It took creativity to place the cast emotionally inside the environment of Pandora. Cameron brought the actors to Hawaiian rain forests and shot reference footage for them to use as sense memory when they returned to the volume. To help them feel an explosion, he boomed a noise over amplifiers, threw foam particles at them, and whacked them with a padded jousting pole. When Saldana was “riding” a flying creature, she clung to a giant gray hobbyhorse rocked on a gimbal by grips. For one gag, a stunt double clung to the back of a three-hundred-pound Samoan galloping around the stage. To approximate the planet’s slippery, moss-covered terrain, Cameron laid plastic sheets on the floor, forcing the cast to walk gingerly. When a group of child extras playing Na’vi children were supposed to follow Jake Sully like a pied piper, Cameron taped a name to Worthington’s chest, the kind of word a seven-year-old finds hilarious, like “buttface,” and told the actor to conceal it from the kids on the stage. The director changed the word on every take. In take after take, the children ran after Worthington, giggling, to try to discern what his sign said. Eventually, Cameron got a magical scene. “I found the whole way of working very freeing,” says Worthington. “All you’ve got to be is a five-year-old kid and jump into that world full-tilt boogie.” It’s the kind of filmmaking environment where it helps to have both imagination and patience. The learning curve on the new technology was steep. A crew member wrote a set catchphrase on a whiteboard: “It’s Avatar, dude, nothing works the first time.”
Some scenes were a combination of live action and CG. For those, Cameron used a new tool called the Simulcam, which allowed the director to see live-action actors in real time playing regular old human beings in exotic CG surroundings. They could be flying in a fully built prop helicopter on a soundstage, with Pandora’s floating mountains visible outside their window in Cameron’s Simulcam view. It’s the kind of detail that helps a director compose a shot and preserve his own visual style. Cameron’s goal was to make Pandora feel as real as possible, to shoot as if he were filming a documentary on another planet. That natural look is tricky to achieve in CG, which can feel sterile and too perfect. Most real-world filmmaking is about losing choices—the light is changing, the wardrobe is fixed, the set is only so large. In a CG world, the number of choices is potentially infinite—you can move your characters around, shift a tree to the left, add some afternoon light pouring in. “In theory, you should be able to make a better movie,” Cameron says, in the midst of adjusting his camera angle on a third-act battle scene, on the 212th day of shooting his marathon film. “It forces you to really have your narrative ducks in a row. It forces you to think through every shot.”
In late 2006, the Playa Vista set had some high-profile visitors when Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson came by to kick the tires of Cameron’s virtual camera and production pipeline. Jackson had visited Cameron at Lightstorm in 2004, when he was considering filming King Kong in 3-D, and gotten a quick tutorial on the 3-D cameras Cameron had used for his documentaries. The Lord of the Rings director felt it was too close to the start of production to introduce the new technology, but he and Cameron formed a bond over their appreciation of each other’s pioneering work. In 2005, Cameron had signed Jackson’s company to help realize his Pandoran world. By 2006, Spielberg and Jackson were in preproduction for a series of animated feature films about Tintin, the Belgian comic-book character, with Spielberg set to direct the first movie and Jackson to produce it. Looking for the most photo-real way to depict Tintin, they headed to Cameron’s workshop, and three of the most elite directors of their generation stood around a dusty warehouse taking turns playing with a camera. As twenty-first-century filmmaking moments go, it was as if Matisse, Picasso, and Monet had gathered to compare paintbrushes. Jackson and Spielberg spent a week at the stage using Cameron’s equipment and crew, who were on hiatus, to film a prototype for Tintin, as Cameron showed his colleagues how to pan and tilt within a virtual world. “He was helping us get our heads around the equipment,” says Jackson. “Jim is very generous in the way he shares knowledge and information. He doesn’t jealously guard technology and secrets.”
