Avatar (2009)

Would you make love to an alien? Because James Cameron wants to know. Lizzie & Chris cap a James Cameron Christmas with perhaps his most polarizing film, Avatar. From epic spats to studio subterfuge and accusations of plagiarism, the journey to Pandora (and box office glory) begs the question: was it worth a seemingly self-imposed exile to a world that doesn't exist? *CORRECTIONS: Contrary to Lizzie's assertion, Zoe Saldaña was not in any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels; thus, Chris's point that she was a relative unknown stands! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:04Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a pioneering and potentially a little problematic film from one of cinema's grumpiest masterminds. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what is your holiday gift to our listeners this year?

• 2:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Today, we are discussing Avatar. In honor of the release of the third Avatar film, which will be coming out on December 19th. It's James Cameron movie. It is a movie he made. And no, no, we're gonna, we're gonna dive into it. It is a really interesting, really interesting story. There are some really unusual elements to this story that I was not sort of expecting. And I'm really excited to talk about it because this is a movie that I think, that I often forget about within his filmography, to be candid.

• 2:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Chris Winterbauer?

  There are three movies of his that I often forget about. This is one of them.

• 2:57Lizzie Bassett?

  What are the others two?

• 2:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I forget about Piranha Two, because, you know, I've only seen it once.

• 3:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 3:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I often forget about True Lies.

• 3:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, you know what? I do, too.

• 3:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think about True Lies very much.

• 3:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not that I don't think about it, it's that I forget that it's him a lot of the time.

• 3:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's very unusual. I think True Lies is, in a weird way, more of an outlier than any of his other films because it's effectively a spoof.

• 3:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's a comedy.

• 3:18Chris Winterbauer?

  We will get to True Lies. We're not talking about it today. Today, we are talking about Avatar. We're going to Pandora. And Lizzie, I have to ask, had you seen Avatar before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

• 3:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I had seen Avatar before, of course. This came out in 2009 when we were sophomores in college, juniors in college, somewhere around there.

• 3:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think it was junior year.

• 3:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 3:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Winter of 2009.

• 3:42Lizzie Bassett?

  A dark time for all, you know? I'll just be very upfront about this. I do not care for this franchise. I really didn't like this movie the first time that I saw it. I was like angry at how much I did not like this movie when I saw it in theaters. Upon rewatching it this time for the podcast, I felt a similar rage burble up in my gut. When I looked at the runtime and remembered that it was two hours and 43 minutes long. And I that rage continued to broil and simmer, I would say, for the first hour and 20 minutes of this movie. I was really not enjoying it, really not happy. I was finding a lot of things about it that I found deeply problematic, which I assume we will talk about a little bit here.

• 4:26Lizzie Bassett?

  And at around the hour and 20 minute mark, this movie does pick up substantially for me. And I actually, I will say, I really enjoyed the back half of this movie. Once the actual conflict comes into play, it is pretty fun. Look, it's gorgeous. It looks great. Everything about this is beautiful. I know the technology is groundbreaking. I know we're going to talk about that. My problem with Avatar is James Cameron is a fantastic writer, as we have learned by covering many of his other movies. And it just feels like with this franchise, he has decided to let that go and just focus more on what he can do technologically than what he can do in terms of storytelling.

• 5:08Lizzie Bassett?

  And I was thinking a lot about Toy Story when I was watching this this time, because something we discussed in that episode is that that was a technological marvel in terms of what they were able to do. First fully computer generated movie ever. But that still wasn't the most important thing about Toy Story. The most important thing about Toy Story was the story. And I do feel like that is lost with Avatar. And I'm not saying it's not fun. I don't want to crap on anybody who loves Avatar. I completely understand because it is really cool to look at and everything. But yeah, it's just, it's not something I would choose to watch voluntarily. My only other gripe with Avatar, and I'm excited to talk about this because I assume there is a reason for this, is that motion capture acting, as we learned on Lord of the Rings in terms of Andy Serkis

• 5:53Lizzie Bassett?

  and how he kind of pioneered a lot of this. Is such a skill that I think people don't appreciate how difficult this is to remain expressive. When you're not able to really use your face, the way that you're used to using it. And I think everyone in this movie pulls it off miraculously. With one massive exception, Chris, and I don't know if you agree with this.

