勵志英語演講：可以失敗，不能畏懼

關於這場演講：James Cameron的大筆預算(票房更龐大)的電影創造出想象的世界。在這個演講中，他揭露了自己從小就喜歡奇幻體驗的背景：閱讀科幻小說，深海潛水，以及這一切如何轉變成成功的巨片如《異形二》、《終結者》、《泰坦尼克號》與《阿凡達》。

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, we 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 film 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 reality. 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 and 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 Titanic, 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 vehicles. 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, because 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 journey 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 until 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.

And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you’ve done a task that you can’t explain to someone else. When you come back to the shore and you say, “We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human performance aspects of working at sea, you can’t explain it to people. It’s that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect.

So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was Avatar, I tried to apply that same principle of leadership which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. And it really changed the dynamic. So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory doing Avatar, coming up with new technology that didn’t exist before. Tremendously exciting. Tremendously challenging. And we became a family, over a four and half year period. And it completely changed how I do movies. So, people have commented on how, well, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora. To me it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that.

So, what can we synthesize out of all this? You know, what are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. It’s the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. I have young film makers come up to me and say, “Give me some advice for doing this.” And I say, “Don’t put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you, don’t do it to yourself, and don’t bet against yourself. And take risks.”

NASA has this phrase that they like: “Failure is not an option.” But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it’s a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. So, that’s the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you’re doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you.

可以失敗，不能畏懼

詹姆斯•卡梅隆

TED大會上的演講

20xx年2月

在我成長過程中，科幻小說一直是我的精神食糧。高中時我每天搭巴士上下學，單程要一小時。坐公車時，我總是沉浸在科幻小說裏，彷彿被帶入另一個世界，書中講述的一個個故事極大地滿足了我無休無止的好奇心。

事實上，在課餘時間，我常常在好奇心的驅使下，去徒步旅行，鑽進樹林去採集“標本”——青蛙、蛇、昆蟲之類，把它們帶回家，放在顯微鏡下觀察。我是個真正的科學怪人，總是想盡可能的去了解這個世界，去揭示它可能存在的極限。

我非常熱愛科幻小說，因爲它們似乎就是現實的寫照，書中的一切都確實發生在我們身邊，60年代末期，人類登上了月球，探索了深海。電影攝影師雅克.格斯特讓我們在電視上看到了神奇的海洋生物，向人類展示了從未想象到的動物，竟和奇妙的水下世界。這似乎與科幻小說中的構想遙相呼應。

我還是個畫家，能繪畫，能創作。那時的我接觸不到電視遊戲，缺乏登峯造極的CG電影技術，連多媒體領域的素材庫都沒有，所以我不得不在腦海中臆造這些形象。就像孩子們讀書時會想象書中的場景那樣，我們讀小說時，作者所描繪的影像就會腦海中不斷放映。這些影像一出現，我就會把它們畫下來，於是我開始畫外星人、外星世界、機器人、宇宙飛船等等。老師不止一次在數學課上逮到我在課本後面亂塗亂畫，因爲我得給我的想象力開啓一扇讓其肆意奔涌的閘門。

然而一件有趣的事——雅克.格斯特的電視節目的播出，着實讓我興奮不已，我相信地球上就存在一個外星世界。雖然我可能永遠無法進入這個世界，因爲這確實不現實。但是我能遊歷水下世界，它就在地球上，富饒又充滿異星情調，就像我讀了科幻小說後所幻想的那樣。

所以15歲時，我決定成爲一個潛水員,去探索神祕的海洋。唯一的問題是，我生活在加拿大的一個小山村，距離最近的海也有600英里。但我沒有因此氣餒，而是纏着父親，而是纏着父親，直到他同意讓我參加在邊境紐約州布法羅市——需要從我家穿過美加國界線——的一個潛水培訓班。於是在一個寒冬，我在布法羅基督教青年會的一個泳池裏獲得了潛水證書。然而，直到兩年後，我們全家搬到了加利福尼亞，我才見到了真正的大海，進行真正的潛水。

從那時算起到現在的40年間，我在海底潛水共約3000小時，其中500小時是在潛水艇裏度過的。無論是深海還是淺海環境，大海都豐富多彩，充滿奧祕，超乎我們想象。比起人類的想象力，自然的想象力更加浩瀚。直到今天，每次下潛時，我仍舊對眼中的海洋世界充滿敬畏，而我與大海的不解情緣仍在延續着，上演着。

但成年後，我並沒有以潛水爲職業，而是選擇了電影攝製作爲自己的事業。孩提時，我就喜歡畫漫畫，畫很多東西。我喜歡講故事，畫圖畫，而要把它們結合起來，電影攝製是再合適不過的工作了。電影攝製將圖片和故事有機結合，並賦予它們更深刻的意義。當然，我選來拍成電影的都是科幻故事，比如《終結者》、《異型》、《深淵》。 拍攝《深淵》時，我把自己對水下世界的愛、對潛水活動的愛融入其中，把對這兩件事的激情融合到了一起。

