James Cameron

I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.

I mean, you have to be able - you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can't do it by yourself.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.

I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.

The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there's an alien world here on Earth.

To convince people to back your idea, you've got to sell it to yourself and know when it's the moment. Sometimes that means waiting. It's like surfing. You don't create energy, you just harvest energy already out there.

I don't use film cameras. I don't do visual effects the same way. We don't use miniature models; it's all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It's a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same.

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.

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.

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.

I'm hopeful that we'll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.