Cameron is dreaming big
Canadian directing titan talks about underwater CG — and his hunt for water beyond Earth
When I ask superstar Canadian filmmaker James Cameron what the biggest “wow” moment will be in the two
Avatar sequels he’s currently filming, I don’t expect him to give the game away.
“It’s all wow stuff!” the Ontario-born Cameron, 63, proclaims from Los Angeles. “It’s the creatures, it’s the environments, it’s the visuals. I’m not going to give you any spoilers, but it’s going to be pretty f---ing cool. I get excited!”
I’m not the least bit surprised by the Canadian filmmaker’s immodest answer, or the discovery later in the interview, when he and are geeking out over Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey, that he has thoughts on how Kubrick should have put more “emotional balls” into his masterpiece.
This is the guy, after all, who proclaimed “I’m king of the world!” from the Academy stage in 1998 after his shipwreck epic Titanic reaped 11 Oscars. And he has a lot more to say about the “wow” factor of the Avatar franchise.
“The stuff that is not ‘wow’ is straight emotional drama. And that stuff is wow, too, because we’re going to a depth of character and a depth of storytelling that the first film didn’t have, and it’s all new environments and creatures. So we’re probably kind of overachieving, but the other thing is: Peoples’ expectations go up.”
What could those expectations possibly be? The first Avatar, a sci-fi fantasy and interstellar love story, featured groundbreaking computergenerated imagery and garnered a record-breaking boxoffice return. It grossed nearly $2.8 billion (U.S.) worldwide, making it the all-time champ in straight dollar figures, a title it still holds. ( Titanic is right behind with nearly $2.2 billion worldwide.)
Let that sink in: James Cameron, a proud Canadian, has directed the two biggest movies in history.
How do you top this? Cameron is determined to at least try, not just with the images but also the story, which he’s been accused in the past of making secondary to the eye candy.
“I don’t think you can just impress people with images,” he says.
“It’s always in a context of the narrative and the characters. Do you care? Do you feel physically present and involved? And then from there, now show me the magic. You can’t just dazzle with a bunch of spectacular shots.”
The first Avatar, released in 2009, was set mainly on the rainforest planet Pandora, where a paralyzed ex-Marine (Sam Worthington) falls in love with a blue-skinned alien played by Zoe Saldana, who is part of Pandora’s ecologyminded Na’vi people.
Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 are due in 2020 and 2021, respectively, with two additional sequels planned if the first two are successful.
The new films will include a lot of underwater scenes, which helps explain why it’s taken so long to follow up Avatar. Cameron (writer/ director of 1989’s undersea sci-fi film The Abyss) is a dedicated gearhead and deep-sea diver as well as film director, and he needed to draw on all these skills and develop the right equipment to do performance-capture work underwater.
“The stuff in the rainforest, we already knew how to do,” he says.
“The stuff in the ocean, we’ve cracked the code on how to do that … the scary part has been: How do we do that air-water interface with waves? There’s no part of the ocean that doesn’t have waves, that I’ve ever seen. So we have a wave tank and we’re actually performing with actors in a wave tank that can generate a fourfoot wave. Then in CG we can make it into a six-foot wave, and that’s a significant wave. That’s an overhead wave.”
The Avatar sequels will of course be in 3D. One of the big selling points of the first Avatar was its innovative and highquality 3D work, and Cameron has been outspoken about the need to insist on better standards for third-dimension cinema.
But he’s not going to go the next step and put virtual-reality scenes in Avatar. He thinks 3D is still the way to go, as long as it’s done properly, despite predictions that the trend has played out.
He’s also not anticipating a big rush toward VR features.
“Virtual reality and movies are two totally different things. That’s the difference between bowling and fishing. You may see narrative virtual-reality entertainments, but they’re not movies. So what are we doing in the movie theatre? Well, most big movies are in 3D. The number of 3D screens in the world today is something like 60,000 or 70,000, and at the time that Avatar came out, there were about 3,000. So people are quick to pronounce 3D dead, but they’re also quick to pronounce movies dead. And they seem to keep being alive, despite the most recent headlines.”
He’s referring to the current uproar over Netflix and fears — by movie distributors, the Cannes Film Festival and his friend and fellow director Steven Spielberg — that smallscreen online movies threaten the big-screen tradition.
Surprisingly for Cameron, he’s on the fence in the Netflix versus traditional movies argument. But he admits that’s because he makes blockbusters that are too big for Netflix. “I think it’s fine, I think there’s room for everybody, and I don’t have a strong opinion about the whole ‘windows’ problem because it’s not relevant to my films.
“We’re not going to release an Avatar film streaming dayand-date. It’s not going to happen. And since I’m tied up on Avatar for the next six years, I kind of don’t care. So to me, it’s a big experiment to see if it works and if it cannibalizes box office, then we shouldn’t do it. Or there needs to be an accommodation that satisfies the theatres as part of the overall ecology.”
Cameron’s gaze is aimed elsewhere, not just underwater for the Avatar sequels, but also out in space for real-life exploration. The two pursuits are actually linked, because he’s fascinated by the idea that there could be water — and also some kind of alien life — on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Images snapped by the Galileo and Cassini spacecraft look extremely promising.
Cameron has been working with NASA and other space agencies developing cameras for space-travelling robots, among them the Mars Curiosity rover.
He says while it would be “cool” to see a manned landing on Mars, which is predicted for sometime within the next 20 years, he’s possibly even more excited about exploring the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
“I’ll be happy if we get a lander on Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons). My new passion is the icy moons. Mars may have had habitability in the past, and we’re talking three billion years ago, but there’s not likely to be any surface life. There might not be any life that’s accessible right now ...
“Europa could be alive, down in that ocean, and so could (Saturn’s sixth-largest moon) Enceladus. And the low-hanging fruit there is Enceladus is venting ocean water into space through crevasses that open due to tidal flexing of that moon, due to the harmonics of the resonance of the other Saturnean moons. They’ve got these giant plumes that are shooting up a couple hundred kilometres into space.”
The plumes are signals, something like the mysterious black monoliths of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year) that includes a mind-blowing trip to Jupiter.
Like many filmmakers — and also film critics — Cameron counts 2001as a major influence. He first saw the film at the age in 13 in Toronto at the old Glendale Theatre on Avenue Rd., having travelled there from his family’s home in Chippewa, Ont., a suburb of Niagara Falls.
“It was probably five days after it opened, the summer of ’68. I watched ( 2001) from front row centre in the balcony, which put me dead in line to the Star Gate (Jupiter trip sequence), right on the axis, so I felt like I was falling down through the Star Gate.”
I was also 13 when I saw 2001 at the Glendale, a few months after he did.
But while Cameron loves the film, he admits to finding it a little too “sterile” to completely embrace.
“It’s not a film that I like; it’s a film that I love. When I say I don’t like it, it’s that I don’t like the feel of the film. I don’t like its sterility. I like a film with a little more emotional balls, just as a movie, to get involved in. But as a work of art, I love ( 2001). It had an enormous, enormous impact on me, at a certain point.”
Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.