Cameron documentary searches for Atlantis
TORONTO — James Cameron is on the line from southern California, taking a rare break from work on his four upcoming Avatar sequels, which he’s shooting concurrently.
The three-time Oscar-winning Titanic writer-director says he’s “charging full-tilt into production” on the followups to his 2009 smash Avatar.
But he’s also carved out time to make and promote the TV documentary Atlantis Rising, because he’s deeply passionate about the subject matter.
Debuting Sunday on Discovery in Canada, the special sees Cameron teaming up with Emmywinning, Israeli-Canadian filmmaker/journalist Simcha Jacobovici to search for archeological evidence of the fabled lost city of Atlantis and its civilization.
“Stepping way back on it and looking at Atlantis as an enduring myth that intrigues us, to me it’s a lot like Titanic,” says Cameron, who was born in Kapuskasing, Ont., and grew up in Niagara Falls.
“Titanic is a story about hubris — it’s a story of humans who thought they could dominate nature, that they were all-powerful, that their technology would save them and protect them and so on — and it turned out to be a bubble of delusion, if you will. And when they hit that iceberg they got pulled up short.
“Well, the Atlanteans perished in some catastrophic way and in the Greek mindset, that would have meant that they challenged the gods, they defied the gods, they got too big for their britches, basically.”
The filmmaker behind such hits as The Terminator, Terminator 2 and Aliens sees parallels between the story of Atlantis and the world today.
“Are people fascinated by these kind of apocalyptic stories because they see us heading for the same kind of precipice?” he says. “I certainly do, with climate change. I look at the challenges that are in front of us and I see us going the wrong direction.
“At a point when we should be linking hands internationally as a global community to solve these kind of existential threats, we’re not. We’re isolating and we’re breaking apart these international communities and I see us going the wrong direction.
“So maybe we should pay attention to Atlantis and Titanic and the fall of the Roman Empire and these great stories from our past. Because does history repeat itself? If it doesn’t repeat exactly, it certainly rhymes with what happened in the past.”
Atlantis Rising marks the third collaboration between Cameron and Jacobovici, after the documentaries The Exodus Decoded and The Lost Tomb of Jesus.
Using Greek philosopher Plato’s description of Atlantis as a treasure map, Jacobovici heads out with a team of experts and cutting-edge technology across the Mediterranean to look for clues on land and underwater.