关于这场演讲：James Cameron的大笔预算(票房更庞大)的电影创造出想象的世界。在这个演讲中，他揭露了自己从小就喜欢奇幻体验的背景：阅读科幻小说，深海潜水，以及这一切如何转变成成功的巨片如《异形二》、《终结者》、《泰坦尼克号》与《阿凡达》。
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 bringing them back, looking at them 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——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 an exotic 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 were in submersibles. And I’ve learned that deep ocean environment, and even the shallow ocean, is 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. 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. 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.
Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. Because we actually created a reality where six months later I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real “Titanic” through a view port, not a movie, not HD, for real.
Now, that blew my mind. And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives was like a space mission. Where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can’t get back by yourself. And I thought like, “Wow. I am like living in a science fiction movie. This is really cool.”
And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep ocean exploration. Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it. It was everything. It was adventure. It was curiosity. It was imagination. And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn’t give me. Because, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn’t imagine what I was seeing out that window. As we did some of our subsequent expeditions I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them.
So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. After the success of Titanic, I said, “Okay, I’m going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I’m going to go be a full time explorer for a while.” And so, we started planning these expeditions. And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. We went back to the “Titanic” wreck. We took little bots that we had created that spoolled a fiber optic. And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn’t have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it.
So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of “Titanic”, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. And I’m flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. When I say, I’m operating it, but my mind is in the vehicle. I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of “Titanic”. And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I’ve ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship.
So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. And it really made me realize that the telepresense experience that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. It was really really quite profound. And may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan.
So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing animals. They are basically aliens right here on Earth. They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. They don’t survive on sunlight based system the way we do. And so, you’re seeing animals that are living next to a 500 degree Centigrade water plumes. You think they can’t possibly exist.
At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well, again, it’s the science fiction influence, as a kid. And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going to the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. And this was fascinating. But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. And taking them down so that they had access astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments, taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on.
So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. I’d completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing.
I didn’t really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. Because I had to, at a certain point, say, “What am I doing out here? Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it?” We don’t make money at these damn shows. We barely break even. There is no fame in it. People sort of think I went away between Titanic and Avatar and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience.
No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? You’re doing it for the task itself, for the challenge —— and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is, for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. Because we would do these things with 10-12 people working for years at a time. Sometimes at sea for 2-3 months at a time.
And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you’ve done a task that you can’t explain to someone else. When you come back to the shore and you say, “We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human performance aspects of working at sea, you can’t explain it to people. It’s that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect.
So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was Avatar, I tried to apply that same principle of leadership which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. And it really changed the dynamic. So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory doing Avatar, coming up with new technology that didn’t exist before. Tremendously exciting. Tremendously challenging. And we became a family, over a four and half year period. And it completely changed how I do movies. So, people have commented on how, well, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora. To me it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that.
So, what can we synthesize out of all this? You know, what are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. It’s the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. I have young film makers come up to me and say, “Give me some advice for doing this.” And I say, “Don’t put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you, don’t do it to yourself, and don’t bet against yourself. And take risks.”
NASA has this phrase that they like: “Failure is not an option.” But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it’s a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. So, that’s the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you’re doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you.
