Five years have passed since James Cameron's record-breaking Avatar hit theaters, making him the director of the top two highest-grossing movies ever. But what's more amazing than the amount of money the film banked is the time Cameron has taken in developing a sequel, or sequels as it were, especially in today's culture when sequels are cranked out on an annual basis.
We already know Cameron plans to film the next three Avatar movies back-to-back-to-back, hiring writers Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver, and Shane Salerno to crank out the screenplays. Cameron took to the Hero Complex Film Festival over the weekend and talked about the massive undertaking of putting those scripts together.
"We tried an experiment. We set ourselves a challenge of writing three films at the same time. And I could certainly write any one of them but to write three in some reasonable amount of time – we wanted to shoot them together so we couldn’t start one until all three scripts were done and approved. So I knew I was going to have to “parallel process” which meant I would have to work with other writers. And the best experience I had working with other writers was in television when I did Dark Angel. The television room is a highly collaborative, fun experience.'
"So we put together three teams, one for each script. The teams consist of me and another writer on each one of the three [films]. So I’m across all the films and then each one of them would have their own individual script they were responsible for. But what we did that was unique was we sat in the writing room for five months, eight hours a day, and we worked out every beat of the story across all three films so it all connects as one, sort of, three film saga. And I didn’t tell them which one was going to be their’s individually to write until the last day. So everyone was equally invested, story wise, in all three films.'
"So, for example, the guy that got movie three, which is middle one of this new trilogy, he now knows exactly what preceded and what follows out of what he’s writing at any given moment. We all consider that to be a really exciting, creative and groundbreaking experiment in screenwriting. I don’t know if that necessarily yields great scripts but it certainly worked for us as a process to get our minds around this kind of epic with all these new creatures, environments and characters and all that.'
"Cause the first thing I did was sat for a year and wrote 1500 pages of notes of the world and the cultures and the different clans and different animals and different biomes and so on. And had a lot of loose thematic stuff that ran through that but I didn’t a concrete story. I wanted to approach it more like, “Guys we’re going to adapt a novel or series of novels.” Because I felt that kind of detail, even if movies can’t ever be that detailed – it can be visually detailed, it can’t be that detailed in terms of character and culture. But you always get this tip of the iceberg kind of thing. You sense it’s there off camera or in the past of the moment that you’re seeing. So I felt that was the way to do it."
The interesting thing is Cameron's admission this might not be the best approach to screenwriting, but it's certainly a novel one. Whether it works or not we'll find out in December 2016 with the arrival of Avatar 2, followed by a new film in December the next two years. [/Film]
