James Cameron Returns

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Not sure anyone cares, but hey, he made a few good popcorn movies back in the day...
James Cameron is to make new movie Avatar, his first film since 1997's Oscar-winning blockbuster Titanic. Fox Filmed Entertainment has confirmed Cameron is to start virtual photography on the sci-fi epic in April, followed by live-action work in August, ahead of a summer 2009 release. Cameron has also written the screenplay for the movie, which tells the story of a wounded marine who is sent to the faraway planet of Pandora against his wishes, and finds himself caught up in a battle of survival with the planet's inhabitants. The 52-year-old has spent years researching and developing the new filming techniques needed to create the movie's $190 million hybrid of action and animation, and he claims he's been "the busiest unemployed director in Hollywood." He vows, "We're going to blow you to the back wall of the theatre in a way you haven't seen for a long time. My goal is to rekindle those amazing mystical moments my generation felt when we first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey or the next generation's Star Wars. It took me 10 years to find something hard enough to be interesting."
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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Interview from AICN:
Jim – Hello

Harry – Hey, Jim how’re you?

Jim – Good, Harry how’re you?

Harry – Oh, good.

Jim – You believe it’s me this time, it’s not one of your friends pulling a prank on ya.

Laughs

Harry – Nah, I definitely recognize your voice.

Jim – Alright (chuckles) Good. So we’re doing this little movie, AVATAR, which you got the scoop on.

Harry – Absolutely.

Jim – So now it’s time to tell the rest of the world about it. So is there anything you’d like to know that hasn’t gone out in the press release?

Harry – Why so long? Why is this going to take till 2009?

Jim – Well – it’s the photorealism. You know, in terms of my ‘gung ho’ directing, I’ll be done in terms of a cut of the picture by… um… probably November of this year.

And then the rest of the time after that, which is going to be like a year and a half is just going to be me working with the effects guys day in and day out to get the visual caliber up to the highest level.

Harry – Now, while your doing the Visual Effects work on this, will you be doing any work on BATTLE ANGEL..

Jim – Probably, Yeah, I’ll probably be sliding into PRE on Battle Angel during that time, it’s hard for me to know, until I’ve gone through the process to know what my time management is going to be capable of. You know, if I spend 5 hours a day doing Visual FX, which is probable, that will leave me time to do Battle Angel.

If it winds up being 8 hours a day. NO. But I can’t answer that for right now. I’m hoping to telescope Pre on Battle Angel into post on Avatar. Which has always been the plan.

Harry – If you would, explain to my audience why it takes this amount of time to achieve photorealism, because don’t we get that in a faster turn around on films today – or is that just not up to the photorealistic standards you’re setting for this picture?

Jim - You do. Well you do, but part of. You know – we’re working with Weta which is a smaller company. They don’t THROW people at it. They’d rather do it with the same 150 artists that really know the characters, which relatively speaking, is a smaller team than ILM or somebody like that, which might throw 300 or more seats at it for a period of time. And I think that that is actually good. It helps with the cost and it helps with the quality. AND it helps with the character. The characters will be consistent throughout.

The creatures are all animated. The humanoid characters, I think you know a little about the story – you have the Na’vis as the kind of indigenous peoples are going to be played by actors and their performances will be baked in by the performance capture process, so the animators will have less to do there other than to tweak and massage and to work on the hair and the physics of the clothing and that sort of thing to make it all real and to work on the lighting.

Ya know, but you have a lot of animation that has to be done with all the creature characters in the film. So I’m really looking forward to that part of it – and that’s all in post. Although we have had some success with doing some of the creatures using performance capture which is kinda wacky in how much you can do with a human performer. We have these flying creatures called Banshees, and we’ve been trying performance capture with the Banshees and it has been working… ya know, how they land, how they crash, how they get shot

Harry – What do you performance capture to get a flying creature?

Jim – You get a creature guy and you give him a wand in each hand that corresponds to his wingtips and you get him to think like a pterodactyl and it actually works, though the targeting is a little strange some times. But it works or at least it works ENOUGH that I can compose the kind of shots I want, so I’m not just composing with negative space for something that just gets added later.

Harry – How much of this is Performance Capture versus from scratch animation?

Jim – Well – Like I said it’s gonna divide.. or bifurcate on whether it’s a humanoid or non-human creature. The Banshees and the other creatures are going to be about 90% or 95% animated. And with the humanoids hopefully we’re going to be coming down to 95% capture with the exception of ears and like I said clothing and hair and stuff like that.

Harry – How far along are you on the casting process, I saw that you had Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana…

Jim – Pretty far – Pretty far. Well Sam is a big milestone for us. Because the studio was equivocating for a long time about making this with a star, even though originally it was conceived as a non-star film. I think there was a moment kinda towards the end of their due diligence process that made them want a Star.

Harry – What was it about Sam that made you want to pull him in?

Jim – Well, we found Sam about six months ago now. I was familiar with him from before, he came in and read for me and I just really liked him. He has a quality.

You know how Russell Crowe has this kinda innate strength about him and how in GLADIATOR men would follow him into hell. Well Jake (Sully the character) needs to have that and for a young guy. And most of these young guys, they’re either physical, meaning that they’re like buff handsome guys who are pretty good actors; or they have a kind of vulnerability that they can reach, but very few of them know how to stand up and be a man.

Ya know, in the old school way – in the way that MEN will respond to. It’s fine for a guy to be attracted to women, but I need the male audience to respond to this guy and say , “Yeah, I see why people would follow him.” So ultimately he becomes this messianic leader who leads them into battle… in the old school Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard way. Where a guy kinda wanders into a situation in another culture, then rises through the ranks – or whatever – a Lawrence of Arabia kinda of story.

Usually the guy has a military background, usually he is disillusioned or broken in some sort of way. It fits that kinda profile and Sam hits all those beats beautifully. He’s just a really good actor.

Harry – What made y’all want to announce to the world right now with names like Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana – I mean will there be more recognizable names attached in parts?

Jim – Yeah. I think the studio just wanted to state that “we’re doing this film” There will be additional casting announcements coming up.

I still have to cast – ya know – I don’t know if you remember from the treatment – but some of the characters have been retained like (couldn’t hear this name) – so some of the major nemeses are yet to be cast. We still haven’t cast Grace yet, you know, who becomes his ally and she runs the, in the new script she runs the Avatar program.

So yes, I think there will be some significant casting announcements coming up. The studio just wanted to drive a stake in the ground and say “We’re doing this, Watch out Summer 2009, don’t plan your big summer movie on Memorial day Mr Spielberg or Disney or whatever.

Harry – Take us through what you’re aiming for – for the visual texture of this film.

Jim - Well, it’s Photorealism, but I think that doesn’t mean it won’t have a cinematic style … and whatever Cinematic style that we adopt – and there’s still some testing to be done there – it has to work equally well in shooting HD DIGITAL STEREO and with CG. So whether it is a hard light look or something soft with some diffusion or whatever kinda color treatment it is… whatever we decide on as our look – that kind of look up table has to work for the digital cameras as well as the cg stuff so that the audience really feels they’re watching one seamless thing. People should not be thinking that was live action and that was CG.

Harry – How early will you tease us with an image?

Jim – That’s a good question, because what happens is there’s an awful big flurry of activity for like a year and you finally get one shot that you like and then after that another 1500 shots have to come in batches of hundreds. I would think that realistically it’d be SHOWEST of 07 – I’m sorry – of SHOWEST of 08

Harry – Wow

Jim – Yeah, that’s ok – that’s just 14 months away – and by the way – that’s still 14 months before release.

Harry – (laughs) Yeah, it’s just curious to see…

{loud noises in the background – Jim yells, “Yeah?” “Hang on a second” – then silence – and suddenly one word is heard, “FIRE” then silence… then “Let me finish up this call” Loud noises in background}

Jim – Hey, Harry?

Harry – Yeah?

Jim – Let me give you a call back. Apparently we have a fire about a half mile away and in dry Malibu with the winds blowing – We’re kinda all assholes and elbows here. I’ll call when I know.

Harry – Alright, be safe.

Jim – Alright – bye.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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PZ wrote:I never bothered to see titanic so some sci-fi from cameron is welcome.
The plot description sounds vaguely Aliens-ish, but our luck it'll probably be more Abyss. :puke:
This is a snakeskin jacket. And for me it's a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.

