Jim Cameron: "Avatar" A Dream Come True

3D or not 3D, that is the question. Hollywood has been making false starts and false promises about 3D since the 1950s. Now comes director Jim Cameron, who is unveiling a movie in mid-December that could settle the argument about the staying power of 3D once and for all.

Cameron, of course, directed "Titanic," the most profitable movie ever made. And he famously declared himself "King of the World" when Titanic won 11 Oscars in 1998. Since then he has been immersed in a wildly ambitious and very expensive 3D science fiction fantasy that mixes real actors with computer generated creatures, the sum of which he believes will change the movie business forever.

The movie is "Avatar," and 70 years after Judy Garland left Kansas for Oz, Cameron plans to take audiences down the Yellow Brick Road of the 21st century, pushing the limits of modern technology with some filmmaking magic he has helped invent.

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"I've been working up to this for a long time. This is the film I always thought I wanted to make when I set down the path of being a filmmaker," Cameron told 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer.

Avatar is set on the moon Pandora, a fantasy Eden, which earthlings want to exploit. It's a Shangri-la created entirely by computers.

"You're creating a world, every creature in it, every blade of grass, every tree, every cloud in the sky, every little reflection in the eyes of the characters," Cameron explained.

It's part cross-cultural love story, part high adventure. About the only thing that's done the old-fashioned way is the music.

On the set, there are far more computer jockeys than stage hands. Avatar is made up of some 3,000 separate shots, each one containing layer upon layer upon layer of special effects.

"What's interesting to me is that, with all the technical changes it always comes down to the story, no?" Safer asked.

"It all boils down to the story and to this, right there, you know, right in the eyes," Cameron replied.

Cameron's stars are Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana. But in a sense, the real stars are the inhabitants of Pandora: ten foot tall blue people with tails.

Asked why he gave them long tails, Cameron told Safer, "Well, tails are cool. Tails are very expressive. I mean, anybody that owns a dog or a cat knows that you can tell the cat's emotional state by what its tail's doing."

And this very tall tale is very expensive: roughly $400 million-plus for production and promotion. At a hi-tech complex on the 20th Century Fox lot, on the very spot where Marilyn Monroe proclaimed that gentlemen prefer blondes, Cameron works down to the wire, supervising the final tweaks to Avatar.

His fantasy creatures are based on performances by the real actors. Cameras record dots on their faces. Computers then analyze their expressions and bring the blue people to life, characters both otherworldly yet strangely like ourselves.

On a satellite link are experts at a special effects studio a world away in New Zealand. It's there the final images are processed.

"We're going through and we're analyzing every last detail within the shot to make sure that it's up to snuff. We can make the grass greener or yellower, we can make the sky bluer, all those things," Cameron explained.

"And you can now just do what you want to do electronically?" Safer asked.

"Sure," Cameron said. "Even when we were doing Titanic twelve years ago, you know, the shot at the bow where they kiss, we waited two weeks for the right sunset to get that shot. Now we'd just shoot it in front of a green screen and choose the right sunset later, you know, digitally."

Shooting actors against a green screen and filling in the background by computer is a brutally time consuming process.

60 Minutes dropped in on Cameron a few times over the past two years and found a man obsessed, a hands-on devil for detail. With time and money slipping away, he spent most of a day rehearsing and shooting - and shooting - a scene that might last barely seconds.

"Are you excessively obsessive? If there is such a thing," Safer asked.

"Obsessively obsessive? Excessively obsessive? Clinically? Never been diagnosed. I'm sure it's a, I think it's in the job description for directors in general," Cameron said.

Cameron is 55, married five times, for the last nine years to actress Suzy Amis. His office is filled with remembrances of blockbusters past, including the wheel from the set of the good ship Titanic.

"I keep this in my office because I know what it feels like to be at the helm of a sinking ship. Which is what it feels like on every movie that I make," Cameron joked.

He wrote Avatar years ago, but had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision of blue people and alien worlds.

"I've loved fantasy and science fiction since I was a kid. I'm an artist. I'm an illustrator. I've been drawing creatures, and characters, and robots and spaceships since I was in high school," he told Safer.

Growing up in Canada, his passions were movies, art and science. After the family moved to California in his late teens, he spent some aimless years, dropping out of junior college, and working as a machinist and a bus mechanic.

"And then one day I just quit my job and started making, making a film, a short film," Cameron said.

"You once said: 'I went from being a bum who liked to smoke dope and hang out by the river to this completely obsessed maniac.' What was the turning point? What was the point at which you lost your mind?" Safer asked.

"Or found it? I think, you know, I found my calling," Cameron said. "And I think the moment you're making a film, no matter how crude, no matter how small or cheap the film is, you're a filmmaker."

He'd hang out at the University of Southern California library, reading up on the technical aspects of moviemaking. Soon, he had his first real Hollywood job.

