The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  The Prototype

  In May 2005, Twentieth Century Fox agreed to a $10 million development budget for Avatar based on Cameron’s treatment, which had changed little since he had written it nearly ten years earlier. The $10 million would cover his writing a script, a year of designing characters and creatures with a staff of artists, construction of a virtual studio in Hughes’s Playa Vista warehouse, and production of a prototype that Fox would use to determine whether to fund the film. Titanic producer Jon Landau nicknamed the endeavor “Project 880” to preserve some secrecy. Cameron had been trying to decide which movie to make next, and there was fervent interest in Hollywood and among the director’s fans about his plans. The smart money seemed to be on Battle Angel, an adaptation of a series of manga comic books first brought to him by Guillermo del Toro and being written by Cameron and a little-known screenwriter named Laeta Kalogridis, who had penned a well-regarded spec script about Joan of Arc while attending UCLA. But Avatar had a better scene in which to test the technology—a five-minute mix of action and dramatic dialogue between two CG characters—so Cameron decided to start with that one. “It didn’t occur to me that this decision would essentially be the decision of what film would be made first, but that’s what happened,” he says.

  From his roughly sketched treatment, Cameron wrote a five-minute scene in which the human-alien hybrid hero Jake (then named Josh) meets Na’vi woman Neytiri (then named Zuleika). In the test scene, the Na’vi woman defends the hero from some terrifying creatures called viper wolves, prays over the animals’ dead bodies, knocks the hero down and berates him; then he follows her onto a log bridge. Incidentally, this is as close to “meet cute” as Cameron gets—in his last movie, the lovers had bumped into each other during her attempt to commit suicide off the edge of a boat, and in The Terminator, they were united by the impending nuclear holocaust. For the prototype footage, the director cast Korean American Yunjin Kim, who was fresh off the first season of J. J. Abrams’s drama Lost, and a young actor named Daniel Best.

  In August, Cameron shot the prototype in a day and a half using a number of new technologies and techniques. In addition to mo-cap suits like the one Serkis had worn as Gollum, the actors donned head rigs Cameron had designed with little boom cameras that tracked their facial expressions. Shooting with a virtual camera, Cameron was able to see the actors not as figures in suits but as crude versions of their alien selves. “It’s very difficult for a director to work in a CG environment,” explains Rob Legato, who helped Cameron develop the virtual cinematography system. “If he can shoot it just the way he would shoot it if the ten-foot-tall blue alien were there for real, then there’s a live, organic quality that you get. It’s not intellectually wrought, it’s viscerally wrought.” Cameron created terrain with ramps and risers and had the actors run on a tape line to simulate the surface of a rounded log.

  Once he captured the performances, he started to experiment with virtual production, in which he could replay the scene and shoot it again, from any angle he wished, without having to bring the actors back. He could change scale, smooth out his motion, even move characters around. He got accustomed to walking through plants and people-like ghosts and to the quirks of the virtual camera, which lagged two hundred milliseconds behind the action. Every shot was also tested in 3-D. Cameron and Vince Pace had developed their 3-D cameras to shoot the Ghosts of the Abyss documentary in 2001, used them again to film Aliens of the Deep, and lent them out to Robert Rodriguez for some scenes in the third Spy Kids movie, but the technology was still nascent. The 3-D added two more weeks to finishing the test, as Cameron encountered all kinds of new problems he hadn’t anticipated relating to focal-length selection. Finally, the five-minute prototype was cut. Despite the crudeness of the models, lighting, and environments, the footage had a cinematic feeling. “We thought it was the bomb,” Cameron says.

  The next step was to take the scene to full resolution, hopefully getting the CG characters in impressive enough shape to convince Fox to fund the movie fully. Cameron selected a thirty-seven-second chunk—anything longer would have taken too long to achieve—and enlisted Industrial Light & Magic to tackle it. The initial results were devastating, particularly for the Na’vi woman, whose color was off and lips were fake looking. “She looked like a dead carp that washed up on a beach,” Cameron says. Somehow his bold vision, laid out so emphatically in the 1992 manifesto, looked like a bad 1980s video game. “I lost all hope in the project.”