James Cameron's Avatar

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Probably about time to get a thread going on this as screenshots (mostly from the video game, but still) and other ephemera are starting to come out. I'm not familiar with the source material but I think sci-fi action is on deck. Cameron has a bit of a track record in that department, so I'm starting to get interested. I've read a couple of things about the groundbreaking technological thingamajiggys he's working up for this; one of them appears to be a "virtual camera," here's the original press release that talks generally about the whole thing (and the release date is wrong, I think this comes out at Christmas):
january 8, 2007 - Academy Award®-winning filmmaker James Cameron begins principal photography on Avatar - his first feature directorial effort since Titanic - in April 2007 for a summer 2009 release, it was announced today by Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman.

Utilizing a blend of live-action photography and new virtual photorealistic production techniques invented by Cameron's team, Avatar will offer audiences a unique cinematic experience. Avatar will be filmed in 3D for release in the new digital 3D format. With the continued roll-out of digital projection systems, the studio and filmmakers anticipate that digital 3D theaters will be widespread by the film's summer 2009 release.

For Avatar, Cameron will use revolutionary image-based performance capture techniques, and a real-time virtual camera system, to create new CG worlds and blend them with dramatic performances and live action in ways never before possible.

Avatar is written by Cameron from an idea he nurtured for over a decade, while working on the technology necessary to realize its wholly imagined world. A return to the action adventure sci-fi genre that made him famous, Avatar is also an emotional journey of redemption and revolution. It is the story of a wounded ex-marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in bio-diversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival. It thus again combines the elements of massive spectacle and intimate character that made Titanic the highest grossing film of all time; a title it still holds by over three quarters of a billion dollars.

Just as he did with the then little known Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron wanted a new face to portray the lead, Jake Sully. Having searched around the world and screen tested a number of emerging young actors, Cameron has chosen the young Australian Sam Worthington, a rising star who has been recognized by The Australian Film Institute and The Film Critics Circle of Australia, in his homeland from such work as Somersault and Dirty Deeds. Zoe Saldana (The Terminal, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl) will portray the local woman Jake first betrays, then loves. Both actors have signed on for possible future installments as well, as Avatar is conceived as a potential franchise. Other casting will be announced shortly.

Said Cameron, "For me, as a lifelong fan of science fiction and action, 'Avatar' is a dream project. We're creating an entire world, a complete ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language. The story is both epic and emotional. The two things that make this film even possible are pioneering advances in CG effects and performance capture, as well as my 22 year relationship with Fox, since only with great trust can you operate so close to the cutting edge. I plan to honor that relationship by bringing them a winner. And I have the team to do it, the best team of artists and technicians I've ever been privileged to work with. This one's going to be a grand adventure."

"Every year, our business makes hundreds of films, most of which come and go. But a Jim Cameron film is different," said Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos. "Jim's movies raise the bar, both in storytelling and use of technology. 'Avatar' will do so again. The world he has created is breathtaking and the action breathless. It will take two more years, but in the summer of 2009, 'Avatar' will be a seismic change in the movie going experience."

The film's new image-based process of facial performance capture will get all the subtle nuances of the actors' performances. The virtual camera system will allow Cameron to work intimately with the cast while seeing in real-time, as each scene evolves, the computer generated worlds and characters. This revolutionary approach allows Cameron to direct scenes with CG characters and environments exactly as he would on a live action set.

The edited performances and scenes, incorporating Cameron's hands-on camera moves, will be turned over to Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning visual effects house Weta Digital ("The Lord of the Rings" trilogy). Weta's artists will incorporate new intuitive CGI technologies to transform the environments and characters into photorealistic 3D imagery that will transport the audience into the alien world rich with imaginative vistas, creatures and characters.

Avatar is produced by Cameron and Jon Landau for Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment. Principal photography will take place in and around Los Angeles, and in New Zealand. Live action will be shot using the proprietary FUSION digital 3D camera system developed by Cameron and Vince Pace.

Avatar is the latest creative partnership between Cameron and Twentieth Century Fox, one of the most successful filmmaker-studio alliances in motion picture history. Cameron and Fox first joined forces in 1985 for Aliens, which became a sci fi classic. Next came The Abyss, which revolutionized visual effects technology; and True Lies, a blockbuster starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 1996, Fox greenlighted Cameron's Titanic, which became the most successful film in history, and won a record-breaking eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

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Some of those game screenshots:
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"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

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I got that funky mergin' going on.

http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6211102/ja ... mpressions

Link includes a video that can't be embedded here.
GameSpot wrote:Avatar is being touted as the legendary director's magnum opus, and the game was on show at E3 2009 behind closed doors in stereoscopic 3D. We snuck in to discover just how epic the world of Pandora is.

There has been a lot of talk about Cameron's latest project but little walk, at least until now. The Hollywood veteran spoke at length about the movie and game during Ubisoft's E3 press conference, but, unfortunately, guests weren't shown any footage from either. Thankfully the movie's producer, Jon Laundau, was at a behind-closed-doors briefing at Ubisoft's E3 booth to introduce the game, which is being developed alongside the movie. Not your average movie tie-in, the game will feature a completely separate complementary storyline and characters.

The science fiction epic takes place in the far future on the small moon of Pandora where a mining corporation is seeking an all-powerful adamantium alloy. Pandora is inhabited by the 10-foot-tall blue-skinned indigenous Na'vi people, and its air isn't breathable by human lungs. Thankfully, the corporation has developed a process to create hybrid human/Na'vi avatars, empty bodies in which they can embed the consciousness of a human. Cameron wrote the script for the movie 14 years ago but was waiting for the technology to support his concept. Stepping up to match his grandiose ideas, Ubisoft is developing Avatar: The Game in full stereoscopic 3D (seen in movies such as Beowulf 3D and Monsters vs. Aliens. Ubisoft showed the game on a massive 130-inch prototype Panasonic plasma 3D TV; however, you'll be able to play the game on regular displays as well.

We've seen 3D game tech demonstrations in the past, such as Gran Turismo 5 and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift at CES 2009, but the concept never gets old and really has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Characters, heads-up displays, weapons, debris, particles, and the environment feel like they literally pop out of the screen at various degrees, and the heightened sense 3D creates is amazing. Grass pops up inches away from your face, and carnivorous plants burst into a floating gas cloud that you feel like you're in the middle of. Text commands hang in front of the TV, making their presence feel more immediate. Bullet cartridges fly past your head when you empty a magazine. If only every game, and indeed every movie, were viewable in this format.

Avatar supports a branching storyline, and at some stage in the game your character will be able to side with either the Resources Development Administration (RDA) or the indigenous Na'vi by becoming an avatar. If you choose the RDA side, you'll have access to a range of technologically advanced weaponry, including an impressive mech. One member of Ubisoft's dev team ran us through a level playing as an RDA character. The jungle of Pandora is both stunning and deadly, with hostile fauna and flora. We saw plants that release swarms of wasps, a giant rhinoceros-like beast, and several packs of viper wolves. Your character will earn effort points and can spend these on weapons, items, and unlocking new areas.

You'll also be able to learn new skills, such as the ability to dash or push enemies away. The goal in the demo is to traverse through the jungle to reactivate three repulsor pods, used to clear the area from hostile life-forms. You will encounter other RDA troops who will help attack bigger enemies, such as the huge hammerhead beast, which looks like an oversized rhino with the head of a hammerhead shark. You can use a mech suit to do battle with the hammerhead until you're flung from it during a scripted sequence. Thankfully you can take him down on foot using a grenade launcher. ( :psypop: ) The next area takes place at night, where the jungle comes alive with bioluminescent wonder. All of the brightly coloured plants appear with glowing blue and green auras after dusk.

Finally we got a glimpse of playing as a Na'vi warrior. The Na'vi are a tribal people, and their weapons lack sophistication, but they are no less formidable. Weapons such as the battleaxe, bow and arrow, and mace will be accessible, and Na'vi characters can level up and be customised just like the RDA. After travelling for a bit on foot, our Na'vi character jumped on a nearby creature that resembled a pterodactyl and took to the skies. Flying though canyons and wide-open areas, you can really appreciate how big and detailed the world is. After gliding peacefully above Pandora's canopy below, we ran into an RDA aircraft at the end of the demo. Thankfully the creature has some pretty powerful skills and swooped down to make mincemeat of the ship.

