- James Cameron’s script for Avatar 2 was rejected because it didn’t live up to his standards.
- He nearly fired his writers for not focussing on what made the first film so successful.
- It took more than a year to write the sequel.
Director James Cameron spent more than a year writing the script for Avatar 2 only to have it rejected because it didn’t live up to his standards.
The Titanic filmmaker described his meticulous work for the Avatar series as follows: “I told my writers when we initially started working on Avatar 2 that we couldn’t move forward unless we knew why the first film was so successful. We need to figure out exactly what happened.”
Cameron and his team came to the following conclusion: “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. I wrote an entire script for the sequel, read it and realized that it did not get to level three. Boom. Start over. That took a year.”
The Academy-award winner revealed that he nearly fired his Avatar sequel writers due to not focussing on what made the film global-hit, “When I sat down to write the sequels, I knew there were going to be three at the time and eventually it turned into four, I put together a group of writers and said, ‘I don’t want to hear anybody’s new ideas or anyone’s pitches until we have spent some time figuring out what worked on the first film, what connected, and why it worked,’” Camerons said.
“They kept wanting to talk about the new stories. I said, ‘We aren’t doing that yet.’ Eventually I had to threaten to fire them all because they were doing what writers do, which is to try and create new stories. I said, ‘We need to understand what the connection was and protect it, protect that ember and that flame.’”
Avatar: The Way of Water will hit theaters on December 16.
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