TEDTalks2010---James Cameron :談在《阿凡達》之前的好奇小男孩

James Cameron: Before Avatar ... a curious boy
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 C.G. 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, C.G. And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, C.G. 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 II, 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 C.G effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in C.G. And the main characters would all be in C.G. And the world would be in C.G. 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)
Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about 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. (Applause)
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. You know, 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, you know, 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 spooled 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 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, you know, 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 know, 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, 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. (Applause)

James Cameron 談在《阿凡達》之前的好奇小男孩
我可說是和科幻小說一起長大的。高中時我每天坐公車上學，來回各一小時；我總是在車上讀著科幻小說，讓我可以神遊其他星球，彷佛親臨，滿足我幾無止盡的好奇心。
而這好奇心也體現在…事實上我只要不在學校，就會去野外健行或是採取樣本，青蛙、蟲、蛇和池塘的水，把他們帶回去用顯微鏡觀察。我非常喜歡科學，瞭解這個世界，瞭解各種可能。
而我對科幻的喜愛似乎映射在真實生活中。當時是六零年代後期，我們正準備登陸月球，我們在探索深海。Jacques Cousteau把他的奇幻生物和世界帶到我們的客廳，這是我們之前無法想像的。這都和我的科幻經驗互相輝映。
我那時是個創作者，我可以畫畫。我發現因為電玩、電腦動畫充斥媒體，我得要把腦中的這些影像繪出來。我們都這樣做過，我們孩提時都有過閱讀時，透過作者描述讓畫面出現在腦中螢幕的經驗。而我對此的回應則是畫出異形生物、外星世界、機器人、太空船等等。我還在數學課上，在教科書後塗鴉被抓到過。創意總得要找到發洩的出口。
Jacques Cousteau讓我看到的有趣事情是…我覺得很興奮，竟然有個異形世界就在地球上。我也許無法某天坐著太空船去外星－這機會看起來相當小，但這有個地球上的異界是我可以去的，跟我從書中所想像過的外星一樣豐富、奇妙。
