James Cameron has big, big plans for Avatar, as he gets ready to begin shooting four sequels that will follow up the story told in the 2009 film - which is still the highest-grossing movie ever released. But that's hardly all that's going on for Avatar, as this past weekend saw the opening of Pandora: The World of Avatar, an entire themed land at Walt Disney World's Animal Kingdom that is based around the film.
At the opening event for Pandora, I spoke to Cameron about this massive undertaking, which includes an incredibly impressive ride, Flight of Passage. We also discussed how the theme park can help his cast, as they prepare to film the sequels, and whether he's concerned over how long it will take for the first follow-up to open.
IGN: You got to sort of dip your toe into the theme park world with T2 3-D: Battle Across Time at Universal many years ago, but getting to be a part of creating this entire Pandora land, is it kind of a dream come true to see your vision come to life like this?
James Cameron: It's quite literally a dream come true, because a lot of the ideas in Avatar came from dream imagery. I didn't quite know what the story was going to be, but I set out to create another world. I had a whole list of what I called “planet stories.” I wanted to do a planet story - some other planet, some other world. And I love being an explorer, and I wanted to get that feeling of adventure. And what I came up with was Avatar. A lot of the imagery came from dreams. I do a lot of work in dreams. So here, to have it be made into a movie, that is a dream come true. This is times ten.
IGN: You are stepping right inside it.
Cameron: Right, because this is physical, tangible. You can walk through it, you can smell it, it's around you, you can hear it, you can hear all the creatures. And of course I know, from mixing the movies, what a lot of those creatures are that we're hearing. And then of course the [Flight of Passage] ride, as you said earlier, is incredible. And that was, I think, the moment where it really felt like being in a dream. You know, I used to have this expression when I had an effects company called Digital Domain. We used to call it “dreaming with your eyes wide open,” when you did something with visual effects that looked so compelling, but you knew you were awake. This is far beyond that. When I was riding that ride, I thought “I'm dreaming with my eyes wide open. I'm on Pandora. I'm flying on a Banshee.” It's not, my mind knows it's not possible, and yet it's happening. And really, everybody has said the same thing coming off this ride. It takes it to such a high level of visual truth, and experiential truth, that nothing is going to touch this ride for ages.
IGN: I had an emotional reaction with it, and I didn't expect to say that about a theme park ride.
Cameron: I did too! I mean, it was a little bit of a manly cry, but I was crying, I was crying at the end. [Laughs] It's amazing, and what it is is the beauty. When a human being is overwhelmed by beauty, they cry. It's not because something sad happened, it's because something great happened.
IGN: You were working on this at the same time you're working on the sequels, so was it kind of a cool experience to build your mythology and build your world and kind of think about things you're putting here that could come into play in the films as well?
Cameron: It’s very helpful, because, very much in the way we did the first film, we're working in quite a sterile environment. We're really reliant on our own imaginations, on our own sense memory. So when we're in the performance capture, there are no plants there. There's no green there. There's no soil there. So I took the actors to Kauai before we started working on the first film to do a sense memory experiment - to remember what it was like to walk down a trail, to have your toes squishing in the mud, to push a wet leaf aside. So that they could bring that all into our performance capture volume. Well now, all the actors are here at the World of Avatar. They don't have to go to Kauai this time! It's all around them!
IGN: The usual Hollywood logic would say you should have a sequel out within two or three years of the original. It's obviously gonna be a lot longer than that for Avatar. But for you, do you not put that stuff in your mind and just say “When it's ready, it's ready”?
Cameron: I don't worry about it. I mean, my sequel for Terminator, Terminator 2, came out seven years later. My sequel for Aliens, from Ridley Scott's film Alien, came out seven years later. We're now a little bit behind that timeline at seven and a half years to start production, to start shooting, but that was because we decided to do the four [sequels] as one big project. And getting four scripts right, as you can imagine, it is four times as hard as getting one script right. And this is not just about getting it right. This is about getting it great. Because people are not going to settle for okay, or more of the same. But, you know, it's that great sequel challenge. Will it still move me, will it still feel fresh, will I be surprised, but not so surprised that I feel betrayed? And we all know we all have our opinions about the sequels to the movies we love, and whether that worked or not.
Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman, IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at http://ift.tt/LQFqjj.
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