The king of the epic only makes blockbusters as a hobby to fund his real passion — deep-sea exploration. He talks about the making of his $1.7 billion series of sequels.
Not all big-screen heroes wear capes. This one is a 68-year-old man with a passion for deep-sea exploration and a knack for directing the biggest films of all time. James Cameron knows how to pack a cinema better than anybody.
He doesn't make many movies, but every one is an event. In 1997 Cameron's Titanic became the first film to take US$1 billion ($1.7 billion). Twelve years later he was king of the world again when his sci-fi epic Avatar became the first to break US$2 billion ($3.4 billion) and remains the highest-grossing movie of all time. Not bad when your CV also includes two timeless Terminator films with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Aliens.
Now, after 13 years away, he has Avatar: The Way of Water. It is the first of four planned sequels in 3D that will further explore the world of those tall blue aliens. It is Hollywood's US$1 billion ($1.7 billion) gamble to save cinema.
Steven Spielberg called the original Avatar "the most evocative sci-fi film since Star Wars". It came out in 2009, when Hollywood had the fear. Online piracy was threatening a business that relies on viewers not watching stuff at home. Enter Cameron. Avatar demanded to be seen on a big screen. It told of evil human colonists arriving on the distant planet Pandora and battling the native Na'vi people for natural resources. But the plot was secondary because the 3D immersed us in Cameron's vivid world. It was an experience, and allowed cinemas to charge more for tickets.
The sequel arrives in December and could not be more timely. Cinema is again under attack, but on two fresh fronts. The rise of streamers such as Netflix and Amazon allows millions to watch blockbusters at home. And the legacy of Covid is that many people have lost the cinema habit — audiences are down about 20 per cent. Avatar 2 is made for cinemas. I saw 3D footage of the new blockbuster and can safely say it will not be as good on the box interrupted by your Deliveroo man.
Will Avatar work a second time? "I guess we'll find out if people show up for Avatar 2," Cameron says, on the other end of a Zoom. He grins. The Canadian-born director is in New Zealand, where he is based, working on his franchise. The third Avatar is already filmed and comes out in 2024, there's a fourth due in 2026 and another planned after that. He is clearly, understandably, confident. A teaser trailer hit 148 million views in 24 hours. The film already has a theme park ride, some Lego and a book series.
What's Cameron's secret of success? "I don't know," says the man whose films have made a combined US$6 billion ($10.4 billion) plus. "I don't make any decisions on movies thinking, 'That will be worth an extra US$5 million.' You just follow your nose as a storyteller — you can't deconstruct the gross.
"That said, when I sat down with my writers to start Avatar 2, I said we cannot do the next one until we understand why the first one did so well. We must crack the code of what the hell happened."
What were his conclusions? "Well, all films work on different levels. The first is surface, which is character, problem and resolution. The second is thematic. What is the movie trying to say? But Avatar also works on a third level, the subconscious." This explains, Cameron says, why so many people saw the original more than once. "I wrote an entire script for the sequel, read it and realised that it did not get to level three. Boom. Start over. That took a year."
But that isn't the only reason it has taken so many years to make the follow-up. "Well, I was also off doing deep-ocean exploration for a while," Cameron says with a laugh.
Quick aside — Cameron, arguably the most successful director in history — only makes films as a hobby.
"Jim's a scientist," says Sigourney Weaver, who worked with him on Aliens and both Avatars. "That may be his first love."
Ten years ago Cameron piloted the first solo dive to the Mariana Trench, 11km below the western Pacific. A prominent oceanographer called him a modern-day Jacques Cousteau.
"We treated it like a space mission," Cameron says of his submarine trip to the deepest place on Earth. "I wasn't surprised it worked, but you're always a little bit relieved because the alternative is not pretty." I think that he approaches films in a similar fashion.
As the title suggests, a lot of The Way of Water takes place in the ocean — I saw clips that looked like Attenborough's Blue Planet, but with blue aliens. Was it inspired by the Mariana Trench trip? "I don't do deep-sea exploration to become a better film-maker," Cameron says. "I'm a film-maker so I can pay for my expeditions. I'd much prefer to be out exploring and seeing things nobody imagined existed for real, rather than making them up. But I'm good at making them up too. So I do that as well."
Cinemas fighting for life after lockdown hope that his popular touch is undiminished. In July lenders took control of Vue, which has 91 cinemas in the UK, and last month Cineworld, which has 751 cinemas around the world, entered rescue talks. Tom Cruise did his bit for this summer's box office with his exhilarating Top Gun: Maverick, already the 12th most successful film of all time. But no superhero film broke the US$1 billion barrier this year, despite the fanfare that greeted Robert Pattinson's arrival as Batman.
Maybe audiences are bored with Hollywood's increasingly formulaic fare. It is astonishing that, since Avatar, there have been 26 Marvel films, five Star Wars films and five Harry Potter sequels or spin-offs, yet none knocked Avatar off its perch as the biggest film of all time.
Jon Landau is a producer who has worked with Cameron since Titanic. When we meet he is wearing Avatar-branded vegan trainers. (There is a strong eco-theme in the films that clearly spreads to its marketing.)
"Hollywood has an aversion to new intellectual properties," he says. "The easiest thing for a studio to say is no — nobody ever got fired for not making a movie. Yes, you can get fired for making the wrong movie, but you have to take chances. Our business is about gut decisions and everyone should be looking for new stories."
