Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own.
Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality.
Building upon the world we created with 'Avatar' has been a rare and incredibly rewarding experience. In writing the new films, I've come to realize that 'Avatar's world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.
I've tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established filmmaker. It's a blue-collar sensibility.
Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.
I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.
I believe 3D is inevitable because it's about aligning our entertainment systems to our sensory system. We all have two eyes; we all see the world in 3D. And it's natural for us to want our entertainment in 3D as well. It's just getting the technology - it's really more the business model than the technology piece. We've solved the technology.
Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.
If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.
The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.
Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.
So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.
Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.
The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.
I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.
People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn't really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things.
I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.
It'll be all of our efforts together. It won't won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the group.
I think people had somehow gotten the sense that we have explored everything, when that isn't the case. We so know so little about the ocean, and so much of it is being destroyed.
The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer.
