It has been one of the most hyped movies of the decade: the return of James Cameron with a $230m-plus 3D inter-species action movie that will, some observers say, decide the future of the industry. 
 
 Avatar Production year: 2009 Country: USA Cert (UK): 12A Runtime: 161 mins Directors: James Cameron Cast: CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Michelle Rodriguez, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana More on this film 
 
 Today it arrived with 20th Century Fox choosing London to launch Avatar, Cameron's sole movie in 12 years – the last being Titanic. 
 
 Cameron said he was just relieved the movie was finally out there. "We can hold our heads high. We got the picture done by the skin of our teeth. It's been a four-and-a-half-year process and it's a relief to let people see it, to quit talking about it, to forget the rumours." 
 
 And there have been a lot of rumours. Rumours that the budget was double the stated amount, more like $500m; that the 3D effects were making people nauseous; that the film, two hours and 40 minutes long, was a complete car crash. 
 
 The Guardian can reveal that the last two are untrue. The film does not make you feel sick and it is not a disaster. All journalists watching the movie in Fox's Soho headquarters had to sign a form agreeing not to publish a review or even express a professional opinion online or in print before Monday. So by saying Avatar was really much, much better than expected, that it looked amazing and that the story was gripping – if cheesy in many places – the Guardian is in technical breach of the agreement. It is not a breach, however, to report that other journalists leaving the screening were also positive: the terrible film that some had been anticipating had not materialised. It was good. 
 
 There is, though, a certain amount of suspension of disbelief needed when watching Avatar. Cynics might sneer at the plot. The film, set in 2154, revolves around a paraplegic marine assigned to a planet where brutish humans are forcing the natives from their homes to mine a precious mineral, unobtanium, which is the only thing that will keep Earth going. 
 
 To get it, they need to blast away an agreeable species called the Na'vi, blue humanoids about 12ft tall, with tails and pixie eyes. Sam Worthington as the paraplegic marine pretends to be a Na'vi through avatar technology. At first, he is on the nasty human military side but he falls in love, gains a conscience and so on. 
 
 Perhaps most surprising was the politics. At one stage the deranged general leading the attack, with echoes of George Bush, declares: "Our survival relies on pre-emptive action. We will fight terror with terror." Cameron agreed there was a connection to recent events, but there were also references to Vietnam and to the 16th- and 17th-century European colonisation of the Americas. "There is this long, wonderful history of the human race written in blood. We have this tendency to just take what we want." And that's how we treat the natural world as well." There's this sense of we're here, we're big, we've got the guns, we've got the technology, therefore we're entitled to every damn thing on this planet. That's not how it works and we're going to find out the hard way if we don't kind of wise up and start seeking a life that's in balance with the natural life on Earth." 
 
 The film will open at cinemas next week and was given its world premiere in London tonight with Cameron joined by his the actors Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldano in Leicester Square. 
 
 Audiences will be able to watch in normal 2D or in what Cameron called the "turbo-charged" version, 3D. Some industry observers are hoping that audiences will be so blown away by the effects that 3D - already being used - will start to become the norm, and a line will have been stepped over. 
 
 "We need something that kick-starts public enthusiasm for cinema as an experience as people start watching on smaller and smaller devices like iPhones. We need something to reverse that trend so I've set as my goal bringing the movie theatre back to it being a sacred experience and 3D is part of that." 
 
 If it does well – and there seems little doubt that it will – then can we expect more? "We'll see," said Cameron. "But yes, I have a story worked out for a second film and a third film." 
 
 • Read Andrew Pulver's two star review ||||| THE last time James Cameron directed a movie he broke all box office records. 
 
 Now — 12 years after Titanic — he has sunk £300million into Avatar to produce the most dazzling film of the decade. 
 
 See a trailer for the epic film, below... 
 
 Click here to download the latest flash player. Video: Avatar - trailer Exclusive look at James Cameron's sci-fi fantasy 
 
 It’s a 3D movie people will look back on in years to come to comment on how it transformed cinema. 
 
 In recent 3D releases such as Beowulf, the effects were impressive but the computer-generated humans looked far from real. 
 
