Avatar (2009)

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Speaker 4 Hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a pioneering and potentially a little problematic film from one of cinema's grumpiest masterminds.

Speaker 4 I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Witterbauer. And Chris, what is your holiday gift to our listeners this year?

Speaker 2 Today we are discussing Avatar.

Speaker 2 In honor of the release of the third Avatar film, which will be coming out on December 19th, it's a James Cameron movie. It is a movie he made.

Speaker 2 And no, no, we're going to, we're going to dive into it. It is a really interesting, really interesting story.
There are some really unusual elements to this story that I was not sort of expecting.

Speaker 2 And I'm really excited to talk about it because this is a movie that I think I often forget about within his filmography, to be candid. Yeah.
There are three movies of his that I often forget about.

Speaker 2 This is one of them. What are the other two? I forget about Piranha 2 because, you know, I've only seen it once.
Sure. I often forget about true lies.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. You know what? I do too.

Speaker 2 I don't think about True Lies very much.

Speaker 4 It's not that I don't think about it. It's that I forget that it's him a lot of the time.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's very unusual. I think True Lies is in a weird way more of an outlier than any of his other films because it's effectively a spoof.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's a comedy.

Speaker 2 We will get to True Lies. We're not talking about it today.
Today we are talking about Avatar. We're going to Pandora.
And Lizzie, I have to ask, had you seen Avatar before?

Speaker 2 And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

Speaker 4 I had seen Avatar before, of course. This came out in 2009 when we were sophomores in college, juniors in college, somewhere around there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it was junior year, winter of 2009.

Speaker 4 A dark time for all.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 I'll just be very upfront about this. I do not care for this franchise.
I really didn't like this movie the first time that I saw it.

Speaker 4 I was like angry at how much I did not like this movie when I saw it in theaters.

Speaker 4 Upon re-watching it this time for the podcast, I felt a similar rage burble up in my gut when I looked at the runtime and remembered that it was two hours and 43 minutes long.

Speaker 4 And that rage continued to broil and simmer, I would say, for the first hour and 20 minutes of this movie. I was really not enjoying it, really not happy.

Speaker 4 I was finding a lot of things about it that I found deeply problematic, which I assume we will talk about a little bit here.

Speaker 4 And at around the hour and 20 minute mark, this movie does pick up substantially for me. And I actually, I will say, I really enjoyed the back half of this movie.

Speaker 4 Once the actual conflict comes into play, it is pretty fun. Look, it's gorgeous.
It looks great. Everything about this is beautiful.
I know the technology is groundbreaking.

Speaker 4 I know we're going to talk about that. My problem with Avatar is James Cameron is a fantastic writer, as we have learned by covering many of his other movies.

Speaker 4 And it just feels like with this franchise, he has decided to let that go and just focus more on what he can do technologically than what he can do in terms of storytelling.

Speaker 4 And I was thinking a lot about Toy Story when I was watching this this time, because something we discussed in that episode is that that was a technological marvel in terms of what they were able to do.

Speaker 4 First fully computer generated movie ever. But that still wasn't the most important thing about Toy Story.
The most important thing about Toy Story was the story.

Speaker 4 And I do feel like that is lost with Avatar. Now, I'm not saying it's not fun.
I don't want to crap on anybody who loves Avatar.

Speaker 4 I completely understand because it is really cool to look at and everything. But yeah, it's just, it's not something I would choose to watch voluntarily.

Speaker 4 My only other gripe with Avatar, and I'm excited to talk about this because I assume there's a reason for this, is that motion capture acting, as we learned on Lord of the Rings in terms of Andy Circus and how he kind of pioneered a lot of this, is such a skill that I think people don't appreciate how difficult this is to remain expressive when you're not able to really use your face the way that you're used to using it.

Speaker 4 And I think everyone in this movie pulls it off miraculously with one massive exception, Chris. And I don't know if you agree with this.

Speaker 2 Sigourney Weaver. No.

Speaker 2 Sorry, we'll continue.

Speaker 4 I think Sam Worthington is a real dead space in this movie. And I actually like him.

Speaker 2 Oh, I don't agree. I think he's fine.
I think he's totally fine in this movie.

Speaker 4 He's fine as a human. When it gets to his avatar, I think because he can't rely on his face the same way, it is a bit tough for me to watch him, especially opposite like Zoe Seldana and C.C.H.

Speaker 4 Pounder, Wes Studi, like everyone else I feel is really pulling it off so much more. And maybe I'm wrong, maybe that's to do with voice acting.

Speaker 4 I don't know, but he just feels like a bit of dead air to me in the middle of this movie. And that's my hot take.
I, you know, I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 4 I don't know what to say about the sort of like, white savior elements of this. I don't love them.
But yeah, Chris, what do you think?

Speaker 2 I I have a similar, I guess I have, yeah, it's kind of a cognitive dissonance around this movie because, like you said, the artistry, the visual effects, the set pieces, the final battle scene.

Speaker 2 It's great. Generally speaking, the visuals remain incredible 16 years later.
In fact, I think it's only by the standard set by Avatar Way of Water that these visuals don't look good.

Speaker 2 It's only when you compare them to the sequel that they don't hold up. By comparison to any other film, they are still remarkable.
There's one exception.

Speaker 2 It's not that I think Sigourney Weaver's performance as the avatar is bad. I think her avatar is the one avatar that does not look good in this movie.

Speaker 2 And there's actually a very specific reason for that. I think the artists would agree.
They had a really hard time designing her. The main issue was her nose.

Speaker 2 The artists tried widening it to match the feline look of the other characters, and it no longer looked like Sigourney Weaver because she has a very distinctly narrow nose.

Speaker 2 So they eventually just slimmed it out and justified the mix of human and Na'Vi.

Speaker 2 DNA could yield any number of combinations, but I actually, I just generally speaking, her avatar sticks out to me like a sore thumb. Curious what our audience thinks.

Speaker 2 I did not have the same experience as you. I enjoyed this movie quite a bit when it came out.
I remember seeing it in theaters. I saw it in 3D.
I don't remember if it was IMAX or not.

Speaker 2 And a few shots I still remember to this day in 3D, the water droplet in Zero-G when he wakes up and it racks focus to it.

Speaker 2 The close-up of the Viper Wolf as it snarls at him in the jungle when he is alone at night before he's saved by Soi Saltanya, Neytiri.

Speaker 2 That shot, I just remember thinking in the theater, I have never seen something look that photorealistic in a movie before. That is not something that was photographed, that is real.

Speaker 2 There's also this seemingly innocuous shot that is completely unremarkable in 2D.

Speaker 2 It is a shot of Jake and the rest of the band, Sugaroni Weaver, et cetera, in the prison cell toward the end of Act II.

Speaker 2 In 3D, for some reason, that shot, there was so much depth to that shot that wouldn't normally be there. Again, I really left that movie thinking 3D is going to be something.

Speaker 2 It's going to be more than a gimmick. I really thought this is the future of cinema.
I was wrong.

Speaker 2 I think that the story, I agree, is effective, although extremely clunky and tropey.

Speaker 2 I think the dialogue can be tough for a lot of moments, especially the human dialogue is really a bit of a struggle.

Speaker 2 Like we have some basil exposition chunks, especially at the beginning of the movie.

Speaker 4 It is exclusively basil exposition for the first almost 90 minutes of this movie.

Speaker 4 Like one of my favorite parts is when they're in the helicopter and Sigourney Weaver is like, we're going to the, what are the mountains called?

Speaker 2 The Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora.

Speaker 4 Sorry, the Hallelujah Mountains. Yes, of course.
But she says we're going there and the other guy is like, the mystic mountains of Pandora? You mean only the like coolest mountains that are floating?

Speaker 4 And he like explains what they are. And it's just like, I don't need it.

Speaker 2 You could have just dropped us in to this world to this story i do not like the voiceover anyway chris continue so i also as we mentioned in aliens sigourney weaver wonderful actress i love her in aliens i do feel she's a bit miscast in this movie in a way because she is so tough and adversarial opposite quarits i almost feel like it infringes upon Jake's story in a weird way and you kind of just want her to take over at certain points.

Speaker 2 And it's sometimes she sticks out in an ensemble. I also feel, candidly, Giovanni Rubisi is a little miscast in this movie.

Speaker 2 You know, we really praised the Paul Riser casting in Aliens. And this movie, in so many ways, is the James Cameron greatest hits of the tropes he knows and loves, right?

Speaker 2 The corporate show, the military macho man, the natives that are fighting them, the guerrilla warfare. There are so many elements, technology versus nature.
Again, we're playing the hits.

Speaker 2 So I enjoyed it in 2009. I never watched it again.

Speaker 2 Despite enjoying it, I never felt like I needed to go back to that story in the way that I felt like I did with Aliens or Terminator 2 or even The Terminator.

Speaker 2 And so again, fell into the true lies category of Cameron film movies. I kind of enjoyed when I watched them, but I just didn't find very thought-provoking in any way.

Speaker 4 Well, and you're talking about the tropes that he's returning to. They're not just storytelling tropes.
There's visual Cameron references in this. Like we talked about the power loader in Aliens.

Speaker 4 That is, again, almost verbatim brought back here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, with the amp suit. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. It's just, it frustrates me because it just feels like a massive pastiche of so many movies.
And that's not usually what he does.

Speaker 4 He is usually so original, not just in the technology and the visuals, but also in terms of the story. And that is very much missing here for me.

Speaker 2 Well, that's where upon diving into this more, I actually have to disagree. Okay, great.
So I do think Terminator feels very original to us. Terminator 2 feels original to us.

Speaker 2 I do think he is playing more with pastiche than we realize there, especially if you go back and look at the science fiction that influenced him.

Speaker 2 But I agree with you, it's less of a direct copy paste or less a simplistic copy paste. And it feels like it's been run through a more interesting story generator, his brain.

Speaker 2 Again, re-watching it, I kind of felt more or less the same. I thought the visuals were amazing.
The action is great. Soy Saldania in particular is so good.
Really good.

Speaker 2 Just really brings that character to life. That is the most convincing CG character I'd seen up until that point, specifically Neytiri, more than Gollum, more than anybody else in the movie.

Speaker 4 I agree. I think she's amazing and she really brings an emotional depth to this movie that's missing.
Also, CCH Pounder as well has some really incredible moments and I have to call out Laz Alonzo.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's great as Soute.

Speaker 4 Really good. Really, really good.

Speaker 2 I disagree. I think Sam Worthington's pretty good in this movie, but I think it makes sense.
He's a Marine. He's reserved.

Speaker 2 He should have a much smaller performance than the rest of the folks around him.

Speaker 4 Totally. I'm not saying he did anything wrong.
I'm saying for me, it doesn't play super well in the form of his avatar. Got it.
That's my only complaint about it as a human. I think he's great.

Speaker 4 I actually do like him and think he's a good actor. He doesn't do it for me in terms of the motion capture in this.

Speaker 4 Can I ask you really quickly, what is the discussion around the sort of use of quote-unquote native tropes in this movie? Like, is everybody just, is everybody cool with this? Am I totally off base?

Speaker 2 No, this movie is very controversial for that point. Let's talk more about the reception.

Speaker 2 Let's save that for the end because that's a big, big, big point of contention that a lot of people have with this movie. Okay.

Speaker 2 I don't want to make that point up front only because I will speak to it more in the reception when we get to the release of the film.

Speaker 2 And again, it's that's been a point of conversation for 14 years, 15, 16, 7, you know, years now.

Speaker 4 I figured that was the case, but I couldn't totally remember what came after the first one.

Speaker 2 You know, if I may, the offer, and my sister pointed me in this direction, a slightly different critique. I think that the story is reductive.
I'm not bored. It's very effective.

Speaker 2 But like you said, it's simplistic.

Speaker 2 And I think that my biggest problem when I really think about it is that there's this rich history in science fiction, especially literature, of building out alien cultures and exploring what would it be like for us to interact with an alien culture, specifically to have two different moral structures collash in a specific way.

Speaker 2 And some of my favorites, you know, Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card, which is a sequel to Ender's Game, The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell, or even something like, you know, Mad Max Fury Road, which is not an alien culture, but it is a culture that's alien to us.

Speaker 2 And we're trying to figure out, ooh, why is it that they have these specific pseudo-quasi-religious, you know, worship structures around bullet farms, etc.

Speaker 2 And it feels like, even though I know that Cameron and his team went to great efforts to bring Pandora to life, it kind of just feels like Earth mixed with a glow stick at the end of the day.

Speaker 2 And there's just not a lot of complexity here. The Navi are just good.
The humans are bad. And again, Cameron has admitted this is intentional.

Speaker 2 They are a lightly reworked, generic American indigenous riff. Period.
Yes.

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, you know what? I couldn't stop thinking about watching this movie is another three-hour long movie that we recently discussed, though we have not covered it itself.

Speaker 2 Dances with Wolves.

Speaker 4 That is right. Dances with Wolves.
This is literally Dances with Wolves in Space. That's all I could think about this whole time.

Speaker 2 I mean, he has said it is John Smith, Pocahontas in space. So let's get into it.
I think James Cameron would tell us, Bols. To shut up.
Well, yes. He'd say, shut your mouth.

Speaker 2 This movie made an insane amount of money.

Speaker 4 Wipe that smile off your face.

Speaker 2 I think he would also say, the story is intentionally simple, so it would appeal to as many people as possible. Fine.

Speaker 2 So whether that's fair or not, let's explore Avatar, the science fiction lineage that he did dive into.

Speaker 2 And let's see if we can figure out why Hollywood's most financially successful director on a per-film basis has exiled himself to Pandora, I mean, New Zealand, for nearly 20 years and see if he's going to stay there for much longer.

