Entertainment
Avatar: Fire and Ash” director James Cameron on generative AI: “That’s horrifying to me
Much of what we see from the Earth-like moon of Pandora, the fantastical setting for the “Avatar” franchise, comes from a soundstage in Los Angeles, where scenes from the second and third movies were filmed. “We had to build an ocean,” director James Cameron said. “We could make a two-meter swell. We could make a wave crash up on a shoreline if we built the shoreline.”
Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña and other actors shot their underwater scenes in the nearly 250,000-gallon tank. Digital artists then took those shots, called performance captures, as a template to render the final versions of the characters we see on screen.
“So, performance capture, we use a whole bunch of cameras to capture the body performance of the actor,” Cameron explained. “And we use a single camera (or now we use actually two) to video their face. They’re in a close-up 100% of the time. But there’s a beautiful thing about being in a close-up 100% of the time. It’s very much like theater rehearsal.”
Mark Fellman | © 2025 20th Century Studios
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is the third film in the series. It tells the story of the indigenous Na’vis’ fight to defend their paradise from colonizing humans.
Cameron created these stories and this world. He’s always been a dreamer, even as a kid in rural Canada. “I lived in a world of my imagination – it was comic books, it was science fiction. I read a lot. There were movies, TV shows,” he said. “I mean, I had a pretty fertile imagination.”
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Cameron moved to Los Angeles with his parents as a teen. He briefly attended community college, where studies included marine biology, before dropping out and picking up odd jobs, including truck driving.
So, how did he go from blue collar to Hollywood? “Watching ‘Star Wars,'” he said. “I used to put my headphones on and listen to fast electronic music and imagine space battles, hyperkinetic space battles with all kinds of maneuvers and energy weapons, and people going through debris fields and all that. If the things I’m seeing in my mind can be the same things that are in a movie that’s the number one movie in movie history, then I’ve got a salable imagination.”
He returned to school, although not in an official capacity. “I started to study visual effects, and the way I did it was, I didn’t have the money to go to USC or anything like that. So what I used to do is, I’d go down to USC, I’d go bury myself on a Saturday, when I wasn’t driving a truck, in the stacks. And I’d read everything I could find on optical printing and front-screen projection and, you know, sodium process traveling mattes. All self-taught. I’d Xerox all these scholarly papers, put them all in binders. And I had this shelf full of black binders that had essentially a graduate course in visual effects and cinematography.”
He found jobs in visual effects departments and production design, rising through the ranks quickly due to his technical knowledge.
Then, in the early 1980s, Cameron, inspired by a literal dream about a robot exoskeleton, co-wrote and directed “The Terminator.” The movie put him on the map, and proved he could turn his imagination into reality.
But CGI wasn’t available at the time; the effects were done largely through puppeteering. “We just figured out how to do it all practically,” Cameron said.
He showed us around his private museum in Los Angeles, full of movie props from his films, including “Aliens,” where puppeteers brought Sigourney Weaver’s powerlifter – and the Alien Queen – to life. Of the Alien Queen, Cameron said, “Her head had, I think, seven or eight different axes of movement that were controlled by cables that went basically out her butt. And we had to hide all that stuff, so there was a lotta steam and smoke and backlight and things like that.”
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Cameron’s first use of CGI came with the science fiction movie “The Abyss,” It was also his first cinematic foray into another one of his fascinations: the deep sea. His second venture into an oceanic film? “Titanic.” It became the then-highest-grossing movie of all time. Cameron took home three Oscars himself.
But the film itself was never the priority for Cameron: He said he wrote the script in order to explore the wreck of the Titanic. “It was a little bit of a means to an end, you know?” he said. “I thought, ‘I can just go do this. All right, I need a story. Okay, ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ You know, young, doomed love on the Titanic.’ Boom! Like, instantaneous.”
