Filmmaker James Cameron has revealed that at least one entire year of the thirteen-year gap between “Avatar” in 2009 and this year’s upcoming first sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water,” was due to a trashed script.
Speaking to The Times UK this week, Cameron says he began work on the “Avatar” sequel screenplay, effectively completing it and then decided to throw it in the trash – never to be seen again.
After that, he and the writers had to come up with a new approach, one that took in what worked with the first film and why it connected so widely, and then go from there:
“When I sat down with my writers to start ‘Avatar 2,’ I said we cannot do the next one until we understand why the first one did so well. We must crack the code of what the hell happened.
All films work on different levels. The first is surface, which is character, problem and resolution. The second is thematic. What is the movie trying to say? But ‘Avatar’ also works on a third level, the subconscious. I wrote an entire script for the sequel, read it and realized that it did not get to level three. Boom. Start over. That took a year.”
Cameron has previously discussed that ‘third level’ before, saying on The Marianne Williamson Podcast last year that:
“It was a dreamlike sense of a yearning to be there, to be in that space, to be in a place that is safe and where you wanted to be… it was a sensory thing that communicated on such a deep level. That was the spirituality of the first film.”
In a separate interview with IGN, Cameron also says you won’t be able to call the upcoming sequel’s story “predictable,” a name slapped on the first one with people claiming it ripped off films like “Dances with Wolves” and “Pocahontas”. The filmmaker says:
“I guarantee you, you won’t be able to predict it. What people hate the most is to go and see a movie and say ‘oh… predictable.’ This is not predictable, I don’t think. I defy anybody to predict where this story goes.”
“Avatar: The Way of Water” opens in theaters December 16th.