The game is being developed by Ubisoft. All hope is lost. :sad:

Highlighted are the parts that make my eyes boggle. The more I read into this, the more it sounds like Far Cry 2 all over again - Ubisoft spend so much time creating these cool extras and immersion effects in the game that they forget to write the game itself. It reminds me of an article that was posted here about the new Star Trek movie; where Star Trek managed to keep the special effects special, unlike Transformers (and in this example, Far Cry 2) where the effects become the movie, and the actual plot or storyline is left behind.

What's annoying is that, with all these effects and doo-das, the game looks so cool. Unfortunately, the same could be said of every Ubisoft developed game - until you play it.

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

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Alexhead wrote:Don't play many new games so I don't know much about Ubisoft, although I've got friends who are big fans of the Far Cry series. Dunno, I'm not as big on stories in games as cool levels and lots of violence.
Ignoring this further divulsion from the topic, but the original Far Cry was epic. The second, while suffering from a chronic lack of story, lacked actual worthwhile gameplay too. Sure it's got lots of bells and whistles, but by the end of the first level, there was nothing new left to explore - it was horribly tedious (and buggy). Their other development titles (namely the Tom Clancy franchise) sport some pretty decent gameplay and even some hint of storylines, but tend to suffer the same bugs and lazy fuck-ups evident throughout their portfolio. In short, they do the same as EA: try to rush the development cycle, and then push it out the door before that already stunted cycle is complete, resulting in many corners being cut.

I could write a dissertation on publishers and developers fucking up otherwise easy sells, so I'll quit while I'm behind. Shame my local college doesn't offer that class...

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

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James Cameron Shows Twenty-Four Minutes Of AVATAR!!!
Beaks here...



I wonder why James Cameron chose to unveil the first chunk of finished footage from AVATAR in Amsterdam?

Reactions are starting to leak out of today's presentation at CineExpo in Amsterdam (despite Fox's attempts to keep any kind of impression from being reported), and, shock of shocks, they're of the "Holy Fuck!" variety. Here's a sweet tweet from Unique Cinema Systems:

"Footage from "Avatar" at #cinexpo was stunning, literally jawdropping. Amazing visuals unlike any before seen, with incredible detail."
UCS is also posting images from the AVATAR after-party, and while there's no actual footage being looped, this production artwork is pretty sumptuous.

For more, check out UCS' Twitter feed.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron showed around twenty-four minutes of footage, and declared that the 3-D "renaissance" has arrived. He was joined by AVATAR cast members Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana and Stephen Lang, as well as producer Jon Landau and Fox chairman Jim Gianopulus. (No Rothman, huh?) I've learned that the folks at CineExpo saw this via the RealD XL Cinema System. It was a 3D presentation on a 55 foot screen with nearly 10 foot Lamberts of light. Nifty!

Now that the cat's out of the bag, does this mean Cameron's bringing this footage to Comic Con? Or is he going to stash it and make us wait until freakin' December?

Obviously, I'll update this story if we get any more images or reactions.

As always, you should check out MarketSaw, which has been AVATAR news central throughout this film's production.

Regarding the 2-D presentation of AVATAR, the Reporter quotes Cameron as saying, "I just want to say that I think 'Avatar' is going to play great in 3-D, 2-D, any 'D.' "

ComingSoon.net has posted a detailed description of the footage.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41510
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

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io9 wrote:Holy Freaking Avatar! We Saw 25 Minutes Of Cameron's Weird Masterpiece

Avatar, James Cameron's long-awaited visit to an alien 3-D world, got its first exposure today at San Diego Comic Con. We watched around 25 minutes of dragon-riding, monster fighting and alien first contact, including Zoe Saldana's sexy alien. Spoilers below...

The Pep Talk

A room of assembled newbie soldiers are sitting in a room in Pandora's Hell's Gate station while the grouchy, Na'Vi-hating Colonial Quaritch explains their new mission. "You're not in Kansas, anymore. You're in Pandora." Everything on Pandora he explains, is deadly. Every plant and animal out there "wants to kill you and eat your eyeballs. Worst of all are the Na'Vi, who are designed for survival, their bones reinforced with natually occurring carbon fiber.

"My job," he continues, "is to keep you alive. I won't succeed —" he waits a beat "— not for all of you."

In the meantime, Jake Sully, a paraplegic soldier, has rolled his wheelchair down the aisle. As the colonial continues listing precautions, Jake muses in voiceover, "Nothing like an old school safety briefing to put your mind at ease."

Meet the Avatars

Jake enters a room filled with medical technology with fellow Avatar-driver Norm Spellman. Avatars, we learn from Jake's voiceover, are bodies designed to look like the Na'Vi, grown in vats using a combination of human and Na'Vi DNA. Humans then "drive" the Avatar bodies as they explore Pandora. In the tank, we get our first look at the Na'Vi-shaped Avatar: it's an incredibly lanky, blue-skinned creature with zebra stripes and a long tail pointed into a diamond at the end. The facial features are leonine, with enormous golden eyes and large, pointed ears.

"It looks like you," Jake tells Spellman.

"No, it looks like you," he replies. "Meet your Avatar."

Getting Your Space Legs

Jake pulls himself into a medical capsule. Sigourney Weaver, as botanist and Pandora conservation advocate Dr. Grace Augustine, marvels that, in Sully's condition, he's decided to head to the most dangerous place in the universe. Cheekily, Jake responds, "Maybe I'm sick of doctors telling me what to do."

He lies down, and Augustine lowers the cover of the capsule. Jake is about to connect to his Avatar for the first time, and other team members monitor his readings on transparent panes. Looking at a chart of Jake's neural pathways, one doctor comments, "That's a nice brain," to which Augustine quips, "Go figure."

They look through a window in the next room, as Jake connects to his Avatar. Jake wakes up in the tank and see two other team members in hazmat suits. Soon he's out and lying on a table. Spellman is next to him, also in his Avatar. The one team member is slowly testing Spellman's motor skills. As soon as Jake gets on the table, he excitedly tries out his new feet, wiggling his toes. Delighted with the response, he leaps awkwardly to his feet. His body hasn't caught up with his excitement, and the team members and doctors start yelling at him to sit down. His long tail whips around, nearly hitting one of them.

"This is dangerous!" shouts a doctor.

Jake, though stumbling, is unfazed, "This is great!"

Monsters of Pandora

Jake, outfitted with a gun and fatigues, is in his Avatar walking through an Amazonian jungle. Spellman and Augustine are behind him in their Avatars, but Jake spots something in the distance and wanders off to investigate. He finds a small grove of tall, orangey beige plant made of single spirals of spines. Jake goes to touch a plant, but before he can, it whirls down and contracts into the ground. Intrigued, he tries it again and again until all the plants contract at once, revealing an enormous beast behind them. This is a massive, prehistoric-looking monster, resembling a vicious, mutant tortoise with a hammerhead-shaped snout over four narrow eyes. As it snarls at Jake, a fan of striking purple fronds flares on top of its head.

Spellman and Augustine enter the grove and Augustine warns Jake not to shoot the creature, as its armor is too tough for the gun to be of use, and it's making a territorial display. "Stand your ground," she says and Jake runs at the creature, making himself as big as he can. The tortoise creature runs off, and we can see a handful of similar creatures nearby.

Jakes whoops in victory. "That's right. Who's tough?" But behind him, we see a far more frightening beast crawling out from the trees. This one has a narrow head, with fearsome teeth at the very front, and black and red spines waving from its neck. The head looks almost like a moray eel's, but the dark body looks like a tiger's. It leaps out toward the other tortoise creatures, scattering them.

Jake turns to Augustine. "What about this one? Stay or run?"

Without hesitation, she screams, "Run!" and does. Fast. Jake runs too, but the eel-tiger-spiney beast chases him through the jungle. At one point, Jake dives into an opening of a tree to escape, but the beast shoves its slender head inside, cornering him. Jake starts shooting at it, which distracts it long enough for him to slip out, but he's forced to drop his gun in the process. The beast continues to chase him, snapping him up in his mouth by his backpack, but he manages to free himself from the pack and keeps running.