Speaker 2 But first, the details.

Speaker 2 Avatar is a 2009 science fiction epic film written and directed by, as we mentioned, James Cameron or Jimmy C. in his concrete boots.
It was produced by James Cameron and John Landau.

Speaker 2 It stars Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, Zoe Saldania as Neytiri, Sigourney Weaver as Grace, Stephen Lang as the scenery-chewing Colonel Miles Quarich. I like Stephen Lang in this movie.

Speaker 2 Michelle Rodriguez as Trudy, Giovanni Rubisi as Parker, the corporate chill, Joel David Moore as Norm Spellman, CCH Pounder, as we mentioned, as Moat, West Studi as E2 Khan, and many, many more.

Speaker 2 It was released by 20th Century Fox on December 18th, 2009, and as always, the IMDb log line reads, A paraplegic marine dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the world he feels is his home.

Speaker 2 Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, The Making of Avatar by Jodie Duncan, Capturing Avatar, the documentary in the DVD's special feature, James Cameron, an unauthorized biography by Mark Shapiro, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film.

Speaker 2 And we are not going to spend as much time on the technological minutiae as they do in Capturing Avatar or Corridor Cruise Breaking Down the VFX of the movie, for example, that you can find on YouTube, because those are better suited to a visual medium.

Speaker 2 And I would like to follow the human drama of what it must be like to work with, as you mentioned, Grumpy McGrumperson, James Cameron.

Speaker 4 Who I do still love more every time I talk about him, even though I don't know that I ever want to personally interact with him.

Speaker 2 Probably not.

Speaker 4 Because he'd hate me, and that's fine.

Speaker 2 Let's start with a couple quotes about James Cameron from the studio side.

Speaker 2 Bill McCannic, we've discussed at length, who ran Fox Studios during Titanic, once said of James Cameron, Even though he knew I was on his side, nobody's ever on his side.

Speaker 2 It's like you're in the trenches and your infantry mate is shooting at you, even if you're the only person there who can save his life. End quote.
Here's Leonard Goldberg, president of Fox.

Speaker 2 This was said prior to the Abyss. James Cameron told me, I want you to know one thing.

Speaker 2 Once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you'll be able to stop me is to kill me. End quote.
He was probably serious.

Speaker 4 Oh, there's no probably. He was definitely serious.

Speaker 2 Well, Lizzy, like the movie itself, the story of Avatar begins with a dream.

Speaker 2 Not a dream of flying, like Jake Sully describes at the beginning of the film, but a dream of a fantastic world far more beautiful than our own.

Speaker 2 As James Cameron once told GQ, I have my own private streaming service that's better than any of that shit out there, and it runs every night for free.

Speaker 2 Just like the plot for The Terminator and some scenes from aliens, the idea for Avatar came to James in his sleep. It was the early 1970s.

Speaker 2 He was a student at Fullerton College, and one night he walked across Pandora.

Speaker 2 I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that looked kind of like fiber optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it and these kinds of lizards that didn't look like much until they took off and then they turned into these rotating fans kind of like living frisbees and then they came down and land on something it was all in a dream I woke up super excited and I actually drew it.

Speaker 2 Now this was very common for James. He would often wake up and sketch his dreams.

Speaker 2 And it was also around this time, Lizzie, that he made a painting which shows a tall, thin woman with blue skin who is wearing skin-tight purple pants.

Speaker 2 Cameron says that this painting of the the 12-foot-tall blue moon was actually inspired by a dream that his mom had. One day she had this dream about a blue goddess with six breasts.

Speaker 2 She thought it was amazing. She went on and on about it.
It must have stuck with me as I ended up using it in Xenogenesis. We eventually ditched four of the six breasts.

Speaker 2 Although I did draw the six-breasted version at one point, it wasn't quite as appealing as it sounds. Regardless of where it came from, 12-foot-tall blue women on James Cameron's mind for 30 years.

Speaker 2 So he's writing his first screenplay in the late 1970s. It takes place on multiple planets, and the movie ends with a native population that is 12 feet tall and blue.

Speaker 2 And I believe, Lizzie, that Xenogenesis, that short film we discussed in Aliens, was the proof of concept he was trying to make to get funding for this movie.

Speaker 2 Now, Cameron was about as close to getting that movie made as he was to reaching an actual alien planet. He was a nobody at this point in time, so the drawings in that script went into a drawer.

Speaker 2 But as we have learned and as we all know, James Cameron from 1984 through 1994, he had one of the most meteoric rises in the history of Hollywood. So the Terminator starts it off.

Speaker 2 $6.5 million budget makes $40 million domestically, $80 million worldwide. Aliens, which we just covered, $18.5 million budget, $85 million domestically.

Speaker 2 The Abyss, technically his only misfire in this run, still made $54 million domestically against a $45 million budget.

Speaker 2 And then, of course, comes Terminator 2, Judgment Day, $520 million worldwide against a $100 million budget, the third highest grossing film ever at the time of its release behind Star Wars and E.T.

Speaker 2 And then True Lies, which was just a cool $378 million against a $120 million budget.

Speaker 2 The reviews were positive to glowing, depending on the film, but primarily working as a genre director, Oscar recognition kind of eluded Mr. Cameron until this point.

Speaker 2 He was pushing technological advances, the use of CGI, as we've discussed in The Abyss and Terminator 2, and he was also dogged by some accusations of plagiarism.

Speaker 2 So you mentioned Cameron as a master of pastiche.

Speaker 2 Sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison accused him of ripping off his 1957 short story, Soldier from Tomorrow and the Outer Limits episode in Inspired Soldier for The Terminator.

Speaker 2 Ellison and the studio studio settled. Cameron denies the claims.

Speaker 2 I don't think these are too similar. I think, generally speaking, he's pulling big sci-fi concepts and it's easy to identify them across a lot of different pieces of work.

Speaker 2 Phyllia and Konstantinos Cortis sued James Cameron, accusing him of stealing their concept of a half-man, half-bull creature who could shapeshift into various forms.

Speaker 2 From their script, The Minotaur for the T-1000 and Terminator 2. That case was dismissed and feels tenuous at best.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, you have to assume someone at James Cameron's height of success is going to get a certain amount of these claims.

Speaker 2 Yeah. He also caught some strays in a suit around the French film La Total, which was what True Lies was based on.
Cameron was not accused of anything. He bought the rights in good faith.

Speaker 2 It was about the film that it was based on, not True Lies itself.

Speaker 2 So shortly after True Lies, Cameron's 40 years old and he is gearing up to make what movie, Lizzie, the biggest movie of his career, the biggest movie in Hollywood's history, it would soon become.

Speaker 2 Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.

Speaker 4 Wait, that's Lord of the Rings. How does Titanic go?

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 2 How does Titanic go?

Speaker 4 What does the penny whistle in Titanic do?

Speaker 2 Every night in my dreams. That's all you need.
There you go. He decides to revisit that bioluminescent dream from two decades prior while he's gearing up for Titanic.

Speaker 2 This movie that he's going to write is going to come after Titanic and it is going to encompass all of his interests. Biology, technology, the environment, the military.

Speaker 2 And his inspirations are the pulpy sci-fi adventures of the early to mid-20th century. So this is very similar.

Speaker 4 L. Ron Hubbard.

Speaker 2 Well, yes, Space Jazz, but it's very similar to George Lucas pulling from Flash Gordon, for example, to make Star Wars. Here's the quote from Cameron.

Speaker 2 I've always had a fondness for those kind of science fiction adventure stories. The male warrior in an exotic alien land, overcoming the physical challenges and confronting the fears of difference.

Speaker 2 Do we conquer, exploit, integrate? Now, the most obvious book that he's pulling from is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. This is John Carter of Mars, the film adaptation.

Speaker 2 The first book is called A Princess of Mars. And if you guys are unfamiliar with these books, they follow a late 19th century Confederate veteran, John Carter, who's whisked off to a dying world.

Speaker 2 Mars. He falls in love with a beautiful Martian princess.
He has to integrate with the alien culture.

Speaker 2 Cameron told The New Yorker in 2009, with Avatar, I thought, forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guy's adventure movie.

Speaker 2 Something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars, A Soldier Goes to Mars. He was tired of this dumb Titanic stuff and the girls.
And Lissy's like, no, sir, please don't.

Speaker 4 That's what you're so good at.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 4 Please don't forget about that.

Speaker 2 Now, there are a lot of other books that he may have pulled from. So we should mention Strugatsky's Noon Universe series.
This is where the name Pandora may have come from. Robert F.

Speaker 2 Young's To Fell a Tree, Ben Bova's The Winds of Voltaire, Clifford Seymack's Desertion, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest.

Speaker 2 The point is, so much of what's in this movie has existed in so many classic works of science fiction before. So Cameron pumps out an 80-page treatment in two weeks.

Speaker 2 He says that the treatment almost wrote itself because it was a combination of ideas that he'd been percolating on for years.

Speaker 2 So Pandora was, according to Cameron, based on a drawing he made in 11th grade called Spring on Planet Flora.

Speaker 2 That became the inspiration for the luminous planet in his script, Xenogenesis, which had a beautiful forest with a vast network of interconnected bioluminescent trees.

Speaker 2 And the human characters cannot survive on this planet because of its deadly atmosphere. The planet is also sentient, much like Eowah, which is just an anagram for Yahweh, the word for God, in Avatar.

Speaker 2 I also do want to mention Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which kind of does something similar with the way that they lull the arriving humans into slumber and vulnerability and then attack them.

Speaker 2 Now, Josh Sully was the original name of the hero of this story, and he was based on a similar character from a short story called Absence that Cameron had written, which he had turned into a short film script called Chrysalis.

Speaker 2 This was about a cosmic journey of self-discovery and transcendence taken on by a wheelchair-bound man who elects to surgically remove all external sensory input so that he can journey through his own mind.

Speaker 2 So a little bit more of a Buddhist approach to Avatar, one might say.

Speaker 4 Sorry, I was just going to say that's something I actually wish they had taken a bit more time to explore in Avatar because that is such an interesting concept that this man who's lost his ability to walk, who once, you know, thrived on his athleticism, is able to regain it by taking on a different body.

Speaker 4 And that's something that goes, I think, strangely unexplained in Avatar and unexplored. And I wish, I think they could have done a lot more with that.

Speaker 2 I also saw a couple articles that pointed out tropes of ableism in Avatar, specifically the idea of a character with a disability who wasn't born with that disability, ultimately desperately seeking a magical cure for that disability.

Speaker 2 But then I saw another really interesting article from a writer who has spinal muscular atrophy, and they made the point that, from their perspective, Jake Sully's goal changes from being one in which he seeks this ultimate cure to being one in which he seeks the family and community that the Navi are offering him.

Speaker 2 And they actually really felt that the scene that moved them was when Neytiri picks up Jake's body in human form, and it's clear that she still loves him and sees him.

Speaker 2 And so the love is very much divorced from any physical form at all. And it's very much just a love for who Jake is, which was also a really interesting interpretation.

Speaker 2 So I just thought I'd point those out.

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Speaker 2 According to Cameron, the concept of an alien avatar came from a story that actually served as a big inspiration for aliens.

Speaker 2 And we talked about it briefly when we were doing our aliens coverage, Lizzie. The story is called Mother.

Speaker 2 And in this story, a xenomorph, Cameron's name for a genetically engineered alien creature, is created based on a local life form in order to serve the needs of the company.

Speaker 2 These xenomorphs are controlled via a psychic link with an adept or an electronic link with a trained controller.

Speaker 2 And according to Duncan's book, the original treatment is actually very close to what we see in the movie. There are some names that are different.

Speaker 2 Neytiri was Zuleika, Jake was Josh, but the big beats of the story, again, John Smith, Pocahontas retold on a foreign planet, like pretty much the same.

Speaker 2 So Cameron really wants to line up Avatar as the direct successor to Titanic.

Speaker 2 He says, there was supposed to have been a continuity of work during the time that Titanic was being made to prepare us for making Avatar after. So he sends the treatment to producer John Landau.

Speaker 2 Now, Landau had been a Fox executive who had overseen the production of True Lies, and unlike nearly every other executive, it seems like James Cameron has worked with, he and Landau actually really got along.

Speaker 2 And I think that Cameron recognized that that was pretty unique. And so when Landau left Fox, Cameron sent him a secret script codenamed Planet Ice, which was not Avatar, that was Titanic.

Speaker 2 And so Landau jumps at the opportunity to work with Cameron. This lifelong partnership forms.
They go and make Titanic together.

Speaker 2 And I would just love to know as they're working on Titanic, which is this very grounded, sweeping romance, he gets this treatment for this militaristic giant blue people on a planet science fiction script.

Speaker 2 It just must have been like, really? This is, I'm sure he was saying, I'd follow you anywhere, James, but that's just such an interesting pivot following Titanic.

Speaker 2 But it seems like James Cameron's timing is going to be just right. So he'd found a digital domain, his VFX house in 1993.

Speaker 2 It's him, Stan Winston, and Scott Ross, former head of ILM, half-owned by IBM. And Steven Spielberg has just proven that you can composite something organic onto live-action plates with Jurassic Park.

Speaker 2 Now, Cameron wants to do the same thing that Steven Spielberg's done with one big difference in Avatar.

Speaker 2 All of the Navi have to have a full range of human expressiveness in their faces, which is a lot harder than making a Tyrannosaurus Rex roar at the end of the day.

Speaker 2 So that means he needs to anchor the CGI in real performances by real actors, hence the need for Lizzie, motion capture. Or, as Landau and Cameron will insist, performance capture.