He found a way to use Hollywood to invest in his passion for scientific exploration. “Yeah, exactly,” he said. “And then I had so much fun on my expedition that was to shoot Titanic for the movie, that I basically took an eight-year hiatus from Hollywood, an eight-year sabbatical. And I did subsequently six more expeditions for a total of seven, before I started ‘Avatar.'”
Cameron wrote the treatment for “Avatar” before “Titanic,” but it wasn’t until 2005 that he thought the current technology could support his vision. And even then, he wasn’t sure the business of Hollywood would go along. “For years, there was this sense that, ‘Oh, they’re doing something strange with computers and they’re replacing actors,’ when in fact, once you really drill down and you see what we’re doing, it’s a celebration of the actor-director moment,” he said.
“Now, go to the other end of the spectrum, and you’ve got generative AI, where they can make up a character,” he continued. “They can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It’s like, no. That’s horrifying to me. That’s the opposite. That’s exactly what we’re not doing.”
Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” opens next months.
So, how does he feel a few weeks from the premiere? “Nervous!” he laughed. “Are you kidding? Always. Always.”
Despite the uncertainty, Cameron is still undaunted, and enamored by the unknown. “I’m attracted, in case you haven’t noticed, by things I don’t know how to do,” he said. “Because you grow and you learn. If I’m still making movies when I got an oxygen tube up my nose and I’m 87 or whatever, should I be that lucky, I want to still be doing things I don’t know how to do.”
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Watch an extended interview with James Cameron (Video)
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Story produced by John Goodwin. Editor: Carol Ross.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES: James Cameron on deep-sea exploration (YouTube Video)
The Oscar-winning director of “Titanic” long had a fascination with life on the ocean floor. With cameras and deep-sea submersibles, James Cameron has brought the extreme environments of Earth’s oceans to movie screens in the documentaries “Ghosts of the Abyss” and “Aliens of the Deep.” In this Jan. 30, 2005 “Sunday Morning” story, Jerry Bowen talked with Cameron, along with marine biologist Djanna Figueroa, seismologist Maya Tolstoy, and astrobiologists Tori Hoehler and Kevin Hand, about how exploring our planet’s most hostile landscapes can help in planning future manned missions to Mars and beyond.
Cruz Beckham gave a special nod to his father David by honouring him with a Manchester United football shirt as he took his The Time For Your Love tour to the city on Wednesday.
For the unversed, Sir David, who was knighted by King Charles last November, played for the team for 12 years.
However, he made sure to support his son as he watched his 21-year-old son and his band, The Breakers perform on stage at The Deaf Institute alongside former player Nicky Butt.
Just hours earlier, David, Victoria, Cruz, and Romeo sent birthday wishes to Brooklyn with Instagram posts to mark his 27th birthday.
The public olive branch came six weeks after Brooklyn made his bombshell statement stating he had no wishes to reconcile with his father.
As for style, David donned a cream beanie as he joined Manchester United star Nicky and his best friend David Gardner.
Cruz’s girlfriend Jackie Apostel, 30, who has been travelling around the UK with the band, was also present at the show.
Jackie, meanwhile cut a stylish figure in a furry brown jacket and denim jeans.
However, Victoria and Romeo missed the show as they are currently in Paris for the city’s Fashion Week.
Sharing childhood photos of Brooklyn, David used his childhood nickname for his son, Buster, as he wrote ’27 today. Happy Birthday Bust. We love you x’
Minutes later Victoria shared the same photo and wrote ‘happy birthday Brooklyn, we love you so much’. She then uploaded a photo of herself laughing with her son with a string of love hearts.
Cruz, meanwhile, shared a sweet throwback of Brooklyn holding him as a baby and wrote: ‘I love you’.
The young musician has been carving out his music career and currently is in the middle of his UK tour with his band, Cruz Beckham And The Breakers, performing at King Tuts in the city.
After nearly two decades of drama, Jersey Shore Family Vacation is coming to an end, and the whole gang is coming back for one final round.
MTV has confirmed that the show will conclude with 18 farewell episodes, premiering globally on Thursday, 7th May.