Cameron’s tendency to become absorbed in the details of filmmaking was indulged on the unique environment of the Avatar set, in which he could go back and reshoot elaborate action scenes endlessly from umpteen angles. An Avid editing suite was set up at the stage so that he could review each shot immediately and make changes. Instead of dailies, he had constant feedback on how his movie looked. Hours were spent on aircraft landing precisely right, a particular obsession of Cameron’s. “To fully appreciate this movie, you have to like helicopters,” he admits. The Avatar crew devised a way to let their director know when his next shot was set up—they played a deafening submarine sound that someone had downloaded from the Internet. Sometimes Cameron still didn’t hear it, so intent was he on reviewing his footage.
The Avatar set was a very different environment from Titanic, not just because of the style of the filmmaking, but also because of the demeanor of the man running the show. Cameron had changed in the years since he sunk his big boat, thanks in large part to the experience he had had on the expeditions. The tight-knit crew at the Playa Vista stage was not unlike the small groups he led on the Keldysh. “We were out in the wilderness working far beyond the borders of the known. We were making technology and seeing it work. We were doing extraordinary things that outsiders would not even understand,” Cameron says. “All these things bring you together.” Sigourney Weaver, remembering Cameron tearing around England’s hoary Pinewood Studios, told fellow cast members the filmmaker had mellowed. Worthington, a Cameron virgin, found in his director the kind of man he had been asked to play—a guy you would follow into battle. “I was at a point in my life where, fuck it, I was looking for someone to stand next to me,” Worthington says. “I was looking for someone to give it all I’ve got to.” There would be low-morale days, especially when trying to make a deadline to turn over shots to the film’s various special-effects houses. A core group would repair to the “Hometree Bar,” actually a visual-effects artist’s office on the set, for morale-boosting shots of tequila. “I have my bad days, and on my best days I’m no Ron Howard,” Cameron confesses. “But I tried to bring a new spirit of leadership.”
Weta
With more than 2,500 special-effects shots, the bulk of the man-hours on Avatar were spent not on a stage but in a dark viewing room in Los Angeles, teleconferencing with Weta artists in Wellington, New Zealand. Peter Jackson and two other New Zealand filmmakers founded Weta the same year that Cameron founded Digital Domain, in 1993. One of the company’s first tasks was to create the elaborate fantasy sequences in Jackson’s macabre drama Heavenly Creatures. The shop went from Kiwi boutique to Hollywood powerhouse with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, earning an Academy Award on each film and another for King Kong. In many ways, Weta is what Cameron wanted to create with Digital Domain, a risk-taking, director-centric company.
In May 2009, Cameron and a half dozen L.A. crew members were conferring with their Wellington-based counterparts over a Pandoran jungle scene. “It looks like fantasy van art, man,” Cameron said, wielding a laser pointer emphatically. “Get rid of that cliff.” The Weta crew was nothing if not accommodating, adding light here, moving tree limbs there. By this point they had been working on shots for more than two years and were accustomed to Cameron’s intense, detail-oriented personality and to his particular likes and dislikes. One of the trickier quirks for the Weta artists to nail down had been “Jim Cameron blue,” a cyan lighting that has appeared in the night shots of all of Cameron’s films.
Perfecting special-effects shots requires a constant back and forth between artists and filmmaker. In this case, the director had seen the images in his head for thirty years and produced templates with carefully chosen color, light, and composition. “I saw the flowers as much more translucent, with a lot more transmuted light,” Cameron said, reviewing one shot. As always on a Cameron film, the real world w
as being used to inform the fictional one. Cameron encouraged an artist trying to get a creature right to “reference a rattlesnake skull and look at the quadrate bone.” A six-legged horse was made shinier because “real horses are shinier.” An energy map of the Pandoran forest was modeled on some rat neurons. As shot after shot was brought up on the screen for Cameron’s appraisal, the smallest details garnered his attention. Hours were spent on getting alien sap to drip precisely right. When a shot from a battle scene went by with few changes, Cameron was pleased. “See, I’m low maintenance,” he said, drawing weary laughter in both hemispheres. A column in one shot annoyed him. After fifteen minutes debating its placement, he declared, “That column is worth fifty million dollars of the domestic gross!” shaking his head at his own obsessiveness. “No one will notice. Well, I’ll notice.”
