A Charlie Rose Q&A with James Cameron

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And I think 3D is a way of getting us back to that.

What's more satisfying, the commercial success or critical success?
I would have to say the commercial success only as a metric of how well the film is communicating. We're reaching people—and we're reaching them in China and Japan and France and Germany and pretty much wherever this film is playing.

Someone said that Spielberg is about awe, and you are about romance.
I can't help myself. I'm romantic. Romance with teeth, you know.

Someone also said you set out to a make a blockbuster, and you made a chick flick.
That was true of Titanic, and it may be true of Avatar. This film is a romance. It's an alien romance. Guy falls in love with a 10-foot-tall, hot blue chick on another planet.

Reviewers have noted a reference almost to Iraq in terms of the war and terror in the film.
I wrote this thing before the Iraq war, but it lined up beautifully, because I was making references in the first script I wrote to Vietnam and all the way back to the colonial period in the Americas. You know, human history is a series of invasions. One group invades another group. The militarily superior takes over and destroys the other culture, and so on. And we're seeing that in this film, but we're seeing it from the standpoint of the people who are getting invaded. And I think anybody who's going to take a position that a war is a right and moral path should understand what it feels like when it's an aggressive war and what it feels like to be invaded. We felt it here with 9/11.

And you believe in just wars as President Obama expressed in his Nobel acceptance speech?
Yes, I believe in just wars. But I think we have to make the distinction, and that's where we as citizens in a democratic society have to be on our toes and have to be well-informed and have to have a voice.

Do you expect this to be the largest-grossing film ever made?
I think it will be as of this week, actually. It's pretty much a done deal, unless a comet hits the earth.

What do you think it'll make overall at the end?
It's hard to predict, but I think we'll definitely get past $2 billion.

And if you win the Academy Award...
I have to get nominated first. I don't like to put a curse on it by even talking about it.

If you win, what will be bigger than "King of the World," which was your self-description when Titanic swept the boards? King of Pandora?
You know, that was my kind of bone-headed attempt to connect with fans of Titanic, since it was such a prominent line in the film. But I'm not saying this from a kind of been-there, done-that position, but from a position of somebody who desperately does not like to stand up in front of large crowds of people. And pretty much the biggest crowd of people that Hollywood knows how to assemble for any moment of human interaction is the Academy Award audience of a billion people. I remember thinking at the moment they were opening the envelope [when Titanic was nominated]: "Please don't let it be us. Please don't let it be me." And you get to that place. You really do. It's funny. It's almost more trouble than it's worth. And having done it already, I kind of feel like, "Well, Avatar doesn't need this." But on the other hand, I see the pride on the part of my editors and my effects people and my actors. And I think, "You know what, this can't be bad."

Emmy Award-winning journalist Charlie Rose is the host of Charlie Rose, the nightly PBS program.

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