於是我在十五歲決定要成為潛水員。唯一的小問題－我住在加拿大的一個小鎮，距離最近的海洋六百英里。但我沒讓這阻攔我。我不停的求老爸，直到他終於在美國找到，距離邊界不遠的紐約水牛城有水肺潛水課，於是我就在紐約水牛城，在深冬的YMCA泳池中拿到執照。在那之前我沒看過海－我是說真的海。到兩年之後我們搬去加州才看到。
在接下來曲折的四十年當中，我在水下花了三千小時，其中的五百小時是在水下載具中。我發現深海，甚至連淺海也是…充滿了超越我們想像的驚奇生命。大自然比我們人類微不足道的想像力要強太多了。直至今日，我依然對潛水所見感到敬畏不已，我和大海的戀情至今還沒有結束。
當我長大，則是選了拍電影謀生。這似乎是在我說故事與製造影像的熱情間最好的折衷。我是孩子時經常畫漫畫書等等，拍電影就是把說故事和影像結合的方法。當然我講的故事鐵定是科幻故事：《魔鬼終結者》、《異形》，然後是《無底洞》。拍《無底洞》的時候，我把我對電影和潛水的熱愛結合，結合這兩種熱情。
《無底洞》帶來了一個新的成果。為了解決這電影特殊的敍事問題，我們得要創造這種液態生物，我們必須擁抱電腦動畫，也就是CG。這是電影中破天荒，首次有軟性表面的動畫角色。雖然沒賺到什麼錢，應該說是勉強損益兩平。我見證了讓人驚訝的狀況－全球觀眾對於這明顯的神奇效果感到震驚。
你知道這是Arthur Clarke定律－任何足夠先進的科技都與魔法無異。他們見證了魔法般的奇蹟，這讓我非常興奮。我想：哇！電影藝術需要擁抱這科技。於是在下一部電影《魔鬼終結者二》，我們更進了一步，我們和ILM合作製造了那個液態金屬人，我們想要看看這有沒有作用。我們又創造了魔法般的奇蹟，觀眾又有了同樣的感覺，所以我們就多賺了一點錢。
我把這兩個經驗連結在一起，這將會是一個新世界，一個新的充滿創造力的世界，特別是對電影從業人員。所以我和Stan Winston開了一家公司。我好友Stan Winston是頂尖的化妝和生物設計師，當時那家公司叫做Digital Domain。這家公司的概念是－我們會跳躍過類比式光學沖印，直接進入數位製作。我們事實上做了，的確讓我們一段時間擁有領先優勢。
我們在九零年代中期發現自己開始落伍。特別是在人物和角色設計，這些我們成立公司的關鍵目標上。於是我就寫了一個叫做「Avatar」的劇本，目標是完全超越目前視覺、電腦特效的極限，人類角色、情感都是用動畫製作，主角也是動畫製作，整個世界都是電腦動畫製作。但技術的極限卻反抗了我們。我公司的員工告訴我，我們目前還做不出這東西來。
於是我就把這點子封存起來，拍了另外一部電影，關於一艘沉沒的大船。我向製片公司推銷時，說這是船上的羅蜜歐與茱麗葉，將會是個史詩般的愛情故事，充滿熱情。但說老實話，我其實只是想要潛到真正的鐵達尼號遺跡去，這才是我拍片的真正理由。這是真的。製片公司並不知道，但我說服了他們。我們將會潛入沉船拍攝真實畫面，用在電影開場一定很棒，會是很好的行銷公關。於是我說服他們贊助這次探險。
聽起來瘋狂，但這講的就是，你的想像力創造現實，真正創造了現實。六個月之後，我坐在俄國的水下載具上，在北大西洋海面下二點五英里，透過舷窗看著真正的鐵達尼號。不是電影，不是高畫質，是真正的鐵達尼號。
這讓我超震驚的！你知道這得做超多準備，我們得設計燈光、攝影機等等。但讓我驚訝的是，這樣的深潛如此類似太空任務，需要非常高的技術，需要大量的計畫。你走進一個密閉空間，進入黑暗危險的區域，如果你不能自行返航，就不可能有人救援。我不禁想：哇！我好像活在科幻電影中，這真是超酷的！
我就像被名為深海探險的蟲咬了一樣，令人好奇之處、科學介入之處什麼都有。有想像力、冒險、好奇心、體驗，這一切都是好萊塢不能給我的。我可以想像我們用特效創造一種生物，但我不能想像這些在潛航中看到的生物。在地熱噴出口附近看到的生物，有時是我從來沒看過的，有時是人類從來沒看過的，事實上連科學都沒有描述過。在我們目擊並且記錄之前根本毫無資料。
我徹底被感動了，所以就越想多做幾次。我甚至做了個不一樣的選擇；在鐵達尼號的成功之後，我說我要暫停我的好萊塢電影導演正職工作，我想暫時當個全職冒險家。於是我們就開始計畫這些冒險，我們想要探勘俾斯麥號－用自動載具探勘。我們又回到鐵達尼號殘骸，我們運去了特別製造出來的小機器人，後面拉著一整捲光纖，目的是進行該船的內部調查。過去從未做過，因為過去沒有方法可以這樣做，所以我們創造了可以做到的科技。