 In Avatar, everything feels real — and it’s as if you are immersed in the action. 
 
 And what action. 
 
 Awestruck 
 
 The final battle scene is 20 minutes long and absolutely mind-blowing. 
 
 Alien nation ... Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana as Na'vi aliens 
 
 Avatar, out next Thursday, is truly an event movie. 
 
 The Sneak still recalls sitting in a cinema 12 years ago watching awestruck as Titanic slipped beneath the Atlantic waves. 
 
 And your critic is sure that, even when he is pushing a Zimmer, he will remember the moment the main spaceship of the baddie corporation goes down in Avatar. 
 
 It is overwhelming, and that is because you are emotionally tied up in the characters and the story. 
 
 The plot is set in the next century, with humans trying to take vital resources from a distant planet called Pandora. 
 
 A paraplegic soldier called Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) gets the chance to walk again when he is transformed into the local species, the Na’vi. 
 
 This 10ft-tall elegant blue creature is his “avatar”. 
 
 Thrill ride ... film's all-action air battle 
 
 Jake is supposed to spy on the Na’vi for his company, but his mission gets complicated when he falls for a local girl. 
 
 The romance between Jake and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) shows that Cameron has not lost his ability to evoke emotion. It will bring tears to your eyes. 
 
 Aussie Sam is totally compelling as Jake. It is easy to see why he is now such an in-demand actor. 
 
 James Cameron has described his new filming process as “emotion capture”. And it’s a boast he lives up to. 
 
 Even when Jake is a strange blue creature, you can tell it is him by his mannerisms. 
 
 A voiceover from Sam leads the audience through the alien world in a soothing, laid-back way. 
 
 Star power ... Sigourney Weaver with Avatar cast 
 
 One of the most amazing scenes comes when Jake and Neytiri are walking in the dark through a forest on Pandora. 
 
 Suddenly, she puts out her torch and you see all the vivid, fluorescent plants. 
 
 Some people — who have only seen the photos and not the film — have commented that it looks a bit cartoonish. 
 
 It doesn’t. Everything feels real. It’s as if Cameron has happened upon this alien world and got his camera out. 
 
 Zoe, who played Uhura in the recent Star Trek remake, also displays star quality. 
 
 You don’t need A-list names to make a great movie but it does help having Sigourney Weaver in the cast. 
 
 Brave 
 
 She plays a scientist called Grace, who wants to prevent the plunder of Pandora. 
 
 mpu 
 
 Clearly, there is a message here about mankind’s destruction of beautiful places. 
 
 And Cameron’s story is very black and white, an old-fashioned tale of good versus evil. 
 
 It’s unashamedly populist. Just like Titanic. 
 
 But don’t worry. This isn’t a preachy story. It’s big action. 
 
 The only reason that Avatar won’t top Titanic at the box office is that there are not enough digital screens around the world to show it in all its 3D wonder. 
 
 But you have to admire the film’s backers for being brave enough to take a risk on funding such ground-breaking technology. 
 
 The Sneak’s advice is to make sure you can say you were there when the future of cinema began. ||||| Movie Review 
 
 With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged. 
 
 The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW. 
 
 The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.” 
 
 Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian. 
 
 It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics. 
 
 The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation. 
 
 Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on steak. 
 
 Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form). 
 
 Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming. 
 
 The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden. 
 
 An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you. 
 
 After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz. 
 
 If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking. 
 
 Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder. 
 
 “Avatar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Gun and explosive violence, death and despair. 
 
 AVATAR 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Mauro Fiore; edited by Mr. Cameron, John Refoua and Stephen Rivkin; music by James Horner; visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri; production designers, Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; produced by Mr. Cameron and Jon Landau; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoë Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Stephen Lang (Col. Miles Quaritch), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Carter Selfridge), Joel David Moore (Norm), C C H Pounder (Mo’at), Wes Studi (Eytukan) and Laz Alonso (Tsu’Tey). ||||| Entertainment 
 
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 PLAYBOY: Your new movie Avatar’s stereoscopic 3-D and CGI have people in the film industry and the media comparing its technological breakthrough to the birth of sound and color film. They’ve also predicted the movie could become a cultural phenomenon. Are you worried about Internet fans who have posted snarky comments about the preview footage shown in theaters in August? 
 
