Avatar News

Simply put, James Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter that Avatar "is the most challenging film I've ever made."

Entourage fans that saw how much Cameron and Vince Chase went through on Aquaman might disagree; but we digress.

The Oscar-winning director points to the film's budget of 60% CG animation and 40% live action as the reason for its challenge.

Still, when it comes to Avatar, the innovative filmmaker and digital 3-D pioneer and champion has never shifted his emphasis from storytelling.

"You have to make a good film that would be a good film under any circumstances," he said. "You have to put the narrative first. The reality is no matter how many (3-D) screens we get, you are still going to have a large number of people - possibly the majority of people - who see the film in a 2-D environment."

James Cameron is not known for being modest. Upon winning Best Director at the Academy Awards, he recited a Titanic quote and announced: I'm the king of the world!

Therefore, it came as no surprise this week when, at Microsoft Advance '08, the director hyped up his highly-anticipated Avatar, which opens on December 18, 2009.

"Avatar will make people truly experience something," said Cameron. "One more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed. All the syn-thespians are photo-realistic. Now that we've achieved it, we discovered CG characters in 3D look more real than in 2D. Your brain is cued, it's a real thing not a picture, and discounting part of [the] image that makes it look fake."

Cameron continued with his high praise for, well, himself and his upcoming movie:

"Avatar is the single most complex piece of filmmaking ever made. We have 1,600 shots for a 2.5 hour movie. It's not with a single CGI character, like King Kong or Gollum. We have hundreds of photo-realistic CG characters. We were Microsoft's sandbox for filmmaking beyond the cutting edge."

James Cameron's upcoming Avatar ranks as one of the most anticipated film projects in recent memory. The film will mark the Oscar winner's first narrative movie since Titanic, while also representing Cameron's long-held dream of melding digital 3-D stereo with epic big screen storytelling.

Below, the director discusses the project with Variety. You can read the full interview here.

We're seeing that audiences like 3-D and it's becoming a main driver for adoption of digital cinema systems in movie theaters. But speaking strictly as a storyteller and director, what does 3-D add to the creative side of a project?
I believe that Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they're not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow.

The building is a thin-walled set, the sunlight is a xenon, and the traffic noise is supplied by the sound designers. It's all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving. This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion. Especially in the types of films which have been my specialty to date, the fantasy experience is served best by a sense of detail and textural reality supporting the narrative moment by moment.

The characters, the dialogue, the production design, photography and visual effects must all strive to give the illusion that what you're seeing is really happening, no matter how improbable the situation might be if you stopped to think about it -- a time-traveling cyborg out to change history by killing a waitress, for example. When you see a scene in 3-D, that sense of reality is supercharged. The visual cortex is being cued, at a subliminal but pervasive level, that what is being seen is real.

All the films I've done previously could absolutely have benefited from 3-D. So creatively, I see 3-D as a natural extension of my cinematic craft.

A 3-D film immerses you in the scene, with a greatly enhanced sense of physical presence and participation. I believe that a functional-MRI study of brain activity would show that more neurons are actively engaged in processing a 3-D movie than the same film seen in 2-D. When most people think of 3-D films, they think first of the gimmick shots -- objects or characters flying, floating or poking out into the audience.

In fact, in a good stereo movie, these shots should be the exception rather than the rule. Watching a stereo movie is looking into an alternate reality through a window. It is intuitive to the film industry that this immersive quality is perfect for action, fantasy, and animation. What's less obvious is that the enhanced sense of presence and realism works in all types of scenes, even intimate dramatic moments.

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Sigourney Weaver stars in the upcoming James Cameron's movie, Avatar.

When this veteran actress was asked by MTV about her role in the film, she said:

"It's a big secret. Jim wrote such a terrific part for me, and it has a lot of different aspects, [but] it reminded me of him, actually â€" very driven and very idealistic. So it was a lot of fun."

See what else Weaver had to say about the project now.

James Cameron gave Ain't It Cool News an update about his December 2009 3D sci-fi action-adventure Avatar.

The film stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Peter Mensah, Laz Alonso, Wes Studi, Stephen Lang and Matt Gerald.

Here's an excerpt from Cameron's interview:

I'm in New Zealand right now, working on effects, while Steve Quale shoots some second unit. We've worked together a lot (he did the engine room scenes on Titanic, plus co-directed Aliens of the Deep with me) and he's the only guy I trust to shoot stuff for me, especially in 3D.

We still have a little performance capture work to do with Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana in March, when we get her back from Star Trek (she's Uhura -- but of course you already knew that.) And we have a couple of days with Stephen Lang in April or May, to shoot his character's last scene, which is so technically difficult it will take us until then to figure out how to do it.

Avatar is scheduled for a May 22, 2009 release.

Here's a bit of news on a pair of hihgly anticipated movies for 2009:

20th Century Fox has announced the studio will release Night at the Museum 2: Escape From the Smithsonian on May 22, 2009, while also moving back James Cameron's 3-D Avatar from its previously scheduled Memorial Day slot.

It will not hit theaters on December 18, 2009, giving the director more time for post-production.

Night at the Museum 2: Escape From the Smithsonian will be the first major Hollywood movie shot at the famous complex in Washington, D.C. Ben Stiller returns to star in it.

Avatar, meanwhile, will now open on the same weekend that Cameron's Titanic did in 1997. The live-action/CGI hybrid is Cameron's first feature since that Oscar winner.

The lead villain in James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar has been cast, as the role has gone to little-known actor Matt Gerald.

Gerald's most recent roles included bit parts in the action sequel XXX: State of the Union, while he also appeared briefly in Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines and S.W.AT.

The actor is the latest in the line of lesser-known talent hired for Avatar, following in the footsteps of unheralded actors such Zoe Saldana, Michelle Rodriguez and Sam Worthington. Sigourney Weaver is the only big name chosen by Cameron for the film.

Look for Avatar in theaters in May, 2009.