奥斯卡最佳导演詹姆斯·卡梅隆TED英文演讲稿.docx

奥斯卡最佳导演詹姆斯卡梅隆TED英文演讲稿I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school, I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had.And you know, that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasnt in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking samples - frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water - and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late 60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans.Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there werent video gamesand this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the authors description, put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was - the creativity had to find its outlet somehow.And an interesting thing happened: The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday - that seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books.So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didnt let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool at a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didnt see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.Since then, in the intervening 40 years, Ive spent about 3,000 hours underwater, and 500 hours of that was in submersibles. And Ive learned that that deep-ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans,are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Natures imagination is so boundlesscompared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was.But when I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. 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, filmmaking 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 filmmaking. 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 didnt 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, its Arthur Clarkes 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 leapfrog 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 90s 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 werent 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: Its 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 thats why I made the movie. (Applause) And thats the truth. Now, the studio didnt know that. But I convinced them. I said, Were going to dive to the wreck. Were going to film it for real. Well 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 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 cant get back by yourself. And I thought like, Wow. Im like, living in a science fiction movie. Thil.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 couldnt give me. Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldnt 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. And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. After the success of Titanic, I said, OK, Im going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and Im going to go be a full-time explorer for a while. And so, we started planning theseexpeditions. And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. We went back to the Titanic wreck. We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didnt have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it.So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. And Im flying a little robotic vehiclethrough the corridor of the ship. When I say, Im operating it, but my mind is in the vehicle. I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience Ive ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship.So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience - that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. It was really, really quite profound. And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan.So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals - theyre basically aliens right here on Earth. They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. They dont survive on sunlight-basedsystem the way we do. And so, youre seeing animals that are living next to a 500-degree-Centigradewater plumes. You think they cant possibly exist.At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well - again, its the science fiction influence, as a kid. And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. And this was fascinating. But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. And taking them down so that they had access - astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments - taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on.So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. Id completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing.I didnt really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. Because I had to, at a certain point, say, What am I doing out here? Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it? We dont make money at these damn shows. We barely break even. There is no fame in it. People sort of think I went awaybetween Titanic and Avatar and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience.No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? Youre doing it for the task itself, for the challenge -and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is - for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time.And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that youve done a task that you cant explain to someone else. When you come back to the shore and you say, We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea, you cant explain it to people. Its that thinps have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect.So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was Avatar, I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. And it really changed the dynamic. So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing Avatar, coming up with new technology that didnt exist before. Tremendously exciting. Tremendously challenging. And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. And it completely changed how I do movies. So, people have commented on how, Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora. To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that.So, what can we synthesize out of all this? You know, what are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. Its the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, Give me some advice for doing this. And I say, Dont put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you - dont do it to yourself, dont bet against yourself, and take risks.NASA has this phrase that they like: Failure is not an option. But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because its a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. So, thats the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever youre doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. (Applause)译文：我是看科幻小说长大的。高中时，我连坐校车上下学时都在读着科幻小说。这些书将我带到另一个世界，满足了我无止境的好奇。每当我在学校，我总是在树丛中寻找一些“标本”青蛙、蛇、昆虫我把它们放在显微镜下观察。我总是试图认知这个世界，想找到它可能的边界。我对科幻小说的热爱或许是那个时代的写照。60年代末期，人类登上了月球，去了深海。通过电视，我们看到了不同的动物和地方。这都是我们不曾想象的。这种氛围中，我不知不觉地喜欢上了科幻小说。每当我看完小说，故事中的影像就会在我脑海中不断放映。或许是因为创造力必须找到一个发泄方式，我开始画外星人、机器人、飞船我甚至会在数学课上在课本的背面画画。对科幻小说的不断接触让我想到：外星人不一定生存在外太空，他们很有可能就生活在我们星球上。所以15岁时，我决定成为一个潜水员。而当时实现梦想唯一的问题是我生活在加拿大的一个小山村，离最近的海有6英里远。但我父亲并没有让这成为我梦想的障碍，他在边境对岸的美国纽约州布法罗找到了一个潜水培训班。于是我便在布法罗的一个泳池里获得了潜水证书。直到两年后，当我们全家搬到加州，我才第一次有机会真正地潜水。在这之后的40年里，我在海底大约总共花了3万个小时。大海如此丰富多彩，众多神奇的生物生活其中。比起我们的想象力，自然的想象力完全没有边界。我想，至今我对大海的了解还是很少，但我对海洋的好奇却一直延续着。但长大后，我并没有成为一名潜水员，我选择的职业是电影。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