Before it released in 2009, “Avatar” was James Cameron’s long-gestating passion project, with talk of the film having floated around since at least the early-mid 1990s.
Cameron returns with the sequel “Avatar: The Way Of Water” in cinemas next month, arriving thirteen years after its predecessor and a film with a lot of pressure on it to perform – including potentially outgrossing his other mega-hit “Titanic”.
In a new interview with GQ, Cameron says he thinks his odds are good when he bets on his dreams. Those dreams led to the gestation of “The Terminator,” the egg chamber sequence and it seems the concept for Pandora when Cameron was just nineteen:
“I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fibre-optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it, and these kinds of lizards that didn’t look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something. It was all in the dream.”
Cameron drew a picture of the world he dreamt at the time, one that came in handy in fact when the film faced legal challenges:
“I woke up super excited and I actually drew it. So I actually have a drawing. It saved us from about 10 lawsuits. Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head. And it turned out there were 10 or 11 of them.
And so I pointed at this drawing I did when I was 19, when I was going to Fullerton Junior College, and said, ‘See this? See these glowing trees? See this glowing lizard that spins around, that’s orange? See the purple moss?’ And everybody went away.”
Cameron says he still has vivid dreams to this da, dubbing them his “own private streaming service” better than any other out there and “runs every night for free”.
More “Avatar” sequels are on the way, with “Avatar 3” having been shot at the same time as “Avatar: The Way Of Water”. A fourth and fifth film in the franchise are not so confirmed though, as the box-office of ‘The Way Of Water’ will dictate that.
“Avatar: The Way of Water” opens in cinemas everywhere on December 16th.