 CAMERON: The ones who were the most vocally negative will be there opening night, I promise you. The ones I worry about are those who haven’t heard of the movie. We know from the exit polling that the response was 95 percent ecstatic. Most of the five percent negative response is from the fanatic fans who imagined the movie in their minds but now have to deal with my movie. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Does this prejudgment remind you of 1997, when people predicted big failure for Titanic because it took so long to make, busted its budget and had no big stars? 
 
 CAMERON: They know Avatar is expensive, but that story hasn’t gathered any traction because—what the fuck?—I always make expensive movies, people always like them, and people always want me to do it again. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: How will you react if critics come gunning for you? 
 
 CAMERON: Avatar is made very consciously for movie fans. If critics like it, fine. I can’t say I won’t read the reviews, because I may not be able to resist. I spent a couple of decades in the capricious world of being judged by those not knowledgeable about the depth and history of film and with whom I would not want to have a conversation—with a few notable exceptions. Why would I want to be judged by them? For me, this past decade has been about retreating to the great fundamentals, things that aren’t passing fads or subject to the whims of some idiot critic. You can’t write a review of the laws of thermodynamics. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Moviegoers have already been wowed by lifelike CG and motion-capture characters such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Will your blue-skinned aliens and gigantic monsters satisfy jaded audiences? 
 
 CAMERON: Ultimately audiences don’t give a rat’s ass how a movie is made. When people see the movie, the story will be about the world of the planet Pandora, the creatures on it, the characters—such as the former Marine and amputee played by Sam Worthington—and the huge conflict between the humans and the inhabitants of Pandora. How does it move you? How emotional is it? It’s pretty damn emotional and dramatic. That said, I think we certainly exceeded our expectations in making these characters feel real. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Audiences may not give a rat’s ass about how a movie is made, but didn’t you have to wait a decade before special effects technology could accommodate what you had in mind? 
 
 CAMERON: Here I was the CEO of a major digital effects company, Lightstorm, which was designed to create fantasy CG characters and was not doing that, so I said, “I’ll write a script that is beyond state of the art, we’ll make it, and it will force us to become a world leader in effects.” Everybody looked at what I had in mind and said I was crazy. In the wake of Titanic I saw how much a project can go off the rails, and I got a little more conservative about taking risks. So I put Avatar away because no one had yet accomplished the photo reality and human emotional expression we needed until Peter Jackson cracked the code with Gollum and King Kong. And Industrial Light & Magic was doing it in a completely different way in Pirates of the Caribbean. With Avatar it’s okay if the characters aren’t perfect. Who knows what aliens are supposed to look like? 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: How is film technology influencing how we process reality? 
 
 CAMERON: Human society and human consciousness are evolving before our eyes in an unprecedented, historic way as we adopt and integrate with our machines. Typically people don’t know when they’re making history, but we are definitely making history right now, for better or worse. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: You’re a major techie, but does any current tech toy elude you? 
 
 CAMERON: On Twitter, a tweet has to be less than, what, 25 words? [Editor’s note: It’s 140 characters maximum.] There isn’t one concept I would be interested in discussing with anyone that could be summed up in 25 words or fewer. I’m totally not into Facebook or Twitter, so that makes me a dinosaur right there. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Sigourney Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley in your film Alien is a powerful sex icon, and you may have created another in Avatar with a barely dressed, blue-skinned, 10-foot-tall warrior who fiercely defends herself and the creatures of her planet. Even without state-of-the-art special effects, Zoe Saldana—who voices and models the character for CG morphing—is hot. 
 
 CAMERON: Let’s be clear. There is a classification above hot, which is “smoking hot.” She is smoking hot. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Did any of your teenage erotic icons inspire the character Saldana plays? 
 
 CAMERON: As a young kid, when I saw Raquel Welch in that skintight white latex suit in Fantastic Voyage—that’s all she wrote. Also, Vampirella was so hot I used to buy every comic I could get my hands on. The fact she didn’t exist didn’t bother me because we have these quintessential female images in our mind, and in the case of the male mind, they’re grossly distorted. When you see something that reflects your id, it works for you. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: So Saldana’s character was specifically designed to appeal to guys’ ids? 
 