這時我坐在潛艇中，位於鐵達尼號甲板上方，看著就像是這樣的甲板，也就是樂團最後在甲板上演奏的地方，然後我操縱著一台遙控載具通過走道。在船上雖然我只是操縱，但意志卻在這載具中。我覺得我彷佛整個人走入鐵達尼號之中，這是我這輩子最超現實的似曾相識感。我在轉過轉角之前，就知道後面的景象；甚至是在燈光照射到之前。因為我在拍電影時，早就在布景走過好幾個月，而我們的布景則是完整複製船的藍圖。
這經驗真是讓人驚訝。讓我真正意識到遙距體驗的可能。你可以用這些機械代理人，你可以把意識灌注到這載具上或是別的存在中，這真的讓人非常著迷。也許這算是讓我們看看幾十年後，當我們都有生化義體時，以便進行探險或是別的工作，這是我可以想像到的後人類時代的未來，因為我是個科幻迷。
在我完成了這些冒險之後，我開始欣賞深海中的事物。就像我們在深海地熱孔所看到的驚人生物，他們相對於地球來說，可說是異形生物；他們活在化學合成的世界中，他們不像我們一樣活在陽光為主的世界。你會看到活在五百度高溫地熱口的動物，你會以為這些生物不可能存活。
但同時我又對太空科學很感興趣，這跟我從小的科幻影響很有關係。我開始投入太空社群，和美國太空總署深入合作、參加美國太空總署顧問委員會、規劃真正的太空任務、去俄羅斯參加太空人準備訓練、生物醫學流程等等等等。真正攜帶著3D攝影機飛到國際太空站，這真的超棒的。但最後，我卻開始帶著太空科學家進入深海。讓他們進入深海，有機會看到太空生物學家、行星生物學家這些對極端惡劣環境有興趣的人們，帶他們到地熱口，讓他們目睹、收集樣品、攜帶測試儀器。
我們開始拍攝紀錄片，但事實上卻是研究科學、研究太空科學。我把這環節連結在一起，因為我孩提時是個科幻迷。把這經驗跟真實世界結合在一起。在這段過程中，在這探索的過程中，我學到了很多。我學到很多科學知識，但我也學到很多關於領導能力的事。你會認為導演就該是個領袖，或就像是船長一樣。
但在進行這些冒險前，我並沒真的學到領導力。因為在其中某刻，我自問，為什麼要在這裡？為什麼我要這樣做？我能獲得什麼？我們這些節目根本不能賺錢，我們只是勉強損益兩平，也沒什麼沽名釣譽之處。人們以為我在鐵達尼和阿凡達之間躲了起來，認為我坐在沙灘上挑指甲。我製作這些紀錄片的觀眾也很少。
沒有名聲、沒有光耀、沒有金錢，你在做什麼？你是為了任務本身而做，為了經歷挑戰。海洋是世界上最有挑戰的環境，為了發現新事物的震慄，還有那奇妙的牽繫。當一小群人組成一個堅韌的團隊，我們必須要有十幾個人一起工作好幾年，有時一次出海就要兩三個月。
在那牽繫中你會發現，最重要的事情是尊敬。你對他們的敬重，他們對你的敬重，你完成了一個無法對他人解說的任務。當你回到岸上時，你說我們得要這樣做，光纖、衰減…這些那些科技的需求還有困境，以及人類在海上工作的難度。你無法對別人解釋，也許警察同僚、戰場上的戰友，這些一同經歷過某些事情的人們永遠無法對別人解釋。這是一種牽繫，互相敬重的牽繫。
所以當我回來製作下部電影阿凡達時，我試著應用這種領導力。你敬重你的團隊，因此獲得他們的敬重，這真的改變了所有互動。這次，我又再度跟一小群人合作，在未知的領域冒險。拍攝阿凡達，想出過去不存在的新科技，非常讓人興奮、非常有挑戰性。我們在四年半的時間中成為一家人，這徹底改變了我拍攝電影的方式。人們評論說，我把海洋生物帶到潘朵拉上。對我來講，這是最基本的方法。流程的改變，改變了結果。
那我們可以從這一切中分析出什麼呢？我們學到了什麼？我想，第一，好奇心很重要，這是你擁有的最強大的事物。想像力是一種可以真正改變現實的力量，團隊和你的互敬比世界上任何桂冠都重要。有年輕的導演問我，做這一行是否有忠告？我說：別自我設限，其他人會替你設限制；千萬別自我設限，別不相信自己，勇於冒險。
美國太空總署有這麼一句話－沒有失敗這回事，但我們一定要接受失敗的可能。在藝術、在探險中都一樣，因為這正好相反。任何重要的創意突破都是冒著風險完成的，你得要願意承擔風險。最後我想說的是－不管你做什麼，永遠都必須承擔風險，但恐懼卻非必然，謝謝！

http://www2.myoops.org/main.php?act=course&id=2120#jjj
MyOOPS開放式課程
翻譯：朱學恒
簡繁轉換：陳盈
後製：洪曉慧
字幕影片後制：謝旻均