  Over the next three months, ILM would bring all its years of CG savvy to bear on the thirty-seven seconds of footage. By Christmas, things were looking a little bit better. Slightly encouraged, Cameron went to his vacation house in Crested Butte, Colorado, to work on the script. After New Year’s, he relocated to his ranch in Santa Barbara County to continue writing. (Some writers move their laptop to another coffee shop when they need a change of environment; when you’re king of the world, you can shift among your multiple idyllically located homes.) Wherever he went, Cameron faced his usual writing demons. “I’m not one of these guys who can write from nine to four every day and have a normal family or social life at the same time,” Cameron says. “I need to completely isolate and think about the piece 24-7. This gets harder later in your career, when you’re multitasking on lots of projects, and having five kids doesn’t help. I still need to bunker completely to get anything good written.”

  As he wrote, he conferred with ILM by iChat, slogging away to get up to some level of reality in the characters’ skin tone, eyes, lips, and lighting. Best’s character was turning out well, because it had been designed around him, but Kim’s character had been designed before she was cast and didn’t physically resemble the actress at all. “We believed it didn’t matter in the case of the Na’vi if they didn’t resemble their characters,” Cameron says. “Wrong. That was an important lesson.” The actress’s mouth was so different from her Na’vi counterpart’s that it turned out to be difficult to make the CG mouth hit the correct shapes when she spoke. When Cameron ultimately cast the Na’vi, he would have to choose actors who physically resembled their characters.

  Finally, a 3-D test clip was finished and a screening was held for executives at Fox, who were wowed. Studio cochairman Tom Roth-man asked to watch the footage over and over again, and then to see it in 2-D, to make sure the movie would be good in either format. It was. The proof of concept was a success. There was only one problem. It had taken several months of minute changes and countless iterations to deliver six CG shots. The final movie would contain more than 2,500 of them. How was Cameron going to achieve his goal of making a whole movie this way and surpass the prototype’s level of reality?

  Good News/Bad News

  The director began refining his process for making this technically arduous film. He chose a mo-cap provider, Giant Studios, which had worked on the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and signed on the company that had delivered Gollum so beautifully, Jackson’s Weta Digital. In May 2006, he turned in a first draft of his script to Fox. As much as it liked the prototype, the studio disliked the script. “They had a lot of notes and basically acted like it was a complete shambles,” Cameron recalls. The draft was too long—153 pages—and a work in progress, which is how Cameron usually writes, continuously editing as he goes, incorporating material from rehearsals with actors. But in the ten years since Titanic, “they’d all forgotten that that’s how I work.” From Fox’s perspective, things looked grim. After nearly a decade of waiting for their star director to climb out of his sub and get back to work on a film set, the studio was not thrilled with the result. Here was an ambitious project with a lot of risky elements, including unproven technology and blue main characters with tails and a script the executives didn’t get. As usual, Cameron planned to cast no-names. Oh, and by the way, the movie would cost at least as much as Titanic, which had nearly doubled its initial budget. “When you get Jim to say yes to a movie, it’s a good news/bad news scenario,” says Peter Chernin, who was
then president of the News Corporation, having been promoted since he had overseen the roller coaster of making and releasing Titanic. “When Jim first pitched Titanic, he pitched it as a more modestly budgeted movie. With Avatar, we went in knowing it was going to be extraordinarily complicated.” So complicated that at first Fox passed on the movie.