 CAMERON: And they won’t be able to control themselves. They will have actual lust for a character that consists of pixels of ones and zeros. You’re never going to meet her, and if you did, she’s 10 feet tall and would snap your spine. The point is, 99.9 percent of people aren’t going to meet any of the movie actresses they fall in love with, so it doesn’t matter if it’s Neytiri or Michelle Pfeiffer. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: We seem to need fantasy icons like Lara Croft and Wonder Woman, despite knowing they mess with our heads. 
 
 CAMERON: Most of men’s problems with women probably have to do with realizing women are real and most of them don’t look or act like Vampirella. A big recalibration happens when we’re forced to deal with real women, and there’s a certain geek population that would much rather deal with fantasy women than real women. Let’s face it: Real women are complicated. You can try your whole life and not understand them. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness? 
 
 CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Are her breasts on view? 
 
 CAMERON: I came up with this free—floating, lion’s-mane—like array of feathers, and we strategically lit and angled shots to not draw attention to her breasts, but they’re right there. The animation uses a physics-based sim that takes into consideration gravity, air movement and the momentum of her hair, her top. We had a shot in which Neytiri falls into a specific position, and because she is lit by orange firelight, it lights up the nipples. That was good, except we’re going for a PG-13 rating, so we wound up having to fix it. We’ll have to put it on the special edition DVD; it will be a collector’s item. A Neytiri Playboy Centerfold would have been a good idea. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: So you’re okay with arousing PG-13 chubbies? 
 
 CAMERON: If such a thing should ­happen—and I’m not saying it will—that would be fine. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: You reunited with Sigourney Weaver for the first time since Aliens, over 20 years ago. What took you so long? 
 
 CAMERON: She was my safest casting choice to play the botanist, which is why I didn’t want to cast her. I woke up one day and said, Don’t be a dumb shit; she’ll be perfect. Sig is worthy of awe, but she’s also goofy, funny, deeply committed to acting, wicked smart and really sweet. There’s no gun porn around her character in this film like there was for Ripley in Aliens, and she doesn’t have big clanging brass balls. Instead, she has a scholarly hippie dowdiness that makes her look as though she no longer fits civilization—a little like Dian Fossey, which is interesting because I had originally gotten Sig into the Fossey movie Gorillas in the Mist; I bailed, but she stuck with the project. I’m really happy with the cast. We went way out on a limb casting Sam Worthington, but he came through for us. So did Zoe. As for Sigourney, we get along great because I don’t have to be demanding with her; she is highly demanding of herself and me. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: You have a rep for being demanding of everyone you work with. Ed Harris is rumored to have punched you on The Abyss and was quoted as saying the strain of making that 1989 movie had actors hurling couches out windows and smashing walls. Kate Winslet said making Titanic had her thinking, Please, God, let me die—and she nearly drowned. 
 
 CAMERON: I’ll cop to my faults, but I’ll also defend the situation in a rational way, and it goes like this: Isn’t the purpose of being attracted to something intense and challenging—such as, say, white-water rafting—to come out the other side and tell everybody how you almost died? It doesn’t mean you almost died. We simply let Kate think she was nearly drowning. A little sputtering and coughing does not count in my book, because I have almost drowned several times and know what it feels like. Asking God to please let you die? I was thinking the same thing at about the same point. Titanic was a catastrophic production financially and getting worse every day. Kate probably got some unnecessary stress from me, but I would say 99 percent of her stress was internally induced as part of her acting process. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: You’re saying she was telling the press post-white-water-rafting stories? 
 
 CAMERON: The real question is “Would she work with me again?” I’m sure it would have to be the right material and all those things, but my guess is, absolutely. I’d certainly work with her again; she’s very talented. Whereas Leo DiCaprio switches his acting on and off like a faucet, Kate’s acting process is to internalize all this stuff and use it. She was carrying the whole burden of this enormous production on her back. I probably didn’t do enough to wrap the actors in cotton wool. The part of directing I wasn’t good at—and probably still am not the best at, although I’m better now—is the personal touch: letting people know you appreciate what they’re doing. Personally, I could not have operated under my direction back then; my pride wouldn’t have allowed it. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Have you ever thrown or taken a punch on a movie set? 
 