拍攝《深淵》時，又出現了些有趣的事：我們要塑造一個水狀的生物，爲了解決這一特效上的問題，我們使用了“計算機生成動畫”技術，即CG。電影史上第一個軟表面的電腦繪製形象在此技術下誕生了。雖然這部電影沒讓公司賺到一分錢，還差點虧本，我還是得說，我看到了令人驚奇的一幕，全世界的觀衆都爲這種像魔法一般的新技術神魂顛倒。

根據亞瑟•克拉克定律——任何非常先進的技術，初看都與魔法無異。很多觀衆都像是看到了神奇的魔法。這讓我非常興奮。我想CG技術也應該用到電影藝術中去。所以，在下一部電影《終結者2》中，我們把這種技術又推進了一步。和工業光魔特效製作公司一起，創造了一個液態金屬人。這部電影能否大放異彩就要看特效了。事實證明，特效不負衆望。我們又一次施展了魔法，觀衆們依舊爲之瘋狂。儘管這部電影還是沒讓我們沒賺到什麼錢。

這兩次經歷是一條分界線，對電影大師們來說，這意味着一個全新的、充滿想象與創造的世界即將誕生。於是我和好友斯坦•溫斯頓——拍攝前幾部電影時的首席特效化妝和角色設計師——創立了“數字領域”公司。這個名字意味着，我們要跳過光學影印模擬製作過程直接進入數字電影製作。實際上，我們也確實是這麼做的，這使得我們在一段時間內有了一定的競爭優勢。

雖然我們確實已經組建了公司進行造型設計，但在90年代中期，我發現我們有些落後了。 我寫了《阿凡達》這部電影，想要以此大力推動視覺效果和CG效果，用CG生成具有真實人類情感的角色，完全用CG詮釋主要角色和世界。但這電影不得不延期拍攝，因爲公司員工告訴我，我們一時半會還沒有能力做到這點。

於是我把《阿凡達》擱到一邊，轉而製作了另一部電影，這部電影主要描述了一艘巨輪——“泰坦尼克號”——的沉沒。 我告訴電影製片方，我把它定位爲巨輪上的《羅密歐與朱麗葉》，一部關於愛情的電影，就像羅密歐與朱麗葉的故事一樣悽美動人。而實際是因爲我想潛入海底尋找真正的“泰坦尼克號”的殘骸，所以我纔要做這部電影。但製片方並不知道這一真相。爲說服他們，我說：“我們要潛入海底，尋找真正的“泰坦尼克號”，這樣可以拍攝真實的畫面。如果把這個片段用在首映式上，會引起很大的轟動，也會有良好的市場反響的。”我真的說服了製片方組建了一支探險隊呢。

雖然這聽起來有些瘋狂，但這就回到了“想象創造現實”的主題。因爲我們確實創造了現實，6個月後，我乘一艘俄羅斯潛艇，在北大西洋2.5英里深的水下，從觀察艙裏看到了真實的“泰坦尼克號”，不是電影裏的，也不是高清屏幕上的，而是真實的“泰坦尼克號”。

《泰坦尼克號》的拍攝着實讓我興奮。我們做了很多準備工作，搭建相機、設置燈光及各種設備。但令我震驚的是，這次深海拍攝就像是一次太空任務，需要尖端的科技和周全的計劃。我乘坐潛水艇潛入深海，那裏漆黑又充滿危險，如果無法靠自己返回水面，其他人也無法開展營救工作。我想：“這就像生活在科幻電影中似的，真是太酷了。”

不過，我真的熱衷於海底探險。當然，探求科學的那種好奇心纔是最重要的，科學需要冒險，需要好奇心，也需要想象力。只是在好萊塢拍電影是無法體驗到這些經歷的。我能夠想象出一個生物併爲它創造出視覺效果。但是透過潛艇窗戶看到的那些生物，這是我永遠想象不到的。在隨後的探險中，我在深海熱泉裏看到了一些無人見過、無人知曉的生物，實際上，我們看到它們並拍下照片時，它們還沒有科學記載。

這一切讓我感到非常震撼，我必須做的更多。爲了滿足自己的好奇心，我做了一個決定。 在《泰坦尼克號》成功後，我決定暫別好萊塢導演這一主業，做一段時間全職探險家。於是我們開始計劃一些探險，一行人興致勃勃的去了俾斯麥海域，在自動探測車幫助下，對這一海域展開了探索。然後我們重回“泰坦尼克號”的殘骸We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic.我們決定進到“泰坦尼克號”內部做一次內部調查，這是史無前例的，從沒有人看過沉船內部，因爲他們無計可施，然而我們想出了辦法。

