There’s a lot of action in James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” with much of it sticking to initially the rainforests and then later the oceans of Pandora.
When it comes to space however, this sci-fi film boasts very little of it – only showing it briefly early on as ships from Earth descend towards the planet – causing forest fires in their wake.
In a surprising reveal, the film’s screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver tell EW that they almost took Na’vi characters off Pandora and into outer space at one point in an early draft of the script.
Ultimately they chose to focus entirely on Pandora’s oceans and continue the franchise’s overall themes of conservation and natural wonder. Jaffa tells the outlet:
“There was one idea of a space battle with Na’vi. That idea got a lot of traction, and we talked a lot about it. We were struggling, though. How would that work with the story that we’re telling? Jim said, ‘Well, give me a few weeks.’ He went off, and he wrote an entire script. And, by the way, a brilliant script. At the end of the day, the whole script got thrown out because it just didn’t really work with the story we were telling.”
Ultimately some of that material ended up being used in comic book form with the three-volume “Avatar: The High Ground” written by Sherri L. Smith, including a subplot from that scrapped script and unfolding in that missing one-year time jump that occurs after humans first arrive in ‘The Way of Water’.
Indeed the many months-long writers room assembled for the films would often take an idea like that and explore it for a few days to see if it would be viable:
Jaffa: “Some of them would be just minor things, a minor idea that we would dial down on. It could be anything, from a plot point to a character to a character beat.”
Silver: “The idea was six months in a writers’ room, and that we were going to break down beat by beat three movies, which would describe a larger saga, but each movie would be distinct.
We didn’t know which movie we were gonna write. We were gonna be invested in all of them and each beat of each movie. Then come Christmas [of 2013], Jim would tell us which movie we had and send us off to write, and he would work on writing each of the scripts with us.”
Jaffa says he loved the writers room they had is that it “was a very safe room. In other words, you could throw out any idea. You could debate any idea. You could express your opinion freely and not worry about being slapped down or being made fun.” They add that no idea was too ‘out there’.
Silver promises that “there are huge surprises and expansion of worlds coming in 3 that make it feel very different,” but won’t talk about the already hinted at ‘Ash People’ because of potential spoilers.
Meanwhile Cameron has also confirmed to Soundtracking podcast that Jake’s son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) will take over narration duties on the third film, taking over from Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully who narrated the first two films. In addition, Cameron says the fourth and fifth film will each boast a different narrator.
“Avatar: The Way of Water” has just passed the $1.9 billion worldwide box-office mark as of today.