 CAMERON: Absolutely not. It would be an alien concept for me. But I won’t make a movie if I think I won’t be tested and it won’t be grueling for me, the crew, the actors. Anybody who signs on is going to be tested. So there are challenges, but it gets misconstrued that there was gross irresponsibility on the part of the production to put people into that situation, when in fact they wanted to be right there. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Some heard your “I’m king of the world” speech after winning the best director Oscar as a sure sign of a highly developed ego. 
 
 CAMERON: Titanic was wildly celebrated on every possible level, so sure, I knew how good that felt. It was almost like back in the 1980s when I got a taste of coke. That door opened a crack, and I saw a glimpse of what it was like to have something more powerful than you that you have to answer to. I put it down in, like, a week when most people—everybody around me—didn’t. Getting a glimpse through that door and seeing that accolades can be so capriciously withdrawn made me know I didn’t want to base my self-value on that. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: How has working with underwater exploration crews instead of film crews in the past decade changed you? 
 
 CAMERON: People who have worked with me before think I’m just as crazy, but I think I’ve come back to moviemaking with a different perspective. On all my films prior to Avatar, the film was the one god you had to serve. Getting involved with NASA and various space projects and doing underwater exploration, I got to meet not only a diversity of people but also a diversity of cultures of thought. It was sobering and necessary to see that what we do in Hollywood means almost nothing to them. I look around the Hollywood landscape and see people who can’t or don’t want to exist outside that bubble. I don’t want to be one of them. Now I see moviemaking as officially a job. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: What aspects of Hollywood mega success made you want to climb into submersibles and film documentaries starring sunken ships, instead of movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio? 
 
 CAMERON: I made Titanic because I wanted to dive to the shipwreck, not because I particularly wanted to make the movie. The Titanic was the Mount Everest of shipwrecks, and as a diver I wanted to do it right. When I learned some other guys had dived to the Titanic to make an IMAX movie, I said, “I’ll make a Hollywood movie to pay for an expedition and do the same thing.” I loved that first taste, and I wanted more. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: So Titanic was a means to an end. 
 
 CAMERON: Titanic was about “fuck you” money. It came along at a point in my life when I said, “I can make movies until I’m 80, but I can’t do expedition stuff when I’m 80.” My father was an engineer. I had studied to be an engineer and had a mental restlessness to live the life I had turned my back on when I switched from the sciences to the arts in college. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: You’ve been a diver for years. When you make so many potentially dangerous exploration dives, how much are your wife and kids on your mind? 
 
 CAMERON: Whenever we tout one of our documentary films we sort of emphasize the risk or that we’re going into unexplored territory, doing things few have done. The reality is it’s pretty darn safe. Having said that, it can be quite white-knuckle when something unexpected happens. I’ve spoken at NASAseminars and symposia about the nature of risk because I make action movies and have managed to lead seven deep-ocean expeditions with no fatalities or significant injuries. And my films have been relatively injury-free—well below the industry average—because we have a pretty rigorous approach to safety. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Do you observe any rituals when you’re about to climb into a submersible? 
 
 CAMERON: You don’t want to put a big emphasis on it because you’re there to do a job and stay focused. But every time I close the hatch of a submersible I say to whoever is gathered to see us off, “I’ll see you in the sunshine.” Of course there’s no sunshine down there, so to say that means you’re coming back to the surface. On most of our dives we come back at night because we stay way too long, and the only people waiting are a couple of bored deckhands. By that time the people who were waving and wishing you luck 16 hours earlier are asleep somewhere or drunk in their cabin. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: As you mentioned, your father was an electrical engineer. Your mother was an artist and a nurse. How are you most like and most unlike them? 
 
 CAMERON: I’m a pretty representative fusion of their DNA, a Mendelian genetics experiment gone well. That created a lot of tension, though, because my father was very authoritarian and pragmatic, but my mom had a romantic sense of wanting to head for the hills, to explore. My mom used to nurture what I was about by taking me to the Royal Ontario Museum to draw. My idea of a great weekend was to spend it drawing, going hiking or building something, like a medieval siege engine. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: You came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. How did your parents view the sexual revolution, drugs and the antiwar movement? 
 
