James Cameron Almost Visited the Space Station - and Helped Design a Camera Now Used On Mars

James Cameron once got himself onto the list for a potential visit to the International Space Station. It's just one of several surprising scientific achievements buried deep inside GQ's massive 7,000-word profile:

After James Cameron's Avatar came out in 2009 and made $2.7 billion, the director found the deepest point that exists in all of earth's oceans and, in time, he dove to it. When Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a couple of hundred miles off the southwest coast of Guam, in March 2012, he became the first person in history to descend the 6.8-mile distance solo, and one of only a few people to ever go that deep....

It would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie, which he helped invent with his debut, The Terminator, and then reinvent with his second, Aliens; it would be accurate to add that he has directed two of the three top-grossing films in history, in Avatar (number one) and Titanic (number three). But he is also a scientist — a camera he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars, attached to the Mars rover — and an adventurer, and not in the dilettante billionaire sense; when Cameron sets out to do something, it gets done. 'The man was born with an explorer's instincts and capacity,' Daniel Goldin, the former head of NASA, told me....

The original Avatar... required the invention of dozens of new technologies, from the cameras Cameron shot with to the digital effects he used to transform human actors into animated creatures to the language those creatures spoke in the film. For [his upcoming Avatar sequel] The Way of Water, Cameron told me, he and his team started all over again. They needed new cameras that could shoot underwater and a motion-capture system that could collect separate shots from above and below water and integrate them into a unified virtual image; they needed new algorithms, new AI, to translate what Cameron shot into what you see....

Among other things, Cameron said, The Way of Water would be a friendly but pointed rebuke to the comic book blockbusters that now war with Cameron's films at the top of the box office lists: 'I was consciously thinking to myself, Okay, all these superheroes, they never have kids. They never really have to deal with the real things that hold you down and give you feet of clay in the real world.' Sigourney Weaver, who starred in the first Avatar as a human scientist and returns for The Way of Water as a Na'vi teenager, told me that the parallels between the life of the director and the life of his characters were far from accidental: 'Jim loves his family so much, and I feel that love in our film. It's as personal a film as he's ever made.'

Another interesting detail from the article: Cameron and his wife became vegetarians over a decade ago, built their own pea-protein facility in Saskatchewan, and though they later sold it Cameron says he 'pretty much' loves farming and pea protein as much as movies. And he once suggested re-branding the word vegan as 'futurevore,' since 'We're eating the way people will eat in the future. We're just doing it early.'

But in a 29-minute video interview, Cameron also fondly discusses his earlier ground-breaking films, even as GQ's writer notes their new trajectory. 'It is a curious fact that Cameron has directed only two feature films in the last 25 years — and perhaps more curious that both are Avatar installments, and perhaps even more curious that the next three films he hopes to direct are also Avatar sequels....

'Cameron told me he'd already shot all of a third Avatar, and the first act of a fourth. There is a script for a fifth and an intention to make it, as long as the business of Avatar holds up between now and then. It seems entirely possible — maybe even probable — that Cameron will never make another non-Avatar film again.'

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