Don't Shoot

Jake is alone now, no shirt, no pack, only a pointed stick for protection. As he wanders through the jungle, we see Na'Vi woman Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) watching him from a tree. She pulls up a bow and cocks an arrow, preparing to finish the job the beast started. But while she holds the arrow, an ethereal white creature that resembles a comb jellyfish without the jelly pulses down from above and gently lands on her bow. She silently takes this as a sign and relaxes the arrow.

You're Like a Baby

Jake is being attacked by yet another set of beasties, these like scrawny furless dogs. Neytiri shoots a dog thing wrestling with Jake — then, leaping through the air, she fends off the others. As the last few scatter, she bares her teeth and hisses, feral. The dog thing she shot is still alive, and she prays over it in Na'Vi — a soft, Native American-sounding language — then slits its throat.

Jake retrieves his stick from a pool of water and suddenly notices the bioluminescent beauty of Pandora. I cannot overstate how incredible this looks — the plants are a spectacle of greens, blues, pinks, and purples without being the slightest bit gaudy. Some of the plants look like jungle flowers, others like hanging butterfly wings. Whenever Jake touches anything, the glowing vegetation ripples and pulses. Even his freckles glow green.

He interrupts Neytiri's praying to thank her. "I would have been screwed without you."

Neytiri stops, indignant. "Don't thank," she says in thickly accented English. "You don't thank for this. This is sad. This is your fault. They don't need to die." She furiously waves him off. "You're like a baby, making noise."

He responds, "If you care so much about your forest friends, why save me."

"Why save you? You have a strong heart, no fear. But you're like a child." She walks away from him across a thick tree branch glowing with moss.

Jake follows her, hopping along to keep up. "If I'm like a child, then teach me." He tries to engage her, "Where did you learn English?"

She ignores the question. "You're like a baby."

He catches up with her. "Take me with you."

She shakes her head sharply. "Go back." She starts to turn away, but then something catches her attention. The comb jellyfish creatures are back and are floating around them en masse. Jake starts to flick them away, but Neytiri grabs his hand and commands him to stop. She lets go and they settle on his body, covering his outstretched arms and head.

"They are the seeds of the Sacred Tree," she explains, awed, "very pure spirits."

When they disperse, Jake is calmed but confused. "What was that all about?"

Neytiri waves him to follow her. "Come! Come!"

Jake lopes behind her. "Where are we going?" She doesn't respond, so Jake admires more of the glowing fauna around him. He taps a green anemone-like plant like a drum and smiles with delight as the color ripples. Similarly, the deep purple path beneath them glows with more intensity with each footfall.

Dragonrider

Jake is now among the Na'Vi in a cave behind a waterfall. The other Na'Vi are male, but Neytiri is there as well. The alpha Na'Vi walks up to Jake and calls him something that sounds like "Shakes-a-Leaf" and says with a smirk that he will go first.

Jake edges along a ledge behind the waterfall. Where the waterfall ends, he sees a bevy of dragons fluttering and grumbling on a rocky cliff. The dragons have iguana-shaped heads with two long, lilly-shaped tubes sweeping back from the crown. Their wings bend down into claws and then bend up to end in three dragonfly wings on either side.

Neytiri is on the ledge behind him, instructing him on how to obtain a dragon mount. "If he chooses you, you will know. You will have one chance."

"How will I know?"

"He will try to kill you."

Jake makes an of course he will face but presses on through the throng of lizards. Quickly, one starts grumbling at him. "Let's do this," Jake says, swinging a whip-like rope.

The men laugh in Na'Vi, "This moron's going to die."

He swings the rope at the dragon, binding its snout closed and, holding onto the end of the rope, scrambles onto the dragon. The men are still laughing, but Neytiri calls out, "Make the bond!" But before he can, the dragon throws him. He falls over the edge of the cliff, but manages to hang on and pull himself up. He holds down the dragon's head and forcibly inserts his braid into the lily shaped tube, forging the bond."That's right," Jake grunts into the dragon's ear. "You're mine now."

They're not done, though. Neytiri calls out that "First flight seals the bond," and before Jake can consider that, she shoves both rider and dragon off the cliff.

They plummet and fumble and tumble and manage a few seconds of clumsy flight before Jake finally says in exasperation to the shrieking dragon, "Shut up and fly straight."

Miraculously, it does, and they begin to glide along smoothly. Surprised and satisfied, Jake instructs it to "Bank right."
wow. O_O

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

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I started to read over AICN's recap, stopped after a bit as I figured it would spoil the fun. Sounds cool in concept, though. The AICN reporter said not to be TOO excited about all this talk of Avatar being the next generation of technical filmmaking, said it looks fucking great but is essentially a lot of really well rendered CGI.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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basically spoiler-free...
Dark Horizons wrote:Comic-Con: Avatar

Been dying to see James Cameron's "Avatar"? Well now you'll be able to in a month.

James Cameron showed up in San Diego an hour ago to show off 24 minutes of footage from the film at the most anticipated presentation at the show amongst non-Twilight fans.

The collection of around five or so scenes from different sections of the film meant we only got a disjointed look at the story. What it mainly was doing was showing off the visuals which truly are breathtaking, groundbreaking but not earth-shattering.

Specifically the texture rendering and lighting is superb. The movements and skin texture of the all CG blue Na'vi aliens are detailed enough that it often looks like actors in makeup. Only the tiny waists and yellow cat-like eyes took away from the photo-realistic illusion but give the blue pastel zebra/horse/cat hybrid creations a very alien look.

The environment and non-Na'vi creatures were more notably CG, especially one scene with attacking alien beasties that seemed more George Lucas than James Cameron in tone. Plants and jungle recreations though were simply beautiful, especially a night scene where the characters traverse a bioluminescent forest utterly rich in biodiversity. The final scene involving harnessing and flying a winged creature was also pretty spectacular.

Some human scenes at the beginning were shown with Sam Worthington (looking hunky as hell) as the wheelchair-bound combat veteran who gets put into a tube with his mind inhabiting the blue creature which can be seen floating in a tub. Sigourney Weaver is also there as a scientist who inhabits one of the other creatures.

The 3D itself is utilized EXACTLY what the technology should be - never drawing attention to itself, immersing you in the world rather than distracting you with gimmicks. Can't really recall one moment where someone throws or points something outward to deliberately show off that you're watching 3D in action.

Is this the revolution of cinema that years of hype have been saying? No, simply because hype has already risen to ridiculous proportions. What it does look like is what the "Star Wars" prequels should've been - a rich sci-fi action/drama that truly transports you to another world.

Visually it looks like one of the most ambitious projects ever made, and certainly in terms of CG photo realism no other film comes close thus far. The technology is not entirely there yet, but more often than not throughout the runtime the "Avatar" footage managed to make the illusion 100% real for me (and I'm a VERY tough judge on CG visual effects).

Cameron saved the best news for last though. Rather than a 2D Quicktime trailer launch, the first glimpse that audiences will get of "Avatar" will take place on August 21st. On that 'Avatar Day', fifteen minutes of footage from the film will be screened for free in IMAX 3D theaters around the world. At present Fox is apparently trying to secure as many theaters as possible for the event so keep an eye out the week before for where the footage will be shown.

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/film wrote:The First Official Photo From James Cameron’s Avatar
avatartank[1].jpg
I woke up this morning to find an an email from an anonymous source, with an attachment. A photo from the most anticipated movie of the next year (at least among film geeks). That’s right, the first real photo from James Cameron’s Avatar. I freaked out because I receive cool stuff all the time, which unfortunately the law prevents me from posting. And if I was the one to leak a photo like this, it would surely start a shit storm.

But I wanted to be sure, so I contacted Fox directly to ask permission to post what I had received. It was one of those moves to just make sure, a last resort. I didn’t really expect them to be like “yeah, that’s fine…” but, well, that’s almost exactly what they said. Apparently the photo was sent out to a couple magazines this week, so Fox is fine with me posting this. So here you have it, the first photo from Avatar.

So what is in the photo? (spoilers which will be revealed in the trailer follow) Sam Worthington plays Jake Sully a paraplegic war veteran, who gets the opportunity to travel to another planet, Pandora, to work with a mining operation. Because the planet is so harsh, traditional armor and envirosuit solutions are not good enough to protect miners, and a clone program has developed in which DNA from humans and Na’vi, the natives that inhabit Pandora, are combined. The result is essentially a cloned Na’vi that can house the consciousness of an individual with human DNA. This means that Jake will be able to walk again. The photo above shows Sully in front of the tank that houses his Avatar. Click on the photo to enlarge.

