‘I want to talk about the characters’ – Avatar: The Way of Water director James Cameron says the CGI is not what’s most exciting about sequel to his 2009 film
- James Cameron, whose Midas touch with movies includes Titanic, Terminator and Aliens, says that to make four Avatar sequels ‘we got to start with the writing’
- He talks about the existential questions raised in the first sequel, and why his focus is storytelling, not the technology used to make The Way of Water
After 13 years, the sequel to the biggest film of all time is finally upon us.
In 2009, Avatar took US$2.7 billion at the global box office. Audiences were enchanted by writer-director James Cameron’s trip to the fictional planet of Pandora, where a blue-skinned alien race known as the Na’vi lived.
Rather than simply work on one follow-up, Cameron has crafted four. “It took years to create [the] whole saga-cycle,” he says, when we meet in London in December at the beginning of a huge promotional push for the first of these sequels, Avatar: The Way of Water.
While he’s been involved in franchises before – most notably, the Terminator series – constructing a sprawling five-movie series is ambitious even for him.
“I figured, ‘Look if we’re going to try to compete conceptually with something like the Lord of the Rings, an epic work across multiple films, we got to start with the writing.’
“They had the books. We didn’t have the books. [Rings author J.R.R.] Tolkien took 12 years, I think it was, to write the trilogy. We managed to write the four scripts in, I think, four years.”
