But, when I chose a career, as an adult, it was film making. 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, film making 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 film making. 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 leap-frog 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 90's 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 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 am 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.

文本大意：

长大后，我没有成为一名潜水员，他选择的职业是电影。我喜欢讲故事，画图画，电影看起来是最合适的工作。当然，我讲述的故事都是科幻的--终结者、外星人等等。

我也将我对潜水的热爱和电影融合在了一起。拍摄《深渊》时，我有了一些有趣的想法。当我们要塑造一个水状的生物时，我们使用了"计算机生成动画"--CG。CG的应用产生了电影历史上第一个软表面、电脑制成的形象。虽然这部电影使公司差点亏本，但全世界的观众被这种新技术所震撼。根据亚瑟·克拉克定律--任何高难度的技术和魔法没有什么区别，很多人觉得自己看到了一些"神奇"的东西。这使我感到很兴奋。我想CG应该被用到电影艺术中去。所以，在我接下来的电影《终结者2》中，我把这种技术又推近了一步，创造了一个金属人。我又变了一次魔术。这部电影很成功，我们赚了一些钱。

作为一个电影人，我看到了一个全新的世界，一个全新的未来。于是我和好友斯坦·温斯顿创立了一家公司，叫做"数字领域"。公司的概念是要跳过普通的电影制作直接进入数字电影制作。我们也是这么做的，这也使得我们在一段时间内有了一定的优势。但在90年代中期，我发现我们有些落后了。

我写《阿凡达》这部电影就是想要推动整个视觉体验以及动画效果的进步。让电影人物跳出人们想象的框架，完全用动画效果诠释人物表情。但一开始，员工告诉我，他们还没有能力做到。于是我把《阿凡达》放在了一边，转而制作了另一部电影--《泰坦尼克号》。

在为《泰坦尼克号》寻找投资商时，我告诉制作人这是一部关于爱情的电影。它的故事就像罗密欧与朱丽叶一样凄美动人。而事实上，我自己真正想做的是潜入海底探寻真正的泰坦尼克号。这是我的真心话，电影公司并不知道。我告诉他们，我们要沉入海底，拍摄泰坦尼克号真实的画面。我们将把这个片段放在首映式上展现，这将会引起很大的轰动，票房也会很好。令人意外，电影公司真的同意出钱，支持我去探索泰坦尼克号。虽然到现在我仍觉得有些疯狂，但这就是"想象创造了现实"。两个月后，我在北大西洋的一艘俄罗斯潜艇里用肉眼看到真正的泰坦尼克号。

《泰坦尼克号》的拍摄体验给我很大震撼。虽然我们要做很多准备工作，但令我震惊的是，这次深海拍摄就像是一次外太空旅行--尖端的科技，繁杂的计划，环境的危险，我仿佛置身于一本科幻小说中。我发现我们可以想象一个生物，但是我想我永远无法想象出透过潜艇窗所看到的那些生物。我看见了一些我从未看见的东西，也看见了一些从来没有被人看见过的东西，因为当我们拍下它们时，他们还没有被科学所描述。我被震撼了。我必须做更多。

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