James Cameron – the Oscar-winning director of Titanic – has an interesting new-ish interview with the Daily Beast. Cameron is currently promoting a documentary called Atlantis Rising, about a group of archeologists searching for (you guessed it) Atlantis. The conversation quickly moved to Cameron’s years of environmental work, his years furthering the technological aspects of filmmaking, and his belief that everyone in the Trump administration is flat-out crazy. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Why the awards shows lately have had bad ratings: “There have been a few times throughout the history of the Oscars where a wildly popular film was well-received, but your typical year the Academy takes the position of: “It is our patrician duty to tell the great unwashed what they should be watching,” and they don’t reward the films that people really want to see—that they’re paying money to go see—and they’re telling them, “Yeah, you think you like that, but what you should be liking is this.” And as long as the Academy sees that as their duty, don’t expect high ratings. Expect a good show, and do that duty, but don’t whine about your ratings. Titanic was a very unusual case. I’m not saying it’s a better film than films before or after, or it was necessarily a better year in general, but it was a film that made a boatload of money and got a lot of nominations. The next time we see that, we’ll see ratings go up. It’s that simple.

Actors don’t like films that are heavy on technology: “There’s definitely a bias. The Academy still has a majority of its members that are actors. Look, I love actors, but that’s how they think—they’re generally skeptical of technology. So when they see a film that’s too dependent on visual effects, they say, oh, that’s not an acting movie…Even though I’ve spent an awful lot of time on scripts and on performance, I still love doing big, visual cinema. I doubt I’ll even get nominated again, but if I did, I’m probably going to lose to a Woody Allen movie. That’s the nature of it. So you don’t try to serve two masters.”

His environmental work: “A lot of my work that’s not specifically on the Avatar films—my activism—is around climate, and sustainability, and sustainable land use, and sustainable agriculture, but climate is number one. Years ago, we sort of spotted the iceberg ahead of us and we called out the order to turn, and we’ve been slowly, slowly, slowly trying to turn this big-ass ship to not hit the iceberg, and then Trump grabbed the tiller and just plunged it right back at the center of the iceberg. So am I worried? Of course. I’m like anyone of good conscience and reasonable intelligence. I think we’re the biggest freakin’ idiot civilization in history right now, and they’ll probably be talking about us 4,000 years from now scratching their heads—like they talk about Atlantis. Who are those guys? What did they do to piss off the gods so much that they’re buried under a hundred feet of mud right now?

Trump has greenlighted Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines: “Oh, I know. And by the way, he nominated a guy to run the EPA [Scott Pruitt] who has eight lawsuits against the EPA, and refuses to recuse himself from those lawsuits! It’s basically the upside-down world right now, and the kind of dialogue coming out of these guys sounds like George Orwell. Alternate facts? There’s no such thing as an alternate fact! These people are insane. But I’m keeping my head down, doing the stuff that I thought I would be doing if Hillary was elected. I’m making my Avatar films, I’m doing my climate work, I’m doing my sustainable agriculture work. You can only do what you can do.

[From The Daily Beast]

“These people are insane.” YES. And he’s also right about how this exact moment in history will be studied 4,000 years from now. Well, I mean, if there are even still human beings and such a thing as “studying history” 4,000 years from now, where earth has been renamed Trumpus and zombies who survived the nuclear holocaust become sentient.

Also: The Daily Beast asks him at the beginning what he thinks about the prevailing theory that in Titanic, Jack could have climbed onto the plank with Rose and they both could have lived. Cameron laughs off the theory and the Mythbusters episode devoted to it, basically saying that Jack would have died from hypothermia no matter what the scenario. I think I agree with that?

Photos courtesy of WENN.