Some 1,400 Weta artists worked on Avatar: The Way of Water, but the helicopter occupies a special place, not least because James Cameron flies helicopters himself and puts them in most of his movies.
Cameron’s critiques of the shots are direct and specific, but as he notes, “I’m in charge, but anyone can give me shit,” he says. Sigourney Weaver says she objected to the initial design of her character, which she described as “too neat and pretty,” and instead advocated for more awkward teenager.
Bringing Sigourney Weaver back
Weaver’s character, scientist Grace Augustine, died in the first Avatar, but “the idea for Kiri came from is Grace really dead?” Cameron says. “I thought, hang on, there’s this avatar. What could I do with the idea of bringing Sigourney back, playing a kid? It was just a fun idea. I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
Cameron has also changed his style at work over the time. “I try to be more emotionally present for the crew and use more humor,” he says.
Cameron loves New Zealand crews, which are less hierarchical than crews in the U.S. or England, more likely to shout, “Hey, Jim,” in the hall than to be deferential. “Here, everybody’s counted equal,” he says.
In fact, Cameron, who was born in Canada and retains his Canadian citizenship, is in the process of applying for New Zealand citizenship.
On The Way of Water, Cameron estimates that he shot 70 percent of the virtual camerawork, and Richard Baneham, an Irish visual effects supervisor who worked on the first Avatar, shot the other 30 percent. “That’s big growth for me,” Cameron says.
Weaver, who first worked with Cameron on 1986’s Aliens, calls him “a much more relaxed director. He’s making this dream of his, this saga, come true. He’s still driven, but it’s much warmer colors.”
Cameron’s collaborators accept his intensity because it pays off. Of the 10 highest-grossing movies of all time, only two–Avatar and Titanic—were not based on preexisting properties like comic books, novels or prior films.
Cameron felt he had opportunity to go bigger in storytelling sense, than he ever had. “I want to tell an epic story over a number of films. Let’s paint on a bigger canvas. Let’s do The Lord of the Rings. Of course, they had the books. I had to write the book first, which is a script.”
Disney
Three months after Cameron started shooting, Pandora came under new ownership, when Disney bought Fox for $71.3 billion. Disney was an ideal home — the studio had already spent $500 million on Pandora attraction at its theme park in Florida.
Disney was also releasing fewer films theatrically, but bigger ones, the kind of spectacle-driven that Cameron is equipped to make.
Cameron and Disney:
Back in 2005, when Fox was wavering over whether to greenlight the first Avatar, Cameron and Landau had invited then-CEO Bob Iger, studio chief Dick Cook and CFO Alan Bergman to Playa Vista to watch test footage. “We walked out and we said, ‘We have to have it,’” says Bergman, now chair of Disney Studios Content. “I’d never seen anything like it. The world, Jake’s character. It was so unique.”
Fox convinced its financial partners to raise investments in the film, and Cameron stayed at the studio he had been in for decades, on Titanic, True Lies and Aliens.
In March 2019, when the Disney-Fox deal closed, Bergman met with Cameron and Landau. “I said, ‘See, Jim, we had to buy the company to get the next Avatar.’”
Weeks before The Way of Water‘s release, Disney fired CEO Bob Chapek and reinstated Iger. “Bob Iger was part of wooing us in the beginning,” Landau says. “He saw value in Avatar across the company. We’re big fans.”
On Titanic and the first Avatar, Cameron clashed with Fox execs over budgets and the potential to earn them back. But his relationship with Disney has been smooth.
Transparency:
He respects Disney’s marketing prowess. “A lot of things I did earlier, I wouldn’t do — career-wise and just risks you take as a wild, testosterone-poisoned young man,” he says. “I always think of testosterone as toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system.”
Landau has been his producer since Titanic. “I’ve seen an evolution of him,” Landau says. “Jim learns from every experience. He goes, ‘This is what worked, this is what didn’t work, how do I make it better?’”
“Did he tell you we’re like an old married couple?” Cameron says. “I don’t want to say nice things in front of him — it’ll go to his head — but I feel like there’s no problem we can’t solve.”
The shooting schedule on the Avatar films is unusually long– crewmembers talk about their “Avatar-versaries.” The human characters, like Champion’s and a marine biologist played by New Zealand actor Jemaine Clement, are shot in live-action. The actors playing Na’vi characters, like Worthington and Weaver, are shot in performance-capture, on stages where cameras track their movements and, later, visual effects artists modify their appearance.
