3 Big Questions: James Cameron

Film director of blockbusters such as Titanic and Avatar

Your films involve a lot of innovation. Do you consider yourself an engineer?

 “ Every project starts at the design stage in CAD, so it starts with engineering. We’ve built deep ocean robotics, ROVs, stereo camera systems we could operate at depths of 16,000 feet – all of them start with a small group of people: engineers, deep ocean experts. And then it’s a case of imagining what we can do. For me it’s about a challenge to do something I haven’t done before and no one has done before. You’re surfing on the edge of a wave. No, I’m not an engineer but I love technology and I was a precision tool and die machinist when I was in college. It helps if you’ve actually cut metal.

Avatar has a strong environmental message and you’re well-known for your environmental activism. What should engineers and designers be doing to help?

“The trend in all engineering and design is to make things more efficient, and that helps. But my view is that with the track we’re on at the moment all the curves converge in a really big, big mess in 20 to 25 years in terms of areas such as planning availability of arable land or planning for a world where we don’t have access to oil and natural gas. All of these things are heading in the wrong direction on virtually every curve, and the solution isn’t to reset the clock, to turn it back. We need to think and design our way out of these problems.

What projects are you engaged on at present?

“I love highly technical projects, so I’m a small part of a team for the stereoscopic camera for the Nasa Mars Rover; I was brought in after Avatar because there was no knowledge about stereo motion imaging. We’re also building a manned vehicle to go to the bottom of the Marianas trench, the deepest ocean trench in the world. We wanted the mass to be less than nine tonnes which is half the mass of previous unmanned vehicles and it has to withstand pressure of 16,000 psi. We did a lot of FEA on this and we’ve pressure tested it with 22 strain gauges. There’ll be a day in the next year when I’ll have to get inside this thing to go down there and I’ll be saying that I trust the FEA.