Since Avatar's release in 2009, the number of books focused on James Cameron grew. Till now, we had two biographies, one of which was authorized, best interviews compilation book, and the Art book. And there's even more around the world. Out now is a new, illustrated coffetable book showcasing Jim Cameron's films.
Now, if you thought that when you have all the aformentioned books, the new one, James Cameron: A Retrospective, wouldn't provide anything new, you're wrong. There's stuff about Jim growing up, and even about each of his films that even I didn't know about, and I think it's in great deal thanks to the new interviews conducted by the author Ian Nathan. Jim Cameron is very open and very candid nowadays, so he doesn't hold anything back. So even if you're a lifelong diehard fan of Jim's work and you think you've read it all, there are still new and interesting bits in the book that hasn't been written or said before. Also, while now it seems like a no brainer, there hasn't really been an illustrated coffetable book on James Cameron's films. It's crazy when you think about it. We're talking about the director, whose nearly every film is either a record shattering milestone, or an international pop culture icon. A track record no director has or ever had.
Sure, there has been fantastic books written about almost every one of his individual films - be it Ian Nathan's Terminator Vault, the late J.W. Rinzler's Making of Aliens, or Jodie Duncan's Making of Avatar to name just a few, but there hasn't been a book that gathered all of his films in one place in a beautiful, very well illustrated hardcover volume. And if you aren't a Cameronite who has been reading everything possible on his work for years or decades, and you don't own these books, then Retrospective is a must if you like Jim's movies and want to know more about him and each of his films
Great new illustrated book James Cameron: A Restrospective is out now. Authored by the author of Terminator Vault, it’s looking to be quite a treat. Review coming soon
After James Cameron’sAvatar came out in 2009 and made $2.7 billion, the director found the deepest point that exists in all of earth’s oceans and, in time, he dove to it. When Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a couple of hundred miles off the southwest coast of Guam, in March 2012, he became the first person in history to descend the 6.8-mile distance solo, and one of only a few people to ever go that deep. Since then, others have followed—most prominently, a private-equity titan and former Naval Reserve intelligence officer turned explorer named Victor Vescovo—but Cameron is adamant that none have surpassed him. Vescovo, Cameron told me, “claimed he went deeper, but you can’t. So he’s basically just making shit up.”
As people sometimes do in response to Cameron’s stories, Vescovo disagrees—“I have a different scientific perspective,” he told me, diplomatically—but even he is a fan of Cameron’s films. Like Cameron, Vescovo has made multiple dives to the wreck of the Titanic, and while returning from one of them, he emailed Cameron. “I said, ‘I watched Titanic at the Titanic.’ And he actually replied: ‘Yeah, but I made Titanic at the Titanic.’ ”
It is perhaps illustrative of Cameron’s gifts as a filmmaker that even his most determined rivals will admit that Cameron has written and directed some of the most successful films of all time. It would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie, which he helped invent with his debut, The Terminator, and then reinvent with his second, Aliens; it would be accurate to add that he has directed two of the three top-grossing films in history, in Avatar (number one) and Titanic (number three). But he is also a scientist—a camera he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars, attached to the Mars rover—and an adventurer, and not in the dilettante billionaire sense; when Cameron sets out to do something, it gets done. “The man was born with an explorer’s instincts and capacity,” Daniel Goldin, the former head of NASA, told me. Sometimes, Cameron seems like a man in search of a problem to solve, or a deadly experience to survive, but he is emphatic that there is a purpose to the challenges he takes on. “There’s plenty of dangerous things that I won’t go near because they’re dangerous, but they have a randomness factor to them,” Cameron said. “Whitewater rafting? Fuck that.”
In December, Disney will release Avatar: The Way of Water. It’s the first feature Cameron has directed in 13 years, and the first of four planned Avatar sequels. The movie, Cameron says, is about family: Many of the main characters from the first film are back, but older and with kids to take care of. “What do two characters who are warriors, who take chances and have no fear, do when they have children and they still have the epic struggle?” Cameron, a father of five, posited. “Their instinct is to be fearless and do crazy things. Jump off cliffs, dive-bomb into the middle of an enemy armada, but you’ve got kids. What does that look like in a family setting?” Among other things, Cameron said, The Way of Waterwould be a friendly but pointed rebuke to the comic book blockbusters that now war with Cameron’s films at the top of the box office lists: “I was consciously thinking to myself, Okay, all these superheroes, they never have kids. They never really have to deal with the real things that hold you down and give you feet of clay in the real world.” Sigourney Weaver, who starred in the first Avatar as a human scientist and returns for The Way of Water as a Na’vi teenager, told me that the parallels between the life of the director and the life of his characters were far from accidental: “Jim loves his family so much, and I feel that love in our film. It’s as personal a film as he’s ever made.”
