Virtually every gushing, embargo-busting review of James Cameron's Avatar has paused momentarily from its fusillade of hyperappreciative (but apparently justified!) slobber to note that the visionary director, realizing that the necessary technology did not yet exist to execute his blue-tinged vision, put aside the script some 15 years ago, happy to stall until Hollywood movie magic provided him with a way to project the vivid Pandora trapped inside his blockbuster-addled mind onto a 3-D IMAX screen. But Cameron wasn't just twiddling his thumbs during that time, waiting for Peter Jackson's WETA team to unearth the game-changing performance-capture camera left buried just outside Auckland by a cinematically advanced alien society that would finally allow them to get Avatar into production. After the jump, Movieline's accounting of how Cameron was pushing -- slowly, insistently -- forward with the project during that frustrating time.
June 12 - September 8, 1994: Having completed a satisfactory early draft of the script in mid-June, the notoriously exacting Cameron spends the most of the summer running through dozens of passes in which the only changes he makes involve the shifting of the apostrophe in Na'vi forward and backward one letter. Entire days disappear as Cameron reads aloud from note cards taped above his desk containing those three variations, making alterations to his pronunciation of "N'avi," "Na'vi," and "Nav'i" so subtle as to be completely imperceptible to anyone but the director himself.
May 24, 1996: Cameron initiates a heated e-mail exchange with a group of world-renowned zoologists, equestrian trainers, biophysicists, and jockeys examining the question of whether a six-legged horse would theoretically be faster than its four-legged, Earth-dwelling cousins. The multidiscilplinary panel often becomes frustrated when Cameron, confronted with a piece of evidence that contradicts his "six legs are faster" theory, arbitrarily alters the physics of Pandora to suit his needs.
January 2nd, 1996 - June 2nd, 1998: Following through on a New Year's resolution to more fully immerse himself in the Na'vi consciousness after stalling in the midst of a tricky script draft, Cameron paints himself blue and pledges to live as one of his Pandoran characters for six months. Business associates have to adjust to difficult, Method-style meetings with Cameron held only in heavily wooded areas, learning to ignore the director's off-putting habit of casually lifting his coyote-skin loincloth to scratch his cerulean junk with the point of a handmade spear while lost in thought.
August 22- November 18, 2000: Though realizing he's still years away from production, Cameron allows himself the diversion of drafting potential cast lists for the epic, which primarily consists of alternating the writing down and crossing out of Sigourney Weaver's and ex-wife Linda Hamilton's names hundreds of times in the column for "Sexy-Tough Lady Doctor Name TBD."
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.