Before awards voters could be rewarded with a sneak peek of Avatar: Fire and Ashthey had to deal with the way of the water, slogging through a rush-hour downpour and a half-mile-long back up to get on the Walt Disney studio lot Thursday for James Cameron’s Oscar campaign kickoff.
Ostensibly an event to plug the new Disney+ documentary Fire and Water: Making the “Avatar” Filmsthe evening was engineered to provide guild members and the media their first chance to hear the filmmaker tout his latest epic installment, the third of five planned Pandora pictures. Thursday night’s programming featured a screening of Fire and Waterwhich showcases the behind-the-scenes artistry and technology required to make 2022’s The Way of Water — and effectively serves as a combination FYC reel and extended commercial for Fire and Ash.
The Pandora crafts push
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Both in the documentary and onstage afterwards, Cameron repeatedly touted the handmade nature of the film. To that end, Disney has devoted a studio soundstage to an Instagram-friendly immersive installation of physical props and ornate costumes by Titanic Oscar winner Deborah L. Scott that will be open to Academy and guild members to tour following Fire and Ash screenings on the lot in hopes of corralling craft nominations.
Above everything, however, the Avatar franchise is known for its eye-popping visual effects, and Cameron made a strong case for rewarding the team that brought Pandora alive. “On Fire and Ashwe have 3,500 shots. And they’re all VFX, every last one. It’s a matter of the scale of the work, of how do we design systems that can handle and stay truthful to the performance in shot after shot after shot. We’re designing all the systems. It’s about pride in the group and in the team effort.”
Sigourney Weaver for Best Supporting Actress?
The highlight of Thursday’s presentation was a Q&A session with Cameron and members of his cast: returning Pandora players Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaverand Stephen Langalong with newcomer Oona Chaplinwho plays Varang, a rival tribe leader in Fire and Ash. (Although a key presence in Fire and Water doc, the other franchise mainstay, Zoe Saldanawas absent from the event.)
It immediately became clear that Cameron was there to position his actors — notably Weaver — as serious awards contenders, a first for the franchise. “We were just doing it demonstration today for a SAG-AFTRA leadership at our studio,” he revealed, “and I think they were kind of blown away by how intimate it is creatively, not technical at all. I mean, it looks technical because you’re wearing this stuff, you guys work,” he continued, gesturing to the cast.
Cameron repeatedly dispelled the notion that the motion-capture performances were real (“there is no generative AI in these films”) and emotional — and as worthy as live action. “I’m working with amazing actors … it just makes it such a joy to go to work every day. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing — and I’ve been doing it for 45 years — there is a dread when you go on to live-action set. You’re not going to make the day, something’s going to happen. But when I come into where we work in the Volume [his state-of-the-art studio complex in Manhattan Beach, Calif.]it’s joyful thing. … Everybody brings something into the sandbox and then we just play.
“We still spend as much time on a scene as we need to spend to get it. And if that’s two hours, fine. If it’s five hours, fine. Doesn’t matter. We just have to feel like we’ve gotten it. And I always say [to my cast and crew]‘If you’re happy, I’m happy.’”
Weaver, for one, compared working on Avatar films to her early-career stage performances. “I did a lot of work off-off-Broadway, where you really have no money for anything more than leotards and an empty stage, so I love this work because it’s so free. You’re just there on the stage with your fellow actors connecting to them, connecting to the material,” she explained.
“Sam and I did a demo today for some SAG members, it was fun to talk about the experience with other actors. … I honestly think our world is so wonderful for actors, but I feel like this is such a joyous place to play, and I feel very safe. The Volume is a really safe space, and I’ve found that especially valuable, because I was going to do the kind of crackpot thing of turning into a 14-year-old in front of people. And yet I felt always felt so supported.”