Speaker 2 And they will yell at you.

Speaker 4 I'm fine with that. You know what? They're right.

Speaker 2 They're right. They are right.
But it was called motion capture in 1995 for a reason. It was primarily limited to the movement of an actor's body.
They needed to capture the face.

Speaker 2 So he starts some basic tests at Digital Domain. This is in the summer of 1996, as he is starting production on Titanic.

Speaker 2 The trades catch wind of Avatar, and a headline from the Hollywood Reporter announces Cameron's future actors could send in the clones, synthetic stars planned for his Avatar.

Speaker 2 It was said that avatar would include at least six photorealistic CGI actors in leading roles, actors who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world.

Speaker 2 And much of the concern seems to be very similar, although I would argue, misplaced at this time for a very specific reason to the use of AI actors, which we're discussing right now.

Speaker 4 It just feels like a major misunderstanding of what motion capture was.

Speaker 2 I think it was terrifying. We talked about it a lot with The Lord of the Rings, especially the two towers and the return of the king.
Right. But Cameron didn't want to replace actors.

Speaker 2 Cameron wanted to replace the time spent in makeup and prosthetics with time spent in post-production using technology to capture their performances right down to the most minute aspects of their facial expressions.

Speaker 2 So from Cameron's perspective, performance capture should allow the actor to be more expressive than they would be able to when under a bunch of makeup, which makes sense to me, but of course I have the benefit of hindsight.

Speaker 2 I could see myself in 1997 thinking, you know, oh my God, this guy's going to replace everybody on screen.

Speaker 4 Well, and we also have to remember this is before Lord of the Rings and, you know, Andy Serka says Gollum was a watershed moment in terms of what can be done with motion capture.

Speaker 2 Excuse me.

Speaker 4 Performance capture. That's right.

Speaker 2 So Digital Domain was reportedly staffing up the project and they were tentatively planning to start production as soon as the summer of 1997. But of course, that was not going to be the case.

Speaker 2 Now, James quickly realized that motion capture technology was years away from being able to do what he wanted to do.

Speaker 2 You talked about this, Lizzie, with Toy Story, Moore's Law, just the compute power power required to do this didn't exist yet.

Speaker 4 But it would.

Speaker 2 But it would. So they pull the plug on R ⁇ D, and Cameron tosses the avatar script back into the drawer full of those saucy drawings of 12-foot-tall blue women.

Speaker 2 And he focuses on Titanic, which had grown to become the most expensive movie of all time with a budget of $200 million.

Speaker 2 And everyone is convinced James Cameron is sunk, including James Cameron a little bit. He was pretty freaked out about his career.

Speaker 2 And then Titanic opens wide in December of 1997, and the box office receipts were outpaced only by the number of middle fingers James Cameron was throwing at anybody who had ever doubted him.

Speaker 2 Oh my goodness. It was just a siphon directly from the box office into his ear, blowing up his head to the size of the world.

Speaker 4 It is amazing. I literally

Speaker 4 for all the crap that we give James Cameron, the things that he has achieved are incredible. Titanic is incredible.
He's dropping extras down a deck and breaking their legs for this.

Speaker 2 Yeah. In 20 years, he goes from driving trucks for a school district to making the highest grossing film of all time and getting 11 Oscar nominations.
Yes. That's wild.
That's unheard of.

Speaker 2 It's unbelievable. Again, do I want to be on that set? I don't think so.

Speaker 2 Maybe when they all got PCP drugged by the soup that one day. And the clam chowder, yeah.
So by the spring of 98, it crosses the $1 billion threshold.

Speaker 2 It unseats Jurassic Park as the highest-grossing movie ever. At the the Golden Globes, Cameron infamously says, so does this prove once and for all that size does matter?

Speaker 2 He topped that off at the Oscars when he concluded his best director acceptance speech by shouting, I'm king of the world, quoting his own movie.

Speaker 2 Apparently, a lot of people didn't understand that he was quoting his own movie. It didn't help his reputation.

Speaker 2 I think this is where we kind of peak with James Cameron as one of the least liked men in Hollywood.

Speaker 2 Again, I would argue to give him a little bit of leeway here, he has scaled, you know, the ladder of Hollywood from its lowest rung, you know, designing ships for Roger Corman 20 years prior, and now he has won Best Director.

Speaker 4 Well, he's also, you know, there's a lot of jokes shortly after this with like Tina Faye and Amy Poehler at the Golden Globes at his expense.

Speaker 2 An excellent joke, by the way.

Speaker 7 It was a great year for film. Women in film, Catherine Bigelow, nominated tonight.

Speaker 7 I haven't really been following the controversy over Zero Dark 30, but when it comes to torture, I trust the lady who spent three years married to James Cameron.

Speaker 4 He's an easy guy to rag on because he's nuts. And, you know, he has had five wives and he shouts, I'm king of the world in his speech.
Like, it's very, very easy to make fun of James Cameron.

Speaker 4 But the problem is he's usually right.

Speaker 2 Well, and I think one of the reasons, candidly, it is a little fun to tease him or tease about him is because he's so successful. It's like the ultimate punching up.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 And so I worry less about him taking it the wrong way than other people, potentially.

Speaker 4 He's also like, there's a weird, I believe there is an amount of self-awareness to James Cameron

Speaker 4 that is lacking from some other people that makes me like him, despite what a kook he would be to work with.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And, you know, it's also worth mentioning that in 2022, Cameron did tell the Hollywood Reporter, I always think of testosterone as a toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system.

Speaker 2 I think this was directly in reference to the shouting matches that he had with studio heads at the time of the making of Avatar, for example, in Titanic.

Speaker 2 But it seems like generally speaking, he's chilled out a bit in the intervening years. So everybody's wondering, what's James Cameron going to do next?

Speaker 2 Titanic is the biggest movie ever by commercial and critical standards. And I did some research, Lizzie.
I went back to 1960 through 2025.

Speaker 2 What do you think the average gap after winning best director between the award-winning film and that director's next film is in terms of number of years? This is from the last 65 years.

Speaker 2 I only went back to 1960. I didn't go back earlier.

Speaker 4 Three years?

Speaker 2 Very good. Three and a half years.
That's the average gap. Do you know who holds the record for the longest gap between winning the best director Oscar and their next film?

Speaker 4 I have no idea.

Speaker 2 James Cameron.

Speaker 4 Okay, you tricky, tricky mix.

Speaker 2 So 12 years, 97 to 2009. The next closest is Mel Gibson from Braveheart to Passion of the Christ, nine years.
Warren Beatty, Reds to Dick Tracy, nine years.

Speaker 2 And Robert Redford, Ordinary People to the Milagro-Beanfield War, eight years. If you notice, all three actors.
All actors. Plenty of projects to keep them busy.
Right.

Speaker 2 James Cameron, not an actor, but plenty to keep him busy. So in the early 2000s, James Cameron steps away from narrative feature filmmaking for a surprisingly long time.

Speaker 2 He produced this TV series that I have never seen called Dark Angel starring Jessica Alba, which ran two seasons. It was her big star vehicle that really blew her up.

Speaker 2 He and Linda Hamilton divorced. He married Susie Amos, actress from Titanic.
They are still married. That was his fifth and last wife.

Speaker 4 It was a bit of

Speaker 4 an Escandalo getting together, but who cares?

Speaker 2 There seems to always be an overlap whenever he divorces and remarries, it seems.

Speaker 4 They're very close. That one, yes, 100% there was an overlap, which Linda Hamilton has talked about.

Speaker 2 We don't have to get into it, but yeah. Now, there are a lot of rumors about what he could do next.
A Terminator sequel. It was done.

Speaker 2 Terminator 3, not the best, not the worst, but it was not done with Cameron. True lies sequels, which I think he wisely probably realized we didn't need.

Speaker 2 He said everything he needed to say in that movie. A remake of Planet of the Apes that ended up being tackled by Tim Burton.

Speaker 2 A Spider-Man movie had been discussed since the early 90s, but of course that was done by San Rainey. Bright Angel Falling, his asteroid movie, but of course we had deep impact in Armageddon.

Speaker 2 Solaris, which he did executive produce and Steven Soderbergh directed, which was a bit of a flop.

Speaker 2 Even an adaptation of Anne Rice's The Mummy, but none of them were meant to be because James Cameron had decided he was going to disappear from the surface of the Earth and go to Mars.

Speaker 2 He was very, very set on making a documentary about going to space. And he decided he was going to do it in 3D, which was going to be the technology of the future.
What else was he doing, Lizzie?

Speaker 4 He's going down.

Speaker 2 That's right. He decides the best environment to test a 3D camera in

Speaker 2 is the crushing depths of the abyss from which James Cameron was forged. He decides he's going to go to the bottom of the ocean.

Speaker 2 He made a documentary about the Bismarck, and then he made two 3D documentaries, one about the Titanic, Ghosts of the Abyss, which I watched in advance of this episode.

Speaker 2 It's very hokey, very beautiful. Like some of the underwater photography is incredible, and it is narrated by Bill Paxton, who is such an affable everyman in this movie.

Speaker 2 And he's just cracking jokes, and these Russian scientists never laugh. He is just the whole time, he's like, so if that number goes under like 20, we're screwed, right?

Speaker 2 And the scientist is like, it doesn't go below 19. He's like, yeah, but if it did, like, we would.
would say, and he's like, no, don't touch that. Don't touch that.

Speaker 2 Bill Paxton's just making jokes that nobody's laughing at. It's very good.

Speaker 4 Isn't that the one where Bill Paxton tells him about 9-11 when he comes up out of

Speaker 2 9-11 interrupted the filming of that project? And it has been suggested in at least one source that that is why he abandoned the idea of going to space.

Speaker 2 And he ended up focusing on water at this point. So then he did Aliens of the Deep in 2005.
But he wasn't just waiting for technology to catch up with his vision for Avatar.

Speaker 2 He was pushing it forward too. So he, and you can see this in the film, you can see the camera itself, he developed this revolutionary lightweight 3D camera system called Fusion with Vince Pace.

Speaker 2 Now, Vince Pace had helped design and manufacture the underwater lighting system for the Abyss back in 1989.

Speaker 2 So Pace agrees to work with Cameron on this rig that can capture both 2D and 3D images simultaneously, and it cost $12 million to develop. And Cameron says it was a lot of his own money.

Speaker 2 Now, if I read this right, the stereoscopic 3D cameras that were available at the time, which Cameron had used to shoot the Terminator ride at Universal, weighed 450 pounds. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 They actually had to have the stuntman run slower so the camera could keep up with the stuntman when they were filming that Universal ride.

Speaker 2 When you see these, it's based on the early Sony digital Cine Alta cinema camera system. You see one of the operators pick this camera up.

Speaker 2 It's about the size of a shoebox with two lenses on the front. I'm guessing anywhere from 12 to 15 pounds.
He picks it up, sticks it in the the rig.

Speaker 2 We're talking 1 40th the size, you know what I mean, of the camera that had existed before. This is an enormous step forward technologically.

Speaker 2 So as early as 99, his production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, starts working with ILM to prepare a facial capture test for a project called Brother Termite. Unfortunate name.

Speaker 2 Basically, it's a walk-and-talk between a live-action actress and a CGI character, which is this tiny suit-wearing alien, like a classic, you know, greys, bulbous head, almond eyes sort of look.

Speaker 2 They're walking through a cemetery. The actor playing the alien wears a head-rigged camera to capture images of his face.

Speaker 2 ILM then used that facial capture data to animate a version of the character, and then they compared it to a keyframe animation, which would have been the classic way of animating it.

Speaker 2 Facial capture version is definitely superior. So this looks really promising.
And then Lizzie, on the other side of the world, a little studio called Weta changes the game with what movie?

Speaker 2 Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings, the Two Taoists, which introduces the world to Gollum.
Can you please just give it to us? The Gollum.

Speaker 4 You know it's not good, but sure.

Speaker 2 Come on.

Speaker 2 There we go. Choke it out.

Speaker 2 I am. You do it.
No, you're too good. No, I'm not.

Speaker 2 Played by Andy Serkis, played wonderfully by Andy Serkis, and brought to life by Joe Letieri and his team at Weta, the Visual Effects House.

Speaker 2 Gollum is a watershed moment, and Cameron credits that with proving to him that he is ready. The technology is ready to make Avatar.
But the technology is extremely young.

Speaker 2 They could only use Circus's performance roughly 20% of the time.

Speaker 2 They had to shoot him entirely separately from the rest of the film, but it broke this dam in Hollywood and everybody rushes to follow.

Speaker 2 So Robert Zemekis, the Polar Express, Peter Jackson, King Kong, Davey Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest, arguably the greatest achievement of computer imagery in film since Jurassic Park, only surpassed by Avatar in 2009.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it looks really good.

Speaker 2 Davey Jones looks amazing. 2006, remarkable.
And the idea of avatars avatars is very much in the zeitgeist, thanks to video games like Second Life and World of Warcraft.

Speaker 2 I'm guessing you are big fans of both of those, Lizzies, and early predictions about virtual reality.

Speaker 2 There are a lot of articles kind of predicting what Zuckerberg would try to make us all join the metaverse. Not gonna happen, Mark.

Speaker 2 Also, James Cameron himself, when he's exploring the Titanic, is very much using an avatar.

Speaker 2 They use these remotely operated vehicles, these little ROVs, that they send out from their submarines to explore the Titanic at the crushing depths that a human could never survive.

Speaker 2 But all of a sudden, Avatar has competition because there's another project that James Cameron is rumored to be circling, Battle Angel Alita. Have you ever heard of Battle Angel Alita, Lizzie?

