The Star Wars Moment That Made James Cameron a Director
Before he rewired Hollywood with Titanic, Avatar, and The Terminator, James Cameron was just a kid in a theater getting his mind blown by Star Wars. That blast of imagination didn’t just entertain him—it reset his sense of what stories could do and lit the fuse on a career that would change cinema.
James Cameron didn’t wake up one day and decide to build Terminators, sink the Titanic, and ship us off to Pandora. First, he sat in a theater, watched Star Wars, and realized his brain wasn’t broken — it was employable.
Star Wars flipped a switch for Cameron
In a recent CBS Mornings interview, Cameron said Lucas’s galaxy far, far away didn’t just wow him — it validated the stuff he’d been picturing for years. He used to throw on fast electronic music and imagine space dogfights and energy weapons. Then Star Wars arrived and basically mirrored his inner movie theater.
"I used to put my headphones on and listen to fast electronic music and imagine space battles ... with all kinds of maneuvers and energy weapons ... and then I saw a movie that — if I believed in people reading your mind with a laser beam — I would’ve thought, 'They took that from my brain.' My conclusion was a little less mentally ill. It was, if the things I’m seeing in my mind can be the same things in the #1 movie ever, then I’ve got a salable imagination ... then I just started figuring out how to make fantastic films."
That moment did what great movies do: it gave him permission. If audiences were lining up to see that kind of grand, pulpy, big-swing sci-fi, maybe his own big swings had a shot. Fast-forward a few decades and, well, Pandora.
He loves Lucas’s six... but The Force Awakens left him lukewarm
Cameron has long praised George Lucas’s original six Star Wars films for pushing the visual envelope and being genuinely new. When Disney relaunched the franchise with The Force Awakens, though, he felt the needle didn’t exactly move.
"I don’t want to say too much about the film. A lot of respect for J.J. Abrams and I want to see where they’re taking it next, you know — see what they’re doing with it. I have to say that George’s group of six films had more innovative visual imagination, and this film was more of a retrenchment to things you had seen before and characters you had seen before, and it took a few baby steps forward with new characters. So for me, the jury’s out."
Translation: slick, entertaining, sure — but too familiar. For a guy who measures storytelling by how far it reaches, The Force Awakens felt like a cautious tap of the brakes.
Looking past Avatar 3: still directing, less micromanaging
On the Avatar side, you can absolutely see the Star Wars fingerprints — world-building, tech ambition, rebels vs. empire vibes — but Cameron says he doesn’t want to live in one franchise forever. With Avatar 3 on the runway, he told THR he’s eager to branch out while still keeping a hand on Pandora.
"I’ve got other stories to tell, and I’ve got other stories to tell within Avatar. What won’t happen is, I won’t go down the rabbit hole of exclusively making only Avatar for multiple years. I’m going to figure out another way that involves more collaboration. I’m not saying I’m going to step away as a director, but I’m going to pull back from being as hands-on with every tiny aspect of the process."
So no, he’s not hanging up the director’s chair. He just wants to stop living inside every CG vine and water ripple for years at a time and bring more collaborators into the process.
Avatar films are streaming on Disney+.