Film director James Cameron has given us some of the most epic movies of our time. Among them are Titanic and the Avatar franchise. He is truly a gifted man and a very deep thinker. So when he and his family left America to settle permanently in New Zealand six years ago, there had to be a really good reason. He did not pack his bags on a whim.
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Cameron spoke frankly about why he made the move when he was on In Depth with Graham Besinger. He put his reason for going elsewhere succinctly. "I'm not there for scenery, I'm there for the sanity."
Cameron First Visited New Zealand in the Mid-1990s
The famed director went there for the first time in 1994. He was enchanted. Cameron said to himself, "I made myself a promise. 'I'm going to come live here someday,'" Actress Suzy Amis, who he was dating at the time, was okay with picking up stakes and putting down roots so far away. The couple wed twenty-six years ago and started a family.
Cameron explained, "Now, later, we have children, we have a family, we've got roots in Malibu and Santa Barbara, that conversation had to be amended slightly, but we did say after Avatar, let's make this happen."
He Approved of How That Country Handled the Pandemic
Perhaps the deciding factor that persuaded Cameron to head for New Zealand was its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. He clarified that point to Graham Besinger.
He said, "New Zealand had eliminated the virus completely. They actually eliminated the virus twice. The third time it showed up in a mutated form, it broke through. But fortunately, they already had a 98% vaccination rate. This is why I love New Zealand. People there are, for the most part, sane as opposed to the United States, where you had a 62% vaccination rate, and that's going down - going the wrong direction."
America's Divisiveness Also Prompted Him To Leave
Cameron expressed his disdain for the political and ideological wrangling rampant across the United States now. He feels that life in New Zealand is much more serene. He asked Besinger, "Where would you rather live? A place that actually believes in science and is sane and where people can work together cohesively to a common goal, or a place where everybody's at each other's throats, extremely polarized, turning its back on science, and basically would be in utter disarray if another pandemic appears."