Speaker 4 I have, yes.

Speaker 2 Yes. It is a Japanese cyberpunk manga series from the early 90s.
Very similar to Ghosts in the Shell, is my understanding. I have not read the series.

Speaker 2 I did watch Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of the series. I liked it.
It was fine.

Speaker 4 I liked it too. It's Rosa Salazar, right?

Speaker 2 That one. Yeah.
Yeah. It's good.
It's fun.

Speaker 2 Cameron is going to direct alita and he's going to do it in 3d because he's doing everything in 3d he even said he was doing his daughter's birthday party in 3d is i real i don't think so i think he said it as a joke but he says everything so seriously it's hard to tell you cannot tell yeah so in 2005 cameron and landau go to 20th century fox who he had done aliens true lies and titanic along with paramount with and they make them a proposal We want to make Avatar and we want to make Battle Angel Alita.

Speaker 2 We don't know which one we're going to do and the technology isn't quite there yet.

Speaker 2 So give us $10 million and one year, and we will pioneer the research and development needed to make this movie happen. Gives Fox an ice out.

Speaker 2 They don't have to greenlight the movie until after they see the tech demo that Cameron and Lando are going to prepare.

Speaker 2 Plus, they get to own all of the technologies that Cameron's team develops with those $10 million and they can amortize them down the line on future projects.

Speaker 2 So Cameron's basically proposing a $10 million test film.

Speaker 4 Wow, that's surprising that he would relinquish the technology to them.

Speaker 2 So I think the issue is that digital domain, Cameron basically, not exactly, but kind of exits in 99.

Speaker 2 So the movie Titanic made an incredible amount of money, but in what would become or what was already a pattern, the VFX house saw none of those profits. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so digital domain was going to have to move more into the commercial space, and it was going to be less Cameron's, I think, playbox and more a full-fledged commercial production, visual effects production studio.

Speaker 2 So my guess is that Cameron, especially after spending a lot of his money on developing the 3D technology, probably realized I should probably get somebody else to start spending the money on developing these things.

Speaker 2 And I feel confident that Fox is going to want to make one of these movies once they see what we can do with this technology. So he doesn't know which one he's going to do first.

Speaker 2 Fox says yes, and Cameron has to pick one of the movies that he's going to do. But he was struggling to synthesize the graphic novels for Alita into a script.

Speaker 2 He's got too much material, so he settles on Avatar in August or September of 2005.

Speaker 2 He's got $10 million and one year to prove to Fox that a movie about 12-foot-tall aliens is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in spend. And if anybody can do it, it's James Cameron.

Speaker 2 So he makes two teams to work concurrently, tech team and the art team. The art team works near his house in Malibu.
They're broadened completely blind. He's like, this story is so original.

Speaker 2 No one can read it outside of my house. They arrive not knowing what the project was.
They are given his scriptment to read.

Speaker 2 Everyone's really excited when they read it because they realize they're not working off of existing IP. They don't have to design it after a character that already exists.

Speaker 2 They get to make everything up, everything that James Cameron wants, obviously. His main direction, come up with flora and fauna that nobody has seen before.
And so for months, they are just drawing.

Speaker 2 Pencil on paper. Cameron would even sit down and draw with them.
If you guys are unfamiliar, Cameron, wonderful artist, concept artist, painter, matte painter, could make models.

Speaker 4 Famously, you can see his hand in Titanic drawing Kate Winslet.

Speaker 2 That's right. Well, is that his hand or did he just do the drawing?

Speaker 4 It's his hand.

Speaker 2 Got it.

Speaker 2 The inspiration that they pulled, of course, was from things in our world, which is why the Hallelujah Mountains look very familiar because that is based on a mountain range in China, these limestone formations in China, jungles and waterfalls in Venezuela, lichen succulents, exotic flowers.

Speaker 2 They pulled from colorful marine life from Cameron's deep sea expeditions. Art from his earlier movies like Aliens in the Abyss.
I think a lot of the military designs are very evocative.

Speaker 2 It was an evolution of aliens, for example. Illustrations of extinct animal species.
For example, the, the I always think of the Tasmanian tiger when I see the viper wolf, for example. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And then it was a delicate balance trying to predict what Cameron had in his head and trying to bring it to life.

Speaker 2 He already had descriptions for some of the characters and Latin names for plants and animals. And he said that all the design elements had to be biologically feasible.

Speaker 2 And he brought in a CG artist to help the artist understand how these creatures would move. And the big core concept was that he wanted six-legged animals.

Speaker 2 Now, according to the New Yorker, Cameron reserved designing the thanator for himself. That's the big, giant, six-legged tiger, like a black jaguar that attacks.

Speaker 4 Yes. Made me very sad when it dies at the end.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So Neville Page, lead creature designer, said that, as Jim put it in the treatment, a Thanator can eat an alien for dessert.
He wanted to outdo himself, outdo the alien queen.

Speaker 2 I don't think he did. The alien queen remains one of my faves.
Yeah. But the creature that took the longest to design only had four limbs.
It was the Ikron or the Banshee.

Speaker 2 The Navi, of course, Lizzie also have four limbs. From the beginning, they were to be tall and blue, but but they started more amphibian or reptile.

Speaker 2 Would you like to see a couple of the designs that they did not use? Yes. All right.
Tell me if you would

Speaker 2 make love to any of these, because that is what James Cameron was asking his art team. Listeners, you can see what Lizzie's having to look at right now and decide for yourself.

Speaker 2 If you head to patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast, we'll post all of these images for free. Oh,

Speaker 2 ah,

Speaker 2 very

Speaker 2 pointy, very

Speaker 4 ET.

Speaker 4 I'm going to just look to each their own. I don't want to yuck James Cameron's yum, but not for me.
If we're talking about sex and aliens, it's not these.

Speaker 2 So it's interesting. Totally agree.
More alien.

Speaker 4 Particularly that like hammerhead shark one is not going to do it.

Speaker 2 Yes. Much more alien, more aggressive, I think, in most instances.
A bit more of a Star Wars vibe, you might say, from some of of them. The Moss Eisley Cantina comes to mind.
Yes.

Speaker 2 They experiment with antenna, gills, one-eyed faces. But as I mentioned, the direction from Cameron was a bit crass.
He wanted something that people would be willing to have sex with.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he wants a fuckable alien. We can just say it.
He does.

Speaker 2 The quote is from concept artist Jordi Shell to Gizmodo, and I'll read this. I do believe at some point he said something to the effect of the audience has to want to fuck her.

Speaker 2 I mean, Jim is very plain in his language. So I went, all right.
So I made something that I don't know if I really particularly wanted to fuck it, but it was certainly a beautiful alien.

Speaker 2 He definitely, he wanted it because he really prefers women that are kind of athletic and buff and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I designed something with big hands and feet and a big presence that felt really big and strong. End quote.

Speaker 4 And also boobs that are exposed the entire time. So much under boob, so much alien under boob in this.
And then there's just like two, the tiniest little feathers.

Speaker 2 No nerps.

Speaker 4 There's just two little feathers that somehow directly over their nerps. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They're taped down with alien tape.

Speaker 4 I actually hate how little clothes they put on the Navi in this. It honestly.

Speaker 2 It's like, go for it. Just make him naked at some point.
Just either embrace it or don't. You know, who cares? I agree.
They're just aliens.

Speaker 4 The way that they do this, it's like that there is a consciousness of the fact that it's titillating because they're slightly covered. That somehow makes it worse for me.

Speaker 2 Like, give them a bigger loincloth. Yeah, I don't really think about it.

Speaker 2 I do think Meytiri is attractive, but I don't. That was not a huge part of it.
It has more to do with Zoe Seldania's performance, in my opinion. Sure.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I find Zoe Saldania more attractive than Neytiri, to be clear. My sister says, yeah, right.
Well, you know, my wife's very tall and blue.

Speaker 2 Unless you think that that quote is hearsay, here is James Cameron on the same issue. We just kept asking ourselves, well, would you want to do it?

Speaker 2 To which I say, sir, the use of we is suspect in that sentence.

Speaker 4 No, he is requiring his team to also ask, would you want to do it? I get it.

Speaker 2 He told Playboy right from the beginning, I said, she's got to have tits, even though that makes no sense because her race, the Navi, aren't placental mammals.

Speaker 2 To your point, Lizzie, 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.

Speaker 4 No, you didn't. No, you did not.
This movie is just avatar colon alien underboob. That's like most of what's happening in this movie.

Speaker 2 Well, 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.

Speaker 2 That was good, except we were 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.

Speaker 2 A Neytiria Playboy Centerfold would have been a good idea. End quote.
All right.

Speaker 2 I didn't realize. I'm just trolling you at this point with these quotes.

Speaker 4 I didn't realize how much James Cameron

Speaker 4 really, really wanted to have sex with an alien a lot, I guess.

Speaker 2 Let me put it in a slightly less creepy way. These are not James Cameron's words.
These these are our researchers' words.

Speaker 2 They wanted the Navi to look human enough for the audience to relate to, which ultimately is what the animation team accomplishes. Sure.
The design team and the animation team.

Speaker 2 Now, does James Cameron have a big poster, you know, in the inside of his locker? Who knows?

Speaker 2 So the design swings from something very alien, maybe amphibian or reptilian, to almost basically blue humans, and then lands somewhere in the middle with the more feline version that we get in the final film.

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Be 21.

Speaker 2 20 miles away in Playa Vista, the tech team is hard at work under the stewardship of a what went wrong alum, Lizzie. Did you see Rob Legato's name in the credits on this film? I think I did.

Speaker 2 That's right, who had risen to fame with his work on Interview with the Vampire, and then, of course, won an Oscar for Titanic, his work with James Cameron on Titanic.

Speaker 2 So Cameron had repaired this 280,000 square foot hangar in Playa Vista, California. It's actually in the, it's where Howard Hughes built the Spruce Guys

Speaker 4 in the 1940s. I've been in there.
The YouTube space is actually either in that or near that compound.

Speaker 2 Oh, how the mighty have fallen to YouTube.

Speaker 4 I know.

Speaker 2 Rob Logato had created a virtual camera while working on on Martin Scorsese's The Aviator.

Speaker 2 Basically, the camera's position and perspective and motion were captured so that the operator could move it within a virtual CG landscape in real time, giving the director and the entire camera team a real-time rough rendering of the CGI world that they were looking into.

Speaker 2 So Lizzie, you've probably seen videos of this before. The director, James Cameron, in this instance, is holding what looks like two handlebars with like an iPad in between them, right? Yes.

Speaker 2 So there's no actual camera there.

Speaker 2 They're just capturing the position and they are assigning a virtual lens and then cameron through the screen can see oh this is roughly what the environment looks like around my actors this is roughly what the cg representations of my actors are imagine like a nintendo 64 style graphics very you know low quality blocky of what the scene eventually will look like but again it's very revolutionary because it allows for fully cg environments so this is not live plate photography.

Speaker 2 This is shooting in a gray room and then replacing everything, but Cameron doesn't see just gray in his monitor.

Speaker 2 He's actually seeing a rough version to scale of what this is going to look like after all of the CGI is completed.

Speaker 2 So everybody has a lot of questions because one of the reasons that Gollum, they think maybe worked so well is because he was set against real world backgrounds. Right.

Speaker 2 This is going to be fully CGI everything for a lot of these scenes. Fully CGI background, fully CGI characters.
A lot of this movie is just fully CG shots entirely.

Speaker 2 So the team is testing two forms of performance capture.

Speaker 2 There's the traditional dots on the actors' faces and also a version where there's a camera positioned in front of the actor's face that is mounted to their head and captures their performance.

Speaker 2 And this is the method that they decided to go with for the most part for the movie, which meant they had to figure out how to mount a camera to the actors' heads.

Speaker 4 Which is wild when you think about these performances, that you're looking into a camera that's right in front of your face the entire time. That's right.

Speaker 2 So they had carbon fiber helmets molded to the head of each actor.

Speaker 2 And in late 2005, they tested a prototype on two actors, not in the final film, to act out the scene in which Neytiri saves Jake Sully from the Viper Wolves.

Speaker 2 Daniel Bess plays Josh Sully at the time, and Yoonjin Kim from Lost. And more recently, K-pop Demon Hunters plays Neytiri or Zuleika at the time.

Speaker 2 So ILM helped with the CGI and they brought in Richard Bainham, an animator who had worked on Gollum.

Speaker 2 So Lizzie, I would love to play you the Avatar Motion Capture Test, which was available on the special edition release of the film. And again, we will link to on our Patreon.

Speaker 4 I love Eunjin Kim so much. I think she's a really great actor.
I'm sorry to tell you, Chris, he's better than Sam Worthington.

Speaker 2 Definitely a different approach, Daniel Bess, for this character.

Speaker 4 I think it works better for me with the performance capture.

Speaker 2 I don't agree, but to each their own. And a lot of people on Reddit really liked his performance too, I will say.

Speaker 4 I also, that reminded me so much of the SNL sketch, Papyrus.

Speaker 2 We will get to Papyrus.

Speaker 2 Okay, great. Yep, don't worry.

Speaker 2 It's on the agenda. Okay.
We'll get there. So

Speaker 2 sometime at the end of 2005, Cameron and Landau present this 37-second prototype to Fox. Fox is impressed, but they have concerns.
Let's talk about them.

Speaker 2 The test is compelling, but it wasn't photoreal, which Lizzie, you can confirm. You just saw it.
Sure. Looks good, does not look as good as the finished film.

Speaker 4 No, it looks, the background looks a bit animated.

