“Avatar: The Way of Water” director James Cameron has revealed he had “certain goals in mind” for the world of Pandora and called on his writers to do their “homework” before working on the sequel to his 2009 epic film.
Cameron, whose movie “Avatar” is the highest-grossing film of all time, told ScreenRant that he made “a bunch of notes for six months,” notes he eventually shared with his writers’ room as he set out to develop “The Way of Water.”
Cameron’s comments come in the same week where he revealed to Collider that he had the screenplays for “The Way of Water,” which is set for release on Friday, along with “Avatar 3” and “Avatar 4″ written before production of the first sequel.
Cameron said he had to have a starting point in order to do multiple scripts with his team of writers so he sat down at his desk to go to work on developing the world of Pandora.
“Literally, just every day sitting at my desk, talking about the world, the characters, trying to fill in what happened the day after Jake woke up in a Navi body, and just was carrying the story forward. I knew I had certain goals in mind,” Cameron told ScreenRant.
“I walked in on the first day with the whole writers room, and I plopped down 800 pages of notes, single spaced. I said, ‘Do your homework, and then we’ll talk.’”
Cameron added that he also asked writers to figure out how the first “Avatar” movie functioned and to determine what people were “keying into” during the film.
“It had to hit the heart, had to hit the mind, had to hit the imagination, and it had to hit something even deeper, which we had a hard time quantifying,” Cameron said.
“Something you could call spiritual, or you could call subconscious. Some kind of connection that you can’t even really describe in words. And I said, ‘If we can’t do that again, then we are going to fail.’”
