Cameron was recently confirmed to direct Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 as his next projects (sorry Cleopatra fans, it looks like he probably won't be able to squeeze that 3-D epic into his schedule any time soon), and at the LA media day for the Avatar: Extended Collector's Edition release the man behind the two biggest grossing films in history did shed a little light on what's happening with the sequels. But the original film was primary topic of the special press day which include in-depth looks behind the scenes with members of the Avatar team. Cameron and producer Jon Landau - even after all this time - are not tired of talking about Avatar, the actors, and the incredible world of Pandora. Cameron said the reason for the special press day was to celebrate the people who dedicated their time and effort to bringing Pandora to life on the screen and to celebrate the technology that allowed Avatar to transport audiences into the land of the fictional Na'vi people.
New footage screened included an alternate beginning to the film which will be included on the Collector's Edition. Cameron and Landau also showed off clips from deleted scenes that were only finished and brought up to release quality for the DVD. After showing off one such deleted scene, Landau explained, "The great thing about showing that scene is you can see how we needed Joe Literri and Steve Rosenbaum and the Weta team to finish this. That creature wasn’t in the movie but it’s a creature from Yuri Bartoli was very much part of the design of way back when. To sort of be able to bring everything together here today and present it is great."
Cameron added, "The other thing is the scene was cut out of the movie still at what we call the template stage. When we were on the performance capture stage, that’s template, that kind of video game look. So we wanted to see it done and of course that took extra money and it’s only by the grace of God and the amount of money that Avatar made that we were able to go back to the well and say to 20th Century Fox, 'Guys, let’s pony up another few million dollars and finish these shots up to release quality.'"
"The funny thing was we never stand still, so when Weta came back and they put this scene online and continued to work on it, they had to create the fluid simulation to get the mud and the water interacting along this riverbed where you’ve got dust, you’ve got mud and you’ve got water. It’s hard to imagine sometimes watching these shots that there is no photography whatsoever involved, other than the little bit of the kickoff at the beginning where Grace is talking. The rest of the scene is 100% CG, so we were continuing to advance the tools even kind of on our summer vacation when we were working on this stuff. For me, it literally was vacation. I was three weeks in Tahiti and we had a hotel room set up nearby where I was staying and I’d kind of sneak away from the family and see how the shots were coming."
Behind the Scenes with James Cameron and Jon Landau on the Avatar: Extended Collector's Edition Release
On Capturing Avatar, the 90 Minute DocumentaryJames Cameron: "It was originally two and a half hours long. We said, 'We can’t have the documentary about the movie be as long as the movie.' So I told them to take an hour out. It’s synthesized now but it tells the story pretty well of everything that Jon and I went through, and all of the other team members went through, to make the film."
On Making Avatar Kid-Friendly:
James Cameron: "We actually created a family friendly audio version of the film you can watch as well. That’s just because I was getting in trouble from my wife when our seven year old was watching Avatar, which he loved to watch, and then for the next two weeks he would go around saying sh*t and god dammit. Then I’d yell at him and he’d say, 'Dad, it’s in Avatar!'"
"It’s all the cast voices. Normally for network versions later downstream, at the time you’re making the film when you’re doing the ADR, you always have all the actors cover all their unacceptable language that wouldn’t pass standards and practices. So we thought, 'Wait a minute, why not use the fact that you can select different audio tracks and different languages and just select an audio track so that people can sit and watch the film as a family viewing experience?' I know there are parents of kids maybe eight, seven, six years old that would probably feel comfortable having their kids watch the movie but don’t want to have to deal with the language issue, which I don’t. Maybe I just did it for me, but hopefully other people can benefit from this as well."
His First Reaction to Seeing a Completed Version of Avatar:
James Cameron: "I think we were all ready to have a heart attack if the film didn’t work, even didn’t work up to our standards. I had intentionally held back seeing the film in 3D from end to end. I’d seen every part of it in 3D - I’d seen the film from end to end - but I hadn’t had that combined experience. So I chose to sit and watch it with friends and with cast. Sigourney [Weaver] sat on one side, Zoe [Saldana] and Sam [Worthington] on the other side. Steven Spielberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger were sitting behind me. So it better f***ing well be good. But just sort of feeling the vibe from Sam and Sigourney and Zoe, and knowing that they loved the movie predisposed me to like what I was seeing. I actually enjoyed the screening, which sounds unfathomable when you’ve deconstructed it down to every molecule over so much time, but I actually enjoyed it. At that point I relaxed because as long as people enjoyed the movie, we were going to be okay. It didn’t bother me to watch two hours and 41 minutes in 3D. It just went by."