Speaker 2 They worried that an audience would not lock in emotionally with Blue Aliens for an entire movie. Okay.
They're concerned about the tails, just general concern about the tails.

Speaker 4 I agree with that note.

Speaker 2 There are residual concerns from Titanic, which had ballooned, of course, from $110 million to $200 million.

Speaker 2 Who knows what this movie will end up costing at the end of the day? So Cameron and Lando are like, are we good? And Fox says, maybe.

Speaker 2 Basically, until they see a budget and a script, there is no way they are going to greenlight this thing.

Speaker 2 So with a maybe in hand, Cameron and Lando and the tech team and the art team continue working on Project 880, as it was called at the time.

Speaker 2 Sometime in late 2005, Landau flies to New Zealand to show the script to Weta. They're fresh off Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 2 They're wrapping up King Kong, and they apparently, again, according to Landau, they love Avatar, but there's no green light.

Speaker 2 But Weta, again, according to Landau, decides to pass on two firm offers for very big shows to wait on Avatar. So meanwhile, James Cameron's trying to finish the script.

Speaker 2 He cranks it out across the first four months or so of 2006. It's over 200 pages.
He cuts it down to 148. Keep cutting.

Speaker 2 Cuts it down to nine pages. Good.
You're done.

Speaker 2 It's unclear when this happens, but Cameron claims he also agreed to cut his usual fee in half and take a lower percentage of the film's revenues if Avatar wasn't profitable.

Speaker 2 If you remember, he did do that on Titanic as well. Yes.
According to some sources, it was 153 pages long when he shows it to Fox in mid-2006. And what happens next depends on who you ask.

Speaker 2 James Cameron claims Fox passed on Avatar. They told us in no uncertain terms that they were passing on the film.
Peter Chernin, then the head of Fox, disagrees.

Speaker 2 According to Cameron, Chernin asked him, is there any way you can get the kind of tree-hugging, hippie bullshit out of it?

Speaker 2 To which Cameron replied, Peter, I'm at a point now in my career and in my life where I can pretty much make any movie I want.

Speaker 2 And I chose to make this story because of the tree hugging hippie bullshit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Cameron, according to Cameron, went on to say, and I said, now you know before your taillights are out of sight, I will be on the phone with Dick Cook at Disney who wants this. And we'll make a deal.

Speaker 2 And that'll be that. And then whatever happens, happens.
And you might look like a big dick if it makes a lot of money.

Speaker 2 And you can kind of see him kind of like recoil because that's the moment that all studio executives absolutely are terrified by, that you pass on something.

Speaker 2 Like Casey Silver passed on Titanic at Universal, right? He looked like a dick later. Just for that one thing.
Casey's a good guy, but that was a flinch. He said, nope, we're passing.

Speaker 2 Now, Peter Cherner, to be clear, disagrees with this telling. He does not remember saying tree hugging hippie bullshit, and he says that they technically didn't pass.

Speaker 2 They just said, we're not going to give you the budget you're asking for. Come back with a lower number.

Speaker 4 Certainly he will not.

Speaker 2 Fox co-chair Jim Giannopoulos later said, there was no way we were going to let this go by. Like, there's absolutely no way we're going to let Avatar get out of our hands.

Speaker 2 But of course, James Cameron and John Landau decide to go rogue instead.

Speaker 2 So Disney had produced James Cameron's two 3D underwater docks, and Cameron claims they called up Bob Iger, Dick Cook, and Alan Bergman and invited them to Playa Vista to watch the tech demo that Fox had paid $10 million

Speaker 2 to make. Oh my god.
Which is just the hubris.

Speaker 4 Yeah, just remember if James Cameron is making a phone call, you're getting fucked. That's right.

Speaker 2 Alan Bergman later said, we walked out of that and we said, we have to have it. Sitting there in that screening room, I'd never seen anything like it.
The world, Jake's character, it was so unique.

Speaker 2 I'm sure also Disney could see the theme park tie-ins that Fox could not. Oh, yeah.
Fox had first right of refusal, though. So Fox brings in partners to distribute the risk.

Speaker 2 Dune Entertainment, which is part of a New York-based private equity fund, and Ingenius Media, which was a film financing fund.

Speaker 2 They'd been involved in Sean of the Dead, Night at the Museum, Live Free or Die Hard.

Speaker 2 It takes some convincing, but with Dune and Ingenius on board, Fox is now going to be responsible for less than half of Avatar's proposed $237 million budget, which would make it the most expensive film of all time.

Speaker 2 Now, I think it's important for reference. 2005, we have King Kong, which costs $207 million,

Speaker 2 distributed, produced by Universal. It's an enormous success.
Also, the most expensive movie of all time up until that point, and importantly, based on IP.

Speaker 2 Then we have Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which costs $150 million, distributed by Warner Brothers, again, part of a major franchise, the fourth entry.

Speaker 2 Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, $113 million, George Lucas-funded, Fox distributed. Chronicles of Narnia, the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, $180 million.

Speaker 2 Again, franchise, Disney, Buena Vista, War of the Worlds, IP, $132 million.

Speaker 2 And then the most expensive original film I found, Mr. and Mrs.
Smith, $110 million, New Regency, and Fox.

Speaker 2 Now, Fox is not playing in the big franchise space in the way that rival studios were, with the exception of Star Wars, and this was not IP. But in October of 2006, they green light avatar.

Speaker 2 Cameron has claimed that a studio executive told him, we don't get the giant blue guys with the tails, but we believe in you and want to do this movie with you, which is just like such a ringing endorsement.

Speaker 2 So the game is on, they need a cast, and they need to figure out what the hell the cast is going to say.

Speaker 2 So Cameron had made up a bunch of Na'Vi words in his scriptment, pulling heavily from Polynesian languages, but he needed a real linguist.

Speaker 2 So he hires USC professor Paul Frommer, who's a PhD in linguistics, and he's stuck teaching at the School of Business.

Speaker 2 He gets an email saying, we need somebody to create an Anglian language for a major motion picture directed by James Cameron. And he says, oh my God, yes, absolutely.

Speaker 2 He's in, he's stoked, and he is determined we're going to beat Klingon. We're going to out Klingon Klingon.
We're going to have a more detailed and well-thought-out language than Klingon.

Speaker 2 Maybe they did, but more people speak Klingon, I believe, today than they do not be. So he came up with more words.
He comes up with three sound palettes for Cameron to choose from.

Speaker 2 And Cameron chooses the one that includes, or he wants it to include, ejectives, which are the popping sounds that you hear in in some Native American, African, or Asian languages.

Speaker 2 And he didn't want it to have the sounds bu, duh, g, ch, or sh.

Speaker 2 By the time the movie came out, Farmer had come up with the structure and all the rules of the language, which was over a thousand words strong. Now, the language wasn't done in time for casting.

Speaker 2 So casting director Marjorie Simkin had the actors audition by making up their own languages.

Speaker 4 Oh, no, that's my absolute nightmare.

Speaker 2 You would not have been chosen.

Speaker 2 They would come into the room, they would do it in a sort of limited English, and then I would ask them to do the scene and make up a language, even if they ended up just doing ABCD ABCD.

Speaker 2 It was like an acting exercise to play the scene without English words.

Speaker 2 And Joel David Moore, Norm Spellman, said his audition went terribly, but his character is not supposed to speak Na'Vi like a native, so maybe that was fine.

Speaker 2 But Simpkins said the ability to make up a language really is what separated the people who embraced the process and landed the roles, like Laz Alonso, who plays Soute, Wes Studi, CCH Pounder, who play Eitu Khan and Moat, respectively.

Speaker 2 Now, I'm sure Fox was like, Jim, we're spending so much money on this movie. We need some big stars.

Speaker 2 We need some big stars for the leads of your movie. And he said,

Speaker 2 no, absolutely not. I want Zoe Saldania as Neytiri, who was cast before Sam Worthington and is basically an unknown at this point in time.

Speaker 2 So we talked about her briefly in Pirates of the Caribbean, Lizzie. Drumline 2002.

Speaker 4 Center stage.

Speaker 2 Center stage. Crossroads with Britney Spears.
Not a giant star. She screen tests in the summer of 2006 and she's cast a few months months later that fall.

Speaker 4 I will say she is a bigger part in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. She is.
She's not unknown. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, fair. But she has not been a lead actress yet.

Speaker 4 No, not for a franchise like this.

Speaker 2 No, and Star Trek would come out right before Avatar and kind of blow her up, I think, in a big way. But this was a huge leap for her.

Speaker 2 Now, Marjorie Simpkin has said that it came down to Saldania and a blue-eyed, blonde-haired actress whose name she has not revealed. Kate Winslet? I don't know.

Speaker 4 I don't know. She's not blonde, typically.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's true. It wouldn't make sense for her anyway.
So Jake Sully was much harder to find. Simpkins says that they saw hundreds of actors in the United States.

Speaker 2 A couple of the big names, Jake Chillenhall and Matt Damon, both reportedly turned down the role. In fact, years later, Matt Damon said, I was offered a little movie called Avatar.

Speaker 2 James Cameron offered me 10% of it. I will go down in history.
You will never meet an actor who turned down more money.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'll say.

Speaker 2 It's a great story, and it seems that Cameron definitely offered Damon the role or maybe was interested in him for it, but he recently disputed Damon's recollection and says there is no way that he ever offered him anywhere near that level of profit participation.

Speaker 2 And for what it's worth, I have a harder time imagining Damon in this role. I think maybe it's just an age thing.

Speaker 2 He's a little older than I imagined the character, but I think Gyllenha would have been really good.

Speaker 4 I actually think both could have been really good. I guess you're right about Matt Damon's age, but I...

Speaker 2 He just feels a little older. That's all.
Listeners, tell us us how you feel. Cameron said about Damon and Gyllenhal that he didn't go out and try to woo them.

Speaker 2 He said that maybe they sensed my lack of 100% commitment to them. And he thinks maybe it's the subject matter.
This is a big Star Wars type movie. These are both serious actors.

Speaker 2 To which Jake Gyllenha says, hold my beer. I'm going to go do Prince of Persia.
To which Matt Damon says, hold my beer, I'm going to go do the Great Wall.

Speaker 2 But Cameron had his heart set on a man down under. Australian hunk, Sam Worthington.
Oh, okay. Very handsome Sam Worthington.

Speaker 2 So Simpkins had expanded the search to include English, Irish, and Australian actors.

Speaker 2 And in the pile of 20 to 30 tapes from Australia, they found Sam Worthington, who was basically an unknown in the United States at this point in time. But he'd found a lot of success in Australia.

Speaker 2 He was in 2004's Somersault, which won all 13 categories at the Australian Film Institute Awards, including best actor for Worthington, was very praised by critics.

Speaker 2 Also directed by Kate Shortland, who directed Black Widow most recently. She's a really, really good director.

Speaker 2 And I have a friend who was her assistant on Black Widow, and she sounds like a lovely person as well.

Speaker 2 Worthington had found some bit parts in American films, The Great Raid and Heart's War, but even though he had come close to international stardom, Lizzie, he was a finalist for James Bond in Casino Royale.

Speaker 4 Oh, he would have been quite young. That's interesting.

Speaker 2 He would have. I think he would have been like 28 or 29 at this point in time.
Huh. He does look a bit like Pierce Pierce Brosnan if you put their photos next to each other.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I can see that.

Speaker 2 It's very interesting.

Speaker 4 If his hair were a little longer, like the bad wig at the beginning of this. Anyway, continue.

Speaker 2 So harsh. Not only did Barbara Broccoli bring in Sam Worthington for a screen test, she went to his hotel room and she gave him a haircut.
And that's the haircut that he has in Avatar.

Speaker 2 I'm just kidding.

Speaker 2 He said, and I totally believe this, he could really pull off the James Wand as a killer vibe that they were going for with the reboot, but he did not have the debonair suave side by his own admission yeah that makes sense he was like i just couldn't pull off that side of it so even though he had only found arguably a small amount of fame in a global sense he really hated it and he was having a really hard time before he read for avatar he was actually living out of his car by his choice I sold everything I owned to my mates because they didn't like who I was.

Speaker 2 I needed to get the heck out. I was living in Sydney and every time I would go to the bar, people would recognize me.
I was rebelling against that.

Speaker 2 So when Worthington got the call to audition, he was not into it. They didn't give him the script and they didn't even tell him who the director was.
They just gave him the sides for the scene.

Speaker 2 So he decides he's going to fuck around during the audition. When he's supposed to say yes, he would just say, uh-huh.
And then at one point, he even spit his gum at the camera in defiance.

Speaker 2 So a week later, he gets a call and he thinks he's going to be in trouble. And they say, James Cameron wants to meet with you.
By the way, that was for his movie, the audition that you just did.

Speaker 2 Over the next six months, he flies to LA multiple times because James Cameron loves his fuck you attitude because it's it's the exact attitude that James Cameron has about everything in his life as well.

Speaker 4 Can I say one thing about this? Yeah, please.

Speaker 4 And this is not a criticism of James Cameron or Sam Worthington, but one of our full-stop supporters, actually, Ben Schindelman, shout out to Ben, who we met at the live show, recently sent us the interview that Kristen Stewart just did with the New York Times.

Speaker 4 And it's really good. It's worth listening to.
She's very charming. She's very fun to hear.

Speaker 4 But one thing that came up was the things that male actors get away with, whether it's sort of like a celebration of method acting or, you know, something like this, where it's like, you got the part because your attitude was, I don't give a shit about the part.

Speaker 4 All I want to say is, I just, I don't know that a female actor would get the same treatment had they shown up with that attitude in the audition. I don't know.
Yeah, we don't know.