The postproduction on the film would be a lengthy and elaborate process, with Cameron again being a full-fledged member of the editing team. He brought Titanic composer James Horner back to write the music, a combination of ethereal choirs and ethnic instruments meant to sound both organic and otherworldly. In September 2009, Avatar took over two mixing stages at Fox. One was used for sound mixing and the other as a CG review stage, where Cameron sifted through the images flowing in from nine special-effects vendors, including Weta Digital and ILM. The idea of an “image mix” similar to a sound mix was one Cameron had detailed in his Digital Manifesto. One by one, he was living out his plans.
Avatar Day
Avatar would prove nearly as complicated to market as it was to make. With no preexisting intellectual property, there was no built-in fan base to harness, other than fans of Cameron. This was a movie designed expressly to lure audiences to giant 3-D cinema screens, but first Fox would have to sell it in the two-square-inch box of an Internet trailer. In May, seven months before the film’s release, Peter Chernin was concerned and was considering not producing a traditional trailer at all. “It feels so revolutionary. A trailer almost diminishes it,” he said, days after having seen a rough cut of the film for the first time. Audiences got their first look at twenty-five minutes of footage in July at Comic-Con, where Cameron was greeted as a conquering war hero in the San Diego Convention Center’s cavernous Hall H, which had been specially equipped to show 3-D footage for Avatars presentation. At Comic-Con, Cameron announced a unique marketing strategy—August 21 would be “Avatar Day,” on which Fox would debut the film’s trailer and 131 IMAX theaters would screen sixteen minutes of select 3-D scenes for free in the United States, while another 300 screens showed it internationally. When the trailer went online, demand was instantaneous, quickly making it the most-downloaded trailer at Apple.com. The Avatar footage triggered a record four million streams in its first day.
But the reaction wasn’t all glowing. Some commenters likened the Na’vi to George Lucas’s reviled CG character Jar Jar Binks, others to the eighties TV cartoon ThunderCats. A particularly hilarious viral video rewrote the subtitles to the climactic scene of the World War II movie Downfall to have Hitler raging about his disappointment in the Avatar trailer. “This is a fucking joke! I wait ten years for fucking Captain Planet with cats!” howled the Führer, a Cameron diehard who has even seen Xenogenesis and Piranha II. Audiences who saw the footage in theaters were considerably more impressed than Hitler, but Chernin’s original fears about marketing an untraditional movie in a traditional way had been validated. The initial hype and interest that had surrounded the project were giving way to a backlash. This was a place Cameron had been before, on Titanic, only instead of online bloggers and commenters, back then it had been mainstream media who snickered at his ambition. He handled any buzz, good or bad, the way he always did, by throwing himself into his work.
In July, Cameron convened an unusual meeting in a conference room at Lightstorm. He sat at the head of the table surrounded by a botanist, a physicist, sci-fi and archaeology writer Charlie Pellegrino, Avatar cowriter Laeta Kalogridis, friend and frequent collaborator Randall Frakes, and a journalist named Dirk Mathison. In case there was any doubt, Cameron donned a blue baseball cap with “HMFIC” printed on it (Head Mother Fucker In Charge). The questions the group debated—What is the lifespan of the average Na’vi? What is the composition of the atmosphere on Pandora? Why does unobtanium float?—would fill Pandorapaedia, a thick manuscript Mathison was maintaining about the plants, creatures, and properties of Pandora that would be used as a reference for any sequels or ancillary properties like video games. Though the first movie was nearly finished, the group was reverse engineering a mythology for it, putting great thought into the science of each question they pondered.
