James Cameron Quotes

I suppose, because I've been able to make a very good living writing books, that going out and finding another million dollars under the sea is not the fascination. The fascination is in finding the ship.

For my new book 'Pirate Hunters', I follow John Chatterton and John Mattera, two world-class scuba divers, who teach themselves to think and act as pirates while searching for what would be only the second pirate ship ever found and positively identified.

There's a line I love in Conan The Barbarian where someone says, "That used to be another snake cult, now I see it everywhere." That's certainly true of documentaries. I wouldn't say it's ubiquitous, but it's become close to ubiquitous. It's everywhere.

In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

The historical record suggests that the transition to to a new hegemon has always been attended by what I have elsewhere called hegemonic war.

I've always read a lot of historical books and I'm a big fan of documentaries, and I've always thought of ways to do it.

I loved watching documentaries and had wanted to try making one for years - I'd just put it off as other opportunities arose. But I felt like time was running out for me if I wanted to do it.

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them. It feels dishonest to be pulling back in that opening shot and leading him to his destiny.

I love the unexpected and I think that's why documentary is an attractive genre to me because you don't know where it's going to go, so I tend to involve that as much as possible in the production process.

In some ways, the documentary form is a kind of trap and so is societal norms.

The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.

I came to explore the wreck.

When I was six, all I dreamt about was becoming a diver on Jacques Cousteau's boat, the famous Calypso.

To secure your historical standing, be sure you are the first to write about it.

We'd been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean.

Bizarrely funny... Rarely is a documentary as well attuned to its subject as Howard Brookner's BURROUGHS, which captures as much about the life, work and sensibility of its subject as its 86 minute format allows.

It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.

Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America. We don't really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking.

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

The ruins of classic movie theaters are a personal obsession of mine, and I've made a couple of documentaries about it.

If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.

From film to film, even documentaries, I was learning the medium and learning how to bring form into some kind of relationship with the content, how to work it, and above all, how to create some kind of order out of chaos.

I've been in entertainment, politics, business, business coaching, public affairs, documentaries, programming, news, theater. So, there aren't many things I see that I haven't seen something like that before.

Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.

For me, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is not so clear - my "documentaries" were largely scripted, rehearsed, and repeated, and have a lot of fantasy and concoction in them.