Avatar Arrives! Can James Cameron Be King Again?

In April 2008, in a windowless Los Angeles warehouse where Howard Hughes built his airplanes some 70 years earlier, James Cameron, in a hockey jersey and jeans, was doing something élite directors do not do — holding a camera. “Why can’t I see anything?” he yelled from an apparently empty warehouse floor to a small crew huddled over computer monitors in a corner. “Oh, oh, oh, I’m in the monster’s head!” Cameron backed up, and a peek through his camera lens revealed blackness giving way to a thick and vivid rain forest where a tall, blue, alien version of Sigourney Weaver was battling the monster whose head had just blocked the director’s view. On the warehouse floor there was no rain forest, no monster, no Weaver — just a bunch of guys and their computers. But Cameron’s camera was allowing him to shoot inside a virtual universe of his own creation. He swooped in over the monster’s shoulder and entered the world of Avatar.

(See 10 things you need to know for Avatar‘s opening day.)

Equal parts artist and gearhead, Cameron, 55, has brought to film the time-travel saga of The Terminator, the watery depths of The Abyss and the sinking deck of Titanic. But more than any of his previous movies, Avatar is wholly Cameron’s world. The 2½-hr. sci-fi epic follows an ex-Marine named Jake Sully as he struggles for survival on an alien moon called Pandora, home to a tall, blue, humanoid species called the Na’vi and to a mysterious resource called unobtainium, which draws humans in a future century to colonize the planet. Jake (Sam Worthington) must inhabit the body of a human-alien hybrid, or avatar, to breathe the noxious air on Pandora. There he falls in love with a Na’vi woman and finds himself at the center of a human-Na’vi battle. The story had been knocking around in Cameron’s brain since the 1970s, when, while driving a truck for Southern California’s Brea Olinda Unified School District, he began to paint some fanciful scenes that would linger in his mind: flying jellyfish, wood sprites (which he called “dandelion things”), blazingly colorful bioluminescent forests, fan lizards and big-eyed cats.

(Read an interview with Avatar director James Cameron.)

Years in the making, and with a production budget from $200 million to $300 million plus marketing costs, Avatar arrives in theaters on Dec. 18 to colossal expectations. The movie industry hopes its immersive special effects spark a big-screen renaissance. Fans crave the next Star Wars. It’s a heavy burden, even for a man who seems to enjoy doing only things that are hard. Cameron first laid out his vision for the technology he would use in the film in a digital manifesto in the early 1990s; he then labored to perfect it over the course of a decade and a half, creating cameras that let him peer into virtual worlds and pushing for the industry’s adoption of a digital 3-D format. The result is as if the director has broken through the screen and pulled the viewer by the hand into a new, exotic world.

Bringing Pandora to Life
Despite Cameron’s success with Titanic — the highest-grossing movie of all time and winner of a record-tying 11 Oscars — Avatar was not an easy sell to his home studio, 20th Century Fox. Since 1997, Cameron had been largely absent from the Hollywood scene, riding in submersibles, shooting documentaries and building new filmmaking toys. In 2005, Fox funded a $10 million, 5-min. prototype for the movie, but when Cameron delivered a 153-page draft of the script months later, the studio balked. Here was an ambitious project with a lot of risky elements, including unproven technology, blue protagonists with tails and a script that wasn’t based on a comic book, novel or video game — making it unique for a big-budget film in its time. In September 2006, Fox formally passed on Avatar. Only after another studio (Disney) seemed poised to take it on — and after Cameron made concessions in both his script and his compensation — did Fox green-light the film. Now he just had to make it.

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The director’s last movie had involved creating the largest and most meticulously detailed set ever made: a scale replica of the Titanic. By contrast, Avatar‘s performance-capture soundstage, which is called the volume, looked like a Saturday Night Live skit about postmodern theater. Instead of sets, gray-painted polygons and the occasional tree were moved around to create topography. For the computer-generated (CG) scenes, which make up about 60% of the finished film, the cast wore clingy Lycra bodysuits covered in markers that were recognized by the 102 cameras on the warehouse ceiling. They donned skullcaps rigged with tiny cameras that imaged their faces. Thanks to software created for the film, the actors appeared on Cameron’s monitor in real time as their alien counterparts.

With more than 2,500 special-effects shots, the bulk of the man-hours on Avatar were spent not on a stage but in a dark viewing room in Los Angeles, in teleconferences with collaborating artists from Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital studio in Wellington, New Zealand. The real world was being used to inform the fictional one: an energy map of the Pandoran forest was modeled on rat neurons; hours were spent getting alien sap to drip precisely right.

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And as much as he could, Cameron tried to place the cast emotionally inside the environment of Pandora. He took the actors to Hawaiian rain forests and shot reference footage for them to use as sense memory. To help them feel an explosion, he boomed a noise over amplifiers, threw foam particles at them and whacked them with a padded jousting pole. To approximate Pandora’s moss-covered terrain, he laid plastic sheets on the floor, forcing the cast to walk gingerly. When Zoe Saldana, who plays Jake’s Na’vi love interest Neytiri, was “riding” a flying creature, she clung to a giant gray hobbyhorse rocked on a gimbal by grips. For scenes that combined live action with CG, Cameron used a new tool called a Simulcam, which allowed him to see actors playing in exotic CG surroundings in real time. Cameron’s goal was to shoot as if he were filming a documentary on another planet. It was the kind of filmmaking environment that required both imagination and patience. A crew member wrote a set catchphrase on a whiteboard: “It’s Avatar, dude, nothing works the first time.”

Avatar Onscreen
Audiences got their first look at Avatar footage in July at San Diego’s Comic-Con. When the trailer went online on Aug. 21, demand was instantaneous, quickly making it the most downloaded trailer at Apple.com The Avatar footage triggered a record 4 million streams in its first day. But the reaction wasn’t all glowing. Some commenters likened the Na’vi to George Lucas’ reviled CG character Jar Jar Binks, others to the ’80s TV cartoon Thundercats. Those who saw the footage in theaters (it screened in select IMAX locations) were considerably more impressed, but the initial hype and interest that had surrounded the project were giving way to a backlash. This was a place Cameron had been before, on Titanic — only instead of bloggers and online commenters, back then it was the mainstream media who snickered at his ambition.

One script element Fox had initially objected to was Cameron’s failure to explain unobtainium, the precious resource that sends humans to Pandora to strip-mine the planet ruinously. Unobtainium is a joke term engineers have used for decades to describe any needed material that is rare, costly or difficult to obtain. For Cameron, the specificity of unobtainium is not important, and despite Fox’s objections, he never explains in the movie what makes unobtainium worth the trouble of interstellar travel. But the answer to that mystery is that the substance’s room-temperature superconducting properties make it the key to cheap power generation back on Earth, where all the oil has run out. Unobtainium is crucial to running ships like the ISV Venture Star, which delivers humans to Pandora. The irony is that the more unobtainium humans mine on Pandora, the more they will be able to travel there. It’s a devastating feedback loop.

Like all of Cameron’s movies, Avatar can be watched as pure escapist entertainment or as a dire warning about humanity’s current path. But here, for the first time, Cameron’s future vision has not been limited by the strictures of a real-world movie set. The result is his most fantastical film, one that hews to the rules of science in its creatures and environments but not to the limitations of the physical world of props and the human body. Of course, it still needs to draw human bodies to the theater. Its trickiest special effect is yet unseen: meeting the expectations that await it.

From The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. Copyright © 2009 by Rebecca Keegan. To be published by the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House

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