The entire original cast will return for the send-off; Angelina Pivarnick, Deena Cortese, DJ Pauly D, Jenni “JWOWW” Farley, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, Ronnie Ortiz-Magro, Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola, and Vinny Guadagnino, the same faces that first came onto screens back in 2009.
It’s a remarkable run by any measure.
Since its debut, the Jersey Shore universe has spanned nearly 300 episodes and spawned multiple spinoffs, turning a house full of rowdy twenty-somethings into one of reality television’s most enduring and culturally significant franchises.
Viewers have watched the cast grow up in real time, through relationships, marriages, sobriety battles, parenthood, and career reinventions, all while somehow keeping the same chaotic chemistry intact.
The final season is billed as “a last hurrah for a cultural icon,” and the milestone moments are coming thick and fast.
The final season will feature the usual mix of celebrations, baby showers, bachelorette parties, gender reveals, birthdays, and weddings, alongside the inside jokes and friendships that have defined the show since the beginning.
Past seasons are currently streaming on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.
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- Measure introduced by Democrat Tim Kaine, Republican Rand Paul.
- Democrats argue Trump bypassed Congress when he ordered air campaign.
- Resolution would’ve required Congress nod for continued US involvement.
WASHINGTON: The US Senate on Wednesday rejected a resolution aimed at curbing President Donald Trump’s authority to continue military strikes on Iran, in a narrow congressional show of support for a conflict launched without explicit approval from lawmakers.
The bipartisan measure, introduced by Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Rand Paul, would have required the withdrawal of US forces from hostilities against Iran unless Congress authorises the campaign.
But with Republicans holding a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber of Congress and largely backing the president’s decision to attack Iran alongside Israel, the resolution fell short by exactly that margin.
The vote came five days into a rapidly expanding conflict that has already killed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior figures in Tehran, while US troops have died in an Iranian attack on a US base in Kuwait.
Democrats argue Trump unconstitutionally bypassed Congress when he ordered the air campaign and say the administration has offered shifting justifications for the war.
“Let me say it this way, there was no presentation of any evidence in that room… that suggested that the US faced any imminent threat from Iran,” Kaine told AFP after a classified briefing from administration officials.
Republicans have largely rallied behind their leader, though some have signalled their support could wane if the war expands or drags on.
“Roadside bombs coming out of Iran have maimed and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans,” Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s top loyalists in the Senate and a longtime advocate of confronting Iran, posted on X.
“They mean it when they say ‘death to America.’ I’m glad we didn’t let it go further. I’m glad we didn’t let them build more missiles.”
‘Knocked out’
For the resolution to pass, Democrats would have needed at least four Republicans to join Paul. One Democrat, Pennsylvania centrist John Fetterman, opposed the resolution.
Even if the measure had cleared the Senate and the House — where a vote on a similar resolution is expected Thursday — Trump would have been able to veto it. Congress would have needed an almost certainly unattainable two-thirds majority in both chambers to override the president.
Governments around the world have scrambled to evacuate citizens stranded by the war in the Middle East, triggered by the US-Israeli strikes that killed Khamenei and prompted retaliatory missile and drone attacks across the Gulf.
Cities such as Dubai and Riyadh — long seen as insulated from the region’s turmoil — have been drawn into the crisis as the conflict spreads across the region.
The debate in Congress over Trump’s authority to wage war reflects broader unease on Capitol Hill about the scope and duration of the military campaign.
Administration officials told lawmakers in classified briefings this week that the operation could last weeks and may require additional funding from Congress. Lawmakers from both parties say the Pentagon could soon seek emergency funds to replenish weapons stockpiles and sustain the operation.
The war powers resolution invoked the 1973 War Powers Act, passed after the Vietnam War, which allows Congress to force votes on military engagements and limits unauthorized conflicts to 60 days.
Democrats had acknowledged the measure faced steep odds but said forcing lawmakers to take a public position on the war was essential.
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