• 6:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Sigourney Weaver.

• 6:16Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 6:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Sorry, we'll continue.

• 6:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I think Sam Worthington is a real dead space in this movie, and I actually like him.

• 6:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I don't agree. I think he's fine. I think he's totally fine in this movie.

• 6:28Lizzie Bassett?

  He's fine as a human. When it gets to his avatar, I think because he can't rely on his face the same way. It is a bit tough for me to watch him, especially opposite like Zoe Saldana and CCH Pounder, Wes Studi. Like everyone else I feel is really pulling it off so much more. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's to do with voice acting. I don't know. But he just feels like a bit of dead air to me in the middle of this movie. And that's my hot take. I, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what to say about the sort of like white savior elements of this. I don't love them, but yeah, Chris, what do you think?

• 7:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I have a similar, I guess I have the, yeah, it's kind of a cognitive dissonance around this movie. Because like you said, the artistry, the visual effects, the set pieces, the final battle scene.

• 7:15Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 7:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Generally speaking, the visuals remain incredible 16 years later. In fact, I think it's only by the standard set by Avatar Way of Water that these visuals don't look good. It's only when you compare them to the sequel that they don't hold up. By comparison to any other film, they are still remarkable. There's one exception. It's not that I think Sigourney Weaver's performance as the avatar is bad. I think her avatar is the one avatar that does not look good in this movie. And there's actually a very specific reason for that. I think the artists would agree. They had a really hard time designing her. The main issue was her nose. The artists tried widening it to match the feeline look of the other characters. And it no longer looks like Sigourney Weaver because she has a very distinctly narrow nose.

• 8:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So they eventually just slimmed it out and justified the mix of human. And Navi DNA could yield any number of combinations. But I actually, I just generally speaking, her avatar sticks out to me like a sore thumb. Curious what our audience thinks. I did not have the same experience as you. I enjoyed this movie quite a bit when it came out. I remember seeing it in theaters. I saw it in 3D. I don't remember if it was IMAX or not. And a few shots I still remember to this day in 3D. The water droplet in Zero G when he wakes up and it racks focus to it. The close up of the viper wolf as it snarls at him in the jungle when he is alone at night before he's saved by Soi Saldanya, Naitiri. That shot, I just remember thinking in the theater, I have never seen something look that photorealistic in a movie before.

• 8:45Chris Winterbauer?

  That is not something that was photographed that is real. There's also this seemingly innocuous shot that is completely unremarkable in 2D. It is a shot of Jake and the rest of the band, Sigourney Weaver, et cetera, in the prison cell toward the end of act two. In 3D, for some reason, that shot, there was so much depth to that shot that wouldn't normally be there. Again, I really left that movie thinking 3D is going to be something. It's going to be more than a gimmick. I really thought this is the future of cinema. I was wrong. I think that the story, I agree, is effective, although extremely clunky and tropey. I think the dialogue can be tough for a lot of moments, especially the human dialogue

• 9:29Chris Winterbauer?

  is really a bit of a struggle. Like, we have some Basil exposition chunks, especially at the beginning of the movie.

• 9:35Lizzie Bassett?

  It is exclusively Basil exposition for the first almost 90 minutes of this movie. Like, one of my favorite parts is when they're in the helicopter and Sigourney Weaver is like, "We're going to the, what are the mountains called?"

• 9:47Chris Winterbauer?

  The Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora.

