More Avatar films
FILMMAKER James Cameron is hoping to make moviegoers an offer they can’t refuse with the next round of Avatar movies by bringing an element of The Godfather’s epic sensibility to the world of Pandora. And he has plans to expand the story into a five-film epic if the first few are successful.
“It’s a generational family saga. It’s very different from the first film,” Cameron says.
“In terms of the storytelling, I found myself – not for any reasons of the zeitgeist or what was popular – but I found myself, as a father of five, starting to think about, ‘What would an Avatar story be like if it was a family drama? If it was The Godfather?’ Obviously, a very different genre, very different story, but I got intrigued by that idea.”
Cameron points out that the fivefilm epic is “green lit” and he has personally committed to all of them, so he knows where he’ll be for the next six years. But whether or not the fourth and the fifth film gets made is dependent upon the success of the second and third films.
The cast and crew recently marked their 100th day of conjoined production on the second and third films, which Cameron reveals is a continuation of the same characters from the first film but with a multigenerational aspect added.
“What happens when warriors that are willing to go on suicide charges and leap off cliffs on to the back of big orange toruks – what happens when they grow up and have their own kids?” Cameron says. “It becomes a very different story. Now the kids are the risk-takers and the change-makers.”
His logic for the new tack, he added, was that it was both universally relatable and a dynamic that has been as yet unexplored by the modern slate of studio blockbusters.
“Everybody’s either a parent or they had parents,” he says. “If you look at the big successful franchises now, they’re pretty much uninterested in that.” Cameron admits he may be taking his emerging franchise into creatively risky territory.
“This could be the seeds of utter damnation and doom for the project, or it could be the thing that makes it stand apart and continue to be unique,” he says. “Nobody knows ‘till you make the movie and put it out. And anybody that thinks that this stuff is easy or it’s a foregone conclusion or we’re just printing money over here in Avatar studio, it doesn’t work that way.”
Even as Cameron builds out the world of his most successful film property, he’s preparing for a long-anticipated return to his original blockbuster baby – the Terminator franchise.
He reveals that as the culture’s relationship with technology has grown increasingly and swiftly more sophisticated in the nearly four decades since the original instalment, he plans to re-explore
the concept accordingly.
“Terminator films are about artificial intelligence, and I would say that we are looking at that differently than I looked at it when I made, when I wrote the first story in 1982,” he says.
“That was just a classic kind of ‘technology bad, smart computers bad’ kind of thing. It’s got to be a much more nuanced perspective now, I think. And hopefully we’ll show that. So ‘smart computers bad, but...’ is the new motif.” – Reuters