Speaker 4 That's all I'll say is go listen to that interview. I think it's an interesting take on male versus female actors and sort of what is required of them.
Anyway, continue.

Speaker 2 My guess, broadly speaking, absolutely true. And maybe one of the only exceptions might be Cameron who just likes the piss and vinegar in everybody.
So who knows?

Speaker 2 But 100%, if you're an actress and you do that, you get labeled difficult immediately. And if you're a guy, you're a genius.

Speaker 4 Yarasta.

Speaker 2 Say, yeah, yeah, you took a shit during the audition. This guy's going to be huge.
Cameron presents Worthington to the studio. By the way, Worthington is, he flies to LA multiple times.

Speaker 2 He screen tests with Soyuz Saldania. I'm sure he has stopped spitting his gum by this point in time.
The studio has two reservations. He's not a big name, and he has an enormous Australian accent.

Speaker 2 Cameron has said he sounded like Crocodile Dundee when we brought him in. Cameron thinks he can deal with one of these things.
He'll hire a dialect coach to train the accent out of Worthington.

Speaker 2 They get... most of the way there by the by the time of the movie.
Yeah. It's fine.
It's not distracting, in my opinion.

Speaker 4 It's totally fine.

Speaker 2 In the end, it comes down to three actors. Sam Worthington, Channing Tatum, and Chris Evans.
Oh.

Speaker 2 Tatum is the one to me that maybe like, but Evans too. They're all good actors.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 Those are all good choices.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think they all could have been good.

Speaker 4 I think the one thing with both Channing Tatum and Chris Evans that Sam Worthington seems to lack almost entirely is a sense of humor.

Speaker 4 I don't know whether or not that's necessary for the role, but that does feel like the big difference between those three.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I can't tell. In the end, Sam Worthington has a great screen test opposite Zoe Saldana.
He gets some help from a dialect coach, and he lands the part.

Speaker 2 And of course, they can't reach him to tell him because, according to John Landau, he was just on a mountaintop somewhere with no cell service, and they could not reach him to tell him you landed the role in Avatar.

Speaker 2 And at this point, he's probably thinking he didn't even get it if he's going up against Shannon Tatum, but he did. He got it.
Now, a couple other casting notes.

Speaker 2 Cameron was hesitant to cast Sigourney Weaver because she played a similar role in Aliens. And her character's name in Avatar was Grace Shipley, and she had played Ellen Ripley.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Cameron realizes I'm being an idiot. She's a great actress.
She's great for the part. So he casts her and he changes the name to Grace Augustine.
He changes it to Shmelin Schmipley.

Speaker 2 Before Weaver was cast, he was considering Aliens in the Abyss alum, Michael Bean, for the role of Colonel Miles Quarich. Oh, would have been good.

Speaker 2 Bean kind of thought he had the part, but Cameron didn't want to do an aliens reunion.

Speaker 2 He calls Bean to tell him that he can't move forward with him after casting Weaver and he instead gives it to Stephen Lang, who we discussed briefly in Tombstone.

Speaker 2 He had auditioned for the role of one of the Space Marines and Aliens 20 years prior. So it came full circle and this really broke Stephen Lang out.
And I really like Stephen Lang. He's great.

Speaker 2 And his character is written as such a caricature, but Lang really commits to it and the physicality of the role. He's in amazing shape.
I really like him in this movie. I think he's a good villain.

Speaker 4 I do too. He's at least having fun, which is more than you can say for Giovanni Rubisi.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Giovanni Rubisi doesn't know what he's doing on this set. I love Giovanni Rubisi.
He's a great actor. I do too, but he's not good in this.

Speaker 2 I think the character is not particularly well written because he's a little bit neither here nor there. He just exists in this gray zone between Quarich and our heroes.
And so he feels wishy-washy.

Speaker 2 And so I just think it's a problem with the way the character is written more than anything else.

Speaker 4 It's not his fault at all. It's not a great character.

Speaker 2 In January of 2007, the trades announce Avatar. Green light, $195 million budget, and Sam Worthington, who has landed the lead role.

Speaker 2 But before they can capture their their motion, the actors have to train a lot. Horseback riding, archery, military training with James Cameron's brother, former Marine, some of his comrades.

Speaker 2 They bring in choreographer Lula Washington, who creates and teaches several big dance numbers, most of which were cut from the movie.

Speaker 2 And movement coach Terry Notary, a Cirque du Salaya alum, came in to help the actors learn to walk and gesture like the Navi.

Speaker 2 Now, he had done How the Grince Stole Christmas, Planet of the Apes, but you have probably seen him in the excellent 2017 film The Square. That amazing send-up of the art art world from Ruben Oshland.

Speaker 2 He's the director of Force Majeure and Triangle of Sadness. Terry Notary has this great role in The Square.

Speaker 2 He plays a performance artist performing as a chimp, and there is a wonderful set piece at the end of the film where he is effectively testing the social boundaries of everybody in the room by literally attacking somebody as a chimp and seeing if they will stop his performance art.

Speaker 2 It's really good. Oh, wow.
He has, of course, done extensive work on the most recent Planet of the Apes reboots. He is an amazing physical performer.
So, the actors also had to learn Navi.

Speaker 2 They worked with Frommer and dialect coach Carla Mayer, Pirates of the Caribbean, Pearl Harbor, Aaron Brockovich, Air Force One. Like, the credits of the folks on this movie are incredible.

Speaker 2 In February of 2007, Cameron takes Saldanya, Worthington, Joel David Moore, and Sigourney Weaver to Kauai.

Speaker 2 The performance capture is going to be taking place in this lifeless void of a room called a volume.

Speaker 2 So, he needs to give them a reference for the environment that they're going to be in in the final CGI.

Speaker 2 So, he goes, put on these loincloths, put on these fake tails, these tiny bikinis, take these bows and arrows and run through the forest while I videotape you with a mini DV camcorder, which

Speaker 2 is a wild image. Sam Worthington in a thong and loincloth is running through the forest, shoots across a path.
There's a dog walker.

Speaker 2 He like draws his bow back, according to Cameron, nearly shoots the poodle, runs off, and the walker goes, what are you doing? And Sam goes, we're making a movie, mate. And he runs off.

Speaker 2 Now, Landau adds a little more color to this story. He says he was with James Cameron following with the camcorder.

Speaker 2 Worthington apparently said, We're making a movie with James Cameron, the guy who did Titanic.

Speaker 2 At which point, the dog walker looks over at James Cameron like Jim in the office and goes, He's gone fucking downhill from there, hasn't he?

Speaker 2 Not realizing he's talking to James Cameron in that moment.

Speaker 4 That's amazing.

Speaker 2 So, in April of 2007, virtual cameras finally roll.

Speaker 2 They're basically shooting two movies: there's the performance capture portion of the film with all the CG scenes, and then the live action portions of the film that involve the humans.

Speaker 2 So, they're going to do all the performance capture for the most part in Playa Vista, and then they're going to shoot the live action down at Stone Street Studios in New Zealand next to Weta.

Speaker 2 There is a lot of trial and error. Apparently a crew member wrote the set catchphrase on the whiteboard, it's avatar, dude, nothing works the first time.

Speaker 2 So this was a really big deal to other directors.

Speaker 2 Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Gore Verbinski, they started visiting the set to watch James Cameron using this new technology, this virtual camera system, to capture performances.

Speaker 2 In fact, they actually set up a screening room at the studio where people could watch in real time what Cameron was seeing on stage when he was doing the virtual capture.

Speaker 2 Now, it doesn't look like much in the volume, and you can see this a lot more in Capturing Avatar, the documentary.

Speaker 2 They would bring in crude props to stand in for environmental elements and CGI creatures, planks of wood, you know, plants sometimes for them to move through.

Speaker 2 But one of my favorite things that they did to enhance the reality is they brought in real horses wearing their own performance capture equipment. Oh, cool.
So cool.

Speaker 2 But the the problem is they had to keep the horses contained because if the horses crossed certain boundaries, the computer would crash and it would take a half hour to reboot everything.

Speaker 2 And the computers were crashing a lot because Lizzie, do you remember how many characters were in that RD scene that they tested for Fox?

Speaker 4 Two.

Speaker 2 Oh yeah. They had created the entire workflow based on two characters.
Whoops.

Speaker 2 So animation supervisor Richard Bainham said that anything past five characters would really short circuit the system, let alone involving, you know, trying to render real-time CGI light and world around them.

Speaker 2 And this process is so complicated.

Speaker 2 They have 102 cameras on the stage capturing the data, 56 markers on each actor's body, and then they'd stream that CGI rough through Motion Builder, which is this industry standard viewing tool live on set.

Speaker 2 And Motion Builder became the like thorn in James Cameron's side and also the saving grace for the crew.

Speaker 2 James Knight, who worked for Giant Studios, they were the performance capture provider on the movie, said that basically Motion Builder crashed all the time.

Speaker 2 And if it was the software, James Cameron wouldn't freak out. But if it was someone being slow and not doing their job, he would freak out.

Speaker 2 So he said that anytime it crashed, we'd just say it was Motion Builder, no matter what, whose fault it was.

Speaker 2 He said, you know, you hear stories about how hard Jim is to deal with, but he was actually pretty cool on set.

Speaker 2 Every now and then, he'd throw his toys out of the pram and we'd all giggle like daddy's having a bad moment.

Speaker 2 It's a fun, a good, healthy way to have it. Yeah.

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Speaker 2 So, they have this brain bar at the end of the room. It's all these computer monitors.
It's 20 texts from Giant Studios, Lightstorm, Weta, and this is revolutionary, right?

Speaker 2 Weta is providing the hero characters, the facial system that allows the projection of the facial performance on the CGI character.

Speaker 2 Lightstorm does the pre-vis environments, and they would film long hours. James Knight references two 26-hour days that they had, and they wouldn't see the results for months.

Speaker 2 John Lando said they sent their first scenes to Weta in early 2007 and didn't get them back until May of 2008. Wow.

Speaker 2 And I do want to mention, it seems like there's the experiential self and the remembering self, right? If you were to write down your experience in a moment, it'll differ from your recollection later.

Speaker 2 And the sense I get is that the remembering self for a lot of the crew of these James Cameron films is relatively generous and positive because the result is so good, but the experiencing self is pretty miserable a lot of the time.

Speaker 4 That would be my guess, yeah.

Speaker 2 So over two years into the making of Avatar, it's time to shoot the live-action portions of the movie. So they go halfway around the world to Wellington, New Zealand at the end of October 2007.

Speaker 2 And this is still using extensive green screens because all of the backgrounds are either set extensions or again, fully CGI. But there's a lot of practical builds that I want to call out.

Speaker 2 A massive full-size amp suit, the AMP suit, like the power loader that you mentioned, the one that Stephen Lang climbs into. That's a practical build.
It looks amazing. Oh, I love it.

Speaker 2 So many of the sets, most of what you see the characters interact with, 100% real, and then they're being extended beyond them. But just fantastic production design, incredible fidelity.

Speaker 2 They're shooting constantly. Now, Landau says it's seven days a week.
I don't actually know if that's legal. I'm sure it was seven days a week for Landau and Cameron.

Speaker 2 I just don't know if it was for the crew. There's also a moment in Capturing Avatar where Cameron says, I think when people rap on time, it's because they ran out of ideas.
So don't count on that.

Speaker 2 And I was just like, oh, God. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Where's the tea lady?

Speaker 2 Now, Zoe Seldania, who was very vocal about not having a good time on Pirates of the Caribbean, Curse of the Black Pearl, as we mentioned, said that she actually had a good time on Avatar and she didn't feel objectified on the shoot.

Speaker 2 She said it took a lot of toughness to survive a Cameron shoot, but he's very much empowering and enabling his actors. And all of the technology is meant to serve the actors.
Yeah, I believe that.

Speaker 2 Alonso, who plays Souté, recalled these 15-hour days and they'd come back the next morning and James Cameron was still there editing the footage from the day before and would pull them in and say, hey, look how good your performance is.

Speaker 2 Look how cool this is going to look. Which on the one hand, oh my God.
But on the other hand, that's really cool that the director is so invested in what you're doing.

Speaker 4 I literally could never. No.
I could not function. I don't understand people like James Cameron.

Speaker 2 I think he may not need very much sleep physiologically to survive.

Speaker 4 He mustn't because of the stuff that he's been able to do.

Speaker 2 So post-production is running in parallel to production, of course. And it had to be done twice, according to Cameron, because they're combining so many elements.

Speaker 2 First, you edit the performances and take, say, Sam from take four, Soe Seldanya from take two, and maybe the master of all the characters from take three. Then you do all the camera work.

Speaker 2 So then you reposition the camera within all of these shots.

Speaker 2 And once you've done all that, you have the virtual shots that you can actually cut with for the first time several months into the process.

Speaker 2 And if when you're cutting, the camera work doesn't work, you have to do the whole thing all over again. So the original release date for Avatar was set for May of 2009.

Speaker 2 Fox pushed it back to December. That could be for two reasons.
It could be they needed more time in posts, but also they needed more time to retrofit theaters for 3D in front of the release.

Speaker 2 So there's an incredible amount of CGI in this film. James Cameron said of the 2,000 shots in the film, probably less than two minutes is free of visual effects.
Wow.

Speaker 2 He said 15 shots in the whole film. Of course, that includes like paintouts, digital mats, compositing.

Speaker 2 The New Yorker actually pegged the total number of VFX shots at 3,000, so could be anywhere between those two numbers. And the movie was long.
So Lizzie, you mentioned two hours, 43 minutes.