• 9:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, the Hallelujah Mountains, yes, of course. But she says, "We're going there," and the other guy is like, "The Mystic Mountains of Pandora? You mean only the, like, coolest mountains that are floating?" And he like explains what they are and it's just like, "I don't need it. You could have just dropped us in to this world, to this story." I do not like the voiceover. Anyway, Chris, continue.

• 10:11Chris Winterbauer?

  So I also, as we mentioned in Aliens, Sigourney Weaver, wonderful actress. I love her in Aliens. I do feel she's a bit miscast in this movie in a way because she is so tough and adversarial, opposite Korich. I almost feel like it infringes upon Jake's story in a weird way. And you kind of just want her to take over at certain points. And it's, sometimes she sticks out in an ensemble. I also feel candidly, Giovanni Ribisi is a little miscast in this movie.

• 10:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 10:41Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, we really praised the Paul Reiser casting in Aliens. And this movie, in so many ways, is the James Cameron greatest hits of the tropes he knows and loves, right? The corporate show, the military macho man, the natives that are fighting them, the guerrilla warfare. There are so many elements, technology versus nature. Again, we're playing the hits. So I enjoyed it in 2009. I never watched it again. Despite enjoying it, I never felt like I needed to go back to that story in the way that I felt like I did with Aliens or Terminator 2, or even The Terminator. And so, again, fell into the true lies category of Cameron film movies. I kind of enjoyed when I watched them, but I just didn't find very thought provoking in any way.

• 11:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and you're talking about the tropes that he's returning to. They're not just storytelling tropes. There's visual Cameron references in this. Like, we talked about the power loader in Aliens. That is, again, almost verbatim brought back here.

• 11:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, with the amp suit.

• 11:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 11:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's just, it frustrates me because it just feels like a massive pastiche of so many movies. And that's not usually what he does. He is usually so original, not just in the technology and the visuals, but also in terms of the story. And that is very much missing here for me.

• 11:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, that's where, upon diving into this more, I actually have to disagree.

• 12:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, great.

• 12:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So I do think Terminator feels very original to us. Terminator 2 feels original to us. I do think he is playing more with pastiche than we realize there, especially if you go back and look at the science fiction that influenced him. But I agree with you, it's less of a direct copy paste, or less a simplistic copy paste. And it feels like it's been run A more interesting story generator, his brain. Again, rewatching it, I kind of felt more or less the same. I thought the visuals were amazing. The action is great. Sois Aldanya in particular is so good.

• 12:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Really good.

• 12:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Just really brings that character to life. That is the most convincing CG character I'd seen up until that point. Specifically, Nate Terry, more than Gollum, more than anybody else in the movie.

• 12:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I think she's amazing and she really brings an emotional depth to this movie that's missing. Also, CCH Pounder as well has some really incredible moments and I have to call out Laz Alonso.

• 12:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's great as Suteh.

• 12:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Really good, really, really good.

• 12:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I disagree. I think Sam Worthington is pretty good in this movie, but I think it makes sense. He's a marine, he's reserved, he should have a much smaller performance than the rest of the folks around him.

• 13:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally. I'm not saying he did anything wrong. I'm saying for me, it doesn't play super well in the form of his avatar.

• 13:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Got it.

• 13:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That's my only complaint about it. As a human, I think he's great. I actually do like him and think he's a good actor. He doesn't do it for me in terms of the motion capture in this. Can I ask you really quickly? What is the discussion around the sort of use of quote unquote native tropes in this movie? Like, is everybody just, is everybody cool with this? Am I totally off base?

• 13:33Chris Winterbauer?

  No, this movie is very controversial for that point. Let's talk more about the reception. Let's save that for the end because that's a big, big, big point of contention that a lot of people have with this movie.

• 13:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 13:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't want to make that point upfront only because I will speak to it more in the reception when we get to the release of the film. And again, it's, that's been a point of conversation for 14 years, 15, 16, seven, you know, years now.

• 13:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I figured that was the case, but I couldn't totally remember what came after the first one.

