Movieline Timeline: James Cameron's 15-Year Odyssey To Realizing His Avatar Vision

February 13, 2003: During a treacherous dive for Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, four of Cameron's crew are nearly killed by an unexpected eruption when they fail to understand the emergency instructions he shouts at them in Na'vi. Cameron uncharacteristically apologizes for the confusion after everyone surfaces from the dive, explaining that he's commissioned the alien language from a USC linguist and needs to test it out in high-stress, real-world situations to know if it will eventually play in the heat of battle.

March 4, 2004: In a rare fit of creative frustration, Cameron completely gives up on coming up with final character names himself. After a Google search leads him to the Internet James Cameron Character Name Generator, he spends the next ten hours continually hitting the "King of the World!" button, and the monikers Dr. Grace Augustine, Jake Sully, Parker Selfridge, Colonel Miles Quaritch and Corporal Lyle Wainfleet are soon find-and-replaced into Final Draft.

October 27 - November 1, 2006: After years of silence on his Equine Listserv, Cameron sends an e-mail blast announcing he's successfully bred a six-legged horse and is about to race it against a series of four-legged thoroughbreds. After several disastrous heats in the following days, Cameron admits that his genetically engineered abomination proved no match for the traditional steeds, but somewhat desperately maintains that on Pandora, his creation would handily win the planet's coveted Sextuple Crown against inferior, Earth-bred competition, which totally justifies the $20 million of Fox's pre-production budget he's spent on the project.

March 10, 2007: Cameron has a major breakthrough when he decides to move a prototype of his performance-capture camera from focusing on a busty stand-in's cleavage to her face. The ensuing, revelatory camera tests demonstrate that the rig can also be used to translate an actress's facial expressions to that of an entirely CGI-rendered character, finally bridging the "uncanny valley" that had so bedeviled him and other mo-cap enthusiasts over the previous decade. Having cleared the ultimate hurdle to production, Cameron knows it's now time to embark upon his Avatar adventure in earnest and change the art of moviemaking forever.

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