以下這篇由本站站整理提供的是《阿凡達》、《泰坦尼克號》的導演詹姆斯·卡梅隆(James Cameron)的一篇TED演講。在這個演講裏，卡梅隆回顧了自己從電影學院畢業後走上導演道路的故事。卡梅隆告訴你，不要畏懼失敗，永遠不要給自己設限。更多演講稿範文，歡迎訪問本站站!
I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school, I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had.
And you know, that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking "samples" -- frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water -- and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.
And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late '60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep ues Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.
And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren't video gamesand this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author's description, put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was -- the creativity had to find its outlet somehow.
And an interesting thing happened: The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday -- that seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books.
So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didn't let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool at a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn't see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.
Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, and 500 hours of that was in submersibles. And I've learned that that deep-ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans,are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Nature's imagination is so boundlesscompared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was.
But when I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories with my urges to create images. And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. So, filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together, and that made sense. And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: "Terminator," "Aliens" and "The Abyss." And with "The Abyss," I was putting together my love of underwater and diving with filmmaking. So, you know, merging the two passions.
Something interesting came out of "The Abyss," which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. And even though the film didn't make any money -- barely broke even, I should say -- I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic.
You know, it's Arthur Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were seeing something magical. And so that got me very excited. And I thought, "Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art." So, with "Terminator 2," which was my next film, we took that much farther. Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. The success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. And it did, and we created magic again, and we had the same result with an audience -- although we did make a little more money on that one.
So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience came to, "This is going to be a whole new world," this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. And the concept of the company was that we would leapfrog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while.
But we found ourselves lagging in the mid '90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. So, I wrote this piece called "Avatar," which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG, and the main characters would all be in CG, and the world would be in CG. And the envelope pushed back, and I was told by the folks at my company that we weren't going to be able to do this for a while.
So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. (Laughter) You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as "'Romeo and Juliet' on a ship: "It's going to be this epic romance,passionate film." Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of "Titanic." And that's why I made the movie. (Applause) And that's the truth. Now, the studio didn't know that. But I convinced them. I said, "We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film it for real. We'll be using it in the opening of the film. It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook." And I talked them into funding an expedition. (Laughter)
Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. Because we actually created a reality where six months later, I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a view port. Not a movie, not HD -- for real. (Applause)
Now, that blew my mind. And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, was like a space mission. You know, where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can't get back by yourself. And I thought like, "Wow. I'm like, living in a science fiction movie. This is really cool."
And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration. Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it -- it was everything. It was adventure, it was curiosity, it was imagination. And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give me. Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn't imagine what I was seeing out that window. As we did some of our subsequent expeditions, I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them.
So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. After the success of "Titanic," I said, "OK, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while." And so, we started planning theseexpeditions. And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. We went back to the Titanic wreck. We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it.
So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. And I'm flying a little robotic vehiclethrough the corridor of the ship. When I say, "I'm operating it," but my mind is in the vehicle. I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship.
So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience -- that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. It was really, really quite profound. And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan.
So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals -- they're basically aliens right here on Earth. They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. They don't survive on sunlight-basedsystem the way we do. And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to a 500-degree-Centigradewater plumes. You think they can't possibly exist.
At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well -- again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. And this was fascinating. But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. And taking them down so that they had access -- astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments -- taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on.
So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing.
I didn't really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. Because I had to, at a certain point, say, "What am I doing out here? Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it?" We don't make money at these damn shows. We barely break even. There is no fame in it. People sort of think I went awaybetween "Titanic" and "Avatar" and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience.
No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? You're doing it for the task itself, for the challenge --and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is -- for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time.
And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to someone else. When you come back to the shore and you say, "We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea," you can't explain it to people. It's that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect.
So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was "Avatar," I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. And it really changed the dynamic. So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing "Avatar," coming up with new technology that didn't exist before. Tremendously exciting. Tremendously challenging. And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. And it completely changed how I do movies. So, people have commented on how, "Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora." To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that.
So, what can we synthesize out of all this? You know, what are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. It's the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, "Give me some advice for doing this." And I say, "Don't put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you -- don't do it to yourself, don't bet against yourself, and take risks."