• 13:59Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, if I may, the offer, and my sister pointed me in this direction, a slightly different critique. I think that the story is reductive. I'm not bored. It's very effective. But like you said, it's simplistic. And I think that my biggest problem, when I really think about it, is that there's this rich history in science fiction, especially literature of building out alien cultures and exploring what would it be like for us to interact with an alien culture? Specifically to have two different moral structures clash in a specific way. And some of my favorites, you know, Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card, which is a sequel to Enders Game, The Sparrow. Maria Doria Russell, or even something like, you know, Mad Max Fury Road, which is not an alien culture, but it is a culture that's alien to us. And we're trying to figure out, ooh, why is it that they have these specific pseudo quasi-religious,

• 14:43Chris Winterbauer?

  you know, worship structures around bullet farms, et cetera? And it feels like, even though I know that Cameron and his team went to great efforts to bring Pandora to life, it kind of just feels like Earth mixed with a glow stick at the end of the day.

• 14:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And there's just not a lot of complexity here. The Na'vi are just good, the humans are bad. And again, Cameron has admitted this is intentional. They are a lightly reworked, generic, American indigenous riff, period.

• 15:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Well, I mean, you know what? I couldn't stop thinking about watching this movie as another three-hour-long movie that we recently discussed, though we have not covered it itself.

• 15:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Dances with Wolves.

• 15:18Lizzie Bassett?

  That is right, Dances with Wolves. This is literally Dances with Wolves in space. That's all I could think about this whole time.

• 15:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, he has said it is John Smith Pocahontas in space. So let's get into it. I think James Cameron would tell us both.

• 15:31Lizzie Bassett?

  To shut up?

• 15:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yes, he'd say, shut your mouth. This movie made an insane amount of money.

• 15:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Wipe that smile off your face.

• 15:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he would also say, the story is intentionally simple, so it would appeal to as many people as possible.

• 15:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Fine.

• 15:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So whether that's fair or not, let's explore Avatar, the science fiction lineage that he did dive into. And let's see if we can figure out why Hollywood's most financially successful director on a per-film basis has exiled himself to Pandora, I mean, New Zealand, for nearly 20 years, and see if he's going to stay there for much longer. But first, the details. Avatar is a 2009 science fiction epic film written and directed by, as we mentioned, James Cameron or Jimmy C. and his concrete boots. It was produced by James Cameron and John Landau. It stars Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, Zoe Saldana as Nitiiri, Sigourney Weaver as Grace, Stephen Lang as the scenery-chewing Colonel Miles Quaritch. I like Stephen Lang in this movie.

• 16:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Michelle Rodriguez as Trudy, Giovanni Raveese as Parker, the corporate shill, Joel David Moore as Norm Spellman, CCH Pounder, as we mentioned, as Moat, Wes Studi as E2 Khan, and many, many more. It was Released by 20th Century Fox on December 18th, 2009, and as always, the IMDb logline reads, "A paraplegic marine dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the world he feels is his home." Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, "The Making of Avatar" by Jodie Duncan, "Capturing Avatar," the documentary in the DVD's special feature, James Cameron, "An Unauthorized Biography" by Mark Shapiro, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film. And we are not going

• 17:13Chris Winterbauer?

  to spend as much time on the technological minutia as they do in "Capturing Avatar" or "Corridor Cruise: Breaking Down the VFX of the Movie," for example, that you can find on YouTube, because those are better suited to a visual medium. And I would like to follow the human drama of what it must be like to work with, as you mentioned, grumpy McGrumperson, James Cameron.

• 17:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Who I do still love more every time we talk about him, even though I don't know that I ever want to personally interact with him.

• 17:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Probably not.

• 17:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Because he'd hate me, and that's fine.

• 17:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's start with a couple quotes about James Cameron from the studio side. Bill Mechanic, we've discussed at length.

