‘Avatar’ director James Cameron held a Reddit AMA this weekend and although it was essentially to discuss and promote his Years of Living Dangerously, there was a lot about Avatar that will delight Fantasy fans who enjoyed the first movie.
Probably the biggest piece of ‘news’ was that the scripts for all three movies will be ready in just six weeks! Specially, Cameron said: “The second, third and fourth films all go into production simultaneously. They’re essentially all in preproduction now, because we are designing creatures, settings, and characters that span all three films. And we should be finished with all three scripts within the next, I would say, six weeks.”
For those wondering why Cameron jumped into so many sequels, the answer wasn’t simply success, the director said that: ” I was encouraged by the fact that an environmental film, or a film about nature, could be successful. It’s certainly not just about money. I’m considering success to mean the measure of the ability of the film to communicate. Every director wants their film to communicate. The biggest factor, however, is the drive to continue developing the world – more characters, more creatures with unfettered creativity.”
You can see Cameron talk a bit more about the important of his ‘environmental’ message in this clip from the DVD extras of the first movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54LKUlzcKik
As to how whether the sequels can possibly live up to the first movie, the director said that: “There’s always pressure, whether it’s a new film or whether it’s a sequel, to entertain and amaze an audience. I’ve felt that pressure my entire career, so there’s nothing new there. The biggest pressure I feel right now is cutting out things I love to get the film down to a length that is affordable. There hasn’t been a problem finding new and wonderful things to include in the movie.”
One fan wondered whether humans would really destroy an entire intelligent race, what would first contact really be like? Cameron responded in a rather depressing, but logical manner: “I believe that human history and the history of evolution on this planet indicates that our first contact with alien species might not be as benign as Steven thinks. The history on our planet is whenever a superior technology society encounters a society with lesser technology, the superior technology supplants the lesser society. There has never been an exception. So if the aliens come to us, it probably won’t go well for us. A thousand years from now, if we’re the ones going to where the aliens are (like the story told in Avatar) it won’t go so well for the aliens.”
Finally, Cameron was asked about what he feels will be the next innovations in film (with an added wondering about the Oculus Rift in movie making). His response was pretty interesting: “I personally would be very interested to find a way to incorporate VR and a narrative filmmaking experience. So a narrative directed experience that has individuated pathways where you have choices that you make in real-time, I think that would be a lot of fun. I think it would be very technically daunting and expensive, to do it as the same quality level as a typical feature, but it would be fun to experiment with. It sounds like a lot of fun. I don’t think it would take over the feature film market though. I’m very familiar with VR, but I haven’t seen the specific Oculus Rift device. I’m interested in it, I’m meant to see it sometime in the next month or so, but I’ve been familiar with VR since its inception. In fact, virtual reality is a way of describing the way we work on Avatar, we work in a virtual workspace all day long. We use a “virtual camera” which is how I create all the shots that are CG in the film, a window into a virtual reality that completely surrounds me.”
You can read the rest of the Reddit AMA thread here.
Jennie Ivins