杏吧原创

James Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario. As a teenager, 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired his own epics 鈥� using an old 16-millimetre camera. After the family moved to California, he dropped out of college to drive trucks. But Star Wars changed that and set him learning all about film-making. A job making models on Battle Beyond the Stars was followed by other low-budget jobs, including the cult film Escape from New York. A battle with the producers of Piranha II: The Spawning (he had to break into the editing suite at night to try to reconstruct the film) made Cameron realise he had to go it alone

You are a famous film director, yet you鈥檝e done more time on the ocean floor than many a marine scientist. Why didn鈥檛 you just become a scientist?

I was always interested in science as far back as I can remember, from being a kid hiking in the woods and picking up frogs and snakes, to astronomy and having my own telescope. My parents fostered that interest by buying me a telescope or a microscope, just little cheap things. I spent more time looking at pond water than your average 10-year-old. Then there was sort of a cusp of a decision when I finished high school. Am I going to go into the sciences or into the arts? And I couldn鈥檛 decide. It was a 50:50 call. I really liked physics but my maths was not strong enough to do anything big, so I opted for literature and passed.

But why ocean exploration?

The same thing that draws me to science fiction: exploring other worlds, of the imagination or real. I was drawn to scuba diving because I thought it was pretty unlikely that I鈥檇 set foot on another planet and the closest I could think of on Earth was under water, which I imagined would be a completely different world with its own rules. And that turned out to be true. I learned to scuba dive in 1969 and it was everything I hoped and much more. I fell in love with the ocean and since then I have spent thousands of hours under water in scuba gear, in a helmet or in a submersible. I don鈥檛 profess to have dedicated my life to underwater exploration, I have too much respect for the researchers to try to come in as a johnny-come-lately. I do it because it is fulfilling. Unfortunately, it doesn鈥檛 pay the bills as well as making big Hollywood movies! I have to oscillate between the two.

Have you ended up doing a lot of science?

In a way. In making Titanic we did a real deep-ocean expedition for the photography, and I realised that the process of making films and sharing and interpreting what is happening in the deep ocean with a lay audience is my way of being involved. That is why we need to develop the highest level of imaging. I鈥檓 not saying that we鈥檙e taking tonnes of samples and coming to lots of meaningful conclusions, but we鈥檙e getting some pretty good images.

Having done that a couple of times for shipwrecks like the Titanic and the Bismarck, I got interested in the hydrothermal vents. We did a cruise to the vents in the Atlantic, too, and as a result I decided to make a film about them and we started to mount quite a big and complex set of expeditions to the mid-Atlantic ridge, and we planned an East Pacific Rise phase a few months later. I thought it would be really tragic to go there with these assets and not do real science at the same time.

Did you get scientists involved?

We called a number of US institutes to see if there were any researchers who could take advantage of what we were about to do. A lot of them couldn鈥檛 because their planning and funding is done so far in advance. There were a few that we caught at the right moment. We got a strong response from the astrobiology community, various NASA scientists from Ames Research, Johnson Space Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We got funding as well 鈥� which went to their researchers so they could develop instruments to take on our expedition, to dive on our submersibles and to gather data in parallel with our imaging work. We ended up taking film or high-definition images of them working and tied it in with the story we were trying to tell about the hydrothermal vents and how they may have a scientific connection to the types of chemosynthesis-based biology that might be found on other planets, or some of the moons in our solar system, such as Europa.

Where did all the deep-sea film technology come from?

In 1995, when we were preparing to film the Titanic wreck, we went out with a Russian crew with the two Mir submersibles. We just wanted to build an underwater vehicle that would act as a prop. This is Hollywood thinking 鈥� let鈥檚 dive to the Titanic, but let鈥檚 simulate a vehicle that can go inside the ship. We won鈥檛 really take it inside the ship, we鈥檒l just have it fly round the outside. So we built this vehicle and it was a stupid little remote-controlled vehicle (ROV) that could barely move, but it had a camera and it functioned.

I got carried away and went to explore inside the ship. I thought this was great, but it was a tethered, conventional ROV that could only go in 6 to 10 metres before the tether got caught up and we were afraid that we couldn鈥檛 recover it.

What did you do about these ROVs?

When Titanic came out it made a lot of money. I was on a scuba-diving trip sitting around and taking a break with some of my diving buddies, one of whom was my brother Mike. We started thinking what would a vehicle be like that could explore the inside of a shipwreck? What would it need? So we set ourselves some engineering goals and one of them was it had to fit through the window of the Titanic 鈥� we didn鈥檛 want to be constrained to just going through the grand staircase. That meant it couldn鈥檛 be more than 43 centimetres wide, a package about the size of two briefcases side by side or a small TV. After a few months of doing a lot of napkin drawings, we came up with the idea of a fibre-spooling vehicle that had its own on-board batteries. It was very, very tiny, and there were probably four or five brand-new ideas in the design of the vehicle. Three years and $2 million later, we had two of these guys built and we were ready to go to the Titanic to film Ghosts of the Abyss.

What inspired you to make that film?

