![]() ![]() ![]() That’s your break even.”īut as Cameron worked late into the evening, day after day, solving the infinite problems that The Way of Water continued to present, he seemed to be enjoying himself. The Way of Water was expensive to make-How expensive? “Very fucking,” according to Cameron, who told me he’d informed the studio that the film represented “the worst business case in movie history.” In order to be profitable, he’d said, “you have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history. Cameron has been working on the movie since 2013 it was due out years ago. “That means there’s been 405 versions of this before it gets to me,” he said. One day in Wellington, New Zealand, where Cameron was finishing the film, he showed me a single effects shot, numbered 405. ![]() Nothing would work the first time Cameron and the production tried it. It’s as personal a film as he’s ever made.” They never really have to deal with the real things that hold you down and give you feet of clay in the real world.” Sigourney Weaver, who starred in the first Avatar as a human scientist and returns for The Way of Water as a Na’vi teenager, told me that the parallels between the life of the director and the life of his characters were far from accidental: “Jim loves his family so much, and I feel that love in our film. What does that look like in a family setting?” Among other things, Cameron said, The Way of Water would be a friendly but pointed rebuke to the comic book blockbusters that now war with Cameron’s films at the top of the box office lists: “I was consciously thinking to myself, Okay, all these superheroes, they never have kids. ![]() Jump off cliffs, dive-bomb into the middle of an enemy armada, but you’ve got kids. “Their instinct is to be fearless and do crazy things. “What do two characters who are warriors, who take chances and have no fear, do when they have children and they still have the epic struggle?” Cameron, a father of five, posited. The movie, Cameron says, is about family: Many of the main characters from the first film are back, but older and with kids to take care of. It’s the first feature Cameron has directed in 13 years, and the first of four planned Avatar sequels. In December, Disney will release Avatar: The Way of Water. “There’s plenty of dangerous things that I won’t go near because they’re dangerous, but they have a randomness factor to them,” Cameron said. Sometimes, Cameron seems like a man in search of a problem to solve, or a deadly experience to survive, but he is emphatic that there is a purpose to the challenges he takes on. “The man was born with an explorer’s instincts and capacity,” Daniel Goldin, the former head of NASA, told me. But he is also a scientist-a camera he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars, attached to the Mars rover-and an adventurer, and not in the dilettante billionaire sense when Cameron sets out to do something, it gets done. It would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie, which he helped invent with his debut, The Terminator, and then reinvent with his second, Aliens it would be accurate to add that he has directed two of the three top-grossing films in history, in Avatar (number one) and Titanic (number three). It is perhaps illustrative of Cameron’s gifts as a filmmaker that even his most determined rivals will admit that Cameron has written and directed some of the most successful films of all time. ![]()
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