可以失败，不能畏惧
詹姆斯•卡梅隆
TED大会上的演讲
20xx年2月
在我成长过程中，科幻小说一直是我的精神食粮。高中时我每天搭巴士上下学，单程要一小时。坐公车时，我总是沉浸在科幻小说里，仿佛被带入另一个世界，书中讲述的一个个故事极大地满足了我无休无止的好奇心。
事实上，在课余时间，我常常在好奇心的驱使下，去徒步旅行，钻进树林去采集“标本”——青蛙、蛇、昆虫之类，把它们带回家，放在显微镜下观察。我是个真正的科学怪人，总是想尽可能的去了解这个世界，去揭示它可能存在的极限。
我非常热爱科幻小说，因为它们似乎就是现实的写照，书中的一切都确实发生在我们身边，60年代末期，人类登上了月球，探索了深海。电影摄影师雅克.格斯特让我们在电视上看到了神奇的海洋生物，向人类展示了从未想象到的动物，竟和奇妙的水下世界。这似乎与科幻小说中的构想遥相呼应。
我还是个画家，能绘画，能创作。那时的我接触不到电视游戏，缺乏登峰造极的CG电影技术，连多媒体领域的素材库都没有，所以我不得不在脑海中臆造这些形象。就像孩子们读书时会想象书中的场景那样，我们读小说时，作者所描绘的影像就会脑海中不断放映。这些影像一出现，我就会把它们画下来，于是我开始画外星人、外星世界、机器人、宇宙飞船等等。老师不止一次在数学课上逮到我在课本后面乱涂乱画，因为我得给我的想象力开启一扇让其肆意奔涌的闸门。
然而一件有趣的事——雅克.格斯特的电视节目的播出，着实让我兴奋不已，我相信地球上就存在一个外星世界。虽然我可能永远无法进入这个世界，因为这确实不现实。但是我能游历水下世界，它就在地球上，富饶又充满异星情调，就像我读了科幻小说后所幻想的那样。
所以15岁时，我决定成为一个潜水员,去探索神秘的海洋。唯一的问题是，我生活在加拿大的一个小山村，距离最近的海也有600英里。但我没有因此气馁，而是缠着父亲，而是缠着父亲，直到他同意让我参加在边境纽约州布法罗市——需要从我家穿过美加国界线——的一个潜水培训班。于是在一个寒冬，我在布法罗基督教青年会的一个泳池里获得了潜水证书。然而，直到两年后，我们全家搬到了加利福尼亚，我才见到了真正的大海，进行真正的潜水。
从那时算起到现在的40年间，我在海底潜水共约3000小时，其中500小时是在潜水艇里度过的。无论是深海还是浅海环境，大海都丰富多彩，充满奥秘，超乎我们想象。比起人类的想象力，自然的想象力更加浩瀚。直到今天，每次下潜时，我仍旧对眼中的海洋世界充满敬畏，而我与大海的不解情缘仍在延续着，上演着。
但成年后，我并没有以潜水为职业，而是选择了电影摄制作为自己的事业。孩提时，我就喜欢画漫画，画很多东西。我喜欢讲故事，画图画，而要把它们结合起来，电影摄制是再合适不过的工作了。电影摄制将图片和故事有机结合，并赋予它们更深刻的意义。当然，我选来拍成电影的都是科幻故事，比如《终结者》、《异型》、《深渊》。 拍摄《深渊》时，我把自己对水下世界的爱、对潜水活动的爱融入其中，把对这两件事的激情融合到了一起。
拍摄《深渊》时，又出现了些有趣的事：我们要塑造一个水状的生物，为了解决这一特效上的问题，我们使用了“计算机生成动画”技术，即CG。电影史上第一个软表面的电脑绘制形象在此技术下诞生了。虽然这部电影没让公司赚到一分钱，还差点亏本，我还是得说，我看到了令人惊奇的一幕，全世界的观众都为这种像魔法一般的新技术神魂颠倒。
根据亚瑟•克拉克定律——任何非常先进的技术，初看都与魔法无异。很多观众都像是看到了神奇的魔法。这让我非常兴奋。我想CG技术也应该用到电影艺术中去。所以，在下一部电影《终结者2》中，我们把这种技术又推进了一步。和工业光魔特效制作公司一起，创造了一个液态金属人。这部电影能否大放异彩就要看特效了。事实证明，特效不负众望。我们又一次施展了魔法，观众们依旧为之疯狂。尽管这部电影还是没让我们没赚到什么钱。
