The movie, Cameron says, is about family: Many of the main characters from the first film are back, but older and with kids to take care of. It’s the first feature Cameron has directed in 13 years, and the first of four planned Avatar sequels. In December, Disney will release Avatar: The Way of Water. “There’s plenty of dangerous things that I won’t go near because they’re dangerous, but they have a randomness factor to them,” Cameron said. Sometimes, Cameron seems like a man in search of a problem to solve, or a deadly experience to survive, but he is emphatic that there is a purpose to the challenges he takes on. “The man was born with an explorer’s instincts and capacity,” Daniel Goldin, the former head of NASA, told me. But he is also a scientist-a camera he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars, attached to the Mars rover-and an adventurer, and not in the dilettante billionaire sense when Cameron sets out to do something, it gets done. It would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie, which he helped invent with his debut, The Terminator, and then reinvent with his second, Aliens it would be accurate to add that he has directed two of the three top-grossing films in history, in Avatar (number one) and Titanic (number three).

It is perhaps illustrative of Cameron’s gifts as a filmmaker that even his most determined rivals will admit that Cameron has written and directed some of the most successful films of all time.

The Sleep Solution by A.J. Cameron