Jon Landau: "That was two weeks before the movie opened."
James Cameron: "Oh, there was no time to change anything at that point. It was done, so there was this great weight lifting. I didn’t have to do anything and I couldn’t anyway. It was going to be okay."
Is There Anything Still Missing?
James Cameron: "No. There’s only one more round to be played at some point in the future, and I don't know if it’s a year or two years out where we release it in 3D. All of our finished work on all of these extra scenes was done in 3D so that we can, when we go to 3D, we just do it once. We do everything. But, that’s it. We’ve put everything into this that’s worth putting into it and probably a few things that weren’t worth putting in."
On the Future of Virtual Camera Technology:
James Cameron: "I think it’s going where we’d like it to go because we’re pushing it, we’re all pushing it in that direction, which is the closer that what we experience in real time is to what the final image will be, the better. So it’ll be better lighting, it’ll be interactive effects like shadowing and volumetrics, special effects like fire, smoke, all of these sorts of things improving so that our real time interface starts to look more and more like the finished shot."
On Giving the Actors Something to React To:
James Cameron: "We try to do that. Practically one of our first tests was what happens if the actors are wearing VR goggles and they can go through the space? It turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. You can’t capture their facial performance while they’re wearing VR goggles, and they can’t see anything. They can’t see each other so they can’t see the emotive part of the other character. They can only see the kind of gross anatomy differences, the fact that they’re blue and so on, and that turns out to be much less important for the actors. So we actually looked at that and dismissed it early on. So that’s not something you’d see coming up. What we do is we’ll do whatever we can in the moment to create a sense of the special position. Then the actors walk over to the monitor and they see what it looks like. You can’t look anywhere around the stage without seeing a monitor."
On Choosing What Version of Avatar to Watch:
James Cameron: "It’s up to the individual viewer what they want and what their appetite is. I think it’s very important that the original release version, which was the Academy Award nominated version, exists in all future disc sets. It should never be supplanted by alternatives. So it exists. If you want to see it the way you saw it in a movie theater exactly, you may. If you want to see the nine minute longer version, if you don’t have an extra 16 minutes, if it’s like, 'No, no, no, I’ve got an early day tomorrow. Let’s watch the nine minute longer.' I’m guessing if people want a longer version, they’ll jump right to the 16 minute longer version but these are available, the two that were in release, the original release version, so we’re just giving people options."
"Some people may not want to just sit and see a completely different version of the movie. That might be upsetting to them. I don't know. 'Wait a minute, it starts on earth? It didn’t start on earth. It started in space.' Everybody can choose what they want. If you don’t care if it’s 16 minutes longer, if you want to pause it and go get a beer, that’s something you can do on Blu-ray. Maybe a 16 minute longer version wouldn’t have played in the movie theater. We don’t know. We still don’t know the answer to that. We don’t know what the upper boundary is for sitting with 3D glasses on before your eyes start to bleed. We don’t have that data yet."
On What Hollywood Can Do Wrong with This Technology:
James Cameron: "You can see all the wrong applications of just about everything that we’ve hopefully tried to do right. I think you’ve seen 3D done wrong before and after Avatar, and I think you’ll see it done wrong for a long time. Hopefully there will be enough good examples that standards get created and the fact that people are paying a premium ticket at movie theaters, they’re paying a premium price for a set at home, they’re probably going to pay a premium price for a 3D channel coming into their home but that’s going to require that those standards are met. So we’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of training people and teaching people good 3D practices and how to use the cameras."
"[...]Any new technology can be abused. Performance capture will probably be abused. The example comes up, 'Well, wouldn’t you love to see Marilyn Monroe in a movie?' Yeah, but she’s dead. If she were alive now and she wanted to play herself at her va va voom age, that’d be great. That’d be cool. I think we could all get behind that. If Clint Eastwood wanted to play Dirty Harry one more time the way he looked in the mid ‘70s, I think that’d be great. But the power has to come from the actor. That’s my philosophy, that’s my set of guidelines. I can’t guarantee that other people won’t abuse this technology."
On Charitable Work and the Impact of Avatar:
James Cameron: "I think I was a little reluctant to acknowledge that because how much power can a movie really have? But there have been enough people come to us and say, 'Look, you can do some real good right here.' So we’ve had to be selective because we can’t get involved in every single cause everywhere. Even if I devoted the rest of my life to it, we still couldn’t do everything."
"So the question that I pose when I start working with a group like Amazon Watch or the Indigenous Network, the indigenous first nations communities in Canada at the tar sands, is, 'What can we really do? What can we accomplish? What are our goals here? What is the good outcome of this? All right, now let’s work backwards. What are the media pieces of this puzzle? What do we have to do to have the credibility?'"
