Avatar Landing Page

by STEVE POND and DREW TAYLOR

photographed by JEFF VESPA

13 years after Avatar broke records, James Cameron is back and his franchise is bigger, bolder and wetter than ever. The director and his team break down their massive undertaking.

As soon as James Cameron finished work on the first Avatar movie in 2009, he gathered his department heads, told them they’d remain on the payroll for an additional two months and asked them to prepare a white paper on what they’d need if there was ever a sequel. “And then we went off to a resort for three days and sat at a big round table and worked out the problem of how to make this better,” Cameron said. The result, 13 years later, is Avatar: The Way of Water, which takes the spectacle of that first movie and kicks it to another level.

That new level is both exterior, with vast new regions of the planet Pandora, and interior, exploring the family life of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine who has left his human body to become one of the Na’vi, the occupants of the lush planet lusted after by war-mongering Earthlings who nearly destroyed their own planet. While the three-hour film is astonishing visually, it’s also a grounded story of a father whose kids are in their awkward teenage years, even if those teens happen to be seven or eight feet tall and blue.

“One of the big points coming out of that retreat was getting more nuanced performances, more empathy for these characters,” producer Jon Landau said. Cameron added, “It’s a more emotional film in general. The motion capture didn’t change that much, but what we did with those facial images—introducing AI and machine deep learning into the equation so that what the actors did was what you got at the end with as little human invention as possible—was super important.”

Exploring these characters, he added, was the reason to do another Avatar—and to do the third film, which has already been shot, and the fourth and fifth, which are written and designed and will be made if The Way of Water proves to be a financially successful followup to the top-grossing movie of all time. “The reason to come back wasn’t the extraordinary financial success of the first film,” he said. “In fact, that’s almost a disincentive. The incentive to do it is that we had this great team of artists and this great cast of actors, and everybody trusted everybody.”

In this special section, more than a dozen of Cameron’s collaborators talk about their second journey to Pandora. —SP

Production Design

On paper, the production design of “Avatar: The Way of Water” seems as if it would be an enormous undertaking. But when production designer Ben Procter talked about it, he upped the ante. “It’s not a production-design job where you’re designing a film,” he said. “This is a bigger project. You’re designing an entire universe.”

BY STEVE POND

Editing

Wrestling the 192-minute runtime of “The Way of Water” to the ground was a Herculean task that required an army of editors and a process unique to the “Avatar” ecosystem. “As we did on the first ‘Avatar,’ the work is divided by necessity because of the complexity of the filmmaking process,” said Stephen Rivkin, who was nominated for an Oscar for the first film.

BY DREW TAYLOR

Cinematography

Cinematographer Russell Carpenter had worked with James Cameron on “True Lies” and “Titanic,” and this time around his work encompassed live-action photography, motion-capture work and advising the visual-effects team on virtual lighting conditions. And while there really isn’t any other film like “The Way of Water,” that doesn’t mean you can’t rely on old tricks of the trade.

BY DREW TAYLOR

Sound

Normally, a production sound mixer would be responsible for recording sound on the set of a film as it is being shot. But “Avatar: The Way of Water” was not a normal shoot, which means that Julian Howarth’s duties went way beyond the job description. “Jim’s got an amazing vision about what he wants, and you just get dragged along,” he said.

BY STEVE POND

Music

James Cameron and composer Simon Franglen agreed that certain musical themes from the first movie should be retained—but with the action moving from the jungles of Pandora to the seaside, they also knew a different approach was needed. “There’s no reason that a reef tribe would have the same sound,” he said, “because they have different materials to work with.”

BY STEVE POND

Costume Design

With a movie as effects and animation heavy as “Avatar: The Way of Water,” it’s easy to assume that physical costumes weren’t actually constructed but were drawn on a tablet and fed to the wizards at Weta FX, who would make the clothes appear fully realized in the finished film. But that wasn’t the case.

BY DREW TAYLOR

Visual Effects

When James Cameron began working on “The Way of Water” and subsequent sequels in the early 2010s, his visual effects team started scripting their own way forward. “At that point it was mostly the functional technical stuff—how do we build a system that Jim could use live?” said visual effects supervisor Richard Baneham. “This is coming from Jim’s desire to treat the digital world and the real world the same,” Weta FX director Joe Letteri added.

BY DREW TAYLOR