James Cameron has been working on Avatar for a while now, his first feature film since some little, mostly unseen movie called Titanic back in 1997. Avatar is an action sci-fi that follows a band of humans who are “pitted in a battle against a distant planet’s indigenous population” and it stars some really good-looking unknown named Zoe Saldana, as well as Giovanni Ribisi, Michelle Rodriguez, Sam Worthington, and Sigourney Weaver. Alright, so cool. It automatically gets some interest points simply because there are a lack of quality sci-fi movies made in our world.
Cameron keeps saying how this is going to be such a revolutionary and groundbreaking movie without saying much more about it, but he caught up with AICN today and had a few things to say about the progress of the movie so far:
“We’ve wrapped principal, and most of the live action portion of the movie is already cut. It’s starting to look and sound like a movie. I’m ecstatic with the performances and the look. The cast chemistry worked out perfectly. … Most of my time now is spent editing, because on this type of film you edit every CG scene twice — once to edit the raw performance capture, before it goes to virtual camera, and then again when you have the virtual camera shots, you do the final edit of the scene. It’s very complex and taxing, but the result is amazing. The Weta animators are ON FIRE, and seeing the world and the creatures come to life is what keeps us going. There’s a spirit on this film, an esprit de corps amongst the virtual team, that comes from knowing we’re doing something absolutely groundbreaking. It’s why people still have good morale after working on this thing for two years or more. And we still have more than a year and a half to go. I don’t know if this will be a good film, great film, awful film, but I can say with absolute certainty that you will see stuff you’ve never imagined, and that the process of making this film will generate a lot of interest within the technical side of the biz.”
I’m not saying I don’t have faith in Cameron, but I’m just left wondering how groundbreaking this really is going to be. Is it simply in the sense of how the film was made behind-the-scenes or are we as viewers going to be able to watch this and have to pick our jaws up from the floor from how revolutionary of a movie it is? Either way, I’m sure it will be awesome. As of now, I have no reason to believe otherwise and hopefully it will quench my inner sci-fi nerd who is so very thirsty.
And one final point, James Cameron looks kind of funny without his facial hair.
