Three-time Oscar-winning director James Cameron wants to take a Titanic-sized journey out of America to escape MAGAland.
On a Kiwi podcast called “The F***ing News,” Cameron said that living under the new administration was like “watching a car crash over and over.” Cameron told journalist Paddy Gower that the president’s rise to power was “horrific” and said his New Zealand citizenship was “imminent.”
The filmmaker joins thousands of others hoping to jump ship after President Donald Trump’s election. On Inauguration Day, Google Trends saw a sharp increase in searches for “dual citizenship” and “how to move to Canada.” Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs noticed a 50 percent surge in the number of Americans seeking Irish passports.
Many Americans can’t afford to move under the Trump administration. But Cameron has both the means and the desire to pack up.
“America doesn’t stand for anything if it doesn’t stand for what it has historically stood for,” the 70-year-old said on the podcast. “It becomes a hollow idea, and I think they’re hollowing it out as fast as they can for their own benefit.”
Cameron has had a home in New Zealand for nearly 20 years but still spends a lot of time in the United States, where he sees “a turn away from everything decent.”
While living in New Zealand might seem like an escape, Cameron said that Trump’s policies will still have a global impact.
“I don’t know if I feel any safer here,” he confessed, but added that he at least doesn’t have to “read about it on the front page every day. And it’s just sickening.”
Cameron, who has generated around $13 billion from some of the highest-grossing films of all time, added that he doesn’t “want to see that guy’s face any more on the front page of the paper.”
And compared to America, where marginalized communities have come under attack, everybody in New Zealand “has this kind of equal status in terms of personhood.”
It’s not the first time Cameron has publicly criticized Trump and his supporters.
“These people are insane,” Cameron said in a 2017 interview with the Daily Beast, “Years ago, we sort of spotted the iceberg 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 and to not hit the iceberg, and then Trump grabbed the tiller and just plunged it right back at the center of the iceberg.”
He told the Beast that America is the “biggest freakin' idiot civilization in history right now.”
Celebs like Whoopi Goldberg, Cher, Lena Dunham, and Raven-Symoné have also teased moving out of the country but have yet to take the plunge.