NASA has this phrase that they like: "Failure is not an option." But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it's a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. So, that's the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you're doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. (Applause)
譯文：我是看科幻小説長大的。高中時，我連坐校車上下學時都在讀着科幻小説。這些書將我帶到另一個世界，滿足了我無止境的好奇。每當我在學校，我總是在樹叢中尋找一些“標本”——青蛙、蛇、昆蟲……我把它們放在顯微鏡下觀察。我總是試圖認知這個世界，想找到它可能的邊界。
我對科幻小説的熱愛或許是那個時代的寫照。60年代末期，人類登上了月球，去了深海。通過電視，我們看到了不同的動物和地方。這都是我們不曾想象的。這種氛圍中，我不知不覺地喜歡上了科幻小説。
每當我看完小説，故事中的影像就會在我腦海中不斷放映。或許是因為創造力必須找到一個發泄方式，我開始畫外星人、機器人、飛船……我甚至會在數學課上在課本的背面畫畫。
對科幻小説的不斷接觸讓我想到：外星人不一定生存在外太空，他們很有可能就生活在我們星球上。所以15歲時，我決定成為一個潛水員。而當時實現夢想唯一的問題是我生活在加拿大的一個小山村，離最近的海有6英里遠。
但我父親並沒有讓這成為我夢想的障礙，他在邊境對岸的美國紐約州布法羅找到了一個潛水培訓班。於是我便在布法羅的一個泳池裏獲得了潛水證書。直到兩年後，當我們全家搬到加州，我才第一次有機會真正地潛水。
在這之後的40年裏，我在海底大約總共花了3萬個小時。大海如此豐富多彩，眾多神奇的生物生活其中。比起我們的想象力，自然的想象力完全沒有邊界。我想，至今我對大海的瞭解還是很少，但我對海洋的好奇卻一直延續着。
電影魔法師與科學體驗
但長大後，我並沒有成為一名潛水員，我選擇的職業是電影。我喜歡講故事，畫圖畫，電影看起來是最合適的工作。當然，我講述的故事都是科幻的——終結者、外星人等等。
我也將我對潛水的熱愛和電影融合在了一起。拍攝《深淵》時，我有了一些有趣的想法。當我們要塑造一個水狀的生物時，我們使用了“計算機生成動畫”——CG。CG的應用產生了電影歷史上第一個軟表面、電腦製成的形象。雖然這部電影使公司差點虧本，但全世界的觀眾被這種新技術所震撼。
根據亞瑟·克拉克定律——任何高難度的技術和魔法沒有什麼區別，很多人覺得自己看到了一些“神奇”的東西。這使我感到很興奮。我想CG應該被用到電影藝術中去。
所以，在我接下來的電影《終結者2》中，我把這種技術又推近了一步，創造了一個金屬人。我又變了一次魔術。這部電影很成功，我們賺了一些錢。
作為一個電影人，我看到了一個全新的世界，一個全新的未來。於是我和好友斯坦·温斯頓創立了一家公司，叫做“數字領域”。公司的概念是要跳過普通的電影製作直接進入數字電影製作。我們也是這麼做的，這也使得我們在一段時間內有了一定的優勢。但在90年代中期，我發現我們有些落後了。
我寫《阿凡達》這部電影，就是想要推動整個視覺體驗以及動畫效果的進步。讓電影人物跳出人們想象的框架，完全用動畫效果詮釋人物表情。但一開始，員工告訴我，他們還沒有能力做到。於是我把《阿凡達》放在了一邊，轉而製作了另一部電影——《泰坦尼克號》。
在為《泰坦尼克號》尋找投資商時，我告訴製作人這是一部關於愛情的電影。它的故事就像羅密歐與朱麗葉一樣悽美動人。而事實上，我自己真正想做的是，潛入海底探尋真正的泰坦尼克號。這是我的真心話，電影公司並不知道。
