A Charlie Rose Q&A with James Cameron

The Avatar director holds forth on the birth of a blockbuster and the future of film

By Charlie Rose

Shortly after the release of Avatar in December and again on Jan. 20, Charlie Rose talked with James Cameron. Below are edited excerpts of their conversations.

Did you have any idea how big Avatar would be?
We didn't see this coming. First of all, there is the critical success, which I certainly was not counting on. I thought it would be spotty at best just because of the history of science fiction. And then the commercial success. We had assumed we would probably come close to making money because we spent a lot.

What, about $230 million?
It was in that very, very general range. I don't want to commit to a number. I figure if the studio wants to announce a number, that's fine. We were actually fairly smart about the marketing. We brought in a number of promotional partners to help hold down the actual out-of-pocket marketing costs. We did that with McDonald's (MCD), Coke Zero (KO), LG, and Panasonic (PC). But even so, we knew we had to perform in the kind of $750 million-plus range to be profitable. And we knew what the negatives were: We didn't have stars, there was no prior art, it wasn't part of a franchise, and it wasn't adapted from a novel or a graphic novel or something that had any hook in the public consciousness. So we had to build all that from scratch. In the back of my mind, I always knew that the one gambit you have when you have a high budget and lots of time is you can make a great movie. And if you can engage an audience, especially a global audience, with a film that sort of transcends language, transcends the immediacy of the pop culture of America, and speaks to more universals of human emotion, human imagination—if you can do that, you can sort of break through and become an event, whatever that means. And I think Avatar did that.

What will it change?
One thing that I can point to right now as a likelihood is that, because of the financial and critical success, filmmakers who were reluctant to jump into making 3D films may be given a kind of permission that they didn't feel they had before—permission from the critical community that a serious filmmaker can do a piece of drama for grown-ups and not an animated film for kids, and they can do it in 3D and they don't have to feel guilty about it or feel that they're committing career suicide.

[Sony (SNE) CEO Sir] Howard Stringer told us a couple of weeks ago that the entire emphasis of Sony at the Consumer Electronics Show was going to be 3D television. And they are gearing up because they helped you make the cameras.
There's an interesting history there because about six or seven months ago I had a closed-door secret presentation to Howard Stringer of a new business venture, and I mapped out what I believed was going to be the future of 3D and how many television sets were going to be entering the home and how there would initially be a dearth of 3D content and blah, blah, blah. I basically mapped out an entire strategy that he promptly announced a week later at the Sony stockholders' meeting. His speech was pretty much culled verbatim from my presentation. So thank you, Howard.

That's the sincerest form of flattery.
A more sincere form would have been to actually make the deal I was proposing.

Is 3D going to revolutionize cinema?
I think 3D will have a part in keeping the cinema experience alive as opposed to watching something on a little screen like a laptop or a small portable device. The home experience was catching up with the theatrical experience and starting to kind of erode it in people's minds as the big, exciting, magical thing that you went to.

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