James Cameron Says Filming the New Secrets of the Penguins Documentary Was 'Literally Survival'

A pair of penguins huddle together on the vast Antarctic tundra and prepare to make a crucial exchange. Mother penguin lowers her feet to reveal an egg tucked within the folds of her feathers, which slowly rolls onto the frigid ground between them. Father penguin has been training for this. He springs into action, using his long, skinny beak to gather the egg up into his own feathers for warmth. The entire swap only takes a matter of seconds. Any longer, and the gestating baby inside the egg will freeze and die.

For James Cameron, executive producer of National Geographic’s new miniseries Secrets of the Penguins, it’s moments like these that give audiences a true glimpse into the unfamiliar, almost alien world that these emperor penguins call home.

“They're living right on the edge of what is possible in nature, in the harshest environment in the world,” Cameron told IGN.

Whether it's the deepest depths of the Earth’s oceans or the dense jungles of Pandora, Cameron has a knack for exploring otherworldly environments. It’s a talent that he says has never been more in demand in an era when the majority of humans live in cities, which may explain why we’re so drawn to stories set in extremely organic environments.

“We're living in a decade now where more of the world is urban than is not, for the first time in human history,” Cameron said. “We're getting pulled away from nature, but I think we innately feel connected to it.”

Through Secrets of the Penguins (the latest in a series of documentaries Cameron’s worked on for National Geographic, including Secrets of the Whales and Secrets of the Octopus), we get a fresh look into how one of our greatest living directors uses imagery and storytelling to immerse the viewer in fantastical worlds. And in a conversation with IGN, Cameron breaks down a few of those techniques, while also sharing some new details about the future of the Avatar franchise and his evolving thoughts on generative AI.

Filming in Antarctica: ‘A Whole Other Level of Commitment’

“Growing up in Canada, I'm certainly no stranger to cold,” Cameron said with a smile.

While the Ontario-born director hasn’t spent as much time climbing icebergs as he has diving to the depths of the ocean, he still has some experience exploring Antarctica.

“I've seen the emperor penguins,” he said. “I've been underwater with emperors.”

This gives Cameron a solid understanding of the formidable conditions the documentary's crew (including series host Bertie Gregory) had to put up with to get all this footage. The team stayed in Antarctica throughout the winter, when the average temperature is a brutal -56 degrees Fahrenheit and travel to and from the South Pole is extremely limited.

“That's a whole other level of commitment,” Cameron said. “That's literally survival.

“I got to talk to the winter-over team before and after,” he continued. “Afterwards was, frankly, to see if they had gone completely crazy, as some people do, in my experience with winter-over crews. But they did great.”

Once the Antarctic winter was over and the crew had returned home, it was Cameron’s turn to step in. He and his colleagues combed through the footage to find interesting moments, visuals, and narrative threads that could immerse them in the documentary’s foreign setting.

Whether it’s a blockbuster sci-fi movie or a National Geographic documentary, Cameron excels at drawing viewers into whatever world he’s decided to depict. And for the director, the most important factor comes down to something that may seem obvious on the surface but speaks to his lifelong obsession with using technology to get the perfect shot by any means necessary.

“It’s the quality of the imagery,” Cameron said. “With the slow motion and the long lenses and the drones, it's putting you right in there with these creatures and their behaviors. You feel like you're there.”

Of course, great visuals only go so far without a story to keep us engaged. “The throughline between fictional films and documentaries is storytelling,” Cameron said. “How do you get inside the head of your characters?

In a movie like Avatar or The Terminator, that part is easy — just write it into the script. In a documentary about penguins, however, crafting a narrative out of hundreds of hours of footage can be a bit trickier. Secrets of the Penguins pulls this off by playing up the most human-like behavior of these creatures, with narration from Blake Lively instilling even more emotion into each gorgeous shot.

At times, Cameron wonders if the series goes too far in this sense, transforming the penguins into something they’re not so audiences can more easily relate to them. But when you watch the series, it’s easy to understand why we do relate to these funny, flightless birds.

“Do they have emotions like us? We don't know,” Cameron said. “Sometimes they sure act like they do in terms of their mating strategies and their parenting strategies and their survival strategies. We try to find the story, but we have to be careful about not overly anthropomorphizing our subject, because that's misleading scientifically.”

Ultimately, even if he needs a bit of movie magic to give these penguins a story that will keep viewers interested, Cameron thinks it’s worth it as long as he can provide a unique experience along the way. After all, The Secrets of the Penguins may take us to some of the most extreme locations on Earth, but the goal is to bring the sense of awe that Cameron’s work always manages to evoke.

“A show like this slams you back into that kind of childlike wonder that you had when you were a kid and maybe it was a frog or a fish or a butterfly that fascinated you,” he said.

Cameron on the Future of AI and Avatar

Cameron clearly has a soft spot for these penguins, which begs the question: Do penguins exist in his Avatar universe? When asked, the director offers a hint at where the blockbuster movie franchise is headed in the future.

“We haven't explored all the biomes of Pandora yet,” Cameron said. “Years ago, I wrote Avatar 4 and 5. I wrote them all at once. So I know exactly where the story goes, and we will see cold climates, the equivalent of Antarctic or Arctic climates. Pandora is a complete world, and there are many different biomes — desert and polar and temperate, and so on. We'll see a lot more of that as we go along.”

The future of the Avatar movies may also rely on AI technology, which Cameron recently said he wants to use to lower the cost of blockbuster filmmaking (ideally without losing any employees). He’s been vague on the specifics of what that means, but told IGN that he sees generative AI as more of a tool to help human artists than a cheap replacement for them.

“It can help with world building,” Cameron said, “but it basically always just regurgitates images and thoughts that other human beings have already had. So I don't see it as the tip of the spear. I see it as more of a convenience.”

He adds that while artificial intelligence is no match for the human imagination (“I think the human imagination is unparalleled”), he does see some ways in which AI can help in the creative process.

“I think that GenAI can assist quite remarkably and do combinations that you might not have thought,” Cameron said, “but it still needs to be directed and controlled.

“It goes back to storytelling,” he continued. “You can't just come up with one great image or 10 great images. How do those images relate to each other? How do you build a narrative around characters that you care about?”

For Cameron, who recently joined the board of directors for Stability AI in an effort to learn more about the technology, everything he does comes down to one simple thing: “curiosity.” It’s that same motivation that got him involved in Secrets of the Penguins and its team of intrepid documentarians in the first place.

“I want to see what they're going to bring back,” he said.

In this case, the footage of these penguins from Antarctica speaks for itself, even if Cameron and his team also did their part to bring these adorable creatures and their inhospitable home to life.

“I just think they're amazing,” Cameron said of the emperor penguins. “They live in the absolute harshest conditions of any bird on the planet.”

Secrets of the Penguins is the latest installment of Nat Geo’s Secrets Of franchise. It premiered on April 20 on National Geographic and all episodes are streaming beginning April 21 on Disney+ and Hulu.

(Top image of James Cameron: Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)