这两次经历是一条分界线，对电影大师们来说，这意味着一个全新的、充满想象与创造的世界即将诞生。于是我和好友斯坦•温斯顿——拍摄前几部电影时的首席特效化妆和角色设计师——创立了“数字领域”公司。这个名字意味着，我们要跳过光学影印模拟制作过程直接进入数字电影制作。实际上，我们也确实是这么做的，这使得我们在一段时间内有了一定的竞争优势。
虽然我们确实已经组建了公司进行造型设计，但在90年代中期，我发现我们有些落后了。 我写了《阿凡达》这部电影，想要以此大力推动视觉效果和CG效果，用CG生成具有真实人类情感的角色，完全用CG诠释主要角色和世界。但这电影不得不延期拍摄，因为公司员工告诉我，我们一时半会还没有能力做到这点。
于是我把《阿凡达》搁到一边，转而制作了另一部电影，这部电影主要描述了一艘巨轮——“泰坦尼克号”——的沉没。 我告诉电影制片方，我把它定位为巨轮上的《罗密欧与朱丽叶》，一部关于爱情的电影，就像罗密欧与朱丽叶的故事一样凄美动人。而实际是因为我想潜入海底寻找真正的“泰坦尼克号”的残骸，所以我才要做这部电影。但制片方并不知道这一真相。为说服他们，我说：“我们要潜入海底，寻找真正的“泰坦尼克号”，这样可以拍摄真实的画面。如果把这个片段用在首映式上，会引起很大的轰动，也会有良好的市场反响的。”我真的说服了制片方组建了一支探险队呢。
虽然这听起来有些疯狂，但这就回到了“想象创造现实”的主题。因为我们确实创造了现实，6个月后，我乘一艘俄罗斯潜艇，在北大西洋2.5英里深的水下，从观察舱里看到了真实的“泰坦尼克号”，不是电影里的，也不是高清屏幕上的，而是真实的“泰坦尼克号”。
《泰坦尼克号》的拍摄着实让我兴奋。我们做了很多准备工作，搭建相机、设置灯光及各种设备。但令我震惊的是，这次深海拍摄就像是一次太空任务，需要尖端的科技和周全的计划。我乘坐潜水艇潜入深海，那里漆黑又充满危险，如果无法靠自己返回水面，其他人也无法开展营救工作。我想：“这就像生活在科幻电影中似的，真是太酷了。”
不过，我真的热衷于海底探险。当然，探求科学的那种好奇心才是最重要的，科学需要冒险，需要好奇心，也需要想象力。只是在好莱坞拍电影是无法体验到这些经历的。我能够想象出一个生物并为它创造出视觉效果。但是透过潜艇窗户看到的那些生物，这是我永远想象不到的。在随后的探险中，我在深海热泉里看到了一些无人见过、无人知晓的生物，实际上，我们看到它们并拍下照片时，它们还没有科学记载。
这一切让我感到非常震撼，我必须做的更多。为了满足自己的好奇心，我做了一个决定。 在《泰坦尼克号》成功后，我决定暂别好莱坞导演这一主业，做一段时间全职探险家。于是我们开始计划一些探险，一行人兴致勃勃的去了俾斯麦海域，在自动探测车帮助下，对这一海域展开了探索。然后我们重回“泰坦尼克号”的残骸We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic.我们决定进到“泰坦尼克号”内部做一次内部调查，这是史无前例的，从没有人看过沉船内部，因为他们无计可施，然而我们想出了办法。
我坐在潜水艇里，到了“泰坦尼克号”的甲板上，看着这些厚木板，感觉这里很像当年船上的乐队演奏的地方。我操控着自动探测仪在穿廊间穿梭，操作仪器时，我的思想像是跟着它走了。我感觉我自己真的到了泰坦尼克号，这艘遇难船的内部。这种似曾相识的感觉像梦一样，从未有过。假如我想转弯，没等探测器的灯光照到那，我就能知道接下来会看到什么。这是因为还在拍电影的时候，我就在“泰坦尼克号”的模型上工作了数月，而那个模型恰恰是根据它的设计图制作的精确复制品。
