James Cameron is a Creative Technologist

A few weeks ago, I gave my definition of what it means to be a creative technologist. I wrote that a Creative Technologist is a builder that builds tools and systems that enable new creative expressions. As I was pondering that topic, I kept coming back to James Cameron as exemplar of what it means to be a modern creative technologist.

James Cameron’s parents’ careers were the earliest indicator of what he would end up pursuing in life. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was an artist and nurse. The dual influence of the technical and the creative from his parents likely imbued him with dexterity to straddle those two worlds.

His brief time in college is another clue. Before leaving college to work odd jobs and to be a truck driver, he was first enrolled to study physics before switching to be an English major. After seeing Star Wars, he quit his truck driving job and decided to become a filmmaker.

Myself and other creative technologists can sympathize with Cameron’s somewhat meandering early career. When you think like a creative technologist, there often aren’t many career or learning paths that neatly fit what you want to do.

That is why many creative technologists end up in generalist roles where multiple disciplines are required. It makes sense, then, why Cameron landed on film directing. At the time, filmmaking was the most multidisciplinary medium for creative expression.

John Anderson of the New York Times wrote that “Cameron has long been a director associated with technology as much as dramaturgy” and that he made “movies that have occasionally seemed as much about what a director could do as should.” This speaks to a directorial approach that is as much about innovating and building as it is about storytelling. You can see this demonstrated through his filmography.

Avatar: Fire and Ash, his latest film in the Avatar series builds on the technology he helped to invent for the first Avatar film in 2009. He, along with Vince Pace, invented the Fusion Camera System for 3D film capture and developed new ways to do motion and performance capture.

When it debuted, Avatar was one of the most visually impressive and immersive storytelling experiences in the history of cinema. It wasn’t just higher quality CGI, it was combining many different technologies to create a new kind of cinematic expression.

Before he got there with Avatar, a convergence had to happen. Cameron’s early filmmaking career started with visual effects, building miniatures for Roger Corman, being an art director and production designer on films like John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. CGI was either non-existent or nascent back then so creating effects had to be done practically.

Cameron did great work with practical effects, but creative technologists are always pushing the boundaries. He converged his practical effects experience with the future possibilities of CGI, introducing to filmmaking the most realistic integration of live-action and CGI in The Abyss in 1989.

From there and throughout his filmography he kept iterating with CGI technology and built other groundbreaking filmmaking innovations like underwater filmmaking equipment and virtual camera systems until he realized the cinematic achievements of Avatar.

Filmmaking has, to some degree, always been about novelty and wowing audiences through the magic of the moving picture. Famously, the Lumière brother’s The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in 1896 allegedly drove people to hysteria from fear of being run over by the train on the screen. Legendary filmmakers like Buster Keaton created sequences that defied what audiences at the time considered humanly possible.

People go to the movies to experience other realities in new ways they could never imagine themselves. James Cameron understands this well. That’s why he is the most commercially successful film director in film history, having directed three of the highest-grossing films of all time - Avatar, Titanic, and Avatar: The Way of Water. Avatar: Fire and Ash recently crossed the $1 billion mark, making Cameron the first director with four consecutive films grossing over $1 billion at the box office.

Industry can often take the wrong lessons from these achievements. Following Avatar, Hollywood chased 3D as a way to increase margins but that failed because a lot of the projects didn’t use and present the technology effectively.

Eventually, studios relied more on 3D post-conversion instead of Cameron’s invented systems. Audiences saw that for the gimmick it was and rejected it. Now it seems the Avatar series is the only 3D film experience audiences will tolerate.

Film lost some of its place in culture in part because most filmmaking today does not attempt to create the novelty that a filmmaker like James Cameron brings to the craft. With enough money, it is trivial to use CGI to make a visually dynamic film but so many of our blockbusters today feel weightless and boring.

Filmmakers found mundanity in the spectacle of being able to visualize anything with computer graphics. Generative AI will make this phenomenon more acute.

Following in the footsteps of Cameron is the way the film industry can save itself. For Cameron, it was never just about CGI. You can tell because his creative technologist impulses were there before he got his hands on that technology.

The attention economy is in full swing so the best way to capture broad attention is to offer experiences people have never had before. It means more filmmakers will have to become builders. It means they will have to think like James Cameron - like a creative technologist.