T here's a good reason why James Cameron is running 15 minutes late when Total Film calls. It's five weeks until his deadline to deliver Avatar: The Way Of Water when we speak over Zoom in mid-October, and the legendary filmmaker is spending every waking moment on Pandora. “It's going to be a bit of a photo finish, but the issue is not that we won't get done,” he starts, pausing to grin. “The issue is: will there be some little compromises here and there throughout the film that probably only I would notice?”
Cameron has never done things by halves, and the Avatar sequels may be the ultimate example of that thinking in a career built on pushing the limits of what's possible on screen.
Subject to a disproportionate level of scepticism before release in mid-December 2009, Avatar resonated in large part thanks to the allure of its richly detailed, exquisitely realised alien world of Pandora, inhabited by the lithe, blue-skinned Na'vi. It would go on to obliterate box-office records as audiences returned again and again to experience cinema's unrivalled escapist fantasy, in still-novel 3D.
Sequels were inevitable, not least because Cameron publicly expressed his desire as early as 2006 to make two follow-ups, should the first film connect. During a solo “ideation” period in the years after release, Cameron produced “thousands of pages of notes on the stories he wanted to tell” according to his long-serving producer Jon Landau. The result: that proposed pair of sequels expanded to encompass four. “I've always said: go big, or go home, you know?” Cameron says with the nonchalant chuckle of a man who's just ordered two Big Macs. “I thought, ‘Why not do the kind of immersive and persistent world that you have with the Tolkien universe or the Star Wars universe if it's within striking distance?’ And it seemed to be. I certainly had no dearth of ideas.”
Inspired by his positive experience making for TV, Cameron established an writers’ room with Josh Friedman (), Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (), and Shane Salerno () all contributing to the big picture, before being assigned separate screenplays to write alongside Cameron. While initial plans to shoot all four scripts simultaneously were eventually scaled back to ‘just’ 2 and 3 – and the first act of 4, which has already been “shot and captured” according to Landau – the magnitude of the production was never lost on Cameron, who relocated to New Zealand to achieve the ambitious plan.
