Welcome to His World: How to Tell a Story Like James Cameron

Season 2 of the Artwell podcast is available now! We studied James Cameron and interviewed his collaborators to find lessons that are relevant for modern creatives.

James Cameron is regarded as one of, if not the greatest living filmmaker. He’s won multiple Oscars, revolutionized the film industry, and made billions of dollars at the box office. And while he is celebrated as one of the industry’s most innovative directors, he is also one of its most underrated writers – his prowess behind the camera overshadows his prowess at the keyboard.

His films may be known for their action, but they have resonance because of their story. Stories born out of hours spent creating rich and vibrant worlds, crafting compelling characters, and finding exotic ways to express universal human experiences. Naturally, his process has evolved over the years but this is an amalgamation of the critical elements required to tell a story like James Cameron.

“Imagination is a force that can manifest a reality” – James Cameron, 2010

A Window Into a World

A James Cameron screenplay starts with a singular image. A metal endoskeleton emerging from a ball of fire. The Titanic rising up and out of the ocean. A lush, bioluminescent rainforest on a faraway planet. These images are a window into a world that Cameron wants to explore and exploring them is the first step to finding the story. You do this by going on an adventure into your own imagination. What that looks like in reality is asking lots and lots of questions. Each question will lead you to an answer, and that discovery will then lead you to a new question.

Making these notes is how you flesh out the details of the world where your story takes place. And you’re not just making high level notes, you want to get as much into the nitty-gritty as you possibly can. For the four Avatar sequels, James decided to put together a writers room. Before they even started brainstorming, he handed each writer a 1400 page document of every little detail he had uncovered about the world of Avatar. The detail was so granular that he even outlined the exact type of bolts used on the spaceships.

The important thing with all of these little details is that none of them are random. They aren’t just for aesthetic purposes, they are there to completely immerse your audience into the world you’re creating. Because in order for your world to feel real, all of the details need to make logical sense within the context of that world. Therefore, you not only need to come up with what the details are, but also the explanation for why those details exist.

For example, when creating the moon of Pandora for the Avatar movies, James decided that it was slightly smaller than Earth. Therefore, due to its denser size, its gravity is weaker. As a result the creatures on the planet have six limbs, not because it looks cool but because the additional limbs give them more traction to counterbalance the lack of gravity. Every single detail you see in Avatar has an explanation like this. All of the machines work from an engineering perspective, all of the plants are biologically sound, and even the floating mountains have a scientific explanation. 

If you’ve seen the Avatar movies you might be thinking to yourself, none of these details are ever explained. That’s a good thing, because if every little detail was explained that would make for some incredibly boring films. Remember, you're writing a story and not a report. But if the details are never mentioned, why put in all the effort to come up with them?

“To create fantasy with a sense of reality, you have to embellish it with a lot of detail. It’s the small detail that makes it feel real to people.” – James Cameron, 2017

The most important thing James Cameron knows about storytelling is that you want to “find universals of the human experience and express them in exotic new ways.” You want to make people feel an emotion they’re familiar with in a setting they’re not. This gives people a perspective of the world they wouldn't get otherwise. But in order for them to truly understand that perspective, your story must be written towards an emotional truth.

"Fact and truth seem like they should be the same thing, but they're different things because truth includes facts and beliefs, whereas facts exclude beliefs." – Andrew Bustamante, 2024

The emotional truth is what the audience should be feeling when they experience your story. But in order to find that truth you do not look outward, you look inward. The emotional truth of the story is your emotional truth. It is about what you believe to be true based on your subjective experience and how that makes you feel. You want to share that feeling with the audience through your work. The goal is to make them believe in your truth, and you do that with emotion.

“You fight an emotion with an emotion. Avatar doesn't teach you facts, it doesn't have one bar graph in it, it's not ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. But it does create a sense of emotional outrage.” – James Cameron, 2010

Because you’re writing towards your truth and not fact, it is paramount that your audience fully believes in the story and the world it’s happening within in order for them to believe in your truth. The second they start to question the validity of the world, their complete immersion in the story is broken and you’ve lost them. This is why every little detail matters because even if they go unexplained, they all add up to make your world feel true.

Care-Actors

But the thing is, people don’t invest in a world, they invest in the people within the world. Without characters, you cannot communicate your emotional truth. While creating a rich and vibrant world is important, creating rich and vibrant characters is just as important. This is why James describes his writing process as simultaneously “moving forward from character, but backward from the shit you want to see.”

Cool shit, is something James Cameron excels at. A core component of each and every one of  his films is spectacle on a massive scale. But he understands that the spectacle is nowhere near as impactful if the audience doesn’t connect with the characters. Because if the audience doesn’t care about your characters, they won’t care about what happens to them during the action scenes. So when he says he moves forward from character, what he’s saying is that in the beginning he wants to make sure you spend enough time with the protagonists so that you are emotionally invested when bullets start flying or ships start sinking. 

