As James Cameron tinkers away in New Zealand on Avatar 2, 3 and 4, he took the time to talk to Empire about the three back-to-back sequels that are expected to head into production imminently for release in 2016, ’17 and ’18, and he seemed rather pumped about what he has in store.
“I can tell you one thing about them,” Cameron laughs. “They’re gonna be bitchin’. You will sh*t yourself with your mouth wide open.”
Let’s not be too boastful, Mr. Cameron. Never one to rest on his laurels, the director had originally intended to shoot the new movies at 60 frames-per-second, but now it seems he’s switched gears on that front due to the fact that 48 FPS has already been somewhat established with The Hobbit movies.
“My thinking at the time was that 60 [FPS] might be a better segue to the video market,” he says. “I’ll be plugging into a system that’s a little more mature, so it makes sense for me to do 48 frames at this point.”
One of the reasons for delays in production has been the fine-tuning process on the three scripts by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, who apparently all broke the stories together.
“I think we met for seven months and we whiteboarded out every scene in every film together,” Cameron explains, “and I didn’t assign each writer which film they were going to work on until the last day. I knew if I assigned them their scripts ahead of time, they’d tune out every time we were talking about the other movie.”
Lastly, he mentions (in an issue edited by Peter Jackson, no less) that Jackson and his creative partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens played an integral role in the first Avatar.
“When Neytiri is holding Jake and she’s just brought him back to consciousness, the ‘I see you’ line was suggested by them,” remembers Cameron. “It might have been Peter who said that.”
(Photo Credit: Getty Images)