我坐在潛水艇裏，到了“泰坦尼克號”的甲板上，看着這些厚木板，感覺這裏很像當年船上的樂隊演奏的地方。我操控着自動探測儀在穿廊間穿梭，操作儀器時，我的思想像是跟着它走了。我感覺我自己真的到了泰坦尼克號，這艘遇難船的內部。這種似曾相識的感覺像夢一樣，從未有過。假如我想轉彎，沒等探測器的燈光照到那，我就能知道接下來會看到什麼。這是因爲還在拍電影的時候，我就在“泰坦尼克號”的模型上工作了數月，而那個模型恰恰是根據它的設計圖製作的精確複製品。

這是一次不同尋常的體驗。這次遠程控制的經歷讓我清楚的認識到，我們可以把自己的意識注入這些機器化身中，它們是另一種形式上的生命存在。這種體驗意義重大。如管中窺豹，可見未來一斑，或許我們馬上就能用機器生命體進行科學探索，或者爲未來的人類做各種事情，只要是我這個科幻小說迷能想到的。

在這些探險之後，我開始真正欣賞那些海底生物，比如我們在深海熱泉所見到的那些神奇生物。這些生物雖生活在地球上，但基本可以稱爲外星生物。它們生活在一個化學合成的環境中。它們無法像我們一樣在太陽爲生命基礎的體系下生存。在海底，還能看到生活在500攝氏度水汽下的動物。你無法相信它們能在那生存。

與此同時，因爲從小受科幻小說影響，我對太空科學也非常有興趣。我迫不及待的加入了空間社，真正參與到NASA中，同諮詢委員會一起，策劃真實的太空任務，我們前往俄羅斯，參加前天體生物醫學會的研討等等諸如此類的任務，讓宇航員帶着3D攝像機進入國際空間站。這令人着迷，但我急切的想讓這些太空專家同我們一起潛入深海，天體生物學家，行星專家，都對特殊環境充滿興趣，帶他們去深海熱泉，觀察深海生物，取一些樣本，測試儀器等等。

所以我們既是在拍紀錄片，也在研究科學，更確切的說是在研究空間科學。I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real.在探索發現的旅途中，我學到了很多，不僅僅是科學知識，還有領導能力。很多人認爲導演就是領導者，像船長或者其他領導者一樣。

沒進行這些探險以前，我並不真正瞭解領導力的內涵。因爲有時我會問自己，我到底在這幹什麼呢?爲什麼要做這些節目? 我從中得到了什麼? 我們並沒有從這些見鬼的節目中賺到錢，還差點破產。我也沒有賺到名聲。很多人以爲我拍了《泰坦尼克號》、《阿凡達》後，就在沙灘上修磨着指甲，享受生活呢。 其實，我拍了這些電影，這些記錄片，只換來了爲數不多的觀衆。

得不到名聲，等不到榮耀，也得不到金錢，我問自己，你在做什麼呢?其實只是爲了任務本身，是爲了挑戰——海洋就是現在最具挑戰性的環境了;是爲了探索發現時的驚喜;也爲了一個小而緊密的團隊所產生的那種不可思議的團隊感。我們這10到12人在一起共事多年。有時要在海里一起工作兩三個月。

在這個團隊中，我發現最重要的東西就是互相尊重。每個人做的工作都無以言表。我回到海邊告訴其他人，我們必須這樣做，用光學纖維，用這種技術那種技術，各種技術，戰勝一切困難，考慮演員在海里的表現。這種互相配合並肩作戰的默契是無法言明的，這些事情只有警察或者參加過戰鬥的人經歷後才能明白，他們知道這是無法向他人表達的。我們必須建立起這種默契，建立起互相尊重的默契。

所以，我開始拍攝接下來的電影《阿凡達》時，試着運用了這種領導原則，我尊重我的團隊，他們也很尊重我。這讓團隊變得很有活力。所以，這次我也帶了一支小團隊，在未經探索的地區拍攝《阿凡達》，創造前所未有的新技術，這非常有意思，也頗具有挑戰性。在這四年半多的時間裏，我們就像一家人一樣。這完全改變了我拍電影的方式。 有人評論說，卡梅隆只是把一些海洋生物放到了潘多拉星球上。但我來說，建立這種互相尊重的默契不僅僅是做商業電影的基本法則，而是過程本身改變了事情的結果。

我能從這些經歷中總結出什麼，又能學到什麼?首先要有好奇心，這是你擁有的最強大的東西;其次要有想象力，這是你展現現實的力量;第三：尊重團隊，這是比世界上一切榮譽都更爲重要。 有不少年輕電影導演向我討教成功經驗，我告訴他們：“不要作繭自縛。別人會束縛你，但你自己不要作繭自縛。不要說自己不行，要敢於承擔風險。”

NASA裏流行一句話：“只能成功，不能失敗”但是，在藝術領域和探索發現時是允許失敗的，因爲這是需要運氣的。只有冒險，創新，才能成功。你必須願意承擔風險，這就是我給你們的建議，無論你做什麼，可以失敗，不能畏懼。