Unobtainium
One script element that Fox had initially objected to was Cameron’s failure to explain unobtainium, the precious resource that sends humans to Pandora to strip-mine the planet ruinously. “Unobtainium” is a joke term engineers have used for decades to describe any needed material that is rare, costly, or difficult to obtain. “Unobtainium is beaver pelts in French colonial Canada,” Cameron explains. “It’s diamonds in South Africa. It’s tea to the nineteenth-century British. It’s oil to twentieth-century America. It’s just another in a long list of substances that cause one group of people to get into ships and go kick the shit out of another group of people to take what is growing on or buried under their ancestral lands.” For Cameron, the specificity of unobtainium is not important. He likens it to the precious briefcase John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson retrieve in Pulp Fiction—you don’t need to know what’s in it, just that people are going to die for it. Despite Fox’s objections, he never explains in the movie what makes unobtainium worth the trouble of interstellar travel. But the answer to that question is that the substance’s room-temperature superconducting properties make it the key to cheap power generation back on Earth, where all the oil has run out. Unobtainium is crucial to running ships like ISV Venture Star, which delivers the humans to Pandora. The unfortunate irony is that the more unobtainium humans mine on Pandora, the more they will be able to travel there. It’s a devastating feedback loop.
Like all of Cameron’s movies, Avatar can be watched as pure escapist entertainment or as a dire warning about humanity’s current path. This time he is cautioning not about a nuclear holocaust but about an environmental one. “All life on Earth is connected, in ways which human science is still grappling to understand,” Cameron says. “But our industrial society is impacting that web of life at a rising rate, which will inevitably lead to a severe degradation of biodiversity and ultimately to a serious blowback effect against humanity. We have taken from nature without giving back, and the time to pay the piper is coming.”
In this movie, as in every one from The Terminator to Titanic, he offers us characters who preserve their spirit in dangerous times, from a wounded warrior to a wizened scientist to a whole species of survivors. “The Na’vi are humanoid because the audience is invited to relate to them, not as aliens but as creatures which express some aspect of ourselves which we admire and aspire to,” Cameron says. “They are emotional, spiritual, and physically accomplished. They are brave and unafraid of death because they know it is part of a greater cycle. They live in harmony with nature, not in some idyllic hippie fantasy but in a realistic way, meaning they know that they can be hunted as well as being the hunter, and they know they must not use technology to disturb the balance and must only take what they need.” With Avatar, for the first time Cameron’s future vision has not been limited by the strictures of a real-world movie set. The result is his most fantastical film, one that hews to the rules of science in its creatures and environments but not to the limitations of the physical world of props and the human body. Rather than diagramming the future, Cameron is expressing his present fear—that we might ruin our planet. Avatar is Cameron’s spiritual and ecological call to arms disguised as an adventure about a planet with ten-foot-tall blue aliens.
Warp Speed or Blade Running?
Futuristic visions tend to
fall neatly into utopian or dystopian categories. Some, from Plato’s Republic to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, envision a society in which life is better than it is today, one where we have achieved enlightenment or peace or, at long last, can travel at warp speed. Others, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, depict a world of totalitarianism, anarchy, or robotic assassins. As a futurist, Cameron has tended to be a bit of both optimist and pessimist. In the first Terminator movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s motorcycle-riding cyborg is our enemy, while in the second he’s our savior.
In his films, Cameron has shown little faith in society’s ability to adapt to a changing world. Yet, perhaps because his own story is so improbable, he exhibits great confidence in our potential to advance as individuals. The imaginative and worried boy from Chippawa forged his own unlikely path to Hollywood, the deep ocean, and the exotic other worlds of his own creation. Cameron gives us a future that is unfixed, one that is a dark highway at night, ours alone to navigate.
Acknowledgments
James Cameron generously granted me access to his set, his intimate circle of colleagues and friends, and his brain. His thoughtful, detailed, and frank answers to my relentless questions far surpassed anything I expected when I requested his cooperation on this book. When Avatar entered its final stages of postproduction and the already vast demands on his energy increased, he continued to make time for my project, because he said he would. I’m grateful for his keeping his word and sharing his most precious resource, his time.
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