Failure Is an Option, but Fear Is Not 失败是一个选项,但畏惧不是--詹姆斯·卡梅隆

名人励志英语演讲视频：

Failure Is

an Option, but Fear Is Not

失 败

是一个选项，但

畏惧不是

--

詹姆

斯·卡梅隆

Speech to TED February, 2010

关于这场演讲：

James Cam eron

的大笔预算（票房更庞大）的电影创造出想象的世界。在

这个演讲中，

他揭露了自己从小就喜欢奇幻体验的背景：

阅读 科幻小说，

深海潜水，

以及这

一切如何 转变成成功的巨片如《异形二》、《终结者》、《泰坦尼克号》与《阿凡达》。

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 wasn’t in

school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking “samples”——

frogs and snakes and bugs,

and bringing them back, looking at them 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 to mirrored in the world around me,

because what was happening, this was in the late’ 60s, w

e 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 weren’t

video games and 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 author’s 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

——

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 an exotic 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 didn’t 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 in a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn’t see

the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.

Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I’ve spent about 3,000 hours underwater, And 500

hours of that were in submersibles. And I’ve learned that deep ocean environment, and

even the shallow ocean, is so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination.

Nature’s imagination is so boundless compared 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 film making. 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, film making 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 film making. 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 didn’t 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, it’s Arthur Clarke’s 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 leap-frog 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 weren’t 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. You know, I went

and pitched it to the studio as Romeo and Juliet on a ship. It’s 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 that’s why I made the movie. And that’s the truth. Now, the studio

didn’t know that. But I convinced them. I said, “We’re going to dive to the wreck. We’re

going to fil

m it for real. We’ll 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.

Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a rea

lity.

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.

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. 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 can’t get back by yourself. And I thought like, “Wow. I am like living

in a science fiction movie. This is really cool.”

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 couldn’t give me. Because, I could

imagine a creature a

nd we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn’t 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 Tit

anic, I said, “Okay, I’m going to park my day job

as a Hollywood movie maker, and I’m going to go be a full time explorer for a while.” And

so, we started planning these expeditions. And we wound up going to the Bismark, and

exploring it with robotic vehic

les. We went back to the “Titanic” wreck. We took little bots

that we had created that spoolled 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 didn’t

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 I’m

flying a little

robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. When I say, I’m 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 I’ve ever had, be

cause 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

telepresense 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 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 animals. They are

basically aliens right here on Earth. They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. They

don’t survive on sunlight based system the way we do. And so, you’re seeing animals that

are living next to a 500 degree Centigrade water plumes. You think they can’t possibly

exist.

At the same time I was getting very interested

in space science as well, again, it’s 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 to 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. I’d completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan,

as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. And you know, along the way in this journe

y 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 didn’t really learn about leadership unt

il 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 don’t make money at these damn shows. We barely break even. There is no fame

in it. People sort of think I went away between 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? You’re 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 2-3 months at a time.