This is why Titanic has Jack and Rose. Neither of the film’s protagonists are based on real people, they are both figments of James Cameron’s imagination. This gave him creative license to tell a love story that the audience could invest in over the course of the film so that when the Titanic hits the iceberg, they have a vested interest in the outcome of the characters. Now, you’re not just watching a ship sink, you’re watching two people you love try to survive a sinking ship. As a viewer, these are two dramatically different experiences.

If you want to see how important this was to Cameron, just look at how long it takes for the ship to start sinking. He devoted over half of a three hour long movie to tell a love story before they ever even hit the iceberg. You’d think this would have bored the audience who came to see the sinking of the Titanic, but by the end of the film, people cared more about the characters than the ship. Or in other words, the spectacle took a back seat to the story. You can see this clearly in the feedback they got following test screenings of the film.

“Most often mentioned as "Favorite Scenes" were the dinner, the sketching, the steerage party, lovemaking in the car, learning to spit, and the sinking. In that order. Card after card after card. Cameron was amazed. When he saw they were rating the sinking of the ship sixth, he knew he had a winner.” – Paula Parisi, ‘Titanic and the Making of James Cameron’, 1998 (Affiliate)

Now don’t forget your story needs more than great characters and cool action, it also needs… a story. You don’t want your characters just sitting around until the action starts. James describes “the middle bit” as getting his characters into the places he wants to see. He does that by taking them on a journey, a journey he says that should be “as excruciating as possible.” 

A journey is excruciating when the stakes are consistently raised. You want to build towards a crescendo and not a quick sting. The audience’s anticipation and anxiety should slowly ratchet up to maximum by the time your protagonists face their greatest test. Out of that final challenge your characters need to emerge triumphant in some way to create an emotional catharsis for the viewer.

You Are The Audience

While James Cameron’s stories are always exciting adventures with great characters, they’re also more than that. Every James Cameron movie is a message. Terminator is about our overreliance on technology, Titanic is about man’s hubris, and the Avatar movies are about nature conservation. His films are so enduring because they leave us thinking about them long after we’ve finished watching them.

“Plot to me is what you leave at the theater, theme is what you walk away with” – Jon Landau, 2023

Knowing this, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that when you start working on your story you need to think about what the theme is. This is wrong. Your message does not come first, it comes last. As a matter of fact, you shouldn’t even have a theme when you write your first draft. It will present itself to you later on, but only if you’re open to hearing it. 

“Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.” – Stephen King, ‘On Writing’, 2000 (Affiliate)

When James sits down to write a screenplay, his only goal is to write a movie that he wants to see – that’s it. He trusts his own sensibilities as a member of the audience and assumes that if the script is working for him, odds are it will work for other people too. Writing a story in this way gives it a sense of concentration, because you’re able to run all decisions through the same filters, “do I like this? Is this working for me?” As soon as you start adding things in to try and accommodate everyone, you end up accommodating no one because you dilute your story. Think of it like a glass of orange juice. Some people love it, others hate it. If you tried to appease everyone who hated orange juice by adding in all of their favourite drinks, you’d end up with an undrinkable concoction disliked by everyone.

When writing for yourself, the things you care about are naturally going to bleed into your story without you even realizing it. That’s because your subconscious uses your creative process as a way to communicate how you’re feeling through your art. But your subconscious mind will not activate if you are using your conscious mind. Meaning if you are focused on the theme you won’t be writing from a place of truth, you’ll be writing towards what you think others want to hear. Not only does that come across as disingenuous but it comprises your story because you become too concerned with what you’re trying to say. Remember, your primary goal as a storyteller is to tell a great story, so focus on that first.

You do not need to concern yourself with the theme until you’ve finished writing your story. Theme is not a tool for writing, it is a tool for revision. After completing your story, go through it to figure out what it is your subconscious was trying to say. When you’ve identified what that is, remove everything that is not in line with that message. No matter how much you love your darlings, if they do not contribute to the theme, you have to kill them. Killing your darlings in this way streamlines your story, it focuses it around a singular idea that the audience can wrap their head around.

People have critiqued James’ movies for being “too simple” but this is by design. The simpler something is, the more people it can appeal to. While James is making movies that he wants to see, he tries to make them accessible so that they can be enjoyed by everyone. He does this by anchoring his stories around simple concepts, or in other words, universals of the human experience.

This doesn’t mean he’s dumbing his stories down. As hard as it is to write a complex story, it’s even harder to then make it simple, and James finds a way to do this without compromising the intellectual integrity of his films. This is his brilliance, he takes big, complex problems that he cares about and presents them to you in such a way that makes you care about them too. And he doesn’t do that with facts, he does it with emotions. Emotions conveyed by fictional characters in other worlds.

"The greatest goal of a filmmaker is to entertain. If you have something to say, let it be said in such a way that you're not chasing the audience out of the theater. You have to entertain first, but many filmmakers have forgotten that there must be something more than entertainment. If you're just going to entertain, why are you doing it? The audience will walk out. And when they come off the emotional rollercoaster, they have nothing left. There's more to filmmaking than just selling popcorn." – James Cameron, 1984

Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter for more essays about art and creativity. If you want to learn even more about James Cameron, you’ll like Season 2 of the Artwell podcast where we studied his career and interviewed his collaborators to find lessons that are relevant for modern creatives.