All of our movie-making heroes are getting old. Steven Spielberg is 79 years old. Ridley Scott is 88. Even Axel Braun is 60 years old. James Cameron is approaching his 72nd birthday already, and he has started planning for the next phase of his career.
Despite the third Avatar movie suffering a drop against the first two, it still made serious money, and in an interview he has given upon receiving the Canadian Governor General Lifetime Achievement Award, he said he still plans to finish all five movies in the franchise if he gets the chance:
I’m still kind of midway in that saga. I have films I want to make outside of that world. But you know that’s not even a story that’s finished for me…Three out of five, and counting.”
Then he said he is open to more collaboration as he enters the next stage of his life, but he has some targets:
“So this is the point where I’m looking at the landscape and asking, ‘What are the other stories I want to tell? How many of them do I need to direct myself versus writing and/or producing with other filmmakers?
And the criterion I’ve literally mapped this out for myself over the last two weeks: I started with, ‘What will do the most good?’ I put that in block letters at the top. And I started looking at all the projects I’m most fond of, asking, ‘How’s this going to improve our condition? How’s that going to make the world better for our kids?’…”
How about asking “What is the best story?” or “What has the potential to be the most entertaining, or exciting?”
Then again, nobody is changing the world with Terminator 9.
