13 years after Avatar broke records, James Cameron is back and his franchise is bigger, bolder, and wetter than ever. His director and team discuss his massive undertaking.
As soon as James Cameron finished working on the first Avatar film in 2009, he rounded up the department heads, told them they would stay on the payroll for two more months, and asked them to prepare a white paper on what they would need if there ever was a sequel. “And then we went to a resort for three days and we sat down at a big round table and worked out the problem of how to make this better,” Cameron said. The result, 13 years later, is Avatar: The Path of Waterwhich takes the spectacle of that first movie and brings it to another level.
That new level is both exterior, with vast new regions of the planet Pandora, and interior, exploring the family life of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine who has left his human body to become one of the Na’vi, the occupants of the lush planet coveted by warmongering Earthlings who nearly destroyed their own planet. While the three-hour film is visually stunning, it’s also a grounded story of a parent whose kids are in their awkward teen years, even if those teens are seven or eight feet tall and blue.
“One of the big things that came out of that retirement was getting more nuanced performances, more empathy for these characters,” said producer Jon Landau. Cameron added: “It’s a more emotional film overall. Motion capture didn’t change much, but what we did with those facial images, bringing AI and deep machine learning into the equation so that what the actors did was what you got in the end with as little human invention as possible, was super important. ”
Exploring these characters, he added, was the reason for making another Avatar—and make the third film, which is already shot, and the fourth and fifth, which are written and designed and will be made if the path of water It proves to be a financially successful follow-up to the highest-grossing movie of all time. “The reason for coming back was not the extraordinary financial success of the first film,” he said. “In fact, that’s almost a disincentive. The incentive to do it is that we had this great team of artists and this great cast of actors, and everyone trusted each other.”
In this special section, more than a dozen of Cameron’s collaborators talk about his second trip to Pandora. —SP