20th Century Fox will be holding a special preview of 15-minutes of Avatar on August 21st, in an event called Avatar Day. Click here to read more. Avatar is scheduled to hit theaters on December 18th 2009.
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hahaha, oh holy shit this is going to be a great article. less than a paragraph in: “Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this motherfucker?”

going to copy & paste the entire thing here for posterity, since most of these paper sites will soon be charging....

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The New Yorker is one of the few sites I'd actually pay for (if I didn't already subscribe to ye olde paper version), their stuff is always excellent.

Cameron sounds like a prick, but I don't think he gives two shits what I or anyone else thinks of him. Also sounds like a very smart guy.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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Movieline wrote:Movieline Explores: James Cameron's Exhaustive Search for the Perfect Avatar Breasts

PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness?
CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

PLAYBOY: Are her breasts on view?

CAMERON: I came up with this free—floating, lion’s-mane—like array of feathers, and we strategically lit and angled shots to not draw attention to her breasts, but they’re right there. The animation uses a physics-based sim that takes into consideration gravity, air movement and the momentum of her hair, her top….

— From Avatar director James Cameron’s exhaustive interview in the new issue of Playboy.


In a converted hangar at Santa Monica Airport, director James Cameron stands, cross-armed, above a visual effects engineer hunched over a workstation.

“Let’s see ‘em.” “Keep in mind that we did our best to incorporate your notes, and did an additional round of motion-capture to address them, and—”

“I don’t have time for this bullsh*t hemming and hawing, let’s just see them.”

The engineer clicks his mouse. The glow of the huge cinema display is reflected in Cameron’s impassive face.

“Those are tits.”
“They are.”
“Those are not the tits.”
“Can you…you know…be a tiny bit more specific?”
“Specific? What else do I need to tell you?”
“Well, Jim, you know that this is our, I think, fifteenth go at this so, I was hoping maybe some more concrete feedback.”
“Nineteenth. You have have failed me eighteen times previously.”
“Maybe if you’d say something more helpful, I could fail fewer times?”
“What did I tell you last time?”
“You said something about imagining three pounds of blue Jello in two Ziploc bags, that’s how they should move this time.”
“Was that not specific enough? I don’t see that in this footage, at all.”
“We went out and bought the Jello, the Ziploc bags. We spent five entire days doing mo-cap on them.”
“And?”
“Well, you see it. And you don’t seem happy.”
“If you’d already committed 17 million dollars to getting this set of Na’vi tits perfect, and had to fight off the goddamn studio every day, hiding that budget number from them while you chased absolute, alien-mammary perfection, and then you saw this, tell me, would you be happy?”
“You told us to go with the Jello and the bags.”
“I didn’t mean literally do that. It’s about a look, a feel!”

He grabs the engineer by his collar and drags him to the other side of the hangar, where a dozen nude, blue-painted women run on treadmills, bounce on trampolines, and perform acrobatic wire-work while harnessed into elaborate apparatuses. All have mo-cap ping-pong balls attached to their breasts.

“Tell me why we would spend millions upon millions of dollars on all this if I wanted you to blow ten bucks at the grocery store. Go ahead, tell me.”
“We just had to try something different. These women have been here for weeks, we’ve been shooting and digitizing them. There’s not a cup size of a body shape we haven’t tried. And none of it seems to have pleased you.”
“It’s not about pleasing me. It’s about getting this Platonic ideal of the perfect set of heaving, cerulean Na’vi titties out of here [taps his temple with his finger] and out on there [points to a giant screen on the wall playing a loop of previous failed attempts by the effects department]. Do you get that?”
“I think I do, yeah.”
“These breasts, they need to make every 13-to-17-year-old kid who buys a ticket to this thing want to run home, still chubbed up from having them bounce around his zit-pocked face for two hours in three glorious dimensions, and touch himself with furious abandon. Then come back the next day for another go-around.”
“I get that.”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“We’ll do better.”

Cameron gestures dismissively to the women on the wires.

“Fire all these girls and get some new ones. They’re not right.”
“They were just getting comfortable with the wire-work.”
“I don’t give a flying, naked, blue-tittied f*ck. The new ones will learn.”
“Consider it done.”
“And why the f*ck is the construction on the water tank going so slowly? What are we waiting for?”
“It’s almost operational.”
“The next time I come back here I better see at least three pairs of breasts bobbing in that tank. When Neytiri fights that five-headed Pandoran death-dolphin, I better f*cking believe that her rack is moving in a realistic way. I better believe it in my bones.”
“You will.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
“See you in ten days?”
“Make it six. And let’s add two pounds to each Ziploc. They need heft. Heft.”
“Heft. Absolutely.”

Cameron climbs into a giant, Hummer-inspired golf cart, circles menacingly in front of the women on the wires, then finally speeds off.

The engineer runs towards them, clapping loudly.

“Out! All of you, out! Out out out!”

He slumps back down at his work station. The two Ziploc bags sit next to the monitor. He picks them up, gives them a jiggle, then dumps the blue Jello inside them onto the floor. He lets out a deep sigh.

“Five pounds seems like a lot.”
Playboy wrote:James Cameron: Playboy Interview

This past August 21, film writer, producer and director James Cameron rolled the dice in a big way. The date was widely advertised, and not modestly, as Avatar Day, and it marked free public previews in IMAX theaters worldwide of 16 minutes of Cameron’s latest movie—a $200 million-plus science-fiction epic about a battle royal between human invaders and inhabitants of a faraway planet—rendered in what is being touted as cutting-edge photorealistic computer-graphics–generated 3-D and an astonishing sense of audience immersion. The hype and curiosity surrounding Avatar led audiences to expect nothing less than the Second Coming. After all, directors Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh had already raved about the excerpts in print (the latter saying it was “the craziest shit ever”), and director Jon Favreau called it “a game changer.” Sony’s boss claimed it would “change the way you consume entertainment.” Hyperbolic fans predicted on the web that the first film in 12 years from the director of such pop culture milestones as The Terminator, Aliens and Titanic would “fuck our eyeballs.”

So roughly four months before Avatar’s December 18 opening date, audiences got a chance to see—and weigh in—for themselves. And weigh in they did, instantly spattering and pontificating on Twitter, Facebook and scores of other Internet outposts. Some mentioned half-empty theaters. Many were dazzled and left panting for more. But others, in what can best be described as a mixed response, were left with their eyeballs intact and virginal.

Cameron, fit, focused and immeasurably wealthy at the age of 55, is accustomed to being second-guessed. Few, at least in Hollywood, had expected all that much from the Canadian-born former pastry apprentice whose father was an electrical engineer and mother a nurse and an artist. In 1971 the family moved to Fullerton, California, where Cameron majored in physics at nearby California State University, Fullerton. Torn between his love of films, sci-fi and science, he supported himself by working as a truck driver while making short amateur action and sci-fi movies with his friends. In 1980 he landed work in and around the thriving basement-budget ­moviemaking scene presided over by Roger Corman.

Things looked way up in 1984 when Cameron wrote and directed a futuristic action thriller for which few had great expectations—The Terminator. It became a huge success, made a bona fide star of the unlikely Arnold Schwarzenegger and cemented Cameron’s relationship with co-writer and producer Gale Anne Hurd, Corman’s former executive assistant, who in 1985 became Cameron’s second wife (they divorced in 1989). From there Cameron continued to exceed expectations by directing some of the biggest and most admired financial successes of the 1980s and 1990s, including Aliens, True Lies, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Abyss. Doom was predicted in 1997 for the crushingly expensive, troubled production of Titanic, yet it went on to become a phenomenon, made a movie idol out of Leonardo DiCaprio and won 11 Oscars, including a best director award for Cameron. His Oscar ceremony declaration “I’m the king of the world!” raised eyebrows, but that’s the kind of thing you can get away with when you’ve created Hollywood’s all-time biggest moneymaker.

Cameron earned a reputation for being a taskmaster, tough on his crews and actors, manic in his attention to detail and quest for perfection. Wild and woolly stories emerged from his sets of mutinous crews and actors vowing never to work with him again. But he seemed untouchable and unstoppable, co-founding a special-effects company, Digital Domain, and avoiding the ready-made projects Hollywood offered him. Instead, in 2002 Cameron, an avid diver, launched into a series of undersea documentaries such as Expedition Bismarck and Ghosts of the Abyss that explore legendary sunken ruins. Some speculated Titanic’s freak success had given him a permanent case of director’s block.

