Director James Cameron‘s third entry in the “Avatar” series, “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” opens this December, but audiences jonesing for a big-screen trip to Pandora can whet their appetites this week with the theatrical re-release of “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Released in 2022, 13 years after the original “Avatar,” “The Way of Water” proved to be worth the wait, a sequel (like Cameron’s earlier “Aliens” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”) that built on the earlier film‘s innovations and dug deeper into its themes.
Because of the sequel’s new ambitions and utilization of up-to-the-minute technology, Cameron found himself in the same position as he was on the original film: learning how to make the movie as he was making it.
“ On the first movie, we were just figuring out the basic technique,” Cameron told IndieWire. “How do you ride an aerial creature? How do we do performance capture?”
Cameron had those problems solved heading into “The Way of Water,” but created a whole new set of challenges for himself by setting so much of the movie underwater. “What we didn’t know is, can we do all those things we did before, but can we do it in and under water? How do you ride an ocean creature? Riding aerial creatures was complicated enough, but we didn’t have that medium that’s 800 times denser than air pushing back against us.”
Cameron’s team built machines that were water jet propelled so that his actors could rocket through the water under the surface, come up and fly above the surface and then dive back in, all the while letting the technology drive the story and vice versa.
“It actually became a feedback loop,” Cameron said. “I didn’t know how people were going to be able to ride a water creature. Once we figured out how the creature had to move and how you had to ride it and handle weapons on it and interact with it, we had to back some of that into the design of the animals. There’d be a fin that you could hook your knee over or that you could get a foot pressed against. We had to modify our machines and then back those modifications into the creatures themselves so that the characters looked fully integrated.”
In spite of the movie’s massive scale, Cameron says he and his crew remained nimble when it came to not only the technology but the script. “I’ll write a script, but when I get into it with the actors, I get new ideas,” Cameron said. “They get new ideas, and sometimes we’ll change it as we go along. I don’t think you write a script and that’s your blueprint and you stick to that blueprint. I like the give and take with the actors and their growing awareness of their characters and the themes that they want to express. I try to be very inclusive of that.”
Cameron says that performance capture technology facilitated a flexibility he never had when shooting more conventional coverage. “We build a rudimentary set. It has no color, and it’s really just there to support them. It might have ramps or be contoured if they’re on complex terrain, or if there’s a door there’ll be a door. But we only build that which they touch. It’s not everything else that you’ll see. So it’s very quick to take this modular system and pop one environment out and be ready to shoot another scene.”
That process of recreating the set took only about an hour, which gave Cameron the freedom for easy reshoots and pickup lines. “I can even change the whole scene,” Cameron said. “It’s an ongoing, iterative, creative process, and then it becomes reductive when you get into post-production. You start throwing stuff out and winnowing it down to what has the greatest visual impact or the greatest emotional impact.”
Achieving that emotional impact is, according to Cameron, aided rather than hindered by the performance capture technology, which allows for smaller crews on set and greater intimacy with the actors. “People think of it as a technological layer that inhibits acting,” Cameron said. “It’s actually the opposite. It enables a purity and an authenticity in acting that you don’t normally get.” To prove his point, Cameron compared the experience of making the “Avatar” films with that of shooting “Titanic.”
“On the set of ‘Titanic’ I had 1500 extras that I had to filter out of my awareness so that I could work with Kate and Leo and some of the other actors in the foreground,” Cameron said. “That intimacy and that focus on just them is very difficult to create. Now let’s say we did ‘Titanic’ with performance capture. I’d just be there with the people that are in the foreground. So now all those extras and that giant set and all the technology and the lighting cranes and all the big reflectors and everything that’s required to bring it all to life in a single image photographically, none of that stuff’s there.”
With performance capture, Cameron can even choose his coverage after the fact, in post-production, because he’s capturing performances in a three-dimensional space that he can recreate with whatever camera angles he chooses. “My choice of lens between the wide shot, the two shot, the over the shoulders, the closeups…that all happens later,” Cameron said. “So I’m just a hundred percent focused on the moment, that moment for those characters. As the writer, it’s a very pure art form. We’re just trying to find the truth of the scene. “All that other stuff will happen later and the actors won’t be subjected to it.”
