From Bus Driver to Box Office Titan: James Cameron on Dreams, Doubt, and the Making of Cinema History

Long before directing record-breaking films such as Avatar, Titanic, and Terminator, James Cameron was navigating a very different path—one lined with school buses, engine oil, and delivery routes across Southern California.

“I was a school bus mechanic. I was a bus driver. I was a delivery truck driver,” he recalls with a grin, remembering the long days spent delivering meals across the Brea Olinda School District. Few children in the 1970s could have imagined that the man dropping off their lunches would someday reshape global cinema.

For Cameron, the monotony of those eight-hour shifts became a creative sanctuary. With his hands occupied but his thoughts free, he spent hours imagining new worlds, sketching ideas, and absorbing filmmaking knowledge. He would slip onto the University of Southern California campus—not as an enrolled student, but as a self-taught filmmaker devouring books, lectures, and techniques.

His trajectory follows a simple theme: Cameron works relentlessly, and he always finds a way.

At a Beverly Hills hotel transformed into a Pandora-inspired hub for the “Avatar: Fire and Ash” press day, Cameron appeared warm, enthusiastic, and reflective. He explained that the early phase of Avatar was not driven by certainty but by “a gigantic leap of faith.” From early motion-capture tests influenced by a Michael Jackson music video created with his late collaborator Stan Winston, to rediscovering a script after a 2005 Titanic expedition, Cameron remembers thinking: “This is a good movie. We should make this.”

Many of Cameron’s greatest ideas come to him in dreams. The Terminator appeared in his sleep, and the bioluminescent forests of Pandora began as paintings inspired by vivid dreams. “It’s not about understanding the message intellectually. It’s about feeling,” he says, describing Avatar as “almost like a dream state.” For him, emotion—not logic—is the soul of storytelling.

Cameron continues to move between two worlds: cinema and the deep sea. His underwater expeditions—to the Titanic, into ocean trenches, and to future locations he has only hinted at—inform his filmmaking as much as his imagination does. Although he has directed only nine feature films, he has produced or directed 12 documentaries, many tied to scientific exploration. “I like to keep one foot in science and one foot in Hollywood,” he explains.

On the subject of AI—an area where his predictions have aged with striking accuracy—Cameron is blunt. The world of Terminator, he says, is no longer fiction. “Not so slowly,” he warns. “It’s happening very fast. We’re living in a science-fiction world right now.” If he returns to the franchise, it will be to address the reality unfolding today.

For Cameron, filmmaking is also a way to process personal fears and anxieties—both as an artist and as a father. His five children, now in their 20s and 30s, shaped the emotional tone of Avatar 2 and 3. “I was processing being a father and processing my own teenage years through the writing,” he shares. “That’s what artists do—they process their own stuff.”

Before the interview, a group of journalists and actors, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, watched Cameron direct a performance-capture sequence with Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver. Despite advanced technology, Cameron insists nothing about the process is artificial. “It’s a full physical performance. We couldn’t get the results we’re getting any other way.”

As the conversation concluded and we stood to shake hands, Cameron instinctively moved his hand above my head to shield it from a low-hanging boom mic—a small, thoughtful gesture from a filmmaker known for grand ambition. It is this combination of precision and humanity that continues to define James Cameron, both as a storyteller and as a visionary.