 CAMERON: They were pretty much against everything. I can’t think of anything my dad was for except hockey. He used to throw my comics and science-fiction books in the trash because he considered them mental junk. I’d go out, wipe off the coffee grounds and spaghetti and read them under the covers at night. He treated science fiction as if it was porn. I actually don’t think I had any porn, but I had the occasional ­playboy I kept well hidden. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: You spent your first 17 years in Canada. Do you ever feel Canadian? 
 
 CAMERON: I went back to get an honorary degree at a Canadian university. When everybody stood and sang the national anthem, I stood onstage in front of a thousand Canadians just moving my lips because I had forgotten the words. I was never into the national anthem and never even went to a football game in high school, so I never had occasion to sing it. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: You weren’t a high school jock? 
 
 CAMERON: In a small, very jocky school I was president of the science club, which consisted of me, some other lab rats and a Czechoslovakian girl who could barely speak English. I had been accelerated twice in elementary school, so I was two years younger than everybody and small. I hung out with the smart, wide-bell-bottomed, paisley-shirt, hair-down-the-middle-of-your-back counterculture rejects. I didn’t do drugs and looked like an accountant. Jocks would come up to me in the hall and punch me for no reason. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Have you since run into any of those guys? 
 
 CAMERON: Yes, and if you ever go to a 25th high school reunion, make sure that in the previous two months you’ve made the world’s highest-grossing movie, won 11 Academy Awards and become physically bigger than most of those guys who used to beat you up. I walked up to them one by one and said, “You know, I could take your ass right now, and I’m tempted, but I won’t.” Actually, they were all nice guys except for one who was still big and mean. I left him alone. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Did anything in your childhood predict you’d gravitate to the career you’re in today? 
 
 CAMERON: I could always get kids on my block to rally around some harebrained idea, such as, “Hey, let’s build an airplane.” It doesn’t occur to kids that you don’t build planes, but we built one that flew briefly until the ropes broke. A high school biology teacher encouraged us to do something interesting, so we started a theater arts program with a small group of kids craving something besides the football or basketball game. I did production design, lights and scenery and wrote and directed a little. Funny, but I didn’t immediately relate it to some kind of career path. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: How did your life change when your father’s job relocated the Cameron family to Fullerton, California when you were 17? 
 
 CAMERON: In Canada there was a general resentment against America. We lived in a border town, and America was this huge culture generator that constantly bathed us in its radiation. To move to Los Angeles was to go into the belly of the beast. At first I thought the culture was all about cars. The kids seemed so shallow. I wanted to shake them and say, “Can’t you see how you’re destroying the earth with your materialistic values?” I started college six months after we moved, and of course I learned to drive. In the U.S., if you don’t have a car, or at least a license and your dad’s car, you’re not getting laid. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: That’s pretty much in the fine print on most driver’s licenses. So you got laid? 
 
 CAMERON: Yeah, and I wound up marrying that girl seven years later. She was my girlfriend in college, on and off. We had a lot of fun. She was a waitress at Bob’s Big Boy, and I worked at a machine shop. We were just two blue-collar kids who’d go out to the desert and have a large time, drive cars fast and be hellions. I was shaking off all my practical conservatism—before that I hadn’t smoked dope, hadn’t driven fast. It’s a good thing I survived, is all I can say. And here I was living in the street-racing capital of southern California. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Did you do any street racing? 
 
 CAMERON: Hell yeah! All my new friends had hot rods and almost killed me a bunch of times on rides—accidentally spinning out or sliding backward down a freeway off-ramp because they thought they were such good drivers. After enduring these white-knuckle terror rides for about a year, I got a 1969 Mach 1 Mustang and made it really fast by tearing apart the engine, lowering it, putting in Coney shocks, putting the battery in the back to transfer the weight. I stripped everything off it and made my own kind of fiberglass hood and spoiler—all the stuff you now just buy aftermarket. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Were you good at street racing? 
 
