'm on the street or I'm killing time someplace. I just start talking to people and I want to hear their story, you know. People that the average person would think that a person like me would never talk to. You know, the janitor, the guy selling the churro, you know. I just want to talk to them. And maybe it's a writer's instinct, you know, to want to hear stories because I think everybody is a universe. And you know, that sort of Trump idea that they're all a bunch of losers

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  and they're not worth anything drives me insane, you know. Because it's not about social standing or status or having a PhD or the argument from authority, oh, his argument, you know, his opinion is more important than that person. You know, I just want to hear everybody's stories, find them all fascinating. Because we all are on this unique path and we're all, our camera is viewing the world from a unique position.

• 1:39:30Jay Shetty?

  I felt that most in watching Sali and Koraj's relationship through fire and ash. There's a lot of seeing each other in different moments, which in moments you don't expect it.

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the story definitely teases to a potential, you know. We can't give anything away.

• 1:39:52Jay Shetty?

  Well, I can't wait to watch it again. I'm gonna take my family when I get back to London for Christmas. I'm so excited. James, I hope we do see four and five happen. I can't wait to watch them.

• 1:40:00Speaker 02

  We'll see, we'll see.

• 1:40:01Jay Shetty?

  See them with family. But such a pleasure sitting with you. Thank you for your energy, your presence, your connection with me today, and I hope for many more. So, thank you so much.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  Well, thanks. Thanks, Jay. Really, really a wonderful interview, you know, and I'm glad we got to go to important, meaningful things instead of all the stupid stuff I normally get asked.

• 1:40:21Jay Shetty?

  I only asked you one.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  You did. You definitely went there on that one. But you know what? At this point, it's like there are worse problems to have than people still arguing about the demise of a character from 28 years ago. You know, as a filmmaker, it's kind of like, great, thank you. Thank you for that.

• 1:40:40Jay Shetty?

  Well, thank you. If you love this episode, I need you to listen to one of my favorite conversations ever. It's with the one and only Tom Holland on how to overcome your social anxiety, especially in situations where you're not drinking and everyone else is. We talk about his sobriety journey and so much more. He gets really personal. I can't wait for you to hear it. It's gonna blow your mind.

• 1:41:05Speaker 04

  The quote is, "If you have a problem with me, text me. And if you don't have my number, you don't know me well enough to have a problem with me."

• 1:41:11Speaker 05

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.