Now the five-time-married Cameron is about to resurface. Playboy sent Contributing Editor Stephen Rebello to Cameron’s Malibu mansion to investigate where the director has been and where he’s headed. Says Rebello, who last interviewed Benicio Del Toro, “This was the kind of interview that at first I thought the intense Cameron may bolt up and expect me to go deep-sea diving, arm wrestle or book passage on an interplanetary flight. But he relaxed and was gentlemanly, and although he’s known for playing it close to the vest, he loosened up and showed himself to be funnier, hipper and even smarter than you may imagine.”

PLAYBOY: Your new movie Avatar’s stereoscopic 3-D and CGI have people in the film industry and the media comparing its technological breakthrough to the birth of sound and color film. They’ve also predicted the movie could become a cultural phenomenon. Are you worried about Internet fans who have posted snarky comments about the preview footage shown in theaters in August?
CAMERON: The ones who were the most vocally negative will be there opening night, I promise you. The ones I worry about are those who haven’t heard of the movie. We know from the exit polling that the response was 95 percent ecstatic. Most of the five percent negative response is from the fanatic fans who imagined the movie in their minds but now have to deal with my movie.

PLAYBOY: Does this prejudgment remind you of 1997, when people predicted big failure for Titanic because it took so long to make, busted its budget and had no big stars?
CAMERON: They know Avatar is expensive, but that story hasn’t gathered any traction because—what the fuck?—I always make expensive movies, people always like them, and people always want me to do it again.

PLAYBOY: How will you react if critics come gunning for you?
CAMERON: Avatar is made very consciously for movie fans. If critics like it, fine. I can’t say I won’t read the reviews, because I may not be able to resist. I spent a couple of decades in the capricious world of being judged by those not knowledgeable about the depth and history of film and with whom I would not want to have a conversation—with a few notable exceptions. Why would I want to be judged by them? For me, this past decade has been about retreating to the great fundamentals, things that aren’t passing fads or subject to the whims of some idiot critic. You can’t write a review of the laws of thermodynamics.

PLAYBOY: Moviegoers have already been wowed by lifelike CG and motion-capture characters such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Will your blue-skinned aliens and gigantic monsters satisfy jaded audiences?
CAMERON: Ultimately audiences don’t give a rat’s ass how a movie is made. When people see the movie, the story will be about the world of the planet Pandora, the creatures on it, the characters—such as the former Marine and amputee played by Sam Worthington—and the huge conflict between the humans and the inhabitants of Pandora. How does it move you? How emotional is it? It’s pretty damn emotional and dramatic. That said, I think we certainly exceeded our expectations in making these characters feel real.

PLAYBOY: Audiences may not give a rat’s ass about how a movie is made, but didn’t you have to wait a decade before special effects technology could accommodate what you had in mind?
CAMERON: Here I was the CEO of a major digital effects company, Lightstorm, which was designed to create fantasy CG characters and was not doing that, so I said, “I’ll write a script that is beyond state of the art, we’ll make it, and it will force us to become a world leader in effects.” Everybody looked at what I had in mind and said I was crazy. In the wake of Titanic I saw how much a project can go off the rails, and I got a little more conservative about taking risks. So I put Avatar away because no one had yet accomplished the photo reality and human emotional expression we needed until Peter Jackson cracked the code with Gollum and King Kong. And Industrial Light & Magic was doing it in a completely different way in Pirates of the Caribbean. With Avatar it’s okay if the characters aren’t perfect. Who knows what aliens are supposed to look like?

PLAYBOY: How is film technology influencing how we process reality?
CAMERON: Human society and human consciousness are evolving before our eyes in an unprecedented, historic way as we adopt and integrate with our machines. Typically people don’t know when they’re making history, but we are definitely making history right now, for better or worse.

PLAYBOY: You’re a major techie, but does any current tech toy elude you?
CAMERON: On Twitter, a tweet has to be less than, what, 25 words? [Editor’s note: It’s 140 characters maximum.] There isn’t one concept I would be interested in discussing with anyone that could be summed up in 25 words or fewer. I’m totally not into Facebook or Twitter, so that makes me a dinosaur right there.

PLAYBOY: Sigourney Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley in your film Alien is a powerful sex icon, and you may have created another in Avatar with a barely dressed, blue-skinned, 10-foot-tall warrior who fiercely defends herself and the creatures of her planet. Even without state-of-the-art special effects, Zoe Saldana—who voices and models the character for CG morphing—is hot.
CAMERON: Let’s be clear. There is a classification above hot, which is “smoking hot.” She is smoking hot.

PLAYBOY: Did any of your teenage erotic icons inspire the character Saldana plays?
CAMERON: As a young kid, when I saw Raquel Welch in that skintight white latex suit in Fantastic Voyage—that’s all she wrote. Also, Vampirella was so hot I used to buy every comic I could get my hands on. The fact she didn’t exist didn’t bother me because we have these quintessential female images in our mind, and in the case of the male mind, they’re grossly distorted. When you see something that reflects your id, it works for you.

PLAYBOY: So Saldana’s character was specifically designed to appeal to guys’ ids?
CAMERON: And they won’t be able to control themselves. They will have actual lust for a character that consists of pixels of ones and zeros. You’re never going to meet her, and if you did, she’s 10 feet tall and would snap your spine. The point is, 99.9 percent of people aren’t going to meet any of the movie actresses they fall in love with, so it doesn’t matter if it’s Neytiri or Michelle Pfeiffer.

PLAYBOY: We seem to need fantasy icons like Lara Croft and Wonder Woman, despite knowing they mess with our heads.
CAMERON: Most of men’s problems with women probably have to do with realizing women are real and most of them don’t look or act like Vampirella. A big recalibration happens when we’re forced to deal with real women, and there’s a certain geek population that would much rather deal with fantasy women than real women. Let’s face it: Real women are complicated. You can try your whole life and not understand them.

PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness?
CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

PLAYBOY: Are her breasts on view?
CAMERON: I came up with this free—floating, lion’s-mane—like array of feathers, and we strategically lit and angled shots to not draw attention to her breasts, but they’re right there. The animation uses a physics-based sim that takes into consideration gravity, air movement and the momentum of her hair, her top. We had a shot in which Neytiri falls into a specific position, and because she is lit by orange firelight, it lights up the nipples. That was good, except we’re going for a PG-13 rating, so we wound up having to fix it. We’ll have to put it on the special edition DVD; it will be a collector’s item. A Neytiri Playboy Centerfold would have been a good idea.

PLAYBOY: So you’re okay with arousing PG-13 chubbies?
CAMERON: If such a thing should ­happen—and I’m not saying it will—that would be fine.

PLAYBOY: You reunited with Sigourney Weaver for the first time since Aliens, over 20 years ago. What took you so long?
CAMERON: She was my safest casting choice to play the botanist, which is why I didn’t want to cast her. I woke up one day and said, Don’t be a dumb shit; she’ll be perfect. Sig is worthy of awe, but she’s also goofy, funny, deeply committed to acting, wicked smart and really sweet. There’s no gun porn around her character in this film like there was for Ripley in Aliens, and she doesn’t have big clanging brass balls. Instead, she has a scholarly hippie dowdiness that makes her look as though she no longer fits civilization—a little like Dian Fossey, which is interesting because I had originally gotten Sig into the Fossey movie Gorillas in the Mist; I bailed, but she stuck with the project. I’m really happy with the cast. We went way out on a limb casting Sam Worthington, but he came through for us. So did Zoe. As for Sigourney, we get along great because I don’t have to be demanding with her; she is highly demanding of herself and me.

