Much of what we see from the Earth-like moon of Pandora, the fantasy setting of the Avatar franchise, comes from the soundstage in Los Angeles where scenes from the second and third films were filmed. “We had to build an ocean,” said director James Cameron. “We could create a two-meter wave. We could make the wave crash onto the shoreline if we built the shoreline.”
Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña and other actors filmed their underwater scenes in the nearly 250,000-gallon tank. Digital artists then used these shots, called performance shots, as a template to render the final versions of the characters we see on screen.
“So in performance capture, we use a whole bunch of cameras to capture the actor's physique,” Cameron explained. “And we use one camera (or now we actually use two) to capture their faces. They are in close-up 100% of the time. But there's a beautiful thing about being close-up 100% of the time. It's a lot like a theater rehearsal.”
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Avatar: Fire and Ash is the third film in the series. It tells the story of the indigenous Na'vi people's struggle to protect their paradise from human colonization.
Cameron created these stories and this world. He was always a dreamer, even as a child in rural Canada. “I lived in the world of my imagination – it was comics, it was science fiction. I read a lot. There were movies, TV shows,” he said. “I mean, I had a pretty vivid imagination.”
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Cameron moved to Los Angeles with his parents as a teenager. He briefly attended community college, where he studied marine biology, before dropping out and looking for odd jobs, including truck driving.
So how did he go from blue collar to Hollywood? “Watching Star Wars,” he said. “I used to put on my headphones and listen to fast electronic music and imagine space battles, hyperkinetic space battles with all kinds of maneuvers and energy weapons, people walking through debris fields and all that stuff. If the things I see in my head can be the same things that are in a movie that is the number one movie in the history of cinema, then I have a marketable imagination.”
He returned to school, although not in an official capacity. “I started studying visual effects and I didn’t have the money to go to USC or anything like that. So I used to go to USC and bury myself on the Saturday when I wasn't driving the truck in stacks. And I read everything I could find about optical printing and front screen projection and, you know, movable sodium process mats. All this is self-taught. I photocopied it all. scientific papers, put them all in folders, and I had a shelf full of black folders that were basically a course in visual effects and cinematography.”
He found work in the visual effects and design departments, quickly rising through the ranks thanks to his technical knowledge.
Then, in the early 1980s, Cameron, inspired by a literal dream of a robotic exoskeleton, co-wrote and directed The Terminator. This film made him famous and proved that he could turn his imagination into reality.
But at that time, computer graphics were not available; the effects were achieved mainly through puppeteering. “We just figured out how to do this practically,” Cameron said.
He showed us his private museum in Los Angeles, full of props from his films, including Aliens, where puppeteers brought to life powerlifter Sigourney Weaver and the Alien Queen. Of the Alien Queen, Cameron said, “I think her head had seven or eight different axes of movement that were controlled by cables that basically came out of her butt. And we had to hide it all, so there was a lot of steam and smoke and lighting and stuff like that.”
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Cameron first used computer graphics in the science fiction film The Abyss. It was also his first cinematic foray into another of his passions: the deep sea. His second ocean film project? “Titanic”. At that time, it became the highest-grossing film of all time. Cameron has personally won three Oscars.
But the film itself was never Cameron's priority: he said he wrote the script to explore the Titanic wreck. “It was kind of a means to an end, you know?” – he said. “I thought, ‘I can just go and do this. Okay, I need a story. Okay, Romeo and Juliet. You know, young, doomed love on the Titanic. Boom! Like, instantly.”
He found a way to use Hollywood to invest in his passion for scientific research. “Yes, exactly,” he said. “And then I had so much fun on my expedition to film Titanic that I actually took an eight-year break from Hollywood, an eight-year sabbatical. And subsequently I went on six more expeditions, making a total of seven before I started Avatar.”
Cameron wrote a take on Avatar before Titanic, but it wasn't until 2005 that he thought current technology could support his vision. And even then he was not sure that things would go well in Hollywood. “For years there was a feeling of, 'Oh, they're doing something weird with computers and replacing actors,' when in fact, once you really dive in and see what we're doing, it's a celebration of the actor-director moment,” he said.
“Now go to the other end of the spectrum and you have generative AI that can compose a character,” he continued. “They can come up with an actor. They can create a play from scratch using a text prompt. It's like no. This is terrifying to me. It's the opposite. No does.”
Cameron's Avatar: Fire and Ash will be released in the coming months.
So how is he doing a few weeks after the premiere? “Nervous!” he laughed. “Are you kidding? Always. Always”.
Despite the uncertainty, Cameron remains undaunted and fascinated by the unknown. “I’m attracted, if you haven’t noticed, to things I can’t do,” he said. “Because you grow and you learn. If I'm still making movies when I have an oxygen tube put in my nose and I'm 87 years old or something, if I'm lucky, I want to keep doing things that I don't know how to do.”
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The story was produced by John Goodwin. Editor: Carol Ross.
