Sigourney Weaver is no stranger to the unique experience of collaborating with James Cameron, having previously worked with the visionary director on the sci-fi classic “Aliens” and, of course, “Avatar” and its sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.” “. So the actress is very aware of the challenges that may arise during the process.
This could be why she ended up doing breathing exercises in her pool with a man who trains Navy SEALs.
“Jim would talk about our swim practice, where we’d be holding our breath for a minute and a half or something, and actually that was conservative. And I thought, well, I can only hold my breath for about 30 seconds, period, let alone when I’m moving,” Weaver said during a screening of “Avatar: The Way of Water,” part of TheWrap’s 2022-2023. Awards Season Screening Series. “And yet Jim never throws these challenges unless he backs them up with help to get you there. So we started training with Kirk Krack, who teaches Navy SEALs, in May of 2017 and had our first session in the pool. My husband and I could hold our breath for a minute, still in the water, and we built from there.”
When all was said and done, Weaver was able to hold his breath for a whopping six and a half minutes, just another seemingly impossible feat that manifested itself in the process of making the movie, which is already one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. hour.
The sci-fi epic returns to the wilds of Pandora, where humans have once again come into conflict with the indigenous inhabitants, the Na’vi. Joining Weaver to discuss the film with TheWrap Executive Awards editor Steve Pond were producer Jon Landau, actor Stephen Lang, costume designer Deborah Lynn Scott and composer Scott Franglen. (Watch the full video here.)
Landau thanked the crew for the mind-blowing challenges he and Cameron threw at the cast and crew every day. “It’s a testament to the 3,800 names that are on the credits,” he said. “We throw obstacles at them every day. And they beat them.”
One particular hurdle was the sheer volume of materials required to populate a universe as vast and deep as the one featured in “Avatar: The Way of Water.”
“Deborah actually built over 2,000 pieces of Na’vi costume,” Landau said. “We build them to photograph, we build them to simulate, to put them in the water to see how light reacts to them. Because if we want wet effects to be attributed to something that looks real, we have to give them something to attribute to.”
“We had to do everything the way they (the actors) had to interpret everything. Our departments had to do everything exactly as you would, and more because we had help informing their motion capture performances, while we designed the world for them,” said Scott. “And it was really gratifying that they got involved, as actors, in my process.”
And yet, for all the towering effects and oversized challenge, there was a current of connection that ran through the production and ended up on screen in powerful fashion.
“In the first paragraph of script 2, there is something that says: ‘Neytiri sings the chord of the song.’ And the chord of the song became this thing. I had to write the song for Neytiri to sing on it,” Franglen said. “I wrote that in January, February 2018. And then sometime, March, April, there is a magical moment when Zoe (Saldaña), in front of 100 technicians, sings this live. And what you see on the screen is her singing live. It is not pre-recorded by me in the recording studio. That’s the live shot.”
“There is something beautiful that happens,” Franglen said. “This kind of organic process between all of us.”