‘It’s got to be an experience, first and foremost’: James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver and Kate Winslet on the return of Avatar
Sigourney Weaver recalls flying back from New Zealand with James Cameron last year, after they had finished filming the new Avatar movie. “I put on Superbad, I got a glass of wine, I had my seat back, slept for 14 hours,” she says. Meanwhile, for the duration of the flight, “Jim is sitting up reading a book that was called something like Is God Dead? I realised that I was not the same kind of human as he is. I mean, the guy is just …” She trails off, grasping for words. “He’s such a marine.”
People often complain that the age of Hollywood legends is over, but everything about James Cameron always seems to be mythologically huge. Where other movie titans owned fleets of luxury cars, Cameron had not just cars but helicopters and even submarines – which he designed himself and took to the bottom of the ocean. Alongside the militaristic hardware, a myth has formed of Cameron as a fearsome, tough-talking army general of a director, subduing and marshalling his crew on set to the extent they once made T-shirts that read: “You can’t scare me, I work for James Cameron.”
The scale of Cameron’s movies is equally legendary. Each one seems to be the most expensive gamble in history, and is predicted to be a disaster, but ends up breaking box-office records. At least that was the story with the last two: Titanic and Avatar. Now comes The Way of Water, the first of four planned Avatar sequels, jointly estimated to be costing more than $1bn to make. It is also three and a quarter hours long, so epically proportioned business as usual, you might say.
The Way of Water comes 13 years after the first Avatar, and much has changed in the interim. Streaming has decimated cinema; Disney has bought up everything (including 20th Century Fox, Cameron’s favoured studio); and an entire cycle of superhero movies has captured the blockbuster territory Cameron once occupied. For some, this has highlighted Avatar’s relative lack of cultural impact: everyone knows Captain America and Iron Man; far fewer will recall the names of Avatar’s heroes, or even its actors (Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, and Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana; Saldana has made four Marvel movies since she last played Neytiri).
Cameron recently took a swipe at superhero movies, complaining “they all act like they’re in college”; today, he’s more measured. “God bless ’em. Let them do their thing. I love Marvel,” he says when we meet in London. The 68year-old is leaner of build and whiter of hair these days, and seems relaxed and attentive, even after a marathon bout of promotional interviews.
Was he looking at Marvel’s cultural impact and thinking that one Avatar movie was not enough?
“I don’t think the Marvel Universe had anything to do with that,” he says. “I think it was more looking at what Peter Jackson had done with the Lord of the Rings films, taking that trilogy of books and turning it into something that people are happy to return to every couple of years. And I thought, ‘Well, let’s do that.’ Let’s create a world that’s that intricate, that has that fractal level of detail. Tolkien spent 12 years putting all that detail into the books.”
Typically, Cameron has almost gone one better. On top of inventing a new world populated by giant blue-skinned
aliens (called Na’vi) and other fantastical fauna and flora, Cameron’s team have invented new film-making technology with which to render it, which partly explains the 13-year delay (although the producer Jon Landau points out that’s a fraction of the time it took them to make a sequel to Top Gun).
Moving on from Avatar’s forest setting, The Way of Water unveils a whole new aquatic ecosystem, populated by bespoke sea animals and a Pacific Islander-like tribe of Na’vi. As well as pioneering new techniques of underwater motion capture, they put actors through a kind of Na’vi boot camp: language and dialect classes, Na’vi movement lessons, underwater sign language, parkour, scuba diving, not to mention free diving – the cast could not use aqualungs when performing underwater, so had to learn to act while holding their breath.
“We did training for like a year with a guy who teaches the Navy Seals,” Weaver explains. “We were certified for scuba, then we went on dives with Jim, who’s a great diver, off the coast of Hawaii, with huge manta rays swimming over us. And then doing some of the work riding on creatures and stuff like that. And then the free diving. By the time we had to shoot those scenes, I’d done a breath hold of six-and-a-half minutes.”
Weaver’s return is something of a surprise considering her character, a human scientist, died in the first Avatar. Somehow she’s back playing a 14-yearold Na’vi girl (she can’t really explain it either). “I had to unearth my own, somewhat ambivalent 14-year-old self,” she says. The magic of technology does the rest – despite appearing as a blue-skinned teenage alien, she is still unmistakably Sigourney Weaver.
Even more of a surprise is the participation of Kate Winslet. After Titanic, Winslet said of Cameron: “He has a temper like you wouldn’t believe … You’d have to pay me a lot of money to work with Jim again.” Whether it was the money or the time – Winslet was 21 back then; now she is 47 – the scars of Titanic seem to have healed. In fact, she and Cameron remained friends, she says, explaining how, at an event in 2014, he said to her, “at some point, we have to get you big and blue”.
Cameron gave Winslet the option of doing as much or as little of the water stuff as she wanted this time, she says. “And I said: ‘Oh no, I’m definitely, definitely doing it.’ And I just loved it so much, my gosh.” She held her breath for a record-breaking seven minutes 20 seconds. “I got quite good at it in the end,” she says proudly.
There were some similarities with making Titanic, she acknowledges, “in the sense that there were so many actors, and we really had to stick together because it was so hard for all of us. And obviously, the shoot was incredibly long and there was an enormous amount of pressure on everybody.” But the infamous Cameron temper seems to have gone. “He’s definitely mellowed,” she says. “I think he said that about himself, too. He’s just a more chilled-out guy these days.”
