An aquatic gearhead with more than 2,500 hours logged underwater, Cameron owns his own fleet of submersibles and ocean-ready robots. This week, drawing on his contacts in the deep-sea science world, the director convened a meeting of more than 20 scientists and engineers in Washington to brainstorm fixes for the leak.

“I know a lot of smart people who regularly work a whole lot deeper than that well,” Cameron told me, referring to BP’s 5,000-foot gusher. “I figured this group of top sub guys and deep-ocean scientists and engineers could maybe come up with something constructive.” The director did not, as many news outlets reported, respond to a call from the Environmental Protection Agency, but rather organized the meeting himself, and invited government bodies including the E.P.A., the Department of Energy, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Coast Guard to participate.

Cameron says he first contacted BP a month ago, but was told they had the crisis handled. “I didn’t want to be another well-meaning idiot with a bunch of suggestions,” Cameron says. “But when the situation went on without a resolution, I figured the guys I knew had to be as smart as the engineers at BP, so it was time to sound the horn.”

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Cameron got back to me while on his way to the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference, where he also fielded questions from Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about his BP role, shown in this video from the event.

A chunk of my book covers Cameron’s role in founding the effects company Digital Domain, with Scott Ross and Stan Winston, in 1993.  This is from a section of The Futurist about Cameron’s “Digital Manifesto,” a passionately argued 13-page document he wrote in 1992, laying out where he expected filmmaking to go in the coming years. Remember, it’s 1992—Bill Clinton just took over the White House, Jay Leno just took over The Tonight Show, T2 won the Oscar for visual effects and the VFX world is atwitter about something called morphing. Cameron, as usual, is looking ahead, describing a process almost identical to the one he would employ 13 years later to shoot Avatar:

In his manifesto, the director described something called “performance capture,” in which an actor would don a “data suit,” sending a stream of information about the actor’s physical movements to a workstation, where they would be inserted into a “synthetic environment.” Artists would then use software to turn the actor’s digitized performance into a fantastical character. “Jack Nicholson could create not just the voice but the total body performance of a
demon, while puppeteers nearby cause his tail to lash and his pointed ears to furl and twitch,” Cameron wrote. “The actor can truly ‘become’ his animated character.”

In this photo essay for Time, I show the deliberate visual parallels between life on Avatar and life on Earth, with a welcome assist from Avatar creature designer Neville Page. Page and I talked about the Thanator’s armored black skin, which is modeled on the chitinous texture of a caterpillar’s cocoon, the tree-swinging Prolemuris, Pandora’s version of the “Missing Link,” and several other Earthly muses for Cameron’s fictional world.

Unlike for most films, Avatar’s editing process began the moment Cameron called action. An Avid editing suite sat stage-side at the spare Los Angeles warehouse where Cameron shot the performance-capture portions of the movie. Instead of dailies, the director watched minutelies: he reviewed every single shot in the moment. Cameron had almost limitless options editorially because of the manner in which he was shooting. In a traditional live-action film, when multiple actors are in a scene, the editor is limited to the performances in a particular take. But Avatar’s editors could combine different takes. In one scene, they might choose Sam Worthington’s Take-Six, for instance, and Sigourney Weaver’s Take-Two. While this provided tremendous flexibility, it was also hugely complicating. And it was just the first of many edit steps.

Next came the camera moves. Cameron was working from a virtual toybox that allowed him to shoot in his C.G. world using the performances he had already filmed. The actors were long gone from the soundstage as the director decided how close to make his close-up and where to pan. Day after day, as Cameron shot and reshot and reshot the scenes—this process did nothing but indulge his usual perfectionism—Avatar’s three-man editing team stitched the narrative together….

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Slasher films, pot comedies, anything starring The Rock — there are some movies that no one expects to win Academy Awards. And traditionally, Oscar’s no-fly list has included science fiction. Academy Award-winning films are supposed to be serious, weighty, historical — if your movie takes place in a galaxy far, far away, well, you can leave your tuxedo in the closet until it’s time to accept a somewhat less prestigious prize shaped like a rocket ship.

“The academy has always thought of sci-fi as a secondary type of exploitation film,” says Roger Corman, who was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in November, in large part for his role in producing the low-budget sci-fi films that gave directors like Cameron their start. “They’re only beginning to realize that there is seriousness and depth within the genre.”

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There is one event, more than any other, that sealed the public image of James Cameron, and that is the last five seconds of his 1997 Best Director Oscar acceptance speech for Titanic. In the second of three speeches he would deliver that night, Cameron quoted Leonardo DiCaprio’s line from his film, “I’m the king of the world! Wahooooooo!” and lifted his trophy triumphantly. “The funniest moment of the whole thing, in retrospect, was the quizzical expression on Warren Beatty’s face after he gave me the Oscar,” Cameron recalled, when I asked him about the speech for my book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. “His expression was like ‘what the fuck were you thinking?’” What Cameron had intended as a heartfelt display of his exuberance had come across instead as self-congratulatory, especially to a room that had already seen Titanic collect most of the awards and box office receipts they hoped would go to their own films.

The delicate art of delivering an acceptance speech comes easily to some—Meryl Streep’s flustered gratitude and Robert Downey Jr.’s laconic wit could be how-to tutorials for the 30-second medium. But Cameron, for all his industry stature, has never seemed entirely at home behind a Hollywood awards podium.

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And, perhaps most importantly, do the Na’vi eat quiche?

All topics tackled in this roundtable interview on Warren Olney’s KCRW show To The Point featuring conservative film critic Michael Medved, io9 editor Annalee Newitz, Otis College of Art & Design Film Studies Senior Lecturer Scarlet Cheng, Columbia College Professor of Philosophy Stephen Asma and yours truly.

Ms. Keegan said that it was possible to read “The Terminator,” his breakthrough 1984 movie, as an anti-technology polemic, an anti-war film or a modern gloss on the birth of Jesus.

“Or,” she said, “ you could just watch it as a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger stomps around like a robot.”

The also story quotes sci fi site io9’s editor, Annalee Newitz, who wrote one of the sharpest cultural critiques of Avatar I’ve read yet.