James Cameron between fire and ash. Travel from Avatars started in 2009 and will enter its final phase incandescent: the third and so far final chapter of a story that in fifteen years has redefined the history of spectacular cinema and created a ecosystem narrative and philosophical in which individuals, environment, memory and violence are intertwined, supported by a company technology never happened before. Each chapter marks a section: new techniques, new production systems, new languages, animal and plant species, new ideas realism in the region where flesh and pixels merge. But Avatars it is also a cultural gesture, a story political ecologycolonialism, grief and rebirth, capable of crossing languages and countries. In the Avatar — Fire and ash (in theaters December 17) the director addresses the conflict between loss (ash) and revenge (fire). We meet him upstairs Zoom in.
How are you feeling right now?
«Pretty excited, we just reunited with the whole cast, I showed them some of the final scenes of the film in 3D. They are enthusiastic. Like me.”
The final straw?
«Editing is always difficult, my films are always too long and I have to summarize them. This lasted more than three hours. I was nervous, but after the testing group of audience reactions, the emotions, the tears, I think it was probably the best of the three, certainly the most emotional. That’s what I want. Amazingly, action is not easy to achieve, but I know how to do it. For the characters we start from the writing, but the interpretation is basic: you have to feel that they are real people. It’s true that you watch films where the characters are made of ones and zeros, but in reality they are created by the actors. This is not generative AI, we are not creating things in the mind of a model. They are human artists working together toward a goal.”
At the end of “The Ways of Water” there is the loss of his son. How will this change everything in the Na’vi family and world?
«Every bereaved family experiences change and this puts pressure on the relationships between those who remain. I think Hollywood treats this theme badly in commercial films: the damage never becomes apparent. Your best friend dies and in the next film you’re back to playing around. There is never any permanent impact. I wanted to make a film that really brought people’s feelings of loss into a very real light. Of course, the protagonists are three meters tall, blue, with a tail and ears, but they look real. You see everything through a fantasy lens, but what you feel is universal. We all have families or would like to have them, we all have parents or lost them and miss them. This is why this film, like so many others, will be able to cross every culture and language and seem familiar: not because you’ve seen it before, but because you recognize its emotional landscape.”
Why is this film the best?
«This is the highlight: Avatars 3 it is the end of a cycle. This time we meet two new cultures: the Wind Traders, who are inspiring — making you want to join them and sail the skies of Pandora — and the Ash Men, the dark Na’vi. Starting to write it I asked myself: what if there was a group of Na’vi who were cut off from Eywa, from the balance of the world? And why? Thus was born the idea of a volcanic eruption destroying their land, the rainforest, their Tree House. They feel lost, abandoned, and from that pain emerged a strong leader who gave them hope. But this is an expectation that comes from power, from control, from exploiting others. This is a response to trauma. And if you look at the world today, there is so much hate that presents itself. This film asks: how do you break that cycle? Neytiri lost her son to the Sky People, hated them, became racist, and went to a very dark place. Can it break the cycle of fire and ash? Fire is violence and hatred, ashes are loss, sorrow. It’s an endless cycle, as losses fuel fires and fires fuel losses. Some characters can solve them, others can’t, and those who can’t are very dangerous. This is our world. And those who have seen it so far say it seems more relevant than ever.”
One of the big challenges of “Avatar” is technical: technology moves quickly. How big has the way of working changed?
“The next big challenge is generative artificial intelligence, which I have never used Avatars. This is a very different workflow. The question is: does it add value or does it take away more than it provides? I do not know. I’m going to study it, because if we can reduce the cost of visual effects and speed up the timeline, a movie will be Avatars it no longer takes four years, but three or two years. But it will never be a magic wand that produces a film out of nothing. For now, the process is completely artist-centric. We will never use AI to create images. At best we will use machine learning to speed up some steps.”
He started writing this third film almost twenty years ago, but it still feels contemporary. Because it is universal, because you are always a person of the future, or because the issues you are talking about – militarization, colonialism, the fight for the planet – are still being discussed.?
“It’s all happening, and it’s been happening for a long time. The real question is: why haven’t we woken up? Why haven’t we changed course? True, the script for this film was written some time ago, but it talks about human nature. Colonialism has been around for centuries, the destruction of the earth is accelerating, our energy consumption is increasing, now also caused by artificial intelligence. Many things are reaching a crisis point. Art simply comments on the experience of the artist. I started the process, which I call “big provocation”: I wrote a story and provoked other artists – actors, designers – to convey their ideas. This is a collective effort. And this resonates because these things have been happening for a long time, and they are getting worse. So the question is: when are we going to wake up and actually smell the coffee?”
“I am both optimistic and pessimistic. I am optimistic about our ingenuity, our ability to solve problems. But I am pessimistic about human systems – government and politics – as the solution. Maybe I am a revolutionary. I believe that change must come from below, from people who say: do you know what it is? enough, we have to change. And I hope that happens. I say ‘I hope’ because I am a parent – I have five children and I don’t want them to grow up in a broken world.”
Often people become revolutionaries when they are young and then become conservatives. Are you still a revolutionary at 71?
“I’ve had a wonderful journey. When I was a kid, I was against war, then I became politicized, and then, with Bush, Trump and everything that was happening in the world, I decided to give up on political systems: they have now failed, they don’t work. Now I’m a revolutionary again.”