这是一次不同寻常的体验。这次远程控制的经历让我清楚的认识到，我们可以把自己的意识注入这些机器化身中，它们是另一种形式上的生命存在。这种体验意义重大。如管中窥豹，可见未来一斑，或许我们马上就能用机器生命体进行科学探索，或者为未来的人类做各种事情，只要是我这个科幻小说迷能想到的。
在这些探险之后，我开始真正欣赏那些海底生物，比如我们在深海热泉所见到的那些神奇生物。这些生物虽生活在地球上，但基本可以称为外星生物。它们生活在一个化学合成的环境中。它们无法像我们一样在太阳为生命基础的体系下生存。在海底，还能看到生活在500摄氏度水汽下的动物。你无法相信它们能在那生存。
与此同时，因为从小受科幻小说影响，我对太空科学也非常有兴趣。我迫不及待的加入了空间社，真正参与到NASA中，同咨询委员会一起，策划真实的太空任务，我们前往俄罗斯，参加前天体生物医学会的研讨等等诸如此类的任务，让宇航员带着3D摄像机进入国际空间站。这令人着迷，但我急切的想让这些太空专家同我们一起潜入深海，天体生物学家，行星专家，都对特殊环境充满兴趣，带他们去深海热泉，观察深海生物，取一些样本，测试仪器等等。
所以我们既是在拍纪录片，也在研究科学，更确切的说是在研究空间科学。I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real.在探索发现的旅途中，我学到了很多，不仅仅是科学知识，还有领导能力。很多人认为导演就是领导者，像船长或者其他领导者一样。
没进行这些探险以前，我并不真正了解领导力的内涵。因为有时我会问自己，我到底在这干什么呢?为什么要做这些节目? 我从中得到了什么? 我们并没有从这些见鬼的节目中赚到钱，还差点破产。我也没有赚到名声。很多人以为我拍了《泰坦尼克号》、《阿凡达》后，就在沙滩上修磨着指甲，享受生活呢。 其实，我拍了这些电影，这些记录片，只换来了为数不多的观众。
得不到名声，等不到荣耀，也得不到金钱，我问自己，你在做什么呢?其实只是为了任务本身，是为了挑战——海洋就是现在最具挑战性的环境了;是为了探索发现时的惊喜;也为了一个小而紧密的团队所产生的那种不可思议的团队感。我们这10到12人在一起共事多年。有时要在海里一起工作两三个月。
在这个团队中，我发现最重要的东西就是互相尊重。每个人做的工作都无以言表。我回到海边告诉其他人，我们必须这样做，用光学纤维，用这种技术那种技术，各种技术，战胜一切困难，考虑演员在海里的表现。这种互相配合并肩作战的默契是无法言明的，这些事情只有警察或者参加过战斗的人经历后才能明白，他们知道这是无法向他人表达的。我们必须建立起这种默契，建立起互相尊重的默契。
所以，我开始拍摄接下来的电影《阿凡达》时，试着运用了这种领导原则，我尊重我的团队，他们也很尊重我。这让团队变得很有活力。所以，这次我也带了一支小团队，在未经探索的地区拍摄《阿凡达》，创造前所未有的新技术，这非常有意思，也颇具有挑战性。在这四年半多的时间里，我们就像一家人一样。这完全改变了我拍电影的方式。 有人评论说，卡梅隆只是把一些海洋生物放到了潘多拉星球上。但我来说，建立这种互相尊重的默契不仅仅是做商业电影的基本法则，而是过程本身改变了事情的结果。
我能从这些经历中总结出什么，又能学到什么?首先要有好奇心，这是你拥有的最强大的东西;其次要有想象力，这是你展现现实的力量;第三：尊重团队，这是比世界上一切荣誉都更为重要。 有不少年轻电影导演向我讨教成功经验，我告诉他们：“不要作茧自缚。别人会束缚你，但你自己不要作茧自缚。不要说自己不行，要敢于承担风险。”
NASA里流行一句话：“只能成功，不能失败”但是，在艺术领域和探索发现时是允许失败的，因为这是需要运气的。只有冒险，创新，才能成功。你必须愿意承担风险，这就是我给你们的建议，无论你做什么，可以失败，不能畏惧。