我告訴他們，我們要沉入海底，拍攝泰坦尼克號真實的畫面。我們將把這個片段放在首映式上展現，這將會引起很大的轟動，票房也會很好。令人意外，電影公司真的同意出錢，支持我去探索泰坦尼克號。
雖然到現在我仍覺得有些瘋狂，但這就是“想象創造了現實”。兩個月後，我在北大西洋的一艘俄羅斯潛艇裏用肉眼看到真正的泰坦尼克號。
《泰坦尼克號》的拍攝體驗給我很大震撼。雖然我們要做很多準備工作，但令我震驚的是，這次深海拍攝就像是一次外太空旅行——尖端的科技，繁雜的計劃，環境的危險，我彷彿置身於一本科幻小説中。
我發現我們可以想象一個生物，但是我想我永遠無法想象出透過潛艇窗所看到的那些生物。我看見了一些我從未看見的東西，也看見了一些從來沒有被人看見過的東西，因為當我們拍下它們時，他們還沒有被科學所描述。我被震撼了。我必須做更多。
在《泰坦尼克號》成功後，我做了一個決定：暫停我的主業——好萊塢導演，做一段時間全職探險家。於是我們開始策劃一些探險。在自動探測車幫助下，我們去了些危險的地方。我們發明了技術，對泰坦尼克號殘骸做了一次全面勘測，使它再次重現在人們面前。
通過一種會飛行的自動探測儀，我可以坐在一個潛艇裏探索泰坦尼克號的內部。當我在操作儀器時，我的腦子就像是在這些探測儀中。我感覺我自己真的到了泰坦尼克號上。這是一種最令人興奮的似曾相識的感覺。我知道假如我在這裏轉個彎，我將會看到什麼。因為我已經在另一個完全一樣的泰坦尼克號複製品上工作了好幾個月。
這是一次不同尋常的體驗。它讓我感覺到，遠程監控的能量。你的意識可以被注入這些機器或注入另一種存在中。這種體驗非常深刻。或許幾十年後，當半機器人出現，或者任何後人類生物出現時，人們會對這種感覺習以為常。
在這些探險之後，我開始真正感謝這些存在於海底的生物。這些生物基本上對於我們來説就是外星生物。它們生活在一個化學合成的環境之中。它們無法像我們一樣存活於太陽之下。同時，從小被科幻小説影響的我對於太空科學也非常感興趣。
我進入了NASA的顧問委員會，策劃真正的太空行程，讓宇航員帶着3D攝像機進入太空站。這些非常有趣，但我真正想做的是將這些太空專家帶入深海，讓他們看看深海，取一些樣本。所以我們既做了紀錄片，也在做科學。這些事業將我整個人生很好地整合了起來。
發現團隊的力量
在發現的旅途中，我學到了很多。我學到的不僅僅是科學知識，還有領導力。很多人以為作為導演，就一定具有很高的領導力。但我卻是從這些探險中學到如何帶領團隊。
在探險時，有時候我會問自己，我為什麼會在這裏?為什麼要做這些紀錄片? 我從中得到了什麼? 我們並沒有從這些紀錄片中賺錢，還差點虧了本。我也沒有賺到名聲。很多人以為我在《泰坦尼克號》之後就一直躺在沙灘邊享受。
那我在做什麼呢?我做這些其實只是為了這件任務本身。為了挑戰——海洋是現存最危險的環境;為了發現;也為了一種奇怪的關係——一個由很少人組成的緊密團隊。我們這10到12個人在一起工作了很多年。有時要在海里一起工作2到3個月。
在這種關係中，我發現最重要的東西就是尊重。我在這裏為了你，你在這裏為了我。每個人做的工作都無法向其他人解釋。我們必須建立起一種關係，建立尊重。
當我開始拍攝《阿凡達》時，我試着將這種互相尊重的領導力原則應用在電影拍攝中。很快情況就改變了。在《阿凡達》拍攝過程中，我的團隊也很小，也在未知領地工作，創造新的科技，這非常有意思，非常有挑戰。四年半時間，我們成為了一個家庭。這完全改變了我以前拍電影的方式。
有評論文章説，卡梅隆把海底的一些生物放到了潘多拉星球上是其影片成功的原因，而對於我來説，做事的基本法則以及過程本身改變了事情的結果。
最後，總結一下。我學到了什麼?
第一：好奇心，這是你擁有的最重要的東西;
第二：想象力，這是你創造現實最重要的力量;
第三：對團隊的尊重，這是比世界上其他定律更重要的定律。
有不少年輕電影導演向我討教成功經驗，我對他們説：“不要給自己劃定界限。別人會為你去劃邊界，但你自己千萬別去。你要去冒險。失敗是你其中一個選項，但畏懼不是。從來沒有一次探險是在有完全安全保障的情況下完成的。你必須願意承擔這些風險。”謝謝大家!(掌聲)