James Cameron: 'I eat pressure for breakfast'

MUMBAI : As the second instalment of epic science fiction film 'Avatar: The Way of Water' is creating a tizzy at the box-office, award-winning director James Cameron has spoken about the pressures a filmmaker has to go through on making a movie at such a grand scale.

Talking to IANS, Cameron shared that one of the pressures on many filmmakers is how to stay objective about your own film.

"I think there are a lot of pressures on many filmmakers... one of the biggest ones that people rarely talk about is how to stay objective about your own film. If you work on a film for five years at the end of that period can you still look at the movie and see it with fresh eyes," he said.

"I think this is one of the hardest skills that as director one has to develop, right..."

The 68-year-old Academy Award-winner agreed that there are pressures.

"There is also the pressure of getting the film done as quickly as possible and this is not a quick film to make clearly. We have had over 3000 vfx shots in this movie and too just to put that on perspective on 'Terminator 2', I had 42 vfx shots. So, that's an enormous pressure."

He shared his mantra of maintaining his calm.

"There is budgetary pressure, there is deadline pressure all that things and I joke around that 'I eat pressure for breakfast bring it on'. And you have to fortify yourself with that kind of mantra... But really the truth of it is that if it wasn't joyful and if it didn't feed an artiste creatively every single day, it wouldn't be tolerable and I wouldn't have done it (made it) again," said Cameron, who became the first person to do a solo descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Earth's ocean, in the Deepsea Challenger submersible.

Cameron, whose 'Avatar' and 'Titanic' are the highest and third highest-grossing films of all time, even shared that while making 'Avatar' and 'Avatar 2', he had "shot and captured Avatar 3 and even Avatar 4. These films are all written all the way to Avatar 5."

"So, if it works out and we prevail in tis altered market place that we are in right now we get to make them all ... giant saga. So, its exciting and something I have done before on that scale... You know that challenges. Part of me is the fun of challenges and part of it with these amazing artiste... And I am talking about the design, computer artiste and incredible cast. I feed on the energy and the creativity of the cast," said the filmmaker, who in 2010 was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.

SOURCE : IANS