By Fred Topel

The highlight of San Diego Comic Con by far was talking to James Cameron about Avatar. I’ve met Cameron before. I covered his Imax documentaries and he turned up for Solaris as a producer. But talking to James Cameron about a James Cameron film is something else.

Crave Online: Is that a bold move, to think of something you don’t even have the means to produce yet?
 
James Cameron: It was done on purpose. I had founded a visual effects company with the idea I didn't really want to be, necessarily, a service company for other filmmakers, although of course that’s how you pay for all the infrastructure. I wanted us to push out in front, and do really cool stuff, and use the new technology to create CG characters. I partnered with Stan Winston, because he was wanting to do the same thing. He was even putting in CG work stations at his Creature Shop, that’s how prescient he was about where this was all going. So, this was in ’91, ’92. We formed a company but then we got side-tracked into all this kind of 2D composite stuff. I’m using 2D, 3D in the computer sense, not in the stereo presentation sense. We did True Lies, and Apollo 13, Titanic, stuff that was not pushing creature development, character development at all. So I said, “All right. I’m gonna write something so that right after Titanic, we go into really pushing the envelope.” And my guys shouted me down. Whereas on The Abyss, with the water weenie character, we’d gone kind of one level beyond, or maybe a level and a half and the same thing with Terminator 2. You know, the liquid metal dude, we could just barely do that. Or we could imagine doing it. And, you know, Stan Winston said something very interesting when I first showed him the 3D footage. Not from Avatar, but right before that, from the documentaries. I said, “Yeah, and I’m thinking about doing a 3D film. I’ll do something small to start out with, and build up.” He said, “No, no, no. You do your biggest and your best idea.” He said, “You do your Star Wars in this.” And Stan could be like that. He just was so crazily intuitive. Boom, right to the idea. I thought, “He’s right.”

Crave Online: Do you feel a lot of pressure coming back to Hollywood filmmaking after 12 years?
 
James Cameron: It turns out in retrospect to look kind of like a master plan because learning how to build the 3D technology, learning how to work with 3D, over that time, we did a tremendous amount of 3D shooting, some of it in very rough conditions. So in a funny way, when I started the live-action shoot on Avatar, I knew exactly what to do. In fact, it was almost easy by comparison. I had six days of prep in New Zealand before we started shooting this movie. Six days. Normally, you’d prep for 60 or 90 days, in situ. I had six days. And the reason was, because first of all, all the sets were already designed virtually in advance, and built from plans. And I was working on a virtue volume here in LA, in virtual sets that were being built for real in New Zealand. So I walked in six days before, and I said, “Okay. I’ve already, in a sense, done all these shots. I know the camera goes there, camera goes there, lights go out there.” So in a way, the documentary films, in 3D, had prepped me for the live action shoots so well, that we just started. It was just very smooth. And I had a good, proven team as a result of that. So in a way, I was building muscle to do this film.
 
Crave Online: With the preparation that you made, and with all the design that you did beforehand, is it the kind of movie that you actually had a sequence that was most challenging for you to achieve, or did you kind of cut that out, because you had pre-planned so much?
 
James Cameron: No, we didn't cut anything out because we couldn't do it, but there was one scene that did take us two years to figure out how to shoot. That’s the action finale, so I can't tell you what it is, but it involved characters in four different scales all interacting with each other, all played by live performers. It was crazy, how hard it was. But at least we knew it was the finale of the film, so it was worth our effort. And it’s a corker.
 
Crave Online: With all that technology at your disposal, are you ever worried about going overboard?
 
James Cameron: Yeah, there’s a danger of that. But I think the hardest part of this job, no matter who it is sitting here, is to maintain a fresh eye. And this is true on any film. Because every film, you plan it, you write it, you storyboard it, you shoot it, you cut it, mix it, do the music, you’ve seen at 1000 times by the time you’re making your final editorial decisions. If you take anything for granted, that the audience understands something that they can't possibly, because you’ve taken out the information they need, you’re doomed. But I think your question was also about, “Oh, you’ve got all this technology, and green screen and CG and all that. Do you lose touch with the humanity?” A lot of what we spent our time developing was a technology that was transparent to me, as a filmmaker, was filmmaker-centric, so I could actually have tools that made it more intuitive. In the way that on the documentaries, I just had that camera there, and I’d just run over and shoot it. Or, if I felt something was happening over there, I’d turn. Like that. Our virtual tools allowed me to do that, in the CG world. With that kind of real-time, instinctive quality. And for the actors, also, to make it transparent to them, so it was just about performance. The irony is, the technology made the technology go away. And, by the way, you can become inured to the beauty of a moment, and cut it too short. So, I think that this is just something you learn. You know, it’s like anything.
 
Crave Online: How important will the 3D exhibition be to the story?
 
James Cameron: I don't think the 2D, 3D, really affects the narrative power of the story. That has to exist as its own thing. And I think every film has to have a certain amount of darkness to appreciate the light. But I think the curious thing about this film especially, and one of the reasons that I was attracted to it, is it has real beauty in the film, by design. I mean, we wanted to balance the intensity and the terror, and kind of the darkness, with the moments of just transporting beauty. And I think a lot of films, most films, I would say, especially in the science fiction genre, don’t try to do that. They should, and occasionally they succeed. But to me, it was about doing both.

Crave Online: Your action sequences still hold up, even going back to the original Terminator. What do you think it is about your style that makes that evergreen, and maybe some of the stuff you see now could be bigger, but who cares?
 
James Cameron: Well, you don’t care. It’s stakes. You have to understand the stakes for the people in the situation. That’s why a down and dirty car chase in Terminator still carries weight. Because you care about the people.
 
Crave Online: But I’ve seen Terminator before and I know how it turns out, but I’m still involved.