DIRECTOR JAMES CAMERON with the cast including Sigourney Weaver, Joel Moore and Sam Worthington.

There were times during the epic journey to bring Avatar to the screen when James Cameron simply had to rely on his natural instincts.

As well as being a consummate filmmaker he is, after all, an explorer at heart – it’s what he dreamed of doing growing up in Canada and has mounted no less than six major underwater expeditions
in the 12 years since he made the Oscar winning Titanic, his last film.

The desire to seek new challenges and overcome obstacles drove Cameron to make Avatar and, along with his team, pioneer the use of ground breaking new technology – to keep pushing forward, when others, perhaps, might have given up in despair.

But Avatar would prove to be his biggest challenge. And for a while, he admits, it simply wasn’t possible to create the world – specifically the far away planet he calls Pandora he wanted to see on the screen.

“With Avatar, despite wanting to push the technology, when we really evaluated it, we felt like we were too many steps away,” he recalls of that original idea back in 1995.

WORTH THE WAIT

Cameron reasoned that he would have to wait for technology to catch up with his innovative ideas.

Now it has. Indeed, he has utilized cutting edge performance capture technology and the very latest digital 3D techniques on Avatar.

But, he admits, there were plenty of times during the production, which started in earnest more than four years ago, when his team faced seemingly insurmountable problems that threatened
to railroad the film.

But they kept going, solving problems and literally designing new programs to enable them to do what Cameron wanted to see up there on the screen – a film unlike any other.

“I wanted to create something that I would have loved when I was a kid, he explains. “Something that takes place on another planet, something that is visually completely imaginative and original.

GREEN MOVIE

There were also the environmental themes which Cameron believes are even more relevant now than when he first wrote the script in 1995.

“For me it was the opportunity to create an alien eco system with all sorts of cool alien creatures that are themselves mind blowing, I think. The innate message were very appealing to me and I thought that they had a purpose in our society right now. Avatar asks you questions about our relationships with each other, from culture to culture, and our relationship with the natural world,” Cameron says.

The action mostly takes place on Pandora, a distant planet, where the indigenous population, the Na’vi, are a graceful people who live at one with nature, peaceful until provoked.

A militarized super company want to explore the planet driven by the lure of potential profits and have devised the Avatar program, where humans are genetically engineered to become a kind of human/ Na’vi hybrid, to send out a team on a reconnaissance mission to Pandora.

A paralyzed marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) volunteers for the program alongside a botanist, Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and both will inhabit their ‘Avatar’ bodies for the mission, enabling them to blend in with the Na’vi and of course, giving Jake the added bonus of inhabiting an unimpaired body.

Once on Pandora they discover an amazing, lush world rich in bio-diversity with fluorescent forests full of trees as tall as skyscrapers and creatures they could never have dreamed existed, including fearsome prehistoric predators.

Cameron promises that there will be plenty of action with huge battle scenes, “the last of which is kind of the mother of all battles, at least compared to anything I’ve worked on. And that takes place on Pandora. There’s very little that takes place in space in this movie. That’s all pretty much at the beginning; it’s just a step on the journey.

MAJOR CINEMA BREAKTHROUGH

Cameron is using the very latest digital 3D technology for Avatar and that along with the very latest performance capture effects, have led many to speculate that the film will represent a major breakthrough for cinema that will change the way films are made in the future.

Performance capture is where an actor’s movements and expressions are electronically tracked and translated into computer generated imagery to bring the character to life. Basically, Worthington and Weaver, wearing black leotards, would act out their roles as Avatars and the camera would super impose the computer generated creatures on to the images while shooting.

Cameron developed a fusion digital 3D camera system for his 2003 documentary, Ghosts of the Abyss, and he has refined and honed the system on Avatar. Experts have predicted that Avatar
will represent a major breakthrough for cinema. What does the director himself think?

“I think it’s part of the natural evolution of CG and performance capture technology and all of that,” says Cameron.

“I think we can do more now than we could when we started the film.

“I also think that 3D is a revolution that’s taking place and Avatar will have its part in that revolution. Maybe it can create its own little niche in the sense that it’s live action, as well as what some people would think of as animation,’’ he ends.