James Cameron reveals where he got the ideas for Terminator, Alien and Avatar. Brilliant!

“It saved us from about 10 lawsuits.”

Here is another interesting piece of text on GQ – in it, James Cameron told many stories about cinema, life and his favorite craft. One of the questions concerned his ideas for films – everyone is wondering how the great director came up with the plots of cult films. The answer will surprise many.

Cameron discovered the secret where he gets his ideas from – these are his dreams! Here is what the master said:

“I have a personal streaming that is better than all this shit around. And he works every night for free.” So it was with the “Terminator”, “Aliens” and “Avatar”.

The idea for The Terminator came to him in a dream; the same thing happened to a pivotal scene in his second film, Aliens, when Ripley finds himself in a silent room full of alien eggs and turns around to see the alien queen.

“Avatar” also came to Cameron while he was sleeping: “I dreamed of a bioluminescent forest with trees that looked like fiber optic lamps, and a river that glowed with bioluminescent particles, and purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked through it”

“And these lizards looked normal until they took off. And then they turned into rotating fans, like living frisbees. It was all in a dream! I woke up very excited and immediately began sketching everything I remembered. So I do have a drawing.”

“It saved us from about 10 lawsuits. In any successful movie, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under a wig who thinks you stole the idea from his head. In our case, it turned out to be 10 or 11. So I showed this drawing, which I drew at the age of 19, when I was still in college, and I said: “See this? See those glowing trees? See this glowing lizard that’s spinning. Is she orange? Do you see the purple moss? And everyone just shut up.”

Then a logical question arises: if he has ideas at night, then why has he made only 2 films in the last 25 years?

“No one empathizes better than Hollywood. But at a certain point, my mind wants to solve real problems. Although solving real problems is more satisfying, movies help to speak out and highlight problems on a global scale. I’m a storyteller and sometimes there are stories that need to be told to the world.”

The first excerpt from the interview. The boss told James Cameron to cut Avatar. That’s what he said! After that, the boss exploded and kicked the director out of the office.