James Cameron would be "feeling like s***" if he had denied his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow the chance to be the first-ever woman to win a Best Director Academy Award.
James Cameron
The pair were married from 1989 to 1991, and they went up against one another for the gong at the 2010 Oscars only for Kathryn to win the prize for helming 'The Hurt Locker'.
Cameron was up for the Best Director accolade for 'Avatar', which also lost out to his ex's movie in the Best Picture category that year - but the 67-year-old filmmaker insists he is "very happy" about how things went.
He said: "I would submit after the fact that she probably enjoyed the evening about 10 per cent more than I did. Ha ha.
"But for me to begrudge not only someone that I’ve loved and believed in winning the best director, but also the first woman... f***, man. Stand back. Let her have her night.
"We talked about it endlessly before and after. They wanted us to be co-presenters, but we looked at one another and said, 'We’re not going to play that game.'
"If I was sitting here now, however many years later, looking at an Oscar that could have been hers, I would be feeling like s**t. I was very happy at how it worked out."
'Titanic' director Cameron credits independent producer Roger Corman with helping him hone the skills he needed to become "an epic filmmaker".
He added to the Irish Times newspaper: "I had prepared myself for years to be an epic filmmaker.
"We were trying to do the impossible. But I happened to be someone who didn’t understand what impossible meant.
"And I found myself thrust among a group of people who thought as I did. We had no track record. It didn’t matter.
"There was a rush off this sense of the impossible being made possible."
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