I lived in a small town -- it was 2,000 people -- in Canada.
A little river that went through it and we swam in the -- you know, there was a lot of
water around.
Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away.
The Niagara Falls.
So I've always sort of loved the water -- possibly as a result of that -- and that has manifested
itself obviously in my work.
What finally attracted me to film in such a definitive way was... it was the only place
I could reconcile the need to tell stories and to work in a visual art medium, and the
desire to understand things at a technological level -- and my fascination with engineering
and technology.
I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched
it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front
of them as opportunities.
Set pieces, props and so on.
They had these great actors to work with and they just blew it.
And there was a moment where I said, "I may not be very good at this but I know I'm better
than that guy."
And that was kind of a critical moment because when you realize that you can at least be
better than somebody else who is already doing it, then you can visualize yourself doing
the job.
There were several light bulbs at several different times, and the first one was when
I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time.
And the light bulb there was, "You know, a movie can be more than just telling a story.
It can be a piece of art."
It can be something that has a profound impact on your imagination, on your appreciation
of how music works with the images and so on.
It sort of just blew the doors off the whole thing for me at the age of 14, and I started
thinking about film in a completely different way and got fascinated by it.
The next light bulb was really just the one that says, "Just do it.
Just pick up a camera and start shooting something."
Don't wait to be asked because nobody is going to ask you and don't wait for the perfect
conditions because they'll never be perfect.
It's a little bit like having a child.
If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film
making is very much the same thing.
You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.
You can always hide it but you will have learned something, you know.
A lot of people ask me, you know, "What's the best advice to someone who wants to be
a director?"
And the answer I give is very simple.
"Be a director."
Pick up a camera.
Shoot something.
No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister
star in it.
Put your name on it as director.
Now you're a director.
Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.
So it's a state of mind is really the point, once you commit yourself to do it.
The thing that is exciting about film making is to think back to the moment in time right
before you had the idea, and think about that at the moment that you're sitting or standing
on the set and there are thousands of people around and they've built this huge set, and
there are all these actors, and there's all this energy and all this focus, and realize
that it's all in the service of something that was made up out of whole cloth, you know?
And that's fun.
I mean, that's what an architect must feel like when they drive down the street and they
look up and see a building that they designed.
It's something that you imagined made tangible.
I would say that my father was completely unsupportive in any way, shape or form, and
was really sort of just sharpening his knives waiting for me to fail so that he could say,
"Ah-ha, I was right.
You should have gone into engineering."
And it was always this sort of attitude of, "Well, you know, one of these days you'll
get a real job and this film thing, you know, will pass as a fad."
So there was zero support there.
And I actually think that it made me angry enough that I had to succeed.
I think if I had a soft, rosy, supportive kind of "It's good if you do it, but if it
doesn't work out..." sort of thing that it would have been different.
But it kind of made me mad, and I had to prove that I was right, that this was the right
thing to be doing and I think it made me mad enough to get good, you know.
Titanic was in some ways the roughest project that I've ever been involved with.
And what saw me through on that was that I had a relationship with the people who were
quite rightly panicking, but they never completely panicked because they knew who I was, and
we always treated each other with a kind of respect.
I always did what I think was the right or ethical thing throughout that.
Even though it was costing me millions of dollars personally right out of my pocket
to do it, I felt I had to do it or they would never trust me again on another film, and
I think that that's ultimately the most important currency that you reap from any situation.
Titanic was a situation where I felt, I think, pretty much like the officer felt on the bridge
of the ship.
I could see the iceberg coming far away, but as hard as I turned that wheel there was just
too much mass, too much inertia, and there was nothing I could do, but I still had to
play it through.
There was no way to get off.
And so then, you know, you're in this kind of situation where you feel quite doomed,
and yet you still have to play by your own ethical standards, you know, no matter where
it takes you.
And ultimately that was the salvation, because I think if I hadn't done that they might have
panicked.
They might have pulled the plug.
Things would have been very different, the whole thing might have crashed and burned
but it didn't, you know.
We held on.
We missed the iceberg by that much.
As a Canadian, the American dream had a very negative and pejorative connotation when I
was growing up, because it was this kind of cultural imperialism.
I grew up in a border town on the other side of the border in Niagara Falls, Canada.
But since I moved to the United States at the age of 17, I actually feel very much like
I'm probably, in my basic genetic nature, much more American than Canadian because I
really believe strongly in a lot of the traditional values of this country in terms of respecting
individuals' rights.
The rights to freedom of speech and a lot of the things that are in the basic fabric
of this country.