PART ONE: Before The Terminator, before Titanic, before Avatar, James Cameron was a college dropout driving trucks and dreaming big. He was fuelled by a stubborn belief that “why not” was reason enough to try. In Part One of this two-part conversation, James sits down with Bruna Papandrea to retrace his early years: the physicist-in-training with a rebellious streak, the kid building submarines out of TV boxes, and the young man whose father did not believe filmmaking was a real career.

We follow the winding road from tool machinist to special effects prodigy to the moment everything fell apart when he was fired from his first directing job on Piranha II after only a few days on set. Broke, sleeping on a friend’s couch and questioning everything, James thought he had reached rock bottom. What happened next would change film history. This is the unlikely beginning of one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.