James Cameron says New Zealand citizenship ‘imminent’

James Cameron is looking forward to his “imminent” move to New Zealand more than ever.

“I’ve already qualified in terms of time in country. I’ve put in my application. I’m told it’s imminent,” the Avatar director told New Zealand journalist Paddy Gower on a recent episode of his The F#$%ing News podcast.

The Canadian filmmaker has an extensive real estate portfolio, including a ranch on a massive estate near Wellington, New Zealand, that he’s owned for years and a similar property on the Gaviota coast in California, which provided him with easy access to the entertainment industry’s main hub. But the sale of that latter property in 2023 couldn’t have come soon enough. “I think it’s horrific. I think it’s horrifying,” Cameron said of the re-election of Donald Trump in November. “I see a turn away from everything decent.”

Cameron continued that “America doesn’t stand for anything if it doesn’t stand for what it has historically stood for. It becomes a hollow idea, and I think they’re hollowing it out as fast as they can for their own benefit.”

Echoing the Avatar franchise’s themes of harmonious attunement with nature triumphing over some of humanity’s more vindictive and extractive impulses, Cameron remarked, “we’re all in this together, globally.”

“I don’t know if I feel any safer here, but I certainly feel like I don’t have to read it on the front page every single day,” he explained. “And it’s just sickening. There’s something nice about the New Zealand outlets. At least they’ll put it on page three. I’d rather read a story about a cat in a tree and the fireman saving it, or some picadillo in government here. I don’t just want to see that guy’s face anymore on the front page of the paper. And that’s inescapable there. It’s like watching a car crash over and over.”

Two years before Avatar was released in 2009, Cameron teased the new story he had concocted to Entertainment Weekly, about a race of beings who “live very closely and harmoniously with their environment, but they are also quite threatening to the humans who are trying to colonize and mine and exploit this planet.” He cited as the primary concern in the film “how we as a Western technological civilization deal with indigenous cultures,” and “our impact on the natural environment.”

By 2017, one year into the first Trump administration, Cameron had grown more specific in his commentary. He called Trump’s first term administration “insane,” citing the “iceberg” of climate catastrophe “ahead of us, and we called out the order to turn, and we’ve been slowly, slowly, slowly trying to turn this big a– 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.”

Though contemporary American politics were certainly a factor in compelling his permanent relocation from the States, Cameron also cited “big city anonymity” that he doesn’t find in his new home, the similarity to his Ontario hometown, and the overall kindness of the residents.

“Look, everybody’s not a saint in New Zealand any more than they are anywhere else. But I definitely, as an outsider or someone who was an outsider, I see a difference here in the way people treat each other.”

You can listen to the rest of Cameron’s interview with Gower below.