They also aren’t burdened with making sure any of their shots match, since in essence any take can be cut up into a master, close-ups, two-shots, or whatever else Cameron decides. “In typical cinematography, we do a scene and we do the master, then we come in tighter and tighter and you have to do the same thing over and over so that it matches. That’s highly limiting for an actor, and it’s almost like kabuki theater. It’s highly stylized if you really think about it. In performance capture, we can shoot one take and if we like everything about that take from a performance standpoint, I can pull all my coverage out of that.”
The process also allows Cameron and his actors to completely reimagine the scene from take to take, since everything will match. Cameron compares the liberating nature of the experience to theater rehearsal — not even theater, since there’s no audience to play to and all the pressure is off. “We can capture up to about 20 people at a time, and then when we do big crowds, we have a group we call the troupe. And the troupe are 10 very talented Swiss Army knife actors that can play anything. They can be an old lady one minute and a young boy the next minute. We do the crowds as tiles and create all that after the fact.”
Cameron’s enthusiasm for the technology extends to a desire to see other filmmakers incorporate it into their own processes, though he says directors aren’t always great about reaching out to each other. “Directors are lone wolves,” Cameron said. “They’re supposed to know everything, and when you’re getting paid to know everything, somehow it seems to elude people that the easiest thing to do is just go ask somebody else that’s done it. I certainly wouldn’t hesitate for a split second to call somebody and say, ‘Hey, how did you do that flood scene? That was amazing.’”
With that in mind, Cameron has an open door policy when it comes to other directors seeing what he’s done. “I always tell everybody, ‘Look, you want to come by? Maybe you can incorporate parts of it into your own creativity. I’m not trying to sell it. I don’t make any money off selling the technology, we just do what we need to do to make our own films. Every once in a while, somebody will come in and go, ‘I can use that,’ or ‘How did you do that?’ And to me that’s the way it should be. We should be more collegial. We should feed into a body of knowledge.”
Where Cameron sometimes clashes with his peers is when he comes across what he calls the Luddite mentality of thinking that anything other than practical effects is second rate. “Give me a break,” Cameron said. “Are you kidding me? We can do anything that could be done practically in CG.” Cameron says that the only difference is one of artistic choice.
“If I were making ‘Aliens’ today, would I do the alien queen exactly that way if she were CG? Would I be using so much steam to hide the wires and rods and things that we had to use? I might not, I might light her a little bit more. I might want to see all of our lovely design elements, and it might lose something there. But that’s talking about it at an aesthetic root level, not at a practical level.”
Cameron does believe that anytime a filmmaker can do something practically it’s worth it, but some things simply call for CG, especially on the “Avatar” films. “We’ve got characters whose eyes are volumetrically four times the size of a human eyeball,” he said. “I want to see how you’re gonna solve that problem. And the emotionality in those eyes is a big part of why people relate emotionally to the ‘Avatar’ films.”
Cameron credits the CG character design with providing an additional 10-percent of expressiveness on top of what the actors are bringing to the table. “You can’t do that with makeup,” he said. “You can’t do that practically. So there’s a little bit of secret sauce in an ‘Avatar’ movie that has to do with emotion. I always say it’s a hundred percent of what the actor did and a little bit more.”
Because he sees technology as being so inextricably linked to emotion and performance, Cameron is always sure to collaborate with his actors on the CG design. “Over the years I’ve talked to the actors and I’ve shown them stuff and I’ve said, ‘Do you buy this augmentation of your emotional state?’” he said. “If they have a cat or a dog, they buy it completely. But we’ve had to come up with a kind of a physiological vocabulary for the animation teams as well, so they don’t overstep their boundaries.”
As Cameron sees it, CG isn’t any different a tool when it comes to performance than editing or cinematography or hair and makeup. “It’s always supporting, in the same way that cinematic lighting makes people look more beautiful or more severe, or whatever it is you want,” Cameron said. “We’re always trying to enhance what the actor’s doing, to take what they’re doing and push it a little bit. And we do that with editing. We do it with lighting. It’s part of the craft. There’s nothing pure about acting unless somebody’s just standing there on stage. And that’s not what movies have ever been.”
“Avatar: The Way of Water” will be re-released in IMAX and 3D for one week starting October 3, 2025.
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