Titanic director James Cameron has been living a more peaceful life in New Zealand with his family after saying goodbye to Hollywood.
Cameron, 71, has been living in New Zealand since 2020, telling Graham Bensinger in a Wednesday, January 21, interview, “I’m not there for scenery, I’m there for the sanity.”
When asked for his reasoning behind the big move, Cameron explained, “After the pandemic hit…New Zealand had eliminated the virus completely. They actually eliminated the virus twice. The third time when it showed up in a mutated form, it broke through. But fortunately, they already had a 98 percent vaccination rate. This is why I love New Zealand.”
He continued, “People there are, for the most part, sane as opposed to the United States, where you had a 62 percent vaccination rate, and that’s going down – going the wrong direction.”
According to the Avatar director, he would “rather live” in a country that “believes in science and is sane.”
“[In New Zealand], people can work together cohesively to a common goal,” he added, claiming that in the States, “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.”
Despite not moving to the island nation until the pandemic gave him the push, Cameron first visited New Zealand in 1994.
“I was on my way to the South Pole. We wound up getting stuck there because the flights were grounded because of ice conditions,” he told Bensinger. “I wound up exploring around the Christchurch area and just really falling in love with the country, the scenery, the people, just the kind of way of life. I made myself a promise, ‘I’m gonna come live here someday.’”