Filmmaker James Cameron on penguins, arctic cold, and lowlight cameras

James Cameron wasn’t near the penguins this time around, but he is extremely familiar with their environment.

“When I went to Antarctica myself, I had a Nikon still camera adapted to the cold with special lubricants,” he tells Popular Science. “I went to the South Pole and the film shattered in my hand when I tried to change it. The camera froze up. I took a video camera, I wrapped it in a heating pack and it [died] in two minutes. I have a good sense of what it takes to take conventional equipment into that environment and survive.”

This time, the legendary director of Titanic, Terminator 2, the Avatar series, and more served as an executive producer for National Geographic’s three-part documentary Secrets of the Penguins. The latest in the award-winning series, Secrets of the Penguins represents the culmination of a two-year excursion around the world. Over 70 scientists and filmmakers traversed the globe from Cape Town and the Galapagos islands all the way to Antarctica’s Ekström Ice Shelf to observe these iconic flightless birds. 

On the Ekström Ice Shelf, a three-person film crew withstood a total of 274 days documenting a 20,000-strong Emperor penguin colony. The team captured never-before-seen footage there of chicks navigating drift ice, penguins using their beaks to climb out of a crevice, and even a bonded pair of adults appear to practice rolling a future egg using a snowball stand-in.

While Cameron didn’t endure the subzero temperatures for Secrets of the Penguins, he still helped edit down the resulting hundreds of hours of footage into the new three-part series. And he’s grateful the team came prepared with more than just a Nikon.