Nothing is slowing down the Avatar franchise, not even James Cameron’s other cinematic projects. While there has been recent momentum on films beyond the upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash—he’s currently developing two features, The Ghosts of Hiroshima and The Devils—make no mistake: he’s still all in with Pandora.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Cameron talked about why he is so committed to the world of Avatar and it’s not (just) because the films make the big bucks every time one is released.
“I’ve justified making Avatar movies to myself for the last 20 years, not based on how much money we made, but on the basis that hopefully it can do some good, it can help connect us, it can help connect us to our lost aspect of ourself that connects with nature and respects nature and all those things,” he shared.
He’s personally invested in the Pandora stories—which have clearly also resonated with audiences—and he also appreciates how they’ve continued to push him to elevate cinema technology.
“So do I think that movies are the answer to our human problems? No, I think they’re limited because people sometimes just want entertainment, and they don’t want to be challenged in that way. I think Avatar is a Trojan horse strategy that gets you into a piece of entertainment but then works on your brain and your heart a little bit in a way.”
His interest in politics has informed his storytelling approach. “We will go one of two ways. We’ll either fragment and be at each other’s throats, fighting over the scraps of what’s left, or we’ll evolve to the next level. And the next level, music plays a part, a huge part. Film, culture, books, these all play a part. They connect us to the other guy, to the other way of viewing the world. We get inside through art. We get inside the heads of other people in a way that we just don’t do in our normal daily lives. And I think that that’s where hope lies. Hope lies in us evolving.”
Empathy and hope have been perhaps the most influential moral compass of Cameron’s movies, as seen not only in the Avatar franchise but as early as his Terminator films.
“I think art in the broadest sense—meaning writing, film, music, culture—is part of the hope, part of the positive side of the equation,” he said. “When I was writing, imagining the story for Terminator 2, a song kept going through my head, which was Sting’s [‘Russians,’ where he sings] ‘I hope the Russians love their children, too’ … When Sarah sees the children in the playground incinerated, that was the core image for that film, and then she gets incinerated herself. So it was really about mothers, children. She was highly dehumanized at the beginning of that story. She finds her empathy, she breaks through that wall, and so I was dealing with all those themes back then.”
That continues now, though as Cameron noted, “I can only hope that I’m just maybe a better, more experienced filmmaker now, and I can deal with this subject respectfully and correctly.” And if it’s through the continued success of the Avatar movies saving cinema time and time again, can we truly just let the man do his thing?
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