PLAYBOY: You have a rep for being demanding of everyone you work with. Ed Harris is rumored to have punched you on The Abyss and was quoted as saying the strain of making that 1989 movie had actors hurling couches out windows and smashing walls. Kate Winslet said making Titanic had her thinking, Please, God, let me die—and she nearly drowned.
CAMERON: I’ll cop to my faults, but I’ll also defend the situation in a rational way, and it goes like this: Isn’t the purpose of being attracted to something intense and challenging—such as, say, white-water rafting—to come out the other side and tell everybody how you almost died? It doesn’t mean you almost died. We simply let Kate think she was nearly drowning. A little sputtering and coughing does not count in my book, because I have almost drowned several times and know what it feels like. Asking God to please let you die? I was thinking the same thing at about the same point. Titanic was a catastrophic production financially and getting worse every day. Kate probably got some unnecessary stress from me, but I would say 99 percent of her stress was internally induced as part of her acting process.

PLAYBOY: You’re saying she was telling the press post-white-water-rafting stories?
CAMERON: The real question is “Would she work with me again?” I’m sure it would have to be the right material and all those things, but my guess is, absolutely. I’d certainly work with her again; she’s very talented. Whereas Leo DiCaprio switches his acting on and off like a faucet, Kate’s acting process is to internalize all this stuff and use it. She was carrying the whole burden of this enormous production on her back. I probably didn’t do enough to wrap the actors in cotton wool. The part of directing I wasn’t good at—and probably still am not the best at, although I’m better now—is the personal touch: letting people know you appreciate what they’re doing. Personally, I could not have operated under my direction back then; my pride wouldn’t have allowed it.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever thrown or taken a punch on a movie set?
CAMERON: Absolutely not. It would be an alien concept for me. But I won’t make a movie if I think I won’t be tested and it won’t be grueling for me, the crew, the actors. Anybody who signs on is going to be tested. So there are challenges, but it gets misconstrued that there was gross irresponsibility on the part of the production to put people into that situation, when in fact they wanted to be right there.

PLAYBOY: Some heard your “I’m king of the world” speech after winning the best director Oscar as a sure sign of a highly developed ego.
CAMERON: Titanic was wildly celebrated on every possible level, so sure, I knew how good that felt. It was almost like back in the 1980s when I got a taste of coke. That door opened a crack, and I saw a glimpse of what it was like to have something more powerful than you that you have to answer to. I put it down in, like, a week when most people—everybody around me—didn’t. Getting a glimpse through that door and seeing that accolades can be so capriciously withdrawn made me know I didn’t want to base my self-value on that.

PLAYBOY: How has working with underwater exploration crews instead of film crews in the past decade changed you?
CAMERON: People who have worked with me before think I’m just as crazy, but I think I’ve come back to moviemaking with a different perspective. On all my films prior to Avatar, the film was the one god you had to serve. Getting involved with NASA and various space projects and doing underwater exploration, I got to meet not only a diversity of people but also a diversity of cultures of thought. It was sobering and necessary to see that what we do in Hollywood means almost nothing to them. I look around the Hollywood landscape and see people who can’t or don’t want to exist outside that bubble. I don’t want to be one of them. Now I see moviemaking as officially a job.

PLAYBOY: What aspects of Hollywood mega success made you want to climb into submersibles and film documentaries starring sunken ships, instead of movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio?
CAMERON: I made Titanic because I wanted to dive to the shipwreck, not because I particularly wanted to make the movie. The Titanic was the Mount Everest of shipwrecks, and as a diver I wanted to do it right. When I learned some other guys had dived to the Titanic to make an IMAX movie, I said, “I’ll make a Hollywood movie to pay for an expedition and do the same thing.” I loved that first taste, and I wanted more.

PLAYBOY: So Titanic was a means to an end.
CAMERON: Titanic was about “fuck you” money. It came along at a point in my life when I said, “I can make movies until I’m 80, but I can’t do expedition stuff when I’m 80.” My father was an engineer. I had studied to be an engineer and had a mental restlessness to live the life I had turned my back on when I switched from the sciences to the arts in college.

PLAYBOY: You’ve been a diver for years. When you make so many potentially dangerous exploration dives, how much are your wife and kids on your mind?
CAMERON: Whenever we tout one of our documentary films we sort of emphasize the risk or that we’re going into unexplored territory, doing things few have done. The reality is it’s pretty darn safe. Having said that, it can be quite white-knuckle when something unexpected happens. I’ve spoken at NASAseminars and symposia about the nature of risk because I make action movies and have managed to lead seven deep-ocean expeditions with no fatalities or significant injuries. And my films have been relatively injury-free—well below the industry average—because we have a pretty rigorous approach to safety.

PLAYBOY: Do you observe any rituals when you’re about to climb into a submersible?
CAMERON: You don’t want to put a big emphasis on it because you’re there to do a job and stay focused. But every time I close the hatch of a submersible I say to whoever is gathered to see us off, “I’ll see you in the sunshine.” Of course there’s no sunshine down there, so to say that means you’re coming back to the surface. On most of our dives we come back at night because we stay way too long, and the only people waiting are a couple of bored deckhands. By that time the people who were waving and wishing you luck 16 hours earlier are asleep somewhere or drunk in their cabin.

PLAYBOY: As you mentioned, your father was an electrical engineer. Your mother was an artist and a nurse. How are you most like and most unlike them?
CAMERON: I’m a pretty representative fusion of their DNA, a Mendelian genetics experiment gone well. That created a lot of tension, though, because my father was very authoritarian and pragmatic, but my mom had a romantic sense of wanting to head for the hills, to explore. My mom used to nurture what I was about by taking me to the Royal Ontario Museum to draw. My idea of a great weekend was to spend it drawing, going hiking or building something, like a medieval siege engine.

PLAYBOY: You came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. How did your parents view the sexual revolution, drugs and the antiwar movement?
CAMERON: They were pretty much against everything. I can’t think of anything my dad was for except hockey. He used to throw my comics and science-fiction books in the trash because he considered them mental junk. I’d go out, wipe off the coffee grounds and spaghetti and read them under the covers at night. He treated science fiction as if it was porn. I actually don’t think I had any porn, but I had the occasional ­playboy I kept well hidden.

PLAYBOY: You spent your first 17 years in Canada. Do you ever feel Canadian?
CAMERON: I went back to get an honorary degree at a Canadian university. When everybody stood and sang the national anthem, I stood onstage in front of a thousand Canadians just moving my lips because I had forgotten the words. I was never into the national anthem and never even went to a football game in high school, so I never had occasion to sing it.

PLAYBOY: You weren’t a high school jock?
CAMERON: In a small, very jocky school I was president of the science club, which consisted of me, some other lab rats and a Czechoslovakian girl who could barely speak English. I had been accelerated twice in elementary school, so I was two years younger than everybody and small. I hung out with the smart, wide-bell-bottomed, paisley-shirt, hair-down-the-middle-of-your-back counterculture rejects. I didn’t do drugs and looked like an accountant. Jocks would come up to me in the hall and punch me for no reason.

PLAYBOY: Have you since run into any of those guys?
CAMERON: Yes, and if you ever go to a 25th high school reunion, make sure that in the previous two months you’ve made the world’s highest-grossing movie, won 11 Academy Awards and become physically bigger than most of those guys who used to beat you up. I walked up to them one by one and said, “You know, I could take your ass right now, and I’m tempted, but I won’t.” Actually, they were all nice guys except for one who was still big and mean. I left him alone.

PLAYBOY: Did anything in your childhood predict you’d gravitate to the career you’re in today?
CAMERON: I could always get kids on my block to rally around some harebrained idea, such as, “Hey, let’s build an airplane.” It doesn’t occur to kids that you don’t build planes, but we built one that flew briefly until the ropes broke. A high school biology teacher encouraged us to do something interesting, so we started a theater arts program with a small group of kids craving something besides the football or basketball game. I did production design, lights and scenery and wrote and directed a little. Funny, but I didn’t immediately relate it to some kind of career path.

PLAYBOY: How did your life change when your father’s job relocated the Cameron family to Fullerton, California when you were 17?
CAMERON: In Canada there was a general resentment against America. We lived in a border town, and America was this huge culture generator that constantly bathed us in its radiation. To move to Los Angeles was to go into the belly of the beast. At first I thought the culture was all about cars. The kids seemed so shallow. I wanted to shake them and say, “Can’t you see how you’re destroying the earth with your materialistic values?” I started college six months after we moved, and of course I learned to drive. In the U.S., if you don’t have a car, or at least a license and your dad’s car, you’re not getting laid.

