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29 March 2024

Revolutionary Avatar set to hit our screens

Actress Sigourney Weaver and director James Cameron attend a photocall to promote Avatar in Berlin, Germany. (GETTY IMAGES)

Published
By Miranda Smith

There were times during the epic journey to bring Avatar to the screen when director James Cameron simply had to rely on his natural instincts. The consummate filmmaker is an explorer at heart – it's what he dreamed of doing growing up in Canada and has mounted no less than six underwater expeditions in the 12 years since he made the Oscar-winning Titanic, his last film.

This desire to seek new challenges and overcome obstacles drove Cameron to make Avatar, which is the closing gala at the Dubai International Film Festival. Along with his team, he pioneered the use of ground-breaking new technology – to keep pushing forward, when others, perhaps, might have given up in despair.

Indeed, when Cameron originally thought of making Avatar in 1995, he realised that it simply could not be done because the filmmaking tools were not available.

"Despite wanting to push the technology, when we really evaluated it, we felt like we were too many steps away," he says.

Cameron has broken new ground plenty of times before, of course. Among Titanic's 11 Oscars was one for Best Visual Effects, but his reputation as special effects hero encompasses The Terminator (1984), the terrifyingly real, nightmarish predators in Aliens (1986) and the undersea sci-fi thriller, The Abyss (1989).

"When we pushed the technology for The Abyss we were a step or two away from being able to do that so we pushed and got there but with Avatar it just seemed like we were four or five or six steps away from being able to do it, years away.

"Within a single production we wouldn't be able to push it that hard or that far, no matter how much money we threw at it. So I said 'Okay, fine, the timing's off' and threw the script in the back of a stack of files and that was that."

Making Avatar has been utterly, totally consuming, he says, and has taken longer than he expected. "For example, the first 62 days of this year were non-stop 16 hour days, no days off, no time off. It's been completely consuming," he says.

Avatar marks Cameron's welcome return to directing movies after 12 years away.

"I didn't expect it to be as long away," he smiles. "Actually my goal was to go and spend five years doing all the stuff I wanted to do in my alternate fantasy life, which was to be an explorer, scientist, space explorer, underwater explorer and all of that. But one thing led to another and before you know it, the years have rolled by."

Much of his time was spent making documentaries, including the Emmy-winning Expedition: Bismarck, about the sinking of the Second World War German battleship and Ghosts of the Abyss, which investigated the seabed resting place of the Titanic and Aliens of the Deep.

The lessons he learned during those taxing expeditions stood him in good stead for what was to come on Avatar, he says. "You know, the ocean hasn't read your script. You go out there and whatever happens, happens. Your technology has to work because there are no second takes. You can't just fix it in post-production."

But as Avatar is finally unveiled, you wonder whether Cameron, whose last film, Titanic, grossed $1.8 billion (Dh6.61bn) worldwide, feels the weight of expectation on his shoulders as he prepares to deliver his latest epic?

"Actually, it's a blessing and a curse because frankly that question reflects the way people think – you know 'Okay, what's he going to show us this time?'

"But the upside is that I can go out and raise money to do something extraordinary. Because of Titanic people trust me to do something that is not based on a source work of a graphic novel or a comic or a book or another movie; it's not a remake or a sequel, and yet do it at a high budget value that I wouldn't normally be able to do.

"So yes there's an expectation on the part of the studio that I'm going to be able to perform like I did before except that Avatar and Titanic are completely different stories that cannot be compared to each other in any reasonable way. So you know, we have to start over at zero for what we are going to do to attract and entertain an audience."

Cameron admits there were plenty of times during the production, which started in earnest more than four years ago, when his team faced seemingly insurmountable problems.

"We'd stop in the middle of the day and sit down to try and figure out how to do it because we'd hit a wall," he says. "We would shoot in fits and starts – we'd shoot a bit, then go figure out more stuff, and then we'd shoot a bit more."

But they kept going, designing new programs along the way to fit Cameron's ideas. "I wanted to create something that I would have loved when I was a kid. Something that takes place on another planet, something that is visually completely imaginative and original," he says.

There were also the environmental themes he wanted to explore and these are, he believes, even more relevant now than when he first wrote the script. "The innate message, the ideas in the film, were very appealing to me and I thought that they had a purpose in our society right now. Not that I think films should be done to be a pulpit for morality. But I think it's good for entertainment to not be completely vacuous and make you think a little bit about our human relationship with the natural world."

The action takes place on Pandora, a planet where the indigenous population, the Na'vi, are a graceful people who live at one with nature, peaceful until provoked. A militarised super company wants to explore the planet driven by its commercial appeal. It has devised the Avatar programme, where humans are genetically engineered into human/Na'vi hybrids, to send out a team on a reconnaissance mission to Pandora.

Paralysed marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) volunteers for the programme alongside a botanist, Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and both will inhabit their 'Avatar' bodies for the mission, enabling them to blend in with the Na'vi. On Pandora they discover a lush world rich in bio-diversity with fluorescent forests full of trees as tall as skyscrapers and creatures they never dreamt existed, including fearsome prehistoric predators.

Cameron promises plenty of action with huge battle scenes, including a final "mother of all battles, compared to anything I've worked on," he says.

"The battle is aerial, it's on the ground, it's cavalry, it's hand to hand – it's gonzo," he laughs. "It's absolutely the biggest thing I've ever done. It's almost a mini movie unto itself."

The director uses the latest digital 3D technology for Avatar and that along with the very latest performance capture effects, have led many to speculate that the film will represent a major breakthrough for cinema that will change the way films are made in the future.

Performance capture is where an actor's movements and expressions are electronically tracked and translated into computer-generated imagery to bring the character to life. Basically, Worthington and Weaver, wearing black leotards, would act out their roles as Avatars and the camera superimposed the computer generated creatures on to the images while shooting.

Cameron developed a fusion digital 3D camera system for his 2003 documentary, Ghosts of the Abyss, and refined the system on Avatar, leading experts to predict the film will represent a major breakthrough for cinema.

What does the director himself think? "I think it's part of the natural evolution of CG and performance capture technology and all of that," says Cameron.

"We can do more now than we could when we started the film. I also think that 3D is a revolution that's taking place and Avatar will have its part in that revolution. Maybe it can create its own little niche in the sense that it's live action, as well as what some people would think of as animation.

"The live action element of it – that's where Hollywood as a community is lagging behind. The 3D renaissance or 3D revolution is right now pretty much being driven by animation – Pixar, DreamWorks – and there are a few live action films, but they are lesser titles. That's not to throw them under a bus, but they are smaller movies. There hasn't been a main kind of tent pole movie made in live action 3D yet. So Avatar will be the test case."


- Avatar plays tomorrow at 8pm at the Madinat Arena; entry is by invitation only. It goes on general release this Thursday

 

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