"Working for Roger Corman. That was big time, for me," Cameron remembered.

Corman was and is the legendary king of the B pictures, who in the 60s and 70s gave many young filmmakers a chance to show their stuff. Besides Cameron, Corman alumni include Jack Nicholson and directors Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese.

"In some ways it was the best film school, because you were self-motivated. You were largely self-taught, or the group taught itself, so people came in with a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of passion. Not much experience," Cameron said.

Cameron made himself useful on a "Star Wars" rip off called "Battle Beyond the Stars." He designed model spaceships, helped with special effects, and soon was running the art department.

"You had no money. There were no delusions of grandeur. You didn't care what film it was. It was a movie," Cameron said.

His first directing job was on a preposterous bit of business called "Piranha II."

"It's the very best flying piranha movie ever made," Cameron joked.

But Cameron and the Italian producer did not get along. And soon, the director was finito.

Asked why he was fired, Cameron said, "The producer wanted to take over the movie and direct it himself, especially the scenes with the Penthouse pinups. It was extremely sleazy, the whole story. But again, all part of the learning curve, right?"

And while in Rome, arguing with the Italians, Cameron had a vision. Literally.

"I was sick, with a high fever and had a dream of this kind of chrome, metallic death figure coming out of, coming out of a fire, kind of a skeletal robot, if you will. So I woke up with that image in mind, did some drawings. And then constructed a story around that image," he remembered.

That dream image became the "Terminator." The movie put Cameron on the map, though his star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was not the studio's first choice.

"The head of Orion, who were gonna release the film, called me up and said, 'Are you sitting down? I've cast this movie. I was at a party, and it's, are you sitting down? It's O.J. Simpson for the Terminator!' And I said, 'This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard,' you know. I didn't know O.J. Simpson, I had nothing against him personally. I didn't know he was gonna go murder his wife later and become the real Terminator,'" Cameron said.

In recent years, he has made underwater documentaries on the Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck. Both expeditions presented enormous challenges, plus the danger of working almost three miles down.

"When you look at your bio, there are so many movies with water references. Correct?" Safer asked.

"I grew up landlocked. Seven hundred miles from the ocean. But the Jacques Cousteau specials, this was in the late 60s, brought the ocean into our living rooms and into my already inflamed imagination that loved, you know, exploration and fantasy. So I had a love affair with the ocean that began before I had actually even seen an ocean," Cameron explained.

His 1989 film "The Abyss" is still remembered as one of the toughest movie shoots ever.
Cameron filmed it in South Carolina, in a decommissioned nuclear power plant filled with ten million gallons of water.

"We were underwater for ten weeks. Six days a week, eight to ten hours a day, submerged," he remembered.

From The Abyss on through Titanic, Cameron got a reputation for driving cast and crew relentlessly - come hell or high water - to get the shot. It's not for nothing that the letters on the cap in his office stand for: "Head - bleep, bleep - In Charge."

"I'm not in this to phone it in or to do mediocre work. I tell everybody when we start a project, 'You know, we're going to the Super Bowl. Just understand that. You got to be ready. Don't, as Martin Sheen said in 'Apocalypse Now,' you know, 'Don't get on the boat if you're not ready to go all the way,'" Cameron said.

"Do you ever cross the line from being demanding to, I don't know, impossible?" Safer asked.

"I like to think not, and certainly not lately. You know, maybe in the early days, there was a lack of perspective, where the movie was everything," Cameron said.

Now Hollywood waits to see if the director still has his best stuff. Cameron's wild ride will soon be released in regular 2D and 3D.

"Avatar is, potentially, the Citizen Kane of this medium," explained Michael Lewis, who runs RealD, a company that makes the 3D system most theaters use.

You still need the glasses, but as Lewis demonstrated, the new ones are very popcorn chic, coming in designer styles, kid's sizes, and doubling as sunglasses.

3D believers see a revolution coming. 3D television sets hit the stores next year, aimed mainly at viewers who want to watch DVDs of 3D games and movies at home.

And beyond that, "Maybe it becomes the standard for news gathering. Maybe it becomes the standard for sports," Cameron said.

"So you think that someday not far from now we'll be in 3D?" Safer asked.

"I'll be doing Avatar 10 and we'll be having the same interview, but we'll be in 3D," Cameron said.

"God help us all," Safer joked.

"Exactly," Cameron replied, laughing.

Movie making, Cameron once said, is war - a constant fight against the countless things that can go wrong in a world of big money and big egos. Where, after four years, just birthing the movie is about all a director can think of.

Asked what will be his next project after Avatar, Cameron told Safer, "I haven't decided. I haven't decided. You know, I think you don't ask a woman if she wants to have another baby at the exact moment she's having a baby. You know what I mean?"

"You sure don't," Safer said.

This weekend, Cameron was still in labor at the Fox studios, still tinkering with only a few weeks before the film's opening.

Produced by David Browning