Filmmaker James Cameron recently appeared on the Marianne Williamson Podcast to discuss how he went about crafting the stories for the upcoming “Avatar” sequels with the help of several other writers.
With those involved knowing there was going to be multiple films planned, the project adopted a writers room style approach along with a formula which Cameron made sure there was adherence to (not unlike Kevin Feige with Marvel Studios titles).
In fact Cameron made sure all those involved took the right amount of time to examine what it is about the first film that really worked and what should carry over into the new stories:
“When I sat down to write the sequels, I knew there were going to be three at the time, and eventually it turned into four, I put together a group of writers and said, ‘I don’t want to hear anybody’s new ideas or anyone’s pitches until we have spent some time figuring out what worked on the first film, what connected, and why it worked.
They kept wanting to talk about the new stories. I said, ‘We aren’t doing that yet.’ Eventually, I had to threaten to fire them all because they were doing what writers do, which is to try and create new stories. I said, ‘We need to understand what the connection was and protect it, protect that ember and that flame.'”
The analysis of the first film tackled multiple levels of the movie from surface things like story and character to the film’s spiritualism and the themes of “capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, human rights abuses, and nature deficit disorder.”
They also explored a ‘tertiary level’ which dealt more with sensation and sensory things that served as the first film’s spirituality.
Then the process of creating the sequel scripts finally began and even then it was difficult: “We created and rejected many storylines for the second and third film because they didn’t take us to that transportive, dreaming-with-your-eyes-wide-open feeling.”
Eventually they got there and mapped out all the films. The first of these is set to arrive in cinemas on December 16th 2022.
Source: Indiewire
