PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine's hotness?
CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, "She's got to have tits," even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.
PLAYBOY: Are her breasts on view?
CAMERON: 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. The animation uses a physics-based sim that takes into consideration gravity, air movement and the momentum of her hair, her top....
-- From Avatar director James Cameron's exhaustive interview in the new issue of Playboy.
In a converted hangar at Santa Monica Airport, director James Cameron stands, cross-armed, above a visual effects engineer hunched over a workstation.
"Let's see 'em."
"Keep in mind that we did our best to incorporate your notes, and did an additional round of motion-capture to address them, and--"
"I don't have time for this bullsh*t hemming and hawing, let's just see them."
The engineer clicks his mouse. The glow of the huge cinema display is reflected in Cameron's impassive face.
"Those are tits."
"They are."
"Those are not the tits."
"Can you...you know...be a tiny bit more specific?"
"Specific? What else do I need to tell you?"
"Well, Jim, you know that this is our, I think, fifteenth go at this so, I was hoping maybe some more concrete feedback."
"Nineteenth. You have have failed me eighteen times previously."
"Maybe if you'd say something more helpful, I could fail fewer times?"
"What did I tell you last time?"
"You said something about imagining three pounds of blue Jello in two Ziploc bags, that's how they should move this time."
"Was that not specific enough? I don't see that in this footage, at all."
"We went out and bought the Jello, the Ziploc bags. We spent five entire days doing mo-cap on them."
"And?"
"Well, you see it. And you don't seem happy."
"If you'd already committed 17 million dollars to getting this set of Na'vi tits perfect, and had to fight off the goddamn studio every day, hiding that budget number from them while you chased absolute, alien-mammary perfection, and then you saw this, tell me, would you be happy?"
"You told us to go with the Jello and the bags."
"I didn't mean literally do that. It's about a look, a feel!"
He grabs the engineer by his collar and drags him to the other side of the hangar, where a dozen nude, blue-painted women run on treadmills, bounce on trampolines, and perform acrobatic wire-work while harnessed into elaborate apparatuses. All have mo-cap ping-pong balls attached to their breasts.
"Tell me why we would spend millions upon millions of dollars on all this if I wanted you to blow ten bucks at the grocery store. Go ahead, tell me."
"We just had to try something different. These women have been here for weeks, we've been shooting and digitizing them. There's not a cup size of a body shape we haven't tried. And none of it seems to have pleased you."
"It's not about pleasing me. It's about getting this Platonic ideal of the perfect set of heaving, cerulean Na'vi titties out of here [taps his temple with his finger] and out on there [points to a giant screen on the wall playing a loop of previous failed attempts by the effects department]. Do you get that?"
"I think I do, yeah."
"These breasts, they need to make every 13-to-17-year-old kid who buys a ticket to this thing want to run home, still chubbed up from having them bounce around his zit-pocked face for two hours in three glorious dimensions, and touch himself with furious abandon. Then come back the next day for another go-around."
"I get that."
"Sometimes I wonder."
"We'll do better."
Cameron gestures dismissively to the women on the wires.
"Fire all these girls and get some new ones. They're not right."
"They were just getting comfortable with the wire-work."
"I don't give a flying, naked, blue-tittied f*ck. The new ones will learn."
"Consider it done."
"And why the f*ck is the construction on the water tank going so slowly? What are we waiting for?"
"It's almost operational."
"The next time I come back here I better see at least three pairs of breasts bobbing in that tank. When Neytiri fights that five-headed Pandoran death-dolphin, I better f*cking believe that her rack is moving in a realistic way. I better believe it in my bones."
"You will."
"That's what I like to hear."
"See you in ten days?"
"Make it six. And let's add two pounds to each Ziploc. They need heft. Heft."
"Heft. Absolutely."
Cameron climbs into a giant, Hummer-inspired golf cart, circles menacingly in front of the women on the wires, then finally speeds off.
The engineer runs towards them, clapping loudly.
"Out! All of you, out! Out out out!"
He slumps back down at his work station. The two Ziploc bags sit next to the monitor. He picks them up, gives them a jiggle, then dumps the blue Jello inside them onto the floor. He lets out a deep sigh.
"Five pounds seems like a lot."