It was an interesting convergence because when we started talking about this vehicle it was hypothetical, we just thought we should build it. But at the same time and completely separately, I was developing a 3D imaging system that was not designed to shoot underwater. So the 3D system and the ROV system came online at the same time. We said: 鈥淗ey, let鈥檚 do an expedition, let鈥檚 shoot it in 3D!鈥� Then we thought we should go back to the Titanic because if I couldn鈥檛 raise the funding to make a documentary about the Titanic then I wouldn鈥檛 be able to raise the money to do anything else. The next thought was what can we do that is meaningful there.

What did you come up with?

We came out of that expedition with three fairly significant tools: a stereo high-definition imaging system rated to 6000 metres, a lighting platform, which we haven鈥檛 used since because it is more of a film tool, and a very small ROV that can be used in complex environments.

How does it feel to be deep in the ocean?

Every single dive produces novel experiences, something that you鈥檝e never seen before 鈥� and some dives are rewarding because you see things that no human being has ever seen before. That is the moment that you live for, whether you are seeing it on video or with the naked eye through the window, I don鈥檛 even make that distinction anymore. Most of the dives I go on, I don鈥檛 even look out of the window. When I鈥檓 in the Mir submersible I can see so much better on camera, I can pan 270 degrees, see down both sides, or across the front of the sub and down one side if you look up and you look straight down. The pilot鈥檚 view is much more restricted. In the deep rover submersibles you鈥檙e surrounded by the ocean so you can look with both your eyes and with the camera.

Are you working on anything novel?

We鈥檙e looking at building an 11,000-metre vehicle. And we have other deep-ocean projects. We want to do a project about the Battle of Midway 鈥� the turning point in the war in the Pacific 鈥� which will involve finding the Japanese fast carriers. The position of the Yorktown is already known. It鈥檚 all very deep: those wrecks are all around 6 or 7 kilometres down.

What is the magic of these wrecks?

Every wreck has a story so it鈥檚 satisfying on many levels. There is the technical challenge of doing the dives, doing the photography and the forensic investigation, which is a very rigorous discipline in itself. What you want to do is relate what you see on the sea floor years later to what happened at the time, the events of the sinking. And then you find certain touchstones to the human stories of the people who were on the ship, from the last hours of the ship鈥檚 life.

For example鈥�

In the case of the Bismarck, we were able to talk to certain survivors and we could relate what we were seeing at the wreck site to where they had workstations and quarters and so on. It becomes a very emotional journey if you are dealing with a recent wreck, as recent as the second world war or later.

As well as pioneering technology and special effects, your films are known for their storytelling. Does science have a narrative?

Science is a detective story and that鈥檚 what鈥檚 great about it. There鈥檚 an inherent drama in trying to figure out why things are the way they are, and it鈥檚 that intellectual curiosity that drives science. Part of the story I am interested in telling is what it is like to be a scientist and dedicate your life to satisfying your intellectual curiosity.

Do people understand scientists?

No. They have a very stereotypical image of scientists as guys in white coats that speak in a very didactic way. They don鈥檛 think of scientists as rounded people with humour and families, that maybe make music or do different things. And many of them are very interesting, dynamic people who have dedicated their lives to something I think is one of the most important pursuits you can be involved in.

What makes science so special to you?

Most people are involved in making money. Unfortunately in our society you are seen as a chump if you don鈥檛 do that. People who pursue other dreams are the ones who interest me most, whether they are artists, explorers, writers, scientists, or people looking for some greater meaning or other purpose. I think these are the only people worth knowing and celebrating. Unfortunately, our western society tends to celebrate the wrong people, people who entertain us in a very superficial way but don鈥檛 entertain us intellectually. I don鈥檛 have any problem with those folks, I just don鈥檛 think that they should be put on a pedestal.

So if exploration is the dream you are pursuing, why is it important to bring it to a wider audience?

Overall we live pretty well. And we live well because we have mastery of technology and we have the mastery because we have challenged ourselves to learn how to use it to do things that are extraordinary, like go to the moon, like explore the oceans, like figure out the human genome, like build supercomputers. The culture that explores and understands its environment or gets there first and is able to reap the economic return of new places and new possibilities, those are the cultures that prevail. The cultures that have the technology to be able to move fluidly within their environment are the cultures that prevail. The ones that isolate and insulate are the ones that ultimately fail. So, how do we as a culture keep the dream alive so to speak, the dream of exploration?

Give us a sneak preview of your latest film.

Right now we鈥檙e calling it Aliens of the Deep. I think it鈥檚 an apt title because we鈥檙e saying that the life we are seeing down there is bizarre and exotic in ways that are very suggestive to the unscientific eye, of another planet. It is hard to believe that you鈥檙e on Earth. That is part of what we are trying to say, that there are places on Earth so strange you can鈥檛 believe it and we haven鈥檛 even begun to find them yet. But there is also a very literal connection in that we are going to find extraterrestrial life at some point. And if we find it in our solar system with the limited options we have, very likely it is going to be extinct in the fossil record of something that may look like these deep-ocean animals. So we have to understand what those bio-signatures are in the rocks so we can recognise them when we do see them on Mars or wherever.