“He was never offered the part,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published Dec. 18. “I can’t remember if I sent him the script or not. I don’t think I did?”
Though the 71-year-old recalled a phone conversation with Damon about working together in a general sense, Cameron continued, “But he was never offered. There was never a deal. We never talked about the character. We never got to that level.”
As for Damon’s 2023 suggestion that he was offered 10 percent of Avatar’s box office income if he’d taken on the leading role? Cameron once again called foul.
“Now what he’s done is he’s extrapolated ‘I get 10 percent of the gross on all my films,’” he said. “And if, in his mind, that’s what it would’ve taken for him to do Avatar, then it wouldn’t have happened. Trust me on that.”
Not only has Cameron often opted to respond head on when his name is brought up, but his reputation has preceded him over the years as an often difficult and demanding director.
Even Kate Winslet—star of Titanic alongside Leonardo DiCaprio—told the New York Times of their time working on the 1999 film, “Being really honest, there were moments when he would yell, and there were moments that were difficult for people.”
But while Winslet will be the first to admit that these days, Cameron is “a different Jim,” there are still many a hot take the director has left in his wake. Read on for more.
In 2017, Cameron called out the positive response to director Patty Jenkin’s Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot.
"All of the self-congratulatory back-patting Hollywood's been doing over Wonder Woman has been so misguided," he shared with The Guardian. "She's an objectified icon, and it's just male Hollywood doing the same old thing. I'm not saying I didn't like the movie but, to me, it's a step backwards."
Comparing the superhero to his iconic Terminator character, he continued, "Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon. She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit. And to me, [the benefit of characters like Sarah] is so obvious. I mean, half the audience is female!"
Jenkins, for her part, called Cameron’s critique in a message shared to social media “unsurprising as, though he is a great filmmaker, he is not a woman.”
One of fans’ longest frustrations with perhaps Cameron’s most beloved film is the simple fact that, to many Titanic viewers’ eyes, that door could have held both Rose and Jack. Cameron’s response to those still lamenting why Jack had to die?
“The answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies," he told Vanity Fair in 2017. "Obviously it was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him."
He added, “Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless. The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down. It's called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons."
In 2024, German director Roland Emmerich—who says he was once attached to Cameron’s attempts at remaking 1966’s Fantastic Voyage—called Cameron “overbearing.”
As for Cameron’s response? “Damn right” he’s overbearing, the Aliens director emphasized to The Hollywood Reporter, “When it’s a project where I’ve contributed to the writing, I might actually have an opinion on it.”
“I actually don’t even remember talking to Roland Emmerich about Fantastic,” he continued. “I remember the other directors that we worked with for months on end trying to develop that project. If I talked to Roland, it was for two minutes. I have a pretty good memory and I don’t remember that at all.”
When J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released in 2015, Cameron held the film to a high standard against the original six movies directed by George Lucas.
“I have to say that I felt that George's group of six films had more innovative visual imagination, and this film was more a retrenchment to things you had seen before and characters you had seen before," he said of the blockbuster, which, at the time, was the third highest-grossing film ever behind Cameron’s own Avatar and Titanic. "It took a few baby steps forward with new characters. So, for me, the jury is out. I want to see where they go with it."
Cameron’s Avatar franchise is among Hollywood’s longest project, with the fifth and final movie scheduled for a 2031 release date—22 years after the first.
The length of the project prompted one Reddit user to ask, “Anyone else feel like it’s an unfortunate waste of talent that James Cameron will [spend] 35+ years on Avatar?”
Cameron, firmly, does not. As he told The Hollywood Reporter in December 2025, “I’m feeling fulfilled as an artist, and when [those critical fans] become filmmakers, they can make those types of decisions for themselves. Or just stay the f–k out of it.”
“It’s my decision, not yours,” he added. “It’s like saying, ‘Gee, I wish she wasn’t married to the same guy for so long.’ It’s none of your business.”
In 2013, Amy Poehler joked on the Golden Globes stage that the three years Kathryn Bigelow spent married to Cameron were similar to the torture depicted in Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty. In 2025, Cameron slammed the quip as “ignorant dig” to The New York Times.
Noting the ceremony was “an event which is supposed to be a celebration of cinema and filmmakers, not a roast,” he added, “I’m pretty thick-skinned, and happy to be the butt of a good-natured joke, but that went too far.”
Despite Matt Damon’s claims that he turned down the opportunity to portray Jake Sully in Avatar, Cameron would loudly beg to differ.
“He was never offered the part,” Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter in December 2025. “I can’t remember if I sent him the script or not. I don’t think I did?”
He added, “There was never a deal. We never talked about the character. We never got to that level. It was simply an availability issue.”
As for Damon’s claim he would have been offered 10% of the box office profits, Cameron added, “if, in his mind, that’s what it would’ve taken for him to do Avatar, then it wouldn’t have happened. Trust me on that.”
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