James Cameron

His paternal great-great-great-grandfather emigrated from Balquhidder, Scotland, in 1825.

Cameron spent summers on his grandfather's farm in southern Ontario.

He attended Stamford Collegiate in Niagara Falls.

At age 17, Cameron and his family moved from Chippawa to Brea, California.

He attended Sonora High School and then moved to Brea Olinda High School.

Classmates recalled that he was not a sportsman but instead enjoyed building things that "either went up into the air or into the deep".

James Francis Cameron (born August 16, 1954) is a Canadian filmmaker.

He is a major figure in the post-New Hollywood era, and one of the industry's most innovative filmmakers.

He often uses novel technologies with a classical filmmaking style.

James Francis Cameron was born on August 16, 1954, in Kapuskasing, Ontario, to Philip Cameron, an electrical engineer, and Shirley (Lowe), an artist and nurse.

He is the first of five children, with two brothers and two sisters.

After high school, Cameron enrolled at Fullerton College, a community college in 1973 to study physics.

He switched subjects to English, but left the college at the end of 1974.

Cameron worked odd jobs, including as a truck driver and a high school janitor, drank beer, smoked cannabis and did a lot of LSD, but wrote in his free time.

During this period, he learned about special effects by reading other students' work on "optical printing, or front screen projection, or dye transfers, anything that related to film technology" at the USC library.

After the excitement of seeing Star Wars in 1977, Cameron quit his job as a truck driver to enter the film industry.

Cameron's directing career began in 1978.

After borrowing money from a consortium of dentists, he learned to direct, write and produce his first short film, Xenogenesis (1978) with a friend.

Learning as they went, Cameron said he felt like a doctor doing his first surgical procedure.

Cameron was hired as the special effects director for the sequel to Piranha (1978), titled Piranha II: The Spawning in 1982.

The original director, Miller Drake, left the project due to creative differences with producer Ovidio Assonitis.

Shot in Rome, Italy and on Grand Cayman, the film gave Cameron the opportunity to become director for a major film for the first time.

Cameron later said that it did not feel like his first film due to power-struggles with Assonitis.

Upon release of Piranha II: The Spawning, critics were not impressed; author Tim Healey called it "a marvellously bad movie which splices clichés from every conceivable source".

He then served as a production assistant for Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979).

While educating himself about filmmaking techniques, Cameron started a job as a miniature model maker at Roger Corman Studios.

He was soon employed as an art director for the science-fiction film Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

He carried out the special effects for John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981), served as production designer for Galaxy of Terror (1981), and consulted on the design for Android (1982).

He first gained recognition for writing and directing The Terminator (1984) and found further success with Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True Lies (1994), as well as Avatar (2009) and its sequels.

He directed, wrote, co-produced, and co-edited Titanic (1997), winning three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing.

He is a recipient of various other industry accolades, and three of his films have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Cameron co-founded the production companies Lightstorm Entertainment, Digital Domain, and Earthship Productions.

In addition to filmmaking, he is a National Geographic sea tourist and has produced many documentaries on the subject, including Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005).

Cameron has also contributed to underwater filming and remote vehicle technologies and helped create the digital 3D Fusion Camera System.

Three of Cameron's films are amongst the top four highest-grossing films of all time; Avatar (2009), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) and Titanic (1997) are the highest, third-highest and fourth-highest-grossing films of all time, respectively.

Cameron directed the first film to gross over $1 billion, the first two films to gross over $2 billion, and is the only director to have had three films gross over $2 billion.

In 2010, Time named Cameron one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Cameron is also an environmentalist and runs several sustainability businesses.

In 2012, Cameron became the first person to do a solo descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Earth's ocean, in the Deepsea Challenger submersible.

Cameron's films have grossed over $8 billion worldwide, making him the second-highest-grossing film director of all time.