英语演讲：《阿凡达》导演詹姆斯·卡梅隆的演讲

I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had.

And you know that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn’t in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking “samples,” frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water, and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.

And my love of science fiction actually seemed to mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late ‘60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.

And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren’t video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author’s description put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was, the creativity had to find its outlet somehow.

And an interesting thing happened, the Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday. That seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books.

So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didn’t let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool in a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn’t see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.

Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I’ve spent about 3,000 hours underwater, And 500 hours of that was in submersibles. And I’ve learned that that deep ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Nature’s imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was.

But, when I chose a career, as an adult, it was film making. And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories, with my urges to create images. And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. So, film making was the way to put pictures and stories together. And that made sense. And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: “Terminator,” “Aliens,” and “The Abyss.” And with “The Abyss,” I was putting together my love of underwater and diving, with film making. So, you know, merging the two passions.

Something interesting came out of “The Abyss,” which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. And even though the film didn’t make any money, barely broke even, I should say, I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic.

You know, it’s Arthur Clarke’s law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were seeing something magical. And so that got me very excited. And I thought, “Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art.” So, with “Terminator 2,” which was my next film, we took that much farther. Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. the success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. And it did. And we created magic again. And we had the same result with an audience. Although we did make a little more money on that one.

So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience, came to, this is going to be a whole new world, this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. And the concept of the company was that we would leap-frog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while.

But we found ourselves lagging in the mid ‘90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. So, I wrote this piece called “Avatar,” which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG And the main characters would all be in CG And the world would be in CG And the envelope pushed back. And I was told by the folks at my company that we weren’t going to be able to do this for a while.

So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. (Laughter) You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as “‘Romeo and Juliet’ on a ship.” It’s going to be this epic romance, passionate film. Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of “Titanic.” And that’s why I made the movie. (Applause) And that’s the truth. Now, the studio didn’t know that. But I convinced them. I said, “We’re going to dive to the wreck. We’re going to film it for real. We’ll be using it in the opening of the film. It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook.” And I talked them into funding an expedition. (Laughter)

I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had.

And you know that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn’t in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking “samples,” frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water, and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.

And my love of science fiction actually seemed to mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late ‘60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.

And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren’t video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author’s description put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was, the creativity had to find its outlet somehow.

And an interesting thing happened, the Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday. That seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books.

So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didn’t let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool in a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn’t see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.

Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I’ve spent about 3,000 hours underwater, And 500 hours of that was in submersibles. And I’ve learned that that deep ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Nature’s imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was.

But, when I chose a career, as an adult, it was film making. And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories, with my urges to create images. And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. So, film making was the way to put pictures and stories together. And that made sense. And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: “Terminator,” “Aliens,” and “The Abyss.” And with “The Abyss,” I was putting together my love of underwater and diving, with film making. So, you know, merging the two passions.

Something interesting came out of “The Abyss,” which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. And even though the film didn’t make any money, barely broke even, I should say, I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic.

You know, it’s Arthur Clarke’s law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were seeing something magical. And so that got me very excited. And I thought, “Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art.” So, with “Terminator 2,” which was my next film, we took that much farther. Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. the success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. And it did. And we created magic again. And we had the same result with an audience. Although we did make a little more money on that one.

So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience, came to, this is going to be a whole new world, this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. And the concept of the company was that we would leap-frog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while.

But we found ourselves lagging in the mid ‘90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. So, I wrote this piece called “Avatar,” which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG And the main characters would all be in CG And the world would be in CG And the envelope pushed back. And I was told by the folks at my company that we weren’t going to be able to do this for a while.

So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. (Laughter) You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as “‘Romeo and Juliet’ on a ship.” It’s going to be this epic romance, passionate film. Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of “Titanic.” And that’s why I made the movie. (Applause) And that’s the truth. Now, the studio didn’t know that. But I convinced them. I said, “We’re going to dive to the wreck. We’re going to film it for real. We’ll be using it in the opening of the film. It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook.” And I talked them into funding an expedition. (Laughter)