You could hardly accuse James Cameron of playing it safe and sound with Avatar, or Avatar: The Way Of Water. The first film in his Na’vi saga was a
You could hardly accuse James Cameron of playing it safe and sound with Avatar, or Avatar: The Way Of Water. The first film in his Na’vi saga was a largely unknown quantity before it sizzled audiences’ eyeballs and transported them to the 3D wonderland of Pandora to record-breaking box office effect. And then, The Way Of Water did it all over again, well over a decade later, proving audiences were more than hungry for a return trip to bioluminescent paradise. But according to the filmmaker, the third Avatar film is going to be even braver – taking audiences, he tells Empire, to “places they won’t expect, but that will feel earned.”
Cameron – talking to Empire in the first of our Path To Pandora exclusives, bringing you fresh details from the Avatar saga in the magazine every single month in the run-up to Avatar: Fire And Ash – promises not just an escalation of action, but of narrative complexity. “Yeah, we’ve got some really clever action set-pieces,” he promises. “You can get your blood up in this movie. But what excites me as an artist who recently turned 70 and has kind of done all that stuff is not only the opportunity to get to do it again, but to get to a level of character and intrigue you haven’t seen before in an Avatar movie.”
If the first two films were all about introducing audiences to Pandora, its people, and those eye-popping home environments, the third entry will raise the storytelling stakes. “We’re just starting to riff on it and twist it and turn it,” Cameron says. “It’s a tricky thing. We could be getting high on our own supply here, and everybody who looks at it goes, ‘Fuck, that’s not what I signed up for.’ But if you’re not making brave choices, you’re wasting everybody’s time and money. That alone is not sufficient to create success, but it’s necessary. You’ve got to break the mould every fricking time.” From a filmmaker who always breaks the mould, that’s saying something.
With the film hitting cinemas this December, Cameron is ecstatic with its current progress. “It’s in strong shape, I think,” he says, comparing it to the process on The Way Of Water. “We’ve doubled the number of shots finished at this stage of the game than we had on movie two [and] the films are about equal length. So that puts us well ahead of the curve, which is something I’ve never, frankly, experienced before.” The process is, he laughs, “a little bit less nightmarish. We’re getting to the point where we’re actually getting good at this.” Frankly, we’d say he was already pretty good.
Read the full James Cameron interview about the fresh Avatar film in Empire‘s 28 Years Later issue, on sale Thursday 16 January. Order a copy online here. The Path To Pandora continues every month in Empire – subscribe here to get the magazine every month and hear the latest Na’vi news. Avatar: Fire And Ash comes to UK cinemas from 19 December.
COMMENTS