  Over the summer of 2006, Cameron reworked the script with the help of Kalogridis, his cowriter on Battle Angel. He collapsed two characters into one, a scientist named Grace Augustine, making her stronger and more central, and added an opening series of scenes on Earth to build up the hero character, the paralyzed marine now named Jake Sully (there were too many guys named Josh working on the movie, so Cameron changed it to “Jake” to avoid confusion). Some of Jake’s opening scenes would end up on the editing-room floor in the summer of 2009, but they seemed to make Fox happier at the time. Nevertheless, on September 11, a day that marks strange milestones in Cameron’s life, Chernin drove to Lightstorm himself to deliver the news: Fox was officially passing on the movie. Chernin wanted Cameron to hear it from him so there was no illusion that this was a lower-level decision. Immediately, Cameron approached Walt Disney Studio chairman Dick Cook, with whom he had a bond over their shared belief in 3-D. Disney had been a partner on Cameron’s two 3-D IMAX documentaries and the previous year had released Chicken Little, the first feature film to be projected in digital 3-D. Within two days, Disney was on board to make Avatar. In particular, the executives loved the script. Then Fox, Cameron’s studio home, with whom he had a first-look pact, decided to reconsider the project. Cameron made some concessions in his personal deal and cut out a couple of CG scenes, and, in October, Fox green-lighted Avatar.

  He Had Me at “Uh-Huh”

  As Cameron worked on the script, a University of Southern California linguist named Paul Frommer had begun creating the Na’vi language, mixing bits of Polynesian and African tongues. This would be Cameron’s Klingon—a constructed, fictional language—and the actors he hired to play Na’vi characters would have to master it. For Avatars casting, Cameron reteamed with his partner since T2, Mali Finn. Sick with melanoma, Finn would retire in 2005, before she could finish Avatar, and die in 2007, making this her last film. Before she left the production in the hands of casting director Margery Simkin, Finn found Cameron’s leading lady, a then-little-known actress named Zoe Saldana. Raised in Queens, New York, and the Dominican Republic, Saldana is the daughter of a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother. She studied ballet as a child and broke into show business at age twenty-one via a forgettable dance movie called Center Stage. Saldana’s unique beauty and athleticism would later earn her small roles in big movies—as the lone female pirate swashbuckling alongside Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and as an officious airport worker in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal. She would get a bigger part as Bernie Mac’s daughter dating Ashton Kutcher in a 2005 reenvisioning of the groundbreaking 1967 racial drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner called simply Guess Who.

  In 2004, while still a relative unknown, Saldana gave a cheeky interview about action roles, saying, “I’d rather quit this business than constantly play the girlfriend of the action hero. In real life, if Spider-Man always came to the rescue, after a point I’d be like, ‘Come on, man, I can do it myself”2 A year later, at age twenty-seven, she would find herself at Lightstorm, reading for Cameron and Simkin for the part of Neytiri, a Pandoran native. Cameron and Simkin were both won over at the same moment, when Saldana spontaneously snarled like a cat in the middle of a scene. “It was completely improvisational and utterly what Neytiri would do,” Cameron says. “Her beauty, her graceful feline movement, the power in her voice, her emotional range, everything said Zoe was the one.” The production of Avatar was so lengthy that in the midst of it, Saldana was cast in an iconic role, as Uhura in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek remake, released in the spring of 2009. In the widely praised relaunching of the sci-fi franchise, Saldana played the competent communications officer of the USS Enterprise, translating Klingon and harboring a crush on young Spock while wearing a minidress and boots, but not, alas, kicking any butt. In Avatar, she would get her chance to rescue the hero, entering the movie by saving Jake from a pack of viper wolves.

