James Cameron will make ‘brave choices’ in Avatar: Fire and Ash
As work on the movie continues to steam ahead, director James Cameron has said there will be some "brave choices" in the story of 'Avatar: Fire and Ash'.
James Cameron has teased he will be making some “brave choices” in ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’.
While he doesn’t potentially want to scare audiences away with his bold narrative decisions in the third entry of his sci-fi blockbuster franchise, the 70-year-old director is going to be taking the story to “places [viewers] won’t expect, but that will feel earned”.
Speaking with Empire magazine, Cameron said: “We’re just starting to riff on it and twist it and turn it.
“It’s a tricky thing. We could be getting high on our own supply here, and everybody who looks at it goes, ‘F***, that’s not what I signed up for.’ But if you’re not making brave choices, you’re wasting everybody’s time and money.
“That alone is not sufficient to create success, but it’s necessary. You’ve got to break the mould every fricking time.”
The ‘Aliens’ director added that as well as the story, the action in ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ will also be bigger and better than ever before.
He explained: “Yeah, we’ve got some really clever action set-pieces. You can get your blood up in this movie.
“But what excites me as an artist who recently turned 70 and has kind of done all that stuff is not only the opportunity to get to do it again, but to get to a level of character and intrigue you haven’t seen before in an ‘Avatar’ movie.”
‘Avatar: Fire And Ash’ - which will star Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet and Stephen Lang - will pick up after the events of 2022’s ‘The Way of Water’, and follow the alien Na’vi tribes and their continuing struggles with humanity on the planet Pandora.
Looking at the film’s December release, Cameron said the project was currently “in strong shape”, and the team was making good progress on it.
He added: “We’ve doubled the number of shots finished at this stage of the game than we had on [‘The Way of Water’] and the films are about equal length.
“So that puts us well ahead of the curve, which is something I’ve never, frankly, experienced before.”
‘The Terminator’ filmmaker joked the production process had been “a little bit less nightmarish”, as the team had become more familiar with working on the blockbuster series.
He said: “We’re getting to the point where we’re actually getting good at this.”
‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ will follow Jake Sully (Worthington) and Neytiri's (Saldana) family as they venture into uncharted territory where they meet a new Na’vi tribe who have their own relationship to the land.
While the original 2009 ‘Avatar’ and its sequel ‘The Way of Water’ focused on the evils of humanity and the innocence of the Na’vi, Cameron insisted things wouldn’t be so “black-and-white simplistic” in ‘Fire and Ash’.
He explained: “One thing we wanted to do in this film is not be black-and-white simplistic. We're trying to evolve beyond the ‘all humans are bad, all Na'vi are good' paradigm.’”