 CAMERON: I got good by systematically taking my friends—the ones who white-knuckled me—for their karmic rides. After that they never rode with me again. I’d go out on my own at three or four a.m. and teach myself to drive really fast, then go out on wet nights and drive sideways for hours, putting myself into a drift to learn how to get out of it. There was no name for that then, but now we call it drifting. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Do you ever let loose behind the wheel now? 
 
 CAMERON: As a family man and father of five, especially two teenagers, I have to lead by example. For me to get in a dumb wreck racing would send the wrong signal. What’s also taken the fun out of it is that there’s no place you can drive fast anymore. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: What were your earliest jobs? 
 
 CAMERON: My first job was at 15, working as an assistant to a crazy Viennese pastry chef in a giant restaurant that served 1,500 dinners a night in Niagara Falls, near where I grew up. A certain kind of showmanship gets in your blood when you grow up in a tourist town. In college in California I worked as a machinist, a bus mechanic, a precision tool and die maker, a high school janitor, whatever I could find. I’m pretty blue collar. I swear like a blue-collar guy when I’m on the set. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: How did you make the transition to moviemaking? 
 
 CAMERON: I loved to write, draw and paint, but I also loved physics and astronomy. No career path seemed to reconcile those two directions except science fiction. Two of my closest friends in Fullerton were interested in filmmaking, but there was no film program. We formed a dumb-ass group of eventually four people, and every week one of us made his own little movie in which the other three would have to act, do stunts, set themselves on fire—whatever was necessary. Later we wrote a script and got it to a tax-sheltered group made up mostly of dentists and an investment guy who had dreams of doing Star Wars. We got $20,000 from them, rented a $200,000 camera that we completely disassembled because we had no idea how to operate it, and we made a movie even though we were monkeys and had no idea what we were doing. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: What impact did Star Wars and George Lucas have on you? 
 
 CAMERON: My entrée into Hollywood came as a direct result of Star Wars because George Lucas suddenly made science fiction gold instead of a ghettoized B-movie genre. When most people saw Star Wars there was the shock of the new. For me there was the shock of recognition, as if somebody had taken my private dream and put it up on the screen. I had gone through the same evolution George had: writing, drawing and envisioning these hyperkinetic World War II dogfights in outer space. Good thing I’m not paranoid, the kind of schizo who thinks the CIA is spying on his thoughts and then has to wear tinfoil on his head. I took Star Wars as a sign that what I had to offer was something people wanted. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Your experience with amateur films helped you get a foot in the door of low-budget filmmaking with Roger Corman’s company, where you made miniature models and designed sets for Rock’n’ Roll High School and Battle Beyond the Stars. 
 
 CAMERON: On a Corman film everybody just rose to his or her own level—the opposite of the Peter Principle, in a way. You didn’t think of a career; you thought, What’s my next opportunity? If you got an opportunity to direct, you didn’t question it. Ron Howard didn’t question it when he got Grand Theft Auto; Francis Ford Coppola didn’t question it when he got to do Dementia 13. These are kind of junk movies, but we were interested in the process, in learning. That’s where I met writer-producer Gale Hurd, and the recognition that we would make a great team was pretty instantaneous. It took only a year or two for us to make a movie together. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: The movie you made together in 1984, The Terminator, got you your first big directing job and made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Did Schwarzenegger’s ascendancy in Hollywood and politics surprise you? 
 
 CAMERON: If you’ve known him for even a short time, you’re not surprised by anything he accomplishes. He used to say, “You don’t program yourself for failure; you program yourself for success.” At first I thought it was just macho bullshit. But I’ve subsequently made many decisions using that principle, especially in recent years. The decision to show 16 minutes of Avatar to the public during a special Avatar Day was based on the principle of programming myself for success. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Niagara Falls, near where you spent your childhood, is a favorite wedding spot. Did growing up there make you hyperaware of marriage? 
 
 CAMERON: I don’t know, but I have been married five times. I’m a perfectionist, so I kept trying until I got it right, which I have, I’m happy to report. Suzy Amis is a keeper. They were all great women, but there are people you can love and later not like, or it can be your rhythms and energies are too disparate to function together as partners. I found—and this was the big one—you have to work at it. Before that I had this attitude, Well, I’ll do this until it doesn’t work, and then I’ll bail. You’ll never stay married if you have that attitude. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: What caused the attitude shift? 
 
