Avatar’ begins its re-release in Northern America this Friday, ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ opens in Northern America on December 16, so why the 13-year gap? Director James Cameron said in a recent interview with ‘The Times’ that the main reason was that the script was time-consuming to create.
Cameron said, “When I sat down with the writers and started writing ‘Avatar: The Way of Water,’ I said unless we figure out why the first one sold? We don’t want to rush through the second film, we have to crack the code of what’s selling.”
To Cameron, “All films work on different levels, the most superficial being character, conflict and resolution; the second level is theme; but ‘Avatar’ has a third level, which is the subconscious. I once wrote a sequel script in a year, but after reading it, I felt it didn’t get to the third level, so I threw it in the trash.”
Cameron analyzed the reasons for Avatar’s popularity on a podcast last year, saying, “Audiences have a dreamy longing that is realized in the movie. People long to go to a certain space, to a space that they want to get to and feel safe. Whether it’s flying, or the feeling of freedom and excitement, or even the smell of the earth in the forest. In short it’s a feeling of communicating on a deep level, and that’s where the spirituality of the first film lies.”
Cameron revealed in the same interview that he almost fired the writers of the ‘Avatar’ sequel because they were preoccupied with creating a new story rather than figuring out the DNA that made the first movie break box office records.
For Cameron, fresh storytelling is only one level of what makes a movie look good; it’s important to figure out the subconscious connection between the story and the audience.
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