A string of hits and 3 of the biggest films of all time: the first two Avatar titles grossed $5.2 billion globally — more than Disney paid to acquire Star Wars.

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But Cameron feels many fail to appreciate the level of artistry and real-world effort that go into making the Avatar films.

“We’ve somehow been lumped in with the issue of AI replacing actors, but anybody who has seen our process is shocked by how performance-centric it is.”

Across an 18-month shoot, Cameron would sometimes work with actors for hours before a scene, then his technology translated their micro-expression into his Na’vi characters.

Sigourney Weaver, who plays Kiri, calls the process “the most liberating way of working; it’s absolutely not what people think.”

In the new film, Marine turned Na’vi revolutionary Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), his fierce wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their children are on the run from the brutal Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who finds ally in franchise newcomer Varang (Oona Chaplin), the frightening leader of the Ash People.

“They were in this trance state, dancing for seven hours on end in actual fire,” he recalls. “Then I was seeing these kids go into this ash field, joyfully playing in this almost postnuclear devastation. I wasn’t thinking, ‘I can use this for Avatar,’ but it was one of those things that informs my dream landscape.”

Once again, Cameron has depicted an alien world stuffed with diverse beauty, wild creatures and epic action-adventure set pieces while largely filming in a single room in Manhattan Beach Studios in Southern California. There’s a scene where the Sully kids swim in a dirty river that’s so photorealistic, it’s almost dizzying (a water tank, a surging current and tons of brown sugar).

“I read every card from audience members, and I do my own data-driven analysis,” he says. “There are things that I’ll [keep in the film] that are important to me, and there are things where I’m like, ‘OK, that’s not a hill I’m going to die on.’ I like to please the audience. I’m not somebody that likes the audience to come out of the theater going, ‘What the fuck was that?’”

Cameron trimmed Fire and Ash to three hours and 15 minutes. Some at Disney would have preferred a shorter cut.

“There’s a wisdom that if we can have more [screenings per day], we’ll make more money,” he says. “But if you engage people, the word will spread. We proved it with Titanic, which is exactly the same length as Fire and Ash.”

But “This doesn’t mean Fire and Ash will make as much money as Titanic.”

Exactly how much money Fire and Ash will make is a crucial question for the fate of the franchise. Cameron says his original plan of concluding the saga depends on the success of Fire and Ash. Weaver says what Cameron has planned for the fourth and fifth movies “is so amazing” that it would be tragedy for the franchise to halt. “All of them are part of one big story,” she says.

“I feel I’m at a bit of a crossroads. Do I want it to be a wild success — which almost compels me to continue and make 2 more Avatar movies? Or do I want it to fail just enough that I can justify doing something else?”