For a while Avatar not only persuaded people to flock to cinemas, but also that 3D was finally the future. Studios have been trying to push 3D since the 1920s, but Avatar's 3D was different; it was a window into the world, rather than a world jumping out of the window. Martin Scorsese's Hugo and Ang Lee's Life of Pi also excelled, but then the cheap 3D rip-offs arrived. I watched a remake of Clash of the Titans in 2010, with retro-fitted 3D effects, and already knew that the format was dying — yet again.
"When film-makers created 3D and made it a part of their art," Cameron says of Scorsese and Lee, "those results were spectacular. But when studios thought they could slap it on in postproduction it went sideways. But 3D is not dead. When Avatar came out there were around 4,500 3D screens in the world. Now there are around 120,000. I'd love this new film to remind us what that experience can look like — it is not just a way to make an extra 10 per cent [by charging more at the box office]."
"3D does not make a film better," Landau adds. "It exacerbates what exists. So if the movie isn't good, 3D will just point that out. Hollywood takes a long time to learn."
When Cameron started Avatar in 2005, he says that it felt like the Manhattan Project. He means the scale and the technical leaps involved — new cameras were designed specifically. Its stars, Sam Worthington, who plays the soldier Jake Sully, and Zoe Saldana, who is the main Na'vi Neytiri, are back for the sequels and the first film feels like it's from a different lifetime. "It felt like a weird indie," Worthington recalls. "It felt like an experiment," Saldana says.
"We knew that every day we were going to be working in uncharted territory," Cameron says. "It was three years before I saw one shot of the final film and I sat in my edit room staring at it for an hour. I just realised, 'We f***ing did this.' It was the first time I could relax. To the extent that I ever relax."
Avatar would go on to make US$2.85 billion ($4.96 billion). Now it has its greatest competitor to date: its sequel. A film that cinemas need more than ever.
The top blockbusters of each decade
1930s: Gone with the Wind (1939)
Adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind is the most successful film of all, beating Avatar into second place. The American Civil War epic starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable made US$402.5 million in 1939; US$3.75 billion today. Back then, there was significantly less competition. No televisions, Tim Berners-Lee not even born — cinema was booming. How modern-day execs would love that.
1940s: Bambi (1942) and Pinocchio (1940)
During the Second World War, people flocked to see Bambi. Fair enough. Watching the trippy, gorgeous cartoon today shows how formulaic animation has become since, while Pinocchio (1940) has been remade as recently as this month, with significantly less success. Escapist movies for a time that needed them.
1950s: The Ten Commandments (1956)
Religious epics were a mainstay of 1950s cinema — The Ten Commandments is the story of Moses and stars the pin-up Charlton Heston. It would have made US$2.37 billion today, and the runner-up, Ben-Hur (also starring Heston) the equivalent of US$1.82 billion. No wonder Hollywood has attempted to mimic that since, with films such as Noah. Yet our idols have altered somewhat, and false gods make more money than old gods.
1960s: The Sound of Music (1965)
Adjusted for inflation, The Sound of Music is the sixth biggest film of all time — it would have taken US$2.57 billion today, more than any film by Spielberg. Not bad for a musical about nuns, Nazis and a young governess (Julie Andrews) falling in love with a baron (Christopher Plummer) and his seven children. It was a different time, though, a decade when the sweeping romance Doctor Zhivago (1965) was the second biggest film. Today it would sit around No 48, behind The Minions.
1970s: Jaws (1975) and Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
The decade when everything changed. Jaws and Star Wars were the first blockbusters of the modern era, and the two most successful films of the 1970s. Both launched successful franchises, informed by focus groups. Third place is taken by The Exorcist (1973), which represents the independent spirit that cinema was about to leave behind.
1980s: ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Blockbusters as we know them today — American, with merchandise tie-ins — came of age in the 1980s via the uncynical money-spinning films of Steven Spielberg. The biggest film of the decade, ET is sequel-free, thankfully. It is a perfectly contained fable of family and fantasy (with a young Drew Barrymore), but The Empire Strikes Back (1980) showed what was to come.
1990s: Titanic (1997)
The 1990s was a golden decade for big-screen cinema and the last time that blockbusters did not rely on sequels and spin-offs. Jurassic Park — the original — was an exhilarating trip to the movies as visceral as the train entering the station in 1896. Yet even Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, Sam Neill and the dinosaurs could not beat Cameron's Titanic, the heartbreaking love story of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet), which appealed across generations to break the US$1 billion mark.
2000s: Avatar (2009)
Avatar became the first film to break the US$2 billion mark at the box office, even though its star, Sam Worthington, was largely unknown (the director, James Cameron, wanted to keep the budgets down). Its success should be studied because with an adjusted total of US$3.3 billion, it remains planets ahead of the US$1.75 billion that the second most popular of the era, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) raked in. The latter might have made more money with less singing.
2010s: Avengers: Endgame (2019)
The 2010s was the decade of superheroes — from Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) to some also-ran called Ant-Man (2015). No shock, then, that the biggest film of the decade was the climax of the Marvel series: Avengers: Endgame. It has an impressive cast, including Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Bradley Cooper and Gwyneth Paltrow, and made US$2.79 billion worldwide.
Avatar is back in cinemas on now; Avatar: The Way of Water opens on December 15.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London