Last Thursday, I had a lengthy, terrific interview with James Cameron in advance of the special edition of Avatar (rereleased to theaters August 27), and all this week, Movieline will bring you pieces of that wide-ranging talk.
James Cameron has several long-held ideas for what he'd like to do with the Avatar sequels, including an exploration of the oceans of Pandora and a hope to shoot Avatar 2 and 3 back to back, but might his recent real-life adventures (including a trip to the Brazilian rain forest and involvement in the cleanup of the BP oil spill) affect those plans at all?
"Absolutely. Absolutely, sure, of course," he told Movieline. "Every experience that you have in your life as a filmmaker is going to affect what you do, and those were both situations where I was directly involved."
It's clear that Cameron is still upset by what he learned when he met with a group of scientists and government officials in June to address the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill that irrevocably ravaged the Gulf of Mexico, but he sees the disaster as a reinforcement of Avatar's environmentally conscious themes.
"[It] was an ecological, environmental catastrophe and I was directly involved in it and I really know what happened there," he said. "Sure, absolutely I'm going to use that for my further condemnation of corporations wrecking the natural world. There's been nothing that's happened to me since Avatar came out to disabuse me of that long-held philosophy. Certainly, that's only been reinforced.
"And then my experience down in the Amazon, both trips meeting the indigenous people and staying with them a while -- and I'm hoping to go back -- it not only influences how I'm going to write the characters and the detail that I'm going to bring to it, but it also forces me to be very, very responsible about what their issues are. I'm starting to do some work not just in South America, but with the North American indigenous community as well. It forces you to be responsible to their needs and concerns and issues."
One thing that won't change in future Avatar installments: the film's font, Papyrus. Some internet pundits were appalled that Avatar's poster and subtitles would use the commonplace typeface, but Cameron shrugs off their criticisms.
"You know, I'm not a font snob," he laughed. "It's not exactly Papyrus -- I think originally it was, and then we sort of riffed on it and made it our own. It just struck me as kind of a tribal-looking font. I didn't even know it was the Papyrus font, really."
MONDAY: Cameron on the Avatar Rerelease and That Sex Scene
TUESDAY: Cameron Takes on Bad 3D, Inception, and Spider-Man
TODAY: Cameron on Avatar 2
THURSDAY: Cameron on the Titanic Rerelease and Future Projects
FRIDAY: Cameron on His Long-Lost Music Video and Falling in Love with Kathryn Bigelow