Speaker 2 That's the theatrical cut. There have been longer releases, the extended cut.
And there are roughly 40 minutes of deleted scenes available online, many of which are fairly complete. Of what?

Speaker 2 Well, let's talk about it. So there's Jake's life on Earth before he goes.
Don't care. I do think it gives a little more context as to why Pandora is so precious.

Speaker 4 No, you're right. I shouldn't say don't care.
That actually might be useful. Continue.

Speaker 2 I actually think a lot of the deleted scenes fill in a lot of the gaps in the story and do make it a slightly more nuanced, still not that nuanced, but slightly more nuanced experience.

Speaker 2 There's more culture and dance with the Navi. There's kind of like an ayahuasca style trip that Jake goes on as part of his rite of passage.

Speaker 2 He also tells Sigourney Weaver's character that he's spying on her at some point. It's not just assumed that she knows.
That I think is more interesting.

Speaker 2 It's nothing 100% necessary, but it does fill in some gaps. So Cameron and Landau show a rough cut to ex-wife director Catherine Bigelow, Rob Lugato, several other VFX artists.

Speaker 2 They do more screenings at Lightstorm and they get some audience feedback. And this leads to some cuts for clarity.

Speaker 2 So like audiences weren't clocking that the Navi only had four fingers and there were some specific lines that referenced this that they ended up cutting.

Speaker 2 And the sex scene was more graphic because Jake Jake and Neytiri connected the fibers of their hairtail things.

Speaker 2 And folks didn't love that, which is funny. I had like a Berenstein Bears moment.
I swear they did that in the theatrical release, but apparently they didn't.

Speaker 4 You know, I thought they did too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but maybe that was when, I think they do do that in one of the extended cuts, and maybe I'm just misremembering that. The studio's got some notes.
It's too long.

Speaker 2 There's too much flying around on the Banshees. What are we doing on these Banshees? And James Cameron says, you know what? I made Titanic.

Speaker 2 This building that we're meeting in right now, this new half billion dollar complex on your lot, Titanic paid for that. So I get to do this.

Speaker 2 And he went on to say afterward that they thanked him for not cutting the Banshee scenes. I don't know if that is true.

Speaker 4 Even if it's true, you know they did it through gritted teeth. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So James Horner comes on to do the music. He and Cameron had patched things up on Titanic after not so great an experience on aliens.

Speaker 2 And in July of 2009, the New Yorker visits Cameron during post to document a moment between him and the sound engineers as they prepared a 25-minute section of the movie for a pre-release screening at Comic-Con.

Speaker 2 And James Cameron says to one of the sound engineers, quote, if we had to ship this thing in like two hours, I'd send the fucking temp, meaning the temp sound that he had made with the editor.

Speaker 2 It was built with a real opinion, and that opinion is not going to change because I personally cut it myself. My advice to you, listen to it, study it, match what's there.

Speaker 2 Your principal, like a surgeon with a Hippocratic oath, should be do no harm. And then Cameron walked out of the room and the sound engineer said, this is going to be a long day.

Speaker 2 He gave us the same thing on Terminator, but he was much nicer about it then. End quote.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he has fuck you, money at this point.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about the logo, Lizzie. Let's talk about Papyrus!

Speaker 2 So according to Peter Stugard, the former senior vice president of creative advertising for 20th Century Fox, a design firm called BLT Communications sent Cameron 75 to 90 potential logos. Wow.

Speaker 2 They were apparently all chrome and futuristic and just not right. And time was running out.

Speaker 2 Now, Stugard just happened to bump into Cameron and he spotted a copy of his script which had a cover page that said avatar and a font that was papyrus. Papyrus.

Speaker 2 Stugard makes some small changes including making the letters thicker and Cameron was like, yes, that's it. That's the font.

Speaker 4 So it's literally the SNL sketch.

Speaker 2 Hold on. He started to request it for everything.
It's not going to just go on the theater poster, but at the end of the first teaser trailer, the end title sequence, the subtitles.

Speaker 2 The design firm responsible for delivering the end title sequence tried to move away from the font, but in the end, one of the designers said that they doubted whether the custom font that they submitted was actually used.

Speaker 2 I don't know if they used my files or based it on my files, but they definitely changed my font back to papyrus and stretched it vertically.

Speaker 2 Maybe they were getting frustrated that we weren't just making it papyrus, which I think is so likely given what we just heard Cameron telling the sound engineer, go back to my temp.

Speaker 2 Like, couldn't you just imagine saying, just use fucking papyrus? Like, at the end of the day.

Speaker 4 Well, that's what they did. And then, of course, in the follow-up SNL sketch, the second one, he realizes all they've done is just make it bold for the way it waters.

Speaker 2 So the designer responsible for creating the original papyrus font back in 1982, Chris Costello, spots the influence when he sees the movie.

Speaker 2 He says the A was a little different, and they made a couple of small changes, but I know what I did because I labored over each character.

Speaker 2 And he also reportedly said that the subtitle font was just straight papyrus. So the title font was slightly different.

Speaker 4 So funny.

Speaker 2 All right, so they're gearing up for the release. And it's, this is very, very important.
And it's just, it's important to understand Fox's position in the studio landscape at this moment.

Speaker 2 So in 2008, 20th Century Fox did not have a film crack the top 10 in box office receipts. So Warner Bros., The Dark Knight is number one.

Speaker 2 Paramount cleans up with Iron Man, Indiana Jones, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar 2. Disney has Wally and Prince Caspian.

Speaker 2 Sony has Hancock, Quantum of Solace, even Universal has Mama Mia. And 2007 hadn't been much better.
Fox snuck in at number eight with the Simpsons movie, but again, Disney Warner Brothers Paramount.

Speaker 2 Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Shrek, Transformers, 300, Ratatouille, I Am Legend, Sony had Spider-Man 3.

Speaker 2 They all have franchises, and if Avatar does well, it will presumably birth a franchise. So, despite a planned December release, Fox decides to build hype over the summer.

Speaker 2 They show 24 minutes of the movie to an audience of more than 1,000 people at the Cinema Expo in Amsterdam, which is an expo for distributors.

Speaker 2 Most is from the first third of the movie, but they pull some unfinished portions from the end. He doesn't want to do spoilers, and the response was great.

Speaker 2 Lando said, this really proved it that you could not just sell this movie in 30-second bites. You got to give people context.

Speaker 2 They then show another version about 25 minutes at Comic-Con in July of 2009, and apparently the studio was underwhelmed by the audience response.

Speaker 2 So distributors got excited, but maybe comic book fans, not so much. So Cameron and Lando come up with the idea that August 21st should be Avatar Day.

Speaker 2 They invite audiences from around the world to come watch 15 minutes of the movie in 3D IMAX for free. And they also released the trailer on apple.com.
And a lot of people watched it.

Speaker 2 4 million people. And they get a lot of harsh feedback.
Message boards are flooding with some descriptions that might be recognizable to you, Lizzie. Dances with Wolves in Space.
Smurf porn.

Speaker 2 Pocahontas meets Halo, and there are comparisons to Thundercats and references to Jar Jar Binks. Yeah.
Now, the online trailer suffers a bit from its format.

Speaker 2 It's very small, it's not in 3D, and a lack of context. And unfortunately, reactions to the Avatar Day 3D screenings were also somewhat underwhelming.
So Fox is getting nervous.

Speaker 2 According to Cameron, after one of the screenings, one Fox exec begged him to shorten the movie with a, quote, stricken cancer diagnosis expression. According to Cameron, here was his reply.

Speaker 2 And David, if you could just give me some Colonel Quarich backup music here, because this quote, quote,

Speaker 2 here we go. I think this movie is going to make all the fucking money.
And when it does, it's going to be too late for you to love the film. The time for you to love the movie is today.

Speaker 2 So I'm not asking you to say something that you don't feel, but just know that I will always know that no matter how complimentary you are about the movie in the future when it makes all the money, and that's exactly what I said in caps all the money, not some of the money, all the fucking money.

Speaker 2 I said, you can't come to me and compliment the film or chum along and say, look what we did together. You won't be able to do that.

Speaker 2 At that point, that particular studio exec flipped out and went bug shit on me. And I told him to get the fuck out of my office.
And that's where it was left. End quote.
Fun times at Fox.

Speaker 4 God, to have the confidence of James Cameron and to also be able to back it up. What a gift.

Speaker 2 What I wouldn't give. What a gift.
Now, the whole industry was nervously awaiting the Avatar release because they were wondering, is 3D going to provide a renaissance for Hollywood?

Speaker 4 No, I hate it.

Speaker 2 DVD sales were on decline. Theater attendance was in decline.
According to the New Yorker, there would be 4,500 3D screens by the time of the release of Avatar.

Speaker 2 Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of DreamWorks Animation, said at the time, when you look at the history of film, there have been two great revolutions, sound and color.

Speaker 2 This will be the third great revolution.

Speaker 2 Maybe. The problem, from some perspectives, was that Avatar wasn't based on existing IP, so its originality could be a liability.

Speaker 2 And just a few days ahead of Avatar's release in early December, Time magazine ran a headline that laid out the stakes. Can James Cameron be king again?

Speaker 2 The movie industry hopes its immersive special effects spark a big screen renaissance. Fans crave the next Star Wars.

Speaker 2 It's a heavy burden, even for a man who seems to enjoy only doing things that are hard. Very true.
Yeah, seriously.

Speaker 2 So Avatar premieres in London on December 10th, 2009, and rolls out worldwide between the 16th and and the 18th of December, 2009.

Speaker 2 According to Cinema Blend, 90% of the advanced ticket sales were for 3D screenings, and reviews were generally positive.

Speaker 2 They praised the effects, the action, the technical elements, some of the performances, but they did criticize the simplicity of the story.

Speaker 2 The New York Times called it glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged. Movies rarely carry us away.
If you even try, they entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. What's often missing is awe.

Speaker 2 Something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance.
Interestingly, the Chicago Tribune Lizzie felt the exact opposite of view.

Speaker 2 They thought the first 90 minutes were great and the other 72 less and less terrific. Well, they are categorically wrong.

Speaker 2 The movie was criticized by indigenous groups for cultural appropriation and stereotyping, as well as employing the well-trod white savior complex.

Speaker 2 All things that James Cameron has publicly said he did. in the movie.

Speaker 2 He has specifically said he was referencing the Native American interactions with early settlers, the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, or at least a simplified version of it.

Speaker 2 Not to condone it necessarily, but it was all there on the surface. There's no hiding it.

Speaker 4 I think it's an interesting choice to make Jake Sully white, to be totally honest. And I don't know, like clearly he's aware of it.

Speaker 4 And I'm not saying like you shouldn't have, I'm not saying you shouldn't have written it like this. I'm not saying you shouldn't have a white actor play this part.
None of that.

Speaker 4 I just think like there could be maybe a little bit more depth to explore with that character if he were himself an outsider or, you know, as he calls himself, an immigrant or alien in this versus just being your like jarhead Marine coming in and, you know, going native, as I think has been described in the past.

Speaker 4 It feels too simple for James Cameron. And I think these are the elements of this movie that really do disappoint me.

Speaker 2 I presume James Cameron's argument would be that it is Jake Sully's disability that separates him from his clan, the Marines at the beginning, which is what enables him ultimately to connect so much with the Navi because he can be part of their community in the way that he no longer can with the Marines.

Speaker 2 Regardless of whether or not you buy that, the audience may have agreed, but it didn't seem to stop them from coming out for the movie in droves. Avatar pulled in $77 million.

Speaker 2 Its opening weekend domestically. It destroyed the competition.
It seems like, honestly, the rest of the studios actually pulled their competition because they didn't want to go up against Avatar.

Speaker 2 The only other movie opening that day was Did You Hear About the Morgans, which I had not. Yep.
Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker, never seen it.

Speaker 2 Avatar made $137 million its opening week in the United States. That grew to $146 million its second week, and then it just kept raking it in.

Speaker 2 It crossed a billion dollars worldwide on the 19th day of its release. The fastest film to ever do so.
I believe it was the fastest film to gross $600 million domestically.

Speaker 2 By the end of January, it was the first movie to gross over $2 billion

Speaker 2 worldwide.

Speaker 2 It just crushed it. In fact, 20th Century Fox Korea later released a 4D version: moving seats, smells of explosives, sprinkling water, laser lights, and wind.

Speaker 4 No, I don't want smell-o-vision. I don't want the Disney park ride of this.

Speaker 2 So, Avatar was nominated for a total of nine Oscars. It won three: cinematography, visual effects, art direction.

Speaker 2 It lost best picture directing, film editing, music written for motion pictures, original score, sound mixing, and sound editing.

Speaker 2 Famously, Catherine Bigelow took home her Oscar that night, and The Hurtlocker beat out Avatar.

Speaker 2 And I believe there is a somewhat infamous quote where Cameron said that he felt Avatar should have won, if only because basically it made more money and more people worked on it.

Speaker 2 And so it is a bigger accomplishment than the smaller films that it went up against that year. Returning to the bigger is better.

Speaker 4 That's not how it works, Jim.

Speaker 2 But there is a moment that I actually think knowing the relationship between Bigelow a little bit and Cameron was taken out of context, which he pantomimed strangling her at the Oscars when she beat him.

Speaker 4 Oh, I think they like each other.

Speaker 2 I think they love each other. And he was the first person she sent the script for the hurt locker to when she was considering it.
And he said, you absolutely have to do this.

Speaker 2 And so I think I'm guarantee that's an inside joke between them.

Speaker 4 Yeah, James Cameron's ex-wives are so interesting. I don't know about the first one.
I know with both Galen Hurd and Catherine Bigelow, he remained on good terms with them.