 CAMERON: It was something a therapist said. I don’t believe in shrinks, and they’re not part of my life, but in this particular case I had agreed to go because it might help, and he gave me something that has stuck with me as a philosophy. He said, “You don’t do this for her; you do this for you, so things make sense to you.” You get into a relationship and make certain promises, and you have to live by a code, a set of values, for your own reasons, not to please the other person. Your word is your bond. It doesn’t matter what kind of money is involved or how the situation subsequently changes. You have to be smart enough to go into a situation knowing the dangers, and you have to live by the agreements you make going in. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Three of your four ex-wives—Gale Hurd, Linda Hamilton and Kathryn Bigelow—are prominent in the movie business. If director Bigelow asked for your opinion of her film The Hurt Locker, could you be honest without the discussion reopening old wounds? 
 
 CAMERON: Kathryn and I are still close, and we’d work together on a film tomorrow. The key is to be honest but diplomatic, constructive, not destructive. She was interested in my input on The Hurt Locker, and I basically said, “You did a great job, and I wouldn’t change a frame,” and it was true in that case. She has seen Avatar at different stages and given good input. Her current partner, Mark Boal, who wrote The Hurt Locker, gave me notes as well. It’s very collegial. I don’t have a lot of those relationships, but I value the ones I do have. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: When director McG’s Terminator Salvation was up against Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at the box office last summer, McG said, “Michael Bay has a big cock, but I’d like to believe mine is bigger. If he’s up for it, we can reveal ourselves on the Spartacus steps at Universal and put the question to rest.” As co-writer and director of two Terminator movies, would you have been willing to drop trou with them to settle the matter? 
 
 CAMERON: No, I prefer we keep work and play separate. Being a good director probably doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the size of one’s penis, big toe, thumb size or anything else. That’s about the dumbest fucking thing you could ever say. I’m surprised he didn’t call me out. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: As someone who has been accused of going off on the set, what do you make of those leaked tapes of Christian Bale berating a crew member on Terminator Salvation? 
 
 CAMERON: The Avatar crew all thought that was a hoot, and for the next few days we were all quoting what I thought was an inspired rant. The joke is I’m a tyrannical guy, but I said, “Man, I have to take my hat off to this guy. I could not pull a rant like that if I had to.” I mean, I can get on a roll but not like that. I just had to bow down. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: How old do you consider yourself to be emotionally? 
 
 CAMERON: Probably 14, and I’m happy about that. In some ways I’m even younger than that because I never want to lose the intellectual curiosity—of always wanting to know how stuff works and wanting to put things together with my hands. I can relate very well to my six-year-old, who’s always building something. If I let him go he’d just take off into the woods and not come back until the end of the day, just like I used to do as a kid. 
 
 
 
 PLAYBOY: Are you already plotting how you might top Avatar? 
 
 CAMERON: I haven’t decided. I always say that when a woman is in the midst of childbirth, don’t ask her if she wants another child. I’m crowning right now. TAGS: 
 
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– James Cameron's Avatar had its world premiere in London last night, and audience members and critics are sworn to secrecy for now. Based on the inevitable leaks and pseudo-reviews, the 3-D epic is pretty good: Anna Keir, the Independent: It's "rather good. Surprisingly, for a film this rich in action and this beautiful to watch, Cameron doesn't overegg the 3D-ness of it all, which makes those moments, when they come, even more of a joy to watch." Sam Rubin, KTLA-TV: "This is another rare example where the quality of the movie does indeed exceed the hype." He predicts Oscar nominations for best picture and best director. The Sneak, the Sun: "Everything feels real—and it’s as if you are immersed in the action. ... The Sneak’s advice is to make sure you can say you were there when the future of cinema began.” Mark Brown, the Guardian: "The film does not make you sick and it is not a disaster. By saying Avatar was really much, much better than expected, that it looked amazing and that the story was gripping—if cheesy in many places—the Guardian is in technical breach of the agreement."