She and Cameron also discussed their longstanding working relationship, dating back to 1986’s Aliensand why he brought her back for the Avatar sequels as Kiri, the teenaged Na’vi daughter of Weaver’s human character, Grace Augustine. “Look, the Sigourney we know from movies is usually a very Alpha type and super intelligent and super in command. And that’s not who you are. It’s acting, right? This was a glimpse of the real thing,” he said with a laugh. “No, it struck me as a fun idea. We killed her off in the first movie, and I love working with Sigourney, so I had to bring her back somehow — so she comes back as her essentially her own daughter.”
“Honestly, I think only Jim was crazy enough to do something like that. In an odd, strange way, he sees something that other directors don’t,” Weaver said. “I feel so grateful for the opportunity to be able to go back to my nerdy, 14-year-old self and re-experience life as her, because I think I had a fractured experience and it’s such a different thing to be able to go back to this time and try to flourish.”
James Cameron for everything
While he developed a harsh reputation in the 1980s and 1990s as one of Hollywood’s toughest directors, age and children have seemingly mellowed out Cameron. As creator, producer, director, writer, and film editor, Cameron admits that he has “to keep everyone on task.” But Weaver and her castmates continually praised his collaborative style.
“When you pick up a Jim Cameron script, the stakes are so high, and every single page, every single scene is heightened,” said Weaver. “The scale of the story makes it impossible for us not to jump in with both feet. You’ve got to fling yourself off the cliff and ready to do the dive. And I feel very spoiled by [Cameron’s] scripts because there’s always so much that pays off.”
“I just I just want good actors to show up for my movies,” Cameron joked.
“Jim is evolving this story, I trust him implicitly that he understands his characters and lets us inhabit him,” added Worthington, who plays franchise lead Jake Sully. “Jim is not sitting behind the camera. He’s right there with you when you do these scenes and throwing ideas out and you’re bouncing ideas off. It is very much like painting.”
Chaplin said she didn’t know what to expect as a franchise newbie, but after weeks of training and rehearsing, she felt comfortable to begin improvising. “I hadn’t done that kind of work since I was in drama school, really having the opportunity to prepare a role with so much support,” the Game of Thrones alum said. “It was a dream come true.”
Worthington said that the trappings of traditional filmmaking can be overwhelming for him as an actor, but Avatar afforded “the freedom to play a bit more.” “When I make a regular movie, I’m very scared, to be honest, because it’s designed in this weird way where everything’s rushing to get the shot. … It’s like too much pressure and pressure is the killer of creativity in a weird way,” he said. But on The Way of the Water and Fire and Ashwhich were filmed back-to-back over nearly two years, the actors are constantly rigged with a GoPro-style camera in their face. “You’re always in a close-up, and so you can’t even think about that. You just have to be as truthful as you can every single time … there is no pressure. It’s almost like we got rid of these regular conventions, as Jim’s been saying he’s uncoupled the performance from the camera.”
Lang got the biggest laugh of the night when he was asked about what inspired his scene-devouring baddie Col. Miles Quaritch, “one of the great villains of all time” and “a terrifying a–hole.” “I use Jim Cameron,” Lang deadpanned. “And I say that with love and due respect. But Quaritch is a manifestation of Jim, as are we all, all the characters are part of him.”
Avatar forever: ‘The chosen family’
Finally, Cameron revealed that he may never be able to quit Pandora. He repeated his oft-told tale that he contemplated retirement from feature filmmaking after the first Avatar in 2009. “Do I really want to try to do that again? I thought, ‘No, I’ll just go do ocean exploration, because I love that.’ And in fact, I did, I went off for a couple of years and I built a sub, I went to the deepest place on the planet and all that.
“And what drew me back to plunge into that vortex again was [the actors] and our core team of innovators. We call it the Avatar Family, it’s a real thing. We respect each other and we love working together and we enter the Volume, we come on the set with a certain joyfulness to see each other and to challenge each other. It’s not the biological family, which you can’t get rid of, and you got to see on Thanksgiving. This is the chosen family.”