Weaver agrees. “He’s more playful now,” she says, thinking back to when she first worked with Cameron on Aliens, in 1985. At that time he had a lot to prove. “People didn’t know who this Canadian kid was, stepping into Ridley Scott’s shoes. So he was pretty serious.” It was only later, when they were showing Aliens at the Venice film festival, that Weaver saw a lighter side to him. “I was having dinner with him. And I turned to him and said: ‘You’re so funny. Where was that the whole time?’ He’s incredibly funny and witty, and a great friend and companion. We’ve become his actor family.”
Family has a lot to do with it. Since 2000, Cameron has been married to the actor Suzy Amis (they met while filming Titanic, in which she has a small role). The couple have three children together plus one each from previous relationships, aged between 15 and 32. In The Way of Water, which is set a decade on from the first Avatar, Jake and Neytiri have four children. “Artistically speaking, I’m writing what I know,” says Cameron.
Unlike those carefree Marvel heroes, Avatar’s characters have acquired adult responsibilities. “He could have quite easily told the story of Jake and Neytiri going on battling the wars,” says Worthington (who, like Saldana, has three children of his own), “but when you add in the kids and having to keep them safe, or not wanting them to emulate you because it can get them killed, they’re operatic themes.”
It must be said, though, that these Na’vi are pretty disciplinarian parents. Jake, the ex-marine, preaches about a father’s role protecting his family, but often treats his own children like military subordinates. They even call him “sir”. “Yeah, he’s a tough guy,” Cameron admits. “And I’ve been accused of that as well by my children. We’ve come to an accommodation around that. My wife founded a school called the Muse school, and it has a kind of radical approach to curriculum. And one of the things is that the students get to critique the teacher, and the teacher has to listen and do what the students think they should do. Well, we also do that in my family as well.”
Basically, Cameron’s children told him he was always off making films, and therefore had no right to lay down the rules when he was at home. And how did Cameron respond? “I gotta listen to them. That’s the rule,” he says, smiling. “I’m much more easygoing now. I let them do what they feel they need to do.” He could be talking about his actors as much as his children.
Where once Cameron collected vehicles and weaponry, now he’s more likely to be found farming organic vegetables in New Zealand (not entirely successfully, it must be said). He has been a vegan since 2012 and, alongside his wife, is a committed advocate of climate-friendly eating. When I ask what he has been doing since the first Avatar, he replies: “I was building a factory in Canada for pea-protein extraction.”
For all their heavy metal action, Cameron’s films have always been ambivalent about technology. Time and again in his movies, the military-industrial complex turns out not to be our friend, from the destructive manmachines of Terminator to the venal extraction industry in The Abyss to the hubristic catastrophe of Titanic. In Avatar the theme is writ even more starkly: human technology versus defenders of the natural order. Or, as Cameron once put it, “helicopters versus pterodactyls”.
“Yeah, it’s a change of priority. There’s less violence and fetishisation of guns and so on,” says Cameron. “But I still like my tech. I get very involved in the design of the helicopters and the boats. And there’s a lot of cool stuff in this movie in terms of big boy toys. But the way the first film worked, and the way that I think this film can work, is that it rekindles in us an awareness of our innate connection to nature, and to each other, which is primordial. It’s very true in Indigenous culture; we’ve lost it quite a bit in our urban, industrial culture. I think, internally, we feel a longing for it. And when we see it on the screen, it awakens something in us.”
Just as the industrial and the organic collide in Avatar, so do the nostalgic and futuristic. Avatar’s world might represent some tree-hugging, pre-industrial Eden, but the movies also play with sci-fi ideas of posthuman identity. Jake, Weaver’s 14-yearold girl and the principal antagonist Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, are all, in different ways, a mix of human and alien, struggling to reconcile their identities. There’s an intriguing scene in The Way of Water where Quaritch, presumed dead at the end of Avatar but now inhabiting a Na’vi body, encounters his own human remains in the forest. He picks up his own skull and crushes it in his blue hand. “Is he truly reincarnated? Or is he, in fact, a new being who’s just strongly influenced by the imprint of the previous version of himself?” asks Cameron.
“I guess what I’m struggling to do is to have the best of both worlds, right? We have to forge a path forward where we listen to the Indigenous wisdomkeepers and rebalance ourselves with nature, and not go fully down the rabbit hole of advanced technology, but at the same time not lose what we’ve created, not lose this zenith of science and understanding of the natural world that we’ve managed to extract. So what does a balanced human future look like? I have ideas around that, of course, but I don’t know what that looks like.”
Given the scale, ambition and scarcity of his output, Cameron is as much a prophet as a film-maker these days, or at least that rare breed of cultural heavyweight whose every new work carries great significance. “I think we shouldn’t overestimate the impact of a single film,” he says. “But I do think that we in the arts, especially if you’ve got more reach, have a responsibility. I think a lot of movies are just escapism. The Avatar films do have a conscience, but I don’t let that get in the way of the big adventure. It’s got to be an experience, first and foremost, or you’re wasting your time trying to say anything thematically.”
So there’s still room for the big boy toys?
“Oh, I want one of everything that’s in the movie for real,” he says.
• Avatar: The Way of Water is in cinemas now