Two of the three highest-grossing films ever made. The director who has, more than any other, pushed the technical envelope of mainstream cinema across four decades.
James Cameron has directed eight narrative features in forty-three years. By output count, this is unusually low. By cumulative box-office impact, it is unprecedented: Titanic (1997) was, for twelve years, the highest-grossing film ever made; Avatar (2009) displaced it; Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) is currently third on the all-time list. Two of Cameron's three most-recent films have crossed $2 billion worldwide. The combined gross of his eight features exceeds the GDP of several small nations.
He works on multi-year cycles. Aliens (1986). The Abyss (1989). Terminator 2 (1991). True Lies (1994). Titanic (1997). Avatar (2009). Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). The Avatar sequels through 2031 are scheduled. Each film has been, at its time of release, the technically most-ambitious film ever attempted at scale.
Cameron has been nominated for Best Director three times (Titanic, Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water) and won once (Titanic). He has also been nominated for Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Producer. He has invented or substantially refined multiple cinematic technologies: the underwater 3D camera, the motion-capture systems used in Avatar, the deep-sea submersible Deepsea Challenger (which he personally piloted to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 2012).
Cameron's films are technologically the most-ambitious of their era. Avatar's motion-capture pipeline. The Terminator 2 liquid-metal CGI. Titanic's full-scale 90% mockup of the ship. Avatar: The Way of Water's underwater performance capture, which required custom-developed dry-for-wet rigs.
What separates Cameron from other technically-driven directors is that the technology is, almost without exception, in service of an emotional or narrative goal. Titanic's CGI sinking sequence is not a flex; it is the climax of a three-hour romance. Avatar's motion-capture Na'vi are not a tech demo; they are characters whose physical reality the film depends on. Cameron invents the technology when the technology to make the film does not yet exist.
Cameron's films have, since The Terminator, been built around strong female protagonists. Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor (two films). Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley (Aliens). Kate Winslet's Rose (Titanic). Zoe Saldaña's Neytiri (Avatar films). The pattern is so consistent that critical writing on Cameron has named it as a structural feature of his work.
What makes the pattern unusual is that Cameron does not write the female leads as conventional 'strong women' — they are not de-feminised, they are not action-hero stand-ins for absent male leads. They are protagonists of genuinely female experience whose strength is consistent with that experience. Ripley's maternal protectiveness in Aliens is not in tension with her competence as a soldier; it is the source of it.
Almost every Cameron production is the most-expensive film of its year, sometimes by significant margin. Titanic (1997, $200m, the most-expensive film ever made at the time). Avatar (2009, $237m). Avatar: The Way of Water (2022, $250m). The Terminator 2 (1991, $102m, the most-expensive film of its year).
Cameron's argument for the scale is that some films are not possible at smaller scale. The Titanic sinking sequence cannot be conjured in a small set. Avatar's Pandora cannot be conjured without sufficient render time. The Way of Water's underwater performance capture requires the full pipeline. Cameron has, throughout his career, refused to make the films he wants at the budgets the industry would prefer.
If you've never watched a Cameron film:
Stanley Kubrick (the technological precision), Ridley Scott (Cameron has acknowledged Scott as a direct influence, particularly Alien on Aliens), Roger Corman (Cameron worked for Corman early in his career), and the New Hollywood directors of the late 1970s.