  Cameron first saw the man who would play Jake Sully on a poor-quality casting tape with twenty other actors on it made in Sydney, Australia. “I didn’t need just a guy that girls would swoon over,” Cameron says. “I needed a young man that men would follow into battle.” Sam Worthington, a native of Perth, Western Australia, was working as a bricklayer in Sydney at age nineteen when he went along to a drama-school audition as moral support for his girlfriend. He got in, she didn’t, they broke up, and Worthington embarked on a path that would lead him to Cameron’s door a decade later. He performed in some theater and TV and had small parts in Australian movies before breaking through there in an independent film called Somersault, as a hunky and vulnerable rancher’s son opposite then-unknown Abbie Cornish. Somersault got noticed at Cannes in 2004 and its rugged male star made it onto a short list for the new James Bond before Daniel Craig was cast in 2005. When he auditioned on tape for Cameron, Worthington had no idea what the project was. Even by Australian standards, he was extremely casual that day. “I thought it was another waste-of-time project that you tend to get in Australia,” Worthington says. He was playing a scene in which the paralyzed marine meets a scientist, with another actor reading the scientist’s lines off camera. Worthington watched the actor with steely indifference and, instead of the “yeses” the script called for, he grunted his replies. The actor’s aloofness, born in part of not knowing he was auditioning to play the hero in a James Cameron movie, happened to be exactly what the director was looking for. “He had me at ‘uh-huh,’” Cameron says. “He just seemed so hardened, so insular. He was an old-school tough guy, the kind Hollywood hasn’t seen in a while.”

  Cameron had Worthington work with an acting coach—“His accent was thicker than Crocodile Dundee’s,” he says—and then flew the actor in for a series of auditions over a six-month period. “Twice a month there were act-offs with other actors,” Worthington recalls. Fox saw the Australian’s potential but was interested in a name, suggesting Jake Gyllenhaal or Matt Damon, “both of whom, mercifully, passed,” Cameron says. It came down to Worthington and two other actors, including Channing Tatum, who went on to appear in Stop-Loss and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. It was on a Braveheart-esque scene where Jake rallies a group to battle that the studio was won over to Worthington. In January 2006, Cameron called the actor to let him know he had outlasted all the challengers and urge him to get on a plane to L.A. as soon as possible to start shooting on the performance-capture stage. Worthington was standing barefoot in a coffee shop in Sydney when he got the call, and his response suggests he didn’t quite know what was coming. “I told Jim, ‘I gotta get the brakes fixed on my car ‘cause I’m gonna give it to my girlfriend, and I’ve gotta help my mate move his fridge, and then I’ll be there.’” Overnight, merely by being cast in Avatar, Worthington became the biggest star no one had ever heard of. As her coveted role had for Saldana, playing Jake Sully would lead to another noteworthy part for Worthington before Avatar was finished, in a series Cameron had originated. Charlies Angels director McG tapped Worthington to play a machine man in Terminator Salvation—his two-fisted performance was singled out above that of his far-better-known costar, Christian Bale.

  Cameron’s cast would include another actor who had proved her mettle to him and to Fox twenty years earlier. For feisty botanist Grace Augustine, the scientist who runs the Avatar program on Pandora, he returned to his first alien-fighting heroine, Sigourney Weaver. It was a role he had originally written as two characters, at least one of whom he had hoped would be played by Morgan Freeman, but had combined into one in an effort to simplify his sprawling script. “I’ve teased him that I’m playing Jim Cameron in the movie,” Weaver says. “The chara
cter is driven, idealistic, perfectionist, but with great heart underneath.”3

  The Volume

  Cameron’s last movie had involved creating the largest and most meticulously detailed set ever made, a scale replica of the Titanic. By contrast, Avatars performance-capture soundstage, which is called “the volume,” looked like a Saturday Night Live skit about postmodern theater. The warehouse environment was so bizarre and spare, it seemed as if Mike Myers would bound out in a black turtleneck at any moment, demanding to have his monkey touched. Instead of sets, gray-painted triangles and polygons and the occasional tree were moved around to create topography for the actors to navigate. Cameron used more refined versions of the technology he had tested for the prototype. For the CG scenes, which would make up about 60 percent of the finished film, the cast wore clingy Lycra bodysuits covered in markers that were recognized by the 102 cameras on the warehouse ceiling. They donned skullcaps rigged with tiny cameras that imaged their faces. Weta software created blends of their eyebrows rising or lips curling, which were applied to Giant’s body capture and streamed to Cameron’s monitor. There the actors appeared, in real time, as their blue, alien counterparts.