PRAISE EYWA! THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, JAMES CAMERON GAVE US THE BIGGEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME. NOW, AS WE RETURN TO PANDORA WITH AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER, HE EXPLAINS WHY HE’S QUADRUPLING DOWN — AND HOW HE’S SET TO CHANGE CINEMA ALL OVER AGAIN

WORDS IAN FREER

THE NA’VI WORD FOR IDIOT IS SKXAWNG.

Pronounced “scowned”, it was an expression used regularly on the Avatar: The Way Of Water set when an actor or crew member messed up.

And it’s a derogatory term that James Cameron might well unleash about anyone who decries that the sequel is currently clocking in at three hours.

“I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” he says on a Sunday evening from New Zealand, where he’s in the midst of post-production. “I can almost write this part of the review. ‘The agonisingly 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.” Call it ‘The Way Of Passing Water’.

The official subtitle has all the feel of an arts-y mood title, but Cameron confirms it’s An Actual Thing in the film. It stems from his unfinished novelisation of the first film (“I never have the damn time to write”) where Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri has an ethos she calls ‘the way of air’. By understanding how air, wind and turbulence interact, by understanding what air does to a creature’s wing membranes, she believes, you can then fly more effectively. For the new film, he simply transposed the concept to water. “It’s a repeated motif,” he says. “‘The way of water’ is understanding the medium in which you operate.”

Above: Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) broods in his new body.

Left: Jack Champion (as Spider) and director James Cameron on set.

The film that found critics readily deploying the word “game-changer”, Avatar remains the highest-grossing film of all time ($2.8 billion and counting), so this sequel represents the biggest roll of the dice in Cameron’s 41-year directorial career. “I had to think long and hard whether I even wanted to make another Avatar film, because it was kind of ours to lose,” he rationalises. “When you’ve done something that’s been that transcendent in terms of success, do you really want to go try and do that again?

There’s a lot of pressure on it. I thought about it for a good two years before we finally made a deal.” As you’d expect from the filmmaker who supersized the Alien series by adding a shit-ton of xenomorphs or emboldened the Terminator saga via a ground-breaking CGI liquid metal assassin, Cameron’s response was, go big or go Hometree. “What I said to the Fox regime at the time was, ‘I’ll do it, but we’ve got to play a larger game here. I don’t want to just do a movie and then do a movie and do a movie. I want to tell a bigger story.’ I said, ‘Imagine a series of novels like The Lord Of The Rings existed, and we’re adapting them.’ Now, that was great in theory, but then I had to go create the frickin’ novels from which to adapt it.”

This shift to producing four sequels at bi-yearly intervals — 2022-2028 — some 13 years after the original is debatably one of the biggest gambles in Hollywood history. Given the scale of the task at hand, Cameron’s way of water is far from plain sailing.