JAMES CAMERON chats about the politics of Avatar,his deep sea inspirations, and reuniting with Aliens star Sigourney Weaver.
Star of Avatar, Sam Worthington
Now Avatar’s finally out there, how do you feel?
Cameron: So relieved! We can hold our heads high that we got the picture done on time by the skin of our teeth. It’s been a very lengthy process. It’s really just a huge relief to let people see it and stop talking about it.
You worked with Sigourney Weaver on Aliens, but did you always plan to cast her in Avatar?
Cameron: Sigourney and I have remained good friends since Aliens. Since then I’ve presented her with a star on the walk of fame. But when I first started the script in 1995, I hadn’t thought of Sigourney. However, when it got to the casting process it just struck me that she would be perfect. And I can prove that I didn’t have Sigourney in mind from the beginning because the name of the character she plays was originally Grace Shipley, and once Sigourney and I started talking about her doing the part we thought we’d better change the name.
But once it popped into my head that Sigourney would be perfect for it, you suddenly have this moment where you hope and pray that the actor is going to respond to it. And Sigourney responded immediately and quite effusively, not just to her the character, but to the intentions of the film overall. And she signed up right away.
MMM: How did the technology you used affect the way you worked with your actors?
Cameron: The interesting thing about working with performance capture technology is that it’s probably the best director-actor relationships and process that I’ve ever been involved in. We did shoot for four months photographically in Wellington but other parts of the film were done virtually. But on the virtual working process I’m not distracted by the lighting or the time of day, is the sun setting, where’s the dolly track going to go, and a thousand questions that pull a director’s mind away from the process of working with the actors. I was really just there to work with them on the performances.
So we spend all our time looking for some moment of truth, emotional truth and the truth of the character. And then we’ll huddle around the high-def playback and look at their faces. I won’t see them as their Na’vi or their Avatar characters for months, or even years sometimes after, because the process takes so long.
But as long as I know in that moment that we’ve got it, then I don’t have to worry about it. I think wisely we didn’t make the assumption that we could modify it or improve it later. We fought hard in the moment to say exactly what we wanted to say. And no one’s harder on Sam or Sigourney or Zoe than themselves. I found it a really stimulating process, and we all bonded around the making of this film and the attempt to strive for excellence.
MMM: How much was your vision of the film influenced by your aquatic explorations?
Cameron: I just swept in every design influence I’ve had in my life. I’ve always had this deep respect for nature and a lot of my youth was spent out in the woods hiking around, being a total science geek and collecting samples. Then as an adult I spent over 2500 hours under water. And I’ve seen things that are absolutely astonishing at the bottom of the ocean. It really is like an alien planet. That’s been something that I always feel is like a gift in my life, to be able to live out science fiction adventure for real in under-ocean expeditions.
So yeah, there’s a lot of influence there. The banshee wings are based on the colouration of a tropical fish, for example. We were a little concerned that these large creatures wouldn’t scale properly and might not look real with these incredibly vivid colour palettes, but we managed to make that work.
MMM: Can you tell us about the politics of the film and its message?
Cameron: Obviously, there’s a connection to recent events. There’s a conscious attempt to evoke Vietnam-era imagery, the way they jump off helicopters. It’s a way of connecting a thread through history. I take that thread farther back to the 17th and 16th centuries and to how the Europeans took over South, Central, and North America, and displaced the indigenous peoples there. I think there’s a long history of the human race written in blood going back to the Roman Empire and further.
We have this tendency to take what we want without asking, as Jake says in the film. I see that as a broader metaphor, not so intensely politicised as some people would make it, but broader in the sense that that’s how we treat the natural world as well. There’s a sense of entitlement: we’re here, we’re big, we’ve got the guns, we’ve got the technology, we’ve got the brains, therefore we’re entitled to do every damn thing on this planet. And that’s not how it works, and we’re going to find out the hard way, unless we wise up and start seeking a life that’s in balance with the natural cycles of life on earth. This is the challenge before us.
The film espouses this kind of love-hate relationship with technology. Obviously we used technology to tell a story that’s a celebration of nature, which is an irony in and of itself. But, I think that it’s not that technology is bad, it’s not that that the technological civilization is bad, it’s that we need to be in control of the technological process. We’re not going to be able to just rip our clothes off and run back into the wilderness.
Sigourney Weaver and co-star Giovanni Ribisi
First of all, there’s not a lot of it left. Second, that’s not going to work for 8 billion people. So, we’re going to have to think our way out of this using technology and science. But we’re also going to need to be very human about it, get in touch with our emotions and with our understanding of each other. One of the themes of the film, I think, is symbolised by the fact that it begins and ends with the main character’s eyes opening. It’s about a change of perception and about choices that are made once our perception has been changed.
MMM: How important do you think 3D is? And how industry changing is your movie?
Cameron: Well, I think we’ll see Avatar‘s ultimate role, little or large, in this 3D revolution which is already in progress and was put in progress by films such as The Polar Express, which was also performance capture and was one of the first films that showed 3D could be very, very profitable.
There’s been a number of releases in the last year with Up, Monsters vs Aliens, and Ice Age 3D, all of which showed an enhanced profitability in 3D that outstripped the additional cost of 3D. All of a sudden, studios are looking at this as a source of additional revenue. The theatrical exhibition community is looking at this as a way to bring people back to the cinema, to make the cinema exciting again, during an economic downturn.
Cinema has done very well compared to most businesses, but there’s an erosion of revenues because of file-sharing, downloading, piracy and all of these things, and the DVD business is tapering down. This has so far been balanced by the increase in international markets like Russia and China coming up. But we need something that kick-starts public enthusiasm for the cinema as an experience because people seem to be going to smaller and smaller devices and watching movies on iPhones. So we need something to reverse that trend, or at least to balance it.
I sort of set as my goal, making the movie theatre back to the kind of sacred experience that it’s always been in my life. And 3D is part of that, but it has to be used in balance with all the other techniques of film as well. I would say that if one was to see Avatar not in 3D, it will still be beautifully acted, beautifully designed, beautifully photographed. It’s not like you’d suddenly be left with 50% of the experience. But if you do want to see it with that extra turbo charger of experience, and will pay a little extra to do so, then 3D is the way to go.
Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana
MMM: Is there going to be a sequel to Avatar?
Cameron: I always said during the making of the film that I dreaded the movie making money because we’d have to do it all again! But when I pitched it to Fox I told them we’re going to spend a lot of money creating all these assets – all these CG mountains, and plants, and trees, and leaves, and flowers, and bugs and creatures.
Everything you see on screen had to be made by people at work-stations over a period of years, so they have value. In terms of what the pitch was, I said, ‘look you’re going to have to spend more money on the first one but on the second one we’ll be able to focus on the story’, and they bought that!
So, I feel like I have to make a second one now! But that will only happen if we make some money on the first one. I have a story worked out for the second film and a third one, but my lips are sealed.
By film journalist Jan Gilbert
