Video:Avatar - James Cameron Interview
with Rebecca MurrayOn the 'Avatar' press line at Comic Con, writer/director James Cameron fielded a batch of questions about a project that's been kept a secret for years - 'Avatar.' After screening 20 minutes of footage, Cameron's finally ready to talk about the film.
Transcript:Avatar - James Cameron Interview
20th Century Fox's Avatar at the 2009 San Diego Comic Con.
Avatar Writer/Director/Producer James Cameron
(This interview was conducted as a group on the red carpet after James Cameron presented footage to the Comic Con crowd)
On finishing Avatar:
James Cameron: "I believe that it's coming together visually, that the visual effects work, that the CG characters play as real and play as soulful and emotional. I'm enjoying the process right now. Every day that we get dailies in from WETA Digital down in New Zealand, we're just gobsmacked. It's like you've got to be kidding me. I feel that way and I know the story, and I know what went into making the shots. I know that people are going to be blown away. So it's made the process enjoyable now that we're sort of through, now it's all coming up to a level of photo realism."
"I can't relax. I had a big sit down chat with the team and I said, 'Look guys, it's like we're at the Indy 500 and we just pulled into the number one spot, but there's a lot of fire-breathing guys behind us ready to run us over so we've got to maintain, get the hammer down and not screw up. That's all you have to do now.' And it's a bullsh-t sports metaphor, but the idea is that we've cracked it. There are no hurdles ahead of us, other than just sheer volume and keeping the hammer down so that we can keep the imagery up to that level."
On the film's spiritual bent:
James Cameron: "You got a little sense of that in the scene, which I think you saw, where the wood sprites come down and land over him. Obviously, he's in some way special, and those themes start to pay off later in the film."
On the dangers of technology:
James Cameron: "It's a double-edged sword. Obviously, he's able to go into his avatar through a futuristic technology, but on the other hand he's living this very primitive and ultimately somewhat spiritual life. He becomes this warrior on behalf of this disadvantaged culture. Not disadvantaged - they're sort of being bullied or dominated by the highly technological earth forces. So it's definitely a love/hate. And it's the same thing with movies, but you've got to learn to balance the two. As a film director, you can embrace the technology and go crazy and have a big mad love affair with the technology, but you still have to tell the story that's about people, emotions, and all that. The big irony of this film is, you know we're doing this story that takes place out in the rain forest, a very simple story, almost classic in a sense, almost an Edgar Rice Burroughs kind of adventure, and yet it's being done with the most advanced technology in the history of film. So there's this weird juxtaposition. I take the actors to Hawaii and we're out on some muddy trail someplace learning how to shoot a bow in the woods and not get bitten by mosquitos so that they'll have enough of a sense memory of what it's like to move through a rain forest so that when they come back to this very sterile stage environment, they can recreate that."
On creating a new world:
James Cameron: "The language, the physiology of the Na'Vi, the physiology of all the animals, this all had to be created. It was a year and a half of design with some of the best creature designers. We worked with Stan Winston Studios. We had our own in-house design group... We got the WETA guys down in New Zealand breathing life into these guys, figuring out how they move. So it's got all of the time that you put into an animated film - it's not unusual for an animated film to take three or four years, by the way. I think it's unusual for a live-action film to take that amount of time, but we sort of have the worst of both, the worst of live-action and the worst of animation."
"We showed 24 minutes today. The film is epic in its scope, and there's an awful lot more. You basically saw stuff that was from the first act and maybe from the first third of the second act. So you get a little bit of a smattering of it, a little bit of the visual vocabulary of the film. But it was our goal that the film would sort of reinvent itself within each act. And it goes much more into the aerial stuff and into the flying. There's a huge battle toward the end, and a lot of conflict around the emotional stuff, betrayal, and divided loyalties. Just good, solid character-driven narrative stuff."
On the chance of a nuclear explosion in Avatar:
James Cameron: "We'll see. I always try to shoehorn one in some place. If they'd had nuclear weapons in 1912, there would have been one in Titanic."
Was he nervous or excited about bringing Avatar to Comic Con?
James Cameron: "I think both. Obviously we were nervous before the fact that it's going to be well received, which now it has been. Also excited to just finally share it. Every time you make a movie, some day somebody is going to have to see it - unless you do really such an abysmal job that it goes straight to the wastebasket."