James Cameron

Cameron grew up in rural Ontario reading science fiction and building homemade rockets and gliders with his brother before the family moved to California, where he worked as a machinist and truck driver while teaching himself special-effects techniques by studying textbooks at the local library. He talked his way into a low-budget job at Roger Corman's New World Pictures, quickly rising from model-builder to art director to, within a few years, feature director.

Cameron became the genre's great engineer-poet: relentless machines, tough heroines, and set pieces built with watchmaker precision. He wrote the first Terminator script while feverish and hospitalized with food poisoning after being fired from his directorial debut, reportedly sold the finished script for one dollar on the condition that he be allowed to direct it himself, and used the film's unexpected success to build a run of sequels and original productions that redefined big-budget action filmmaking.

He went on to direct two of the highest-grossing films in cinema history in Titanic and Avatar, and remains as well known for pushing camera, effects and 3D technology forward as for the films themselves — he has personally engineered deep-sea submersible and camera systems, and became a licensed submersible pilot who has dived solo to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point in Earth's oceans.