By any financial measure, James Cameron is the most successful director in the history of Hollywood. That’s not an exaggeration, because Cameron’s Titanic was the highest grossing movie of all time for over a decade before it was surpassed by his next film, Avatar. Even Cameron’s follow-up, Avatar: The Way of Water, landed at No. 3 on the list of the highest grossing movies behind Avengers: Endgame. With that resume in mind, it’s easy to see why Cameron bristles at naysayers who don’t like the dialogue in his films.
“I don’t cringe on any of the dialogue, but I have a lower cringe factor than, apparently, a lot of people do around the dialogue that I write,” Cameron told Empire Magazine. “You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films–then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness.”
Cameron is unquestionably a gifted visual storyteller, but there have definitely been some shaky bits of dialogue in his films, especially during the most-over dramatic scenes in Titanic. It’s not disingenuous to say that Cameron is better at some aspects of filmmaking than others. But he’s not wrong about his track record. Audiences have clearly responded to his movies in unprecedented ways.
The one thing that Cameron did admit to Empire is that he’s a little embarrassed about the production values of The Terminator, which he considers to be his directorial debut.
“I don’t think of it as some Holy Grail, that’s for sure,” said Cameron. “I look at it now and there are parts of it that are pretty cringeworthy, and parts of it that are like, ‘Yeah, we did pretty well for the resources we had available… Just the production value, you know?”
Cameron’s next movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash, will be in theaters December 19, 2025.
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