Speaker 4 I don't think as good with Linda Hamilton.

Speaker 2 I don't think so either. I don't don't think that was a good relationship.
Now, Fox immediately wanted a sequel. Cameron said he was the one who was actually unsure.

Speaker 2 He said he kind of put the brakes on it for a minute, but just a few days before the movie came out, he had told the New York Times that recent screenings bode well for a sequel.

Speaker 2 And if there is no sequel, it means we didn't make any money. Of course, Avatar remained the highest-grossing film of all time without adjusting for inflation.
That is an important distinction.

Speaker 2 It was briefly dethroned by Avengers Endgame, but there was an Avatar re-release. It reclaimed its top spot at $2.9 billion.

Speaker 2 And Avatar Way of Water, released in 2022, holds the number three spot, not adjusted for inflation, at $2.3 billion.

Speaker 2 Although some people think that Titanic actually sold enough DVDs and VHS tapes and played enough on television that, if you include all ancillary markets, it's possible that Titanic is the highest grossing film of all time without adjusting for inflation.

Speaker 2 And if you do adjust for inflation, Gone with the Wind remains the highest grossing film of all time with Avatar in second place.

Speaker 2 And Avatar, Fire, and Ash, the third installment is coming out this December 19th. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I know a fourth has been written. Cameron's talked about that script a little bit, but the fourth and the fifth are contingent on the financial success of the second and third.

Speaker 2 So we will find out theoretically very soon. Now, I need to close the loop on something.

Speaker 2 I mentioned accusations of plagiarism that dogged James Cameron earlier in his career with some of his earlier films. And of course, that happened after the release of Avatar.

Speaker 2 He was sued by at least two individuals. Eric Ryder is the name that I'll mention because he'll come back in a second.
Both of these lawsuits were dismissed, one in summary judgment.

Speaker 2 Back in 2012, 2013, the judge felt that Cameron had not stolen their story ideas for his screenplay.

Speaker 2 One of the byproducts of these lawsuits was that Cameron produced this extensive

Speaker 2 amount of documentation detailing where all of the ideas for Avatar came from.

Speaker 2 And that's how we know about the dream that his mother had had about the 12-foot alien and all of these plants and bioluminescence and sentient planets, et cetera, from childhood, teen years, etc.

Speaker 2 Eric Ryder did sue James Cameron, I believe, again, just earlier this year ahead ahead of the release of Fire and Ash. But this is specifically about The Way of Water.

Speaker 2 He alleges that there are elements of that movie that were also stolen from a movie that he developed allegedly with or in conjunction with Lightstorm, I believe, back in the 90s.

Speaker 2 If you guys are interested in any of that, check out the trades, variety, just search James Cameron, Avatar, Plagiarism. You'll find it.
And so

Speaker 2 that kind of brings us to the end. A couple of just brief, where are they now? Sam Worthington never really broke out beyond Avatar.
I, again, like him in these movies.

Speaker 2 I think he's well suited to them. I think they will kind of remain his legacy.
Zoe Saldania did, I think, to a much greater extent. The Avatar franchise has brought in some unusual castings.

Speaker 2 Kate Winslet is unusually cast in Way of Water,

Speaker 2 no matter how you slice it. It's just an odd choice for a number of reasons.

Speaker 2 And as has been said, ad nauseum elsewhere, despite making so much money, it's unclear what the cultural imprint of these movies is.

Speaker 2 They are kind of huge events, and then they don't seem to linger in the zeitgeist or in our memory at the end of the day. And so I guess what I'm left with is it's odd.

Speaker 2 I couldn't think of another example of a movie that made so much money. And this is his most financially successful movie.

Speaker 2 And combined, these movies will make more than all of his other movies combined. And yet I don't think they'll be the films that so many of us remember him for.
But maybe that's a generational thing.

Speaker 2 Maybe they will for younger people. And it's just because I was raised on earlier iterations of Cameron.

Speaker 4 I don't think so. And I think, you know, maybe part of what people are really enjoying about these is that they are truly an escape and they're not asking a ton of the audience.

Speaker 4 It's not a particularly thought-productive.

Speaker 2 They're theme park rides at the end of the day.

Speaker 4 They are theme park rides.

Speaker 4 And I think as our world becomes more fragmented, more stressful, more driven by sort of short-form anxiety, I understand the appeal of this and I understand the enduring appeal of leaving it at the door as soon as you walk out of the theater.

Speaker 4 And I think that's what people like about these. They look great.

Speaker 2 One last thing I'd like to mention, because a lot has been made of the white savior trope and other just, again, long used elements of this movie.

Speaker 2 I think that this movie was interestingly complicated by Jordan Peel's Get Out in 2017.

Speaker 2 And look, I'll be honest, when I saw this in 2009, I didn't give a lot of this movie a second thought. And I did not think about it critically.
I just didn't think about it much at all after I saw it.

Speaker 2 And when I watched Way of the Water after watching Get Out, what I thought was really interesting is there's a very dark interpretation of this movie that I don't think is entirely fair.

Speaker 2 But the one way that you could interpret it is the suggestion of the film is that the ultimate version of the hero is the white man, the human, but the white man's mind

Speaker 2 fully assimilated into the body of the indigenous person, which is of course

Speaker 2 what Get Out is doing in that movie. Like that is the perspective of the villains in Get Out.
And so I just think that's kind of interesting.

Speaker 4 You're so right. And I think that is at the core of what bothers me about this.

Speaker 4 I wonder what Jordan Peele thinks of Avatar.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know. I bet you Jordan Peele appreciates the craftsmanship of the technological side, but I don't know.
I would never want to speak for him. But he's a brilliant storyteller.

Speaker 2 And I think he really thinks long and hard about those things in a very interesting way.

Speaker 4 What's frustrating is James Cameron does too.

Speaker 2 And that's why I'm like, well, you know, you know, again, and from Cameron's perspective, I think both things can be true.

Speaker 2 I think James Cameron truly believes that he is honoring Native people and Native groups in depicting a version of their struggle here.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's a super compelling presentation, but I'm just saying that is the position he has taken. And I think he believes that to his core.

Speaker 4 Yeah, get him in a room with Kevin Costner.

Speaker 2 Sure, right. But I think...
Can you imagine a grumpier room? No, that would be a grumpy room.

Speaker 2 But again, filmmakers like Jordan Peale kind of take those ideas and then they flip them and they put them into really interesting perspectives.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, like the Get Out Avatar double screening is a really interesting one.

Speaker 4 You're so smart, Chris. That's such a great parallel to draw.
Yeah, it makes me want to rewatch Get Out, which I've seen so many more times than Avatar and will continue to see.

Speaker 2 Get Out's great. Yeah.
Jordan Peel is great. I thought Nope was great.
I thought that was

Speaker 2 underrated. All right, guys, that brings us to the end of our coverage of Avatar.
So we have to say, what went right?

Speaker 4 You know what? I want to give it to a lot of the cast. In particular, I would love to give it to Zoe Seldania.

Speaker 2 She's so good in this movie.

Speaker 4 She's really good. And this is, you know, this is such an easy thing to overlook when you can't see the human form of the actor.
But I think it must be so much harder to do this.

Speaker 4 As you pointed out, she's on a soundstage this entire time with a camera pointed in her face. She's not dressed in the clothes.
She's not interacting with any of the physical things.

Speaker 4 And yet she turns in an incredibly moving, emotionally rooted performance. And she does so much with her face and her eyes and her voice.

Speaker 4 And I just think this movie really doesn't work without her performance. And the only times I felt myself getting emotionally involved were with her.

Speaker 2 She's wonderful. And I do think there are a lot of good performances in this movie, but she does so much, like you said, Lizzie, with very little.
She does so much outside of the dialogue.

Speaker 2 And I would like to just extend that what went right if I may. I'll use it to jump to mine, which is just the incredible animators that worked on this movie.

Speaker 2 Yes, they are capturing the performance of the actors, but again, you can see this online, the amount of work and artistry required on the back end by the animation teams at Weta, at Lightstorm, to then realize in the highest fidelity under the scrutiny of seeing this on a hundred plus foot screen in 3D, in IMAX, it's just an incredible achievement.

Speaker 2 It is so tedious. It took years to make this movie.

Speaker 2 And, you know, working under someone extremely difficult, an extremely difficult person, James Cameron, a hard person to work with by his own admission, and as other people have told us.

Speaker 2 And they do so and they pull off something that's virtuosic, but also very human. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Cameron has all these quotes about, you know, sexualizing the characters, but I think what he's really saying is like, make them as human as possible. And they do it.

Speaker 2 And I think those quotes, you know, he's speaking to to Playboy are definitely meant to titillate.

Speaker 4 Totally. We're going to get to this in the new year, but of a spoiler alert, we're going to cover Don't Worry, Darling, and that was a downfall of that.
Right.

Speaker 4 But it's not to say that it wasn't something that had been done many, many times before it happened on that movie. And yes, that is what he's doing here.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But the artists do such a good job in finding the micro movements of the face and the humanity. And they never let the spectacle overwhelm.
the humanity in the portrayal visually of these characters.

Speaker 2 And that's really impressive, especially when so many times the spectacle does overwhelm the story, but they don't allow it to overwhelm the performances.

Speaker 2 So to everybody at Weta and all of the artists on this film, thank you. It's beautiful.
I agree. All right.
If you guys are enjoying this show, there are a few easy ways to support us.

Speaker 2 You can tell a family member or friend, check out what went wrong. They just did an episode on Avatar.
It's almost as long as Avatar. Just kidding, but it's close.

Speaker 2 You can sign up for bonus content on both Apple Podcasts and our Patreon. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts for $4.99 a month to get at least one bonus episode a month.

Speaker 2 We primarily are doing those on new released films. So it's not really a standard episode.
It's kind of a hybrid review.

Speaker 2 And you may have noticed that we just released one of these in front of the paywall, a review of Ryan Johnson's new film, Wake Up Dead Man, a Knives Out Mystery.

Speaker 2 We did that so you guys could get a sense of what these reviews are like. So if you're curious, go ahead and listen to our Wake Up Dead Man review.
Again, that is free in front of the paywall.

Speaker 2 And then if you want to get something like that, but focused on Avatar, Fire, and Ash, we're going to be dropping our Avatar, Fire, and Ash review on Patreon and for our Apple subscribers on December 26th.

Speaker 2 It's coming the day after Christmas. Santa's coming one day late for y'all.
And we also offer a shout-out just like one of these for our $50 full-stop Patreon patrons.

Speaker 2 We have so deeply enjoyed making this podcast for all of you this year. It's really been an honor.
So we thought we'd end it with a call to James. Come home from Pandora, James.

Speaker 2 You don't need the digital tools. Sometimes all you need is a guitar and a song from from the heart.

Speaker 2 When I was just a boy, my mother sat me down. She said, James, listen close to the story that I tell.
Last night I dreamed a dream, a woman 12 feet tall. And oh, she had six breasts.

Speaker 2 Oh, and I saw them all.

Speaker 2 I've held that image close for close to 40 years.

Speaker 2 I've conquered time and space in Hollywood I'll drink your fucking tears And when the dream I dreamt it finally hits the screen It'll be too late for you, your studio shows who doubted me

Speaker 2 I'm James Cameron

Speaker 2 Cameron now let me entertain you with these contents of my Titanic mind. You've got your Disney blessing at plays.

Speaker 2 It don't compare to that good shed I'm running every night. Yes, I'm James Cameron.

Speaker 2 I'll terminate the competition with the help of all of my wives. Mary Posas Humans, There Is No Spoon, Frankenstein, D.B.

Speaker 2 Smith, Angeline Renee Cook, Evan Downey, Jose Jose Salto, Amy Olgeschlager-McCoy, Nathan Sentino, Jory Hillpiper, Felicia G, Jared Pronounced, a Jen, Scott Oshida, Karina Kanaba, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindelman, The Provost Family, where the O's sound like O's, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, David Friskelanti, Film It Yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Elrington, M.

Speaker 2 Zodia, C.

Speaker 2 Grace B, Blaise Ambrose, Rural Juror, Nate the Knife, Lena, LJ, Half Grey Hound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido, Sadie, just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pang Correa, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheibel, Rosemary Southward, Jason Frankel, Soman Chainani, Michael McGrath, and Lydia Howes.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much to everybody who listened to what went wrong this year and especially our full-stop supporters. It is an honor to serve you.

Speaker 2 And what the future holds, only James Cameron knows. We're going blind, my friends, into this dark abyss of the unknown, where all our lies are true, and life may run on to.

Speaker 2 We'll make the best of it, we know we can, as long as we have you.

Speaker 2 Come home, James Cameron.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 give us something new from that titanic mind.

Speaker 2 Come home, James Cameron. Come back and entertain us.

Speaker 2 Tell us a story. Don't worry about sights.
I'm tired of my Netflix.

Speaker 2 But I'm missing all that good shit you're keeping to yourself.

Speaker 2 Come home, James Cameron.

Speaker 2 There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

Speaker 2 Thank you guys so much for listening. We will see you in a couple of days for Avatar, Fire, and Ash, and then we will see you in the new year.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 2 For a little film about memory, Lizzie.

Speaker 4 That's right. Chris is going to be gracing us with memento.

Speaker 2 I already forgot what it's about. All right.
Until then, have a happy new year. A wonderful holiday season.
Travel safe. If you have children, prepare to get sick.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And we will talk to you in 2026.

Speaker 2 Go to patreon.com slash whatwent wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentrongpod.com.

Speaker 2 What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.

Speaker 2 This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krupsaw.