Avatar: The Way Of Water must be the third or fourth highest-grossing film ever to break even

James Cameron is back, and so are James Cameron interviews. This latest one from GQ is a humdinger, offering revelations about a director known for innovation, short tempers, and, perhaps, more confidence than any mortal man has ever had. How confident? Well, confident enough to spend the last 15 years making the sequels to the highest-grossing movie ever. The Avatar series is exactly “very fucking” expensive to make, according to Cameron, who considers The Way Of Water “the worst business case in movie history.” Ultimately, the movie would need to be “the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history” to break even. This means Avatar: The Way Of Water would need to outgross both Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Cameron’s inaugural highest-grossing movie ever made, Titanic.

Thankfully, Cameron believes wholeheartedly in his decisions and has good reason for doing so. Aside from being “a competition-grade shooter” who was trained by “the guy who taught Keanu Reeves how to be John Wick,” nothing will stand in the way of his dreams of Pandora, complete with “hippie bullshit,” which one sorry executive asked him to cut out. Another suggested he shorten the film after a pre-release screening. Cameron responded by predicting the movie would make “in caps ALL THE MONEY.” He recalls the exchange:

“ ‘I think this movie is going to make all the fucking money. And when it does, it’s going to be too late for you to love the film. The time for you to love the movie is today. So I’m not asking you to say something that you don’t feel, but just know that I will always know that no matter how complimentary you are about the movie in the future when it makes all the money’—and that’s exactly what I said, in caps, ALL THE MONEY, not some of the money, all the fucking money. I said, ‘You can’t come back to me and compliment the film or chum along and say, ‘Look what we did together.’ You won’t be able to do that.’ At that point, that particular studio executive flipped out and went bug shit on me. And I told him to get the fuck out of my office. And that’s where it was left.

Cameron first thought of the idea for Avatar at 19. It came to him in a dream, he says, and he drew pictures of what he saw. Illustrating the “fiber-optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it” saved him a fortune in legal fees.

It was all in the dream. I woke up super excited and I actually drew it. So I actually have a drawing. It saved us from about 10 lawsuits. Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head. And it turned out there were 10 or 11 of them. And so I pointed at this drawing I did when I was 19, when I was going to Fullerton Junior College, and said, ‘See this? See these glowing trees? See this glowing lizard that spins around, that’s orange? See the purple moss?’ And everybody went away.

His instincts have led him this far, and it’s the only reason he’s still with us. He once turned down a trip on a space shuttle because an orbital flight wasn’t exactly what he wanted to do. The guy wanted to experience space for a while and witness the “human drama” of people living in space, so he declined the loop around the earth. He made the right call. “The shuttle mission I refused?” he said. “It was the Columbia. I fucking saved my own life by choosing the higher path!”

We will never doubt James Cameron again. Avatar: The Way Of Water opens on December 15.