PLAYBOY: That’s pretty much in the fine print on most driver’s licenses. So you got laid?
CAMERON: Yeah, and I wound up marrying that girl seven years later. She was my girlfriend in college, on and off. We had a lot of fun. She was a waitress at Bob’s Big Boy, and I worked at a machine shop. We were just two blue-collar kids who’d go out to the desert and have a large time, drive cars fast and be hellions. I was shaking off all my practical conservatism—before that I hadn’t smoked dope, hadn’t driven fast. It’s a good thing I survived, is all I can say. And here I was living in the street-racing capital of southern California.

PLAYBOY: Did you do any street racing?
CAMERON: Hell yeah! All my new friends had hot rods and almost killed me a bunch of times on rides—accidentally spinning out or sliding backward down a freeway off-ramp because they thought they were such good drivers. After enduring these white-knuckle terror rides for about a year, I got a 1969 Mach 1 Mustang and made it really fast by tearing apart the engine, lowering it, putting in Coney shocks, putting the battery in the back to transfer the weight. I stripped everything off it and made my own kind of fiberglass hood and spoiler—all the stuff you now just buy aftermarket.

PLAYBOY: Were you good at street racing?
CAMERON: I got good by systematically taking my friends—the ones who white-knuckled me—for their karmic rides. After that they never rode with me again. I’d go out on my own at three or four a.m. and teach myself to drive really fast, then go out on wet nights and drive sideways for hours, putting myself into a drift to learn how to get out of it. There was no name for that then, but now we call it drifting.

PLAYBOY: Do you ever let loose behind the wheel now?
CAMERON: As a family man and father of five, especially two teenagers, I have to lead by example. For me to get in a dumb wreck racing would send the wrong signal. What’s also taken the fun out of it is that there’s no place you can drive fast anymore.

PLAYBOY: What were your earliest jobs?
CAMERON: My first job was at 15, working as an assistant to a crazy Viennese pastry chef in a giant restaurant that served 1,500 dinners a night in Niagara Falls, near where I grew up. A certain kind of showmanship gets in your blood when you grow up in a tourist town. In college in California I worked as a machinist, a bus mechanic, a precision tool and die maker, a high school janitor, whatever I could find. I’m pretty blue collar. I swear like a blue-collar guy when I’m on the set.

PLAYBOY: How did you make the transition to moviemaking?
CAMERON: I loved to write, draw and paint, but I also loved physics and astronomy. No career path seemed to reconcile those two directions except science fiction. Two of my closest friends in Fullerton were interested in filmmaking, but there was no film program. We formed a dumb-ass group of eventually four people, and every week one of us made his own little movie in which the other three would have to act, do stunts, set themselves on fire—whatever was necessary. Later we wrote a script and got it to a tax-sheltered group made up mostly of dentists and an investment guy who had dreams of doing Star Wars. We got $20,000 from them, rented a $200,000 camera that we completely disassembled because we had no idea how to operate it, and we made a movie even though we were monkeys and had no idea what we were doing.

PLAYBOY: What impact did Star Wars and George Lucas have on you?
CAMERON: My entrée into Hollywood came as a direct result of Star Wars because George Lucas suddenly made science fiction gold instead of a ghettoized B-movie genre. When most people saw Star Wars there was the shock of the new. For me there was the shock of recognition, as if somebody had taken my private dream and put it up on the screen. I had gone through the same evolution George had: writing, drawing and envisioning these hyperkinetic World War II dogfights in outer space. Good thing I’m not paranoid, the kind of schizo who thinks the CIA is spying on his thoughts and then has to wear tinfoil on his head. I took Star Wars as a sign that what I had to offer was something people wanted.

PLAYBOY: Your experience with amateur films helped you get a foot in the door of low-budget filmmaking with Roger Corman’s company, where you made miniature models and designed sets for Rock’n’ Roll High School and Battle Beyond the Stars.
CAMERON: On a Corman film everybody just rose to his or her own level—the opposite of the Peter Principle, in a way. You didn’t think of a career; you thought, What’s my next opportunity? If you got an opportunity to direct, you didn’t question it. Ron Howard didn’t question it when he got Grand Theft Auto; Francis Ford Coppola didn’t question it when he got to do Dementia 13. These are kind of junk movies, but we were interested in the process, in learning. That’s where I met writer-producer Gale Hurd, and the recognition that we would make a great team was pretty instantaneous. It took only a year or two for us to make a movie together.

PLAYBOY: The movie you made together in 1984, The Terminator, got you your first big directing job and made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Did Schwarzenegger’s ascendancy in Hollywood and politics surprise you?
CAMERON: If you’ve known him for even a short time, you’re not surprised by anything he accomplishes. He used to say, “You don’t program yourself for failure; you program yourself for success.” At first I thought it was just macho bullshit. But I’ve subsequently made many decisions using that principle, especially in recent years. The decision to show 16 minutes of Avatar to the public during a special Avatar Day was based on the principle of programming myself for success.

PLAYBOY: Niagara Falls, near where you spent your childhood, is a favorite wedding spot. Did growing up there make you hyperaware of marriage?
CAMERON: I don’t know, but I have been married five times. I’m a perfectionist, so I kept trying until I got it right, which I have, I’m happy to report. Suzy Amis is a keeper. They were all great women, but there are people you can love and later not like, or it can be your rhythms and energies are too disparate to function together as partners. I found—and this was the big one—you have to work at it. Before that I had this attitude, Well, I’ll do this until it doesn’t work, and then I’ll bail. You’ll never stay married if you have that attitude.

PLAYBOY: What caused the attitude shift?
CAMERON: It was something a therapist said. I don’t believe in shrinks, and they’re not part of my life, but in this particular case I had agreed to go because it might help, and he gave me something that has stuck with me as a philosophy. He said, “You don’t do this for her; you do this for you, so things make sense to you.” You get into a relationship and make certain promises, and you have to live by a code, a set of values, for your own reasons, not to please the other person. Your word is your bond. It doesn’t matter what kind of money is involved or how the situation subsequently changes. You have to be smart enough to go into a situation knowing the dangers, and you have to live by the agreements you make going in.

PLAYBOY: Three of your four ex-wives—Gale Hurd, Linda Hamilton and Kathryn Bigelow—are prominent in the movie business. If director Bigelow asked for your opinion of her film The Hurt Locker, could you be honest without the discussion reopening old wounds?
CAMERON: Kathryn and I are still close, and we’d work together on a film tomorrow. The key is to be honest but diplomatic, constructive, not destructive. She was interested in my input on The Hurt Locker, and I basically said, “You did a great job, and I wouldn’t change a frame,” and it was true in that case. She has seen Avatar at different stages and given good input. Her current partner, Mark Boal, who wrote The Hurt Locker, gave me notes as well. It’s very collegial. I don’t have a lot of those relationships, but I value the ones I do have.

PLAYBOY: When director McG’s Terminator Salvation was up against Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at the box office last summer, McG said, “Michael Bay has a big cock, but I’d like to believe mine is bigger. If he’s up for it, we can reveal ourselves on the Spartacus steps at Universal and put the question to rest.” As co-writer and director of two Terminator movies, would you have been willing to drop trou with them to settle the matter?
CAMERON: No, I prefer we keep work and play separate. Being a good director probably doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the size of one’s penis, big toe, thumb size or anything else. That’s about the dumbest fucking thing you could ever say. I’m surprised he didn’t call me out.

PLAYBOY: As someone who has been accused of going off on the set, what do you make of those leaked tapes of Christian Bale berating a crew member on Terminator Salvation?
CAMERON: The Avatar crew all thought that was a hoot, and for the next few days we were all quoting what I thought was an inspired rant. The joke is I’m a tyrannical guy, but I said, “Man, I have to take my hat off to this guy. I could not pull a rant like that if I had to.” I mean, I can get on a roll but not like that. I just had to bow down.

PLAYBOY: How old do you consider yourself to be emotionally?
CAMERON: Probably 14, and I’m happy about that. In some ways I’m even younger than that because I never want to lose the intellectual curiosity—of always wanting to know how stuff works and wanting to put things together with my hands. I can relate very well to my six-year-old, who’s always building something. If I let him go he’d just take off into the woods and not come back until the end of the day, just like I used to do as a kid.

PLAYBOY: Are you already plotting how you might top Avatar?
CAMERON: I haven’t decided. I always say that when a woman is in the midst of childbirth, don’t ask her if she wants another child. I’m crowning right now.