"The first thing I tell them is I can’t just start blathering. I have to go, I have to meet people, I have to understand the experience they’re going through. I’ve got to study this [issue] from both side, and I have to be at least knowledgeable enough that when I make a passionate plea to raise public awareness, I’m not just kind of running around with my hair on fire, that there are some actual facts involved in it. That takes some time, so it is a commitment."
"I think you have to take these commitments seriously and you have to also make a commitment to follow up and not just do kind of a drive-by deal. So I’ve made commitments to people in the Amazon that I’ll follow up with that and to the First Nations people in Alberta, Canada that I’ll follow up with that. The other causes that I get involved with judiciously, I’ll do as much as I can. The point that I stop being effective, I’ll stop doing it."
Jon Landau: "I also think it was the movie that was empowering."
James Cameron: "Oh sure, it’s not me. A year ago I couldn’t have stood up and done all that stuff - and nobody would’ve asked me to. It’s really the fact that there was so much resonance with the movie and that the movie has created this kind of almost global consciousness around this idea that we have to do something about our relationship with nature. The movie doesn’t tell you what to do; it just gives you a kind of emotional response and a sense that you have to do something to the people that are responding to that. Some people aren’t, and some people are diametrically opposed to it because politically or from a business perspective they have to be. They don’t have a choice because they’re CEO of a major oil company or something. I’m not going to win that guy, but I might win his daughter or his son. He’s got to go eat Thanksgiving dinner with them. These memes, they do percolate through society in all kinds of ways that are too complex to follow."
"I’m also not, by the way, delusional that a movie can change the world. But I do believe that if you put a foot in the right direction and then you follow it up with other action that’s in parallel...I can’t just wait until I make another Avatar movie. There’s too many important things that are happening right now so I’m planning to do it in parallel with direct action, with what I can do with my own voice and my own resources."
What's Happening with Avatar 2?
James Cameron: "It’s in progress right now. There’s a lot of writing, a lot of designing and a lot of tech work that we’re going to do. What I can tell you is this: our plan right now is to make 2 and 3 together as a single large production and release them a year apart. In order to do that, we have to refine our technical processes beyond the end of where we were finishing Avatar, essentially a year ago, because we need to future-proof ourselves out five or six years to the end of the third film , if you will. So we’re taking that time now. Partially because going through the process, even though we refined that process as the film went along, there were certain things we would have had to go full stop to be able to improve and upgrade. We’re in that process right now."
Jon Landau: "Again, it all starts with the story. We talk about the technology, waiting for that. I’ll forget that he’s in the room but Jim has done two sequels in the past and both times those stories have lived up to what the first one did. I think that’s really our goal."
James Cameron: "No pressure."
Sigourney Weaver Says Grace Didn’t Die and She’ll Be Back:
James Cameron: "Who said she died? Nobody dies in a science fiction movie. Whether Grace lives or dies depends probably more on Sigourney’s agent than anything."
On the True Lies TV Series:
James Cameron: "I’m not really doing that. That was initiated by others, friends of mine who wanted to do that and I said, 'Yes, go with God. Do True Lies but do I have to show up to do anything?' They said, 'Absolutely not.'"
On His Possible Involvement with the Cleopatra Film and How It Would Fit Into His Schedule:
James Cameron: "I haven’t made any decisions about that. Here’s a decision. I’m not going to work on a film between 2 and 3. It’s really just a question if I do one between now and when we start 2. We’re still evaluating how much of our tech work, how much of our facility work, how long it’s going to take. That’s not decided as of right now. I’d love to just start on Avatar 2 right now but I don't know if that’s possible or if it makes sense to wait."
"With respect to the novel, the novel’s a big project. My idea for the novel is not a novelization which I hate, where you basically just take the script and put it into prose form and add a few extra adjectives. What I really want to do is say, 'Okay, if this movie was based on a book, what would the book have to be?' It ends conterminously with the end of the movie, not one frame beyond that. But, how about the 30 years before Jake got to Pandora? The discovery of the planet, Grace’s arrival there, all the backstory, the history of earth, all the context for what happened in the story. And then everything lateral to what you see in the movie, whether it’s things that are happening off camera or things that are happening inside the characters’ heads."
"It’s been a very rewarding journey so far. I’ve still got quite a fair bit of work to do, but what I want to do is create a kind of bible or a foundation from which other writers can write novels that coexist in the same Avatar universe, maybe graphic novels and comic books and everything can treat that as a source work so that they’re not making up things that are dissonant with what I want to do in the future from this point on."