This is how the character of Kiri manages to look recognizably like Weaver and like a teenage alien at the same time.
Cameron had finished 16-month performance-capture portion of the second, third and part of the fourth Avatar films and had shot some of the live-action portions when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.
In March, New Zealand closed its borders and imposed a strict lockdown, moves that were credited with containing the virus there but that derailed shooting key scenes with Champion, a teenager who was growing so quickly it would be hard to match previous shots.
Cameron, who had been in the U.S. when the lockdown was imposed, wrote a letter to the New Zealand government outlining why the production fit the government’s criteria that permitted international travel and describing the COVID-19 safety precautions. Their arrival would enable the work pipeline to continue and to keep more than 1,000 people working, including Weta artists at home. By May, the government agreed, and Cameron, Landau and 31 crewmembers were allowed to enter the country together on a single plane.
COVID also shrunk the theatrical marketplace into which this movie will be released. “I knew it would never come back hundred percent,” Cameron says of theatergoing. “I don’t think it ever will. But maybe 80 percent’s enough. We’ve got less competition because everybody’s working for streaming now.”
When theaters were closed during the pandemic, Cameron would get on Zoom with Spielberg and del Toro and talk about the fate of the industry. “I’d say, ‘We might be out of work, guys,’” Cameron says. “Except we’re not. I got to a fatalistic but calm place. It’s like, ‘I’ll still have a job. I can still tell stories. I’ll still get to work with actors and shoot scenes. Might not be at the scale of an Avatar movie, but, I mean, they’re doing some pretty big stuff for streaming.’”
The Way of Water is one of a number of epic films, including Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Paramount’s Babylon. Cameron says that was negotiated pre-Disney. “I said [to Disney], ‘You bought this from a bunch of guys at Fox who agreed to a three-hour movie,’ because that’s what we said we were going to do. We’re going to play the epic game.”
Repeat Viewing
Asked how audiences should time bathroom break, Cameron says, “Any time they want. They can see the scene they missed when they come see it again.” He’s not kidding. A huge part of Cameron’s box office success on his previous films has been attributable to repeat viewing. He typically doesn’t have a massive opening weekend, but instead holds or builds his audience over time. “We’ll know by the third weekend,” he says. “You’re not going to know by the first weekend. Titanic didn’t work that way. Avatar didn’t work that way.”
Avatar, which opened to $79 million, dropped just 8 percent a week for 10 weeks.
3D, a huge part of the original Avatar‘s success, remains Cameron’s preferred audience viewing format this time around as well. But it’s fallen out of favor in Hollywood. “Ironically, it’s less in-demand and more available,” he says, noting that, at the time Avatar was released, there were some 6,000 3D-enabled digital projectors worldwide; now there are roughly 110,000. Cameron attributes the drop in demand to screens that weren’t bright enough and to the poor quality of films that studios began releasing after Avatar — 2D films quickly converted to 3D in a bid for a cash grab rather than something originally created in 3D, like Avatar. There are signs audiences will still pay for 3D tickets for certain films — when Disney rereleased Avatar in September, it earned an impressive $76 million at the global box office, more than 97 percent of that from 3D. One of the surprises of the rerelease for Cameron was to learn that teens and 20-somethings, who hadn’t been old enough to see Avatar in theaters the first time around, were the audience most enthusiastic to see the movie.
With the future of the franchise already mapped out, Cameron is eager to see it through, but he recognizes the possibility that he might not. “We’ll probably finish movie three regardless because it’s all shot,” he says, figuring Disney has already spent more than $100 million of that budget. “We’d have to really crater for it not to seem like it was worth the additional investment. We’d have to leave a smoking hole in the ground. Now, hopefully, we get to tell the whole thing because five’s better than four, four’s better than three, and three’s better than two.”
Should the world demand them — for Avatar 6 and 7. “I’d be 89 by then,” Cameron says. That sounds like a joke, but based on the fact that it took 25 years for him to make the first two Avatar movies, it’s pretty realistic. “I’m not going to be able to make Avatar movies indefinitely, the amount of energy required.” He’s started giving some thought to a succession plan. “I would have to train somebody how to do this because, I don’t care how smart you are as a director, you don’t know how to do this.” He figures he may have five or six more movies in him and that three of them, probably, would be Avatar movies.