The original Avatar — a brightly colored dream of a movie, set in the year 2154, about an ex-Marine falling in love with a blue, nine-foot-tall princess on a foreign moon, Pandora, which is being invaded and stripped of its natural resources—required the invention of dozens of new technologies, from the cameras Cameron shot with to the digital effects he used to transform human actors into animated creatures to the language those creatures spoke in the film. For The Way of Water, Cameron told me, he and his team started all over again. They needed new cameras that could shoot underwater and a motion-capture system that could collect separate shots from above and below water and integrate them into a unified virtual image; they needed new algorithms, new AI, to translate what Cameron shot into what you see.
Nothing would work the first time Cameron and the production tried it. Or the second. Or usually the third. One day in Wellington, New Zealand, where Cameron was finishing the film, he showed me a single effects shot, numbered 405. “That means there’s been 405 versions of this before it gets to me,” he said. Cameron has been working on the movie since 2013; it was due out years ago. In September, he still wasn’t done. The Way of Water was expensive to make—How expensive? “Very fucking,” according to Cameron, who told me he’d informed the studio that the film represented “the worst business case in movie history.” In order to be profitable, he’d said, “you have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history. That’s your threshold. That’s your break even.” But as Cameron worked late into the evening, day after day, solving the infinite problems that The Way of Water continued to present, he seemed to be enjoying himself. “I like difficult,” he told me. “I’m attracted by difficult. Difficult is a fucking magnet for me. I go straight to difficult. And I think it probably goes back to this idea that there are lots of smart, really gifted, really talented filmmakers out there that just can’t do the difficult stuff. So that gives me a tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen, because the really gifted people don’t fucking want to do it.”
Cameron and his fifth wife, Suzy Amis Cameron, live year-round in New Zealand, where they have owned a 5,000-acre farm east of Wellington since 2011—ocean on one side, lake on the other, mountains in the distance. They grow hemp and organic vegetables. “I’ve never really checked this out,” Cameron said, “but I’m told we’re the biggest supplier of organic brassicas”—a category of plant that includes broccoli, kale, cauliflower—“in New Zealand, which is a niche of a niche, granted.” For a while, Cameron attempted an experimental agricultural project, taking 25 acres of trees and intercropping between them, producing “143 different species of fruit, different apples, and pears, and berries.” But that proved to not be viable, commercially. So he thought: maybe he’d just open the land to the public. Civilians could just wander in and eat, like Eden. “We could probably feed a thousand people out of that forest,” he told me. But then he realized there was also a flaw in that plan; his food forest, far from the nearest city, was nowhere close to the people it was meant to feed. “You learn as you go,” he said, shrugging.
“Avatar: The Way of Water” is set to run approximately three hours and 10 minutes, nearly 30 minutes longer than the already-long original “Avatar” in 2009.James CamerontoldTotal Film magazinethat his “Avatar” sequel runs so much longer because there is an increased focus on “relationship and emotion” compared to the first movie.
“The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis,” Cameron said. “I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion. We didn’t spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it’s a longer film, because there’s more characters to service. There’s more story to service.”
Not only are protagonists Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) returning in the sequel, but the two characters also now have children (one of which is played by Sigourney Weaver) that are main characters.
“People say, ‘Oh my God, a family story from Disney? Just what we want…’ This isn’t that kind of family story,” Cameron added. “This is a family story like how ‘The Sopranos’ is a family story.”
In an interview with Empire magazine over the summer, Cameron confirmed “Avatar: The Way of Water” was “currently coming in at around three hours” and told moviegoers he was not interested in hearing their complaints.
“I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” Cameron said. “I can almost write this part of the review. ‘The agonizingly long three-hour movie…’ It’s like, give me a fucking break. I’ve watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here’s the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it’s okay to get up and go pee.”
“Avatar: The Way of Water” opens in theaters nationwide Dec. 16.
Avatar: The Way of Water is fast approaching, and thanks to Total Film, we have a new look at the breathtaking world of Pandora.
Say what you will about Avatar's plot, but those 3D visuals looked insane in 2009, so we can only begin to imagine how much this sequel will push the boundaries.
We're sure the publication will reveal new details about the movie next week, but don't expect anything too major as Disney and 20th Century Studios are clearly looking to keep The Way of Water's biggest surprises under wraps. That's no bad thing, of course, and should only serve to make the experience of sitting down to watch it in theaters even more special.
Disney has also released a handful of new stills from the Avatar follow-up, and you can check those out below along with Total Film's regular and subscriber-exclusive covers.
Avatar: The Way of Water is fast approaching, and thanks to Total Film, we have a new look at the breathtaking world of Pandora.
Say what you will about Avatar's plot, but those 3D visuals looked insane in 2009, so we can only begin to imagine how much this sequel will push the boundaries.
We're sure the publication will reveal new details about the movie next week, but don't expect anything too major as Disney and 20th Century Studios are clearly looking to keep The Way of Water's biggest surprises under wraps. That's no bad thing, of course, and should only serve to make the experience of sitting down to watch it in theaters even more special.
Disney has also released a handful of new stills from the Avatar follow-up, and you can check those out below along with Total Film's regular and subscriber-exclusive covers.
