James Cameron Interview

TheGreenGirls interviews James Cameron about his environmental passion and how he incorporated this into Avatar.

James Cameron Interview Apple: Hey this is Apple and we’re here at the Global Green the pre-Oscar Party and you’re watching the Green Girls TV The greengirls.com James: Well that has been on my mind since I was a teenager really. You know if you think the environmental movement started with the big Santa Barbara oil spill in 1970 and I was on the cover of Time Magazine and it was just was on my mind when I was in my last couple of years of high school. I wrote a play at that time called Extinction Syndrome about how we were destroying our planet and you know it’s been in my mind to do a film with these themes for a long time and I finally got the opportunity. You know I took a hiatus between Titanic and the start of Avatar for about 8 years doing documentary films when I started Avatar in 2005 I wanted to do a film that actually could mean something. I wanted to be entertainment first and foremost so that we reached the most number of people but I wanted to, we’ve been to the film you know a message or a number of messages really. How strange is it that the media yourself being probably the one notable exception hasn’t picked up on the fact that the biggest action movie of the year has a disabled, differently able guy in a wheelchair as the main character that’s pretty bizarre don’t you think. I mean I always thought that was going to be a big topic of discussion. You know certainly the disabled community has noticed it and I have heard many a lot of anecdotes of people who were you know very touched and moved and empowered by that amongst the disabled community so I’m happy about that. You know I guess I was just making my little anti war statement about how war you know shatters people’s lives and you know it kind of truncates their potential. Of course the disabled would say you know our potential is not truncated we can do all these things and the break through for me in writing Jake Sully Sam Worthington’s character was the realization that his personality hasn’t changed he’s still a warrior. He is still a guy who will succeed you know exactly. Yeah exactly and you know and then you know there was the struggle of getting the studio to accept the fact that I was in fact making a film with a strong environmental theme and hit had these kind of spiritual what they called you know kind of New Age tree hugger stuff you know in it and I said I’m doing it. I said then you know if you don’t want that then let’s not make this movie together and so they— I’ll have to go hug a tree. You know the interesting thing about making Avatar and spending so much time designing kind of the ultimate tree that is almost the people in the story. It’s been their home for 10,000 years. This had to be the coolest tree of history. I look at trees very differently now than I have really for my whole life. I really see them as these kind of miraculous things. Well. Suzy: I think it’s the way we live and it’s really important. Either initiatives are amazing when you’re building green schools and we have to focus on our children because it’s our children that are going to inherit the earth and they’re the ones that are going to become stewards and they are the ones that need to be educated to learn to take care of the earth too. James: All of their initiatives I think is that we all collectively has a society need to be thinking about it and embracing it and we need to take responsibility as individuals and as a nation and as a world as a species really and you know we’re not. I mean we’re you know but we collectively are not and we have too and you know anyone that has children or has a conscience about the world that we’re going to leave to future generations has got to change their thinking as a result. If they take responsibility for that really you know on a deep level it’s going to change everything in the way they act the way they vote, the way they think, the way they buy and nothing less is going to work. We all are going to have to change. The way we you know people my age the way we’ve been brought up to think we have to reprogram ourselves. Suzy: There needs to be a major shift in consciousness around our relationship and our connected- Apple: That’s it for now until the next event. This is Apple and you’re watching the Green Girls TV