• 17:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 17:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Who ran Fox Studios during Titanic, once said of James Cameron, "Even though he knew I was on his side, nobody's ever on his side. It's like you're in the trenches and your infantry mate is shooting at you, even if you're the only person there who can save his life." End quote. Here's Leonard Goldberg, president of Fox, this was said prior to the abyss. "James Cameron told me, 'I want you to know one thing. Once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you'll be able to stop me is to kill me.'" End quote. He was probably serious.

• 18:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, there's no probably. He was definitely serious.

• 18:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, like the movie itself, the story of Avatar begins with a dream. Not a dream of flying, like Jake Sully describes at the beginning of the film, but a dream of a fantastic world, far more beautiful than our own. As James Cameron once told GQ, "I have my own private streaming service that's better than any of that shit out there, and it runs every night for free." Just like the plot for The Terminator and some scenes from Aliens, the idea for Avatar came to James in his sleep. It was the early 1970s. He was a student at Fullerton College, and one night, he walked across Pandora. I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that looked kind of like fiber optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent

• 19:05Chris Winterbauer?

  particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it. And these kinds of lizards that didn't look like much until they took off and then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living frisbees. And then they came down and land on something. It was all in a dream. I woke up super excited and I actually drew it. Now, this was very common for James. He would often wake up and sketch his dreams. And it was also around this time, Lizzie, that he made a painting which shows a tall thin woman with blue skin who is wearing skintight purple pants. Cameron says that this painting of the 12-foot-tall blue woman was actually inspired by a dream that his mom had. One day, she had this dream about a blue goddess with six breasts. She thought it was amazing. She went on and on about it. It must have stuck with me.

• 19:46Chris Winterbauer?

  As I ended up using it in Xenogenesis, we eventually ditched four of the six breasts. Although I did draw the six-breasted version at one point, it wasn't quite as appealing as it sounds. Regardless of where it came from, 12-foot-tall blue women on James Cameron's mind for 30 years. So, he's writing his first screenplay in the late 1970s. It takes place on multiple planets and the movie ends with a native population that is 12 feet tall and blue. And I believe, Lizzie, that Xenogenesis, that short film we discussed in Aliens, was the proof of concept he was trying to make to get funding for this movie. Now, Cameron was about as close to getting that movie made as he was to reaching an actual alien planet.

• 20:29Chris Winterbauer?

  He was a nobody at this point in time, so the drawings in that script went into a drawer. But, as we have learned and as we all know, James Cameron, from 1984 through 1994, had one of the most meteoric rises in the history of Hollywood. So, The Terminator starts it off. Six and a half million dollar budget makes 40 million domestically, 80 million worldwide. Aliens, which we just covered, 18 and a half million dollar budget, 85 million dollars domestically. The Abyss, technically his only misfire in this run, still made 54 million dollars domestically against a 45 million dollar budget. And then- Then, of course, comes Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

• 21:12Chris Winterbauer?

  $520 million worldwide against a $100 million budget, the third-highest grossing film ever at the time of its release, behind Star Wars and E.T. And then True Lies, which was just a cool $378 million against a $120 million budget. The reviews were positive to glowing, depending on the film, but primarily working as a genre director, Oscar recognition kind of eluded Mr. Cameron until this point. He was pushing technological advances, the use of CGI, as we've discussed, in The Abyss and Terminator 2, and he was also dogged by some accusations of plagiarism. So you mentioned Cameron as a master of pastiche. Sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison accused him

• 21:56Chris Winterbauer?

  of ripping off his 1957 short story Soldier From Tomorrow and the Outer Limits episode in Inspired Soldier for The Terminator. Ellison and the studio settled. Cameron denies the claims. Eh, I don't think these are too similar. I think, generally speaking, he's pulling big sci-fi concepts, and it's easy to identify them across a lot of different pieces of work. Filia and Konstantinos Kortis sued James Cameron, accusing him of stealing their concept of a half-man, half-bull creature who could shapeshift into various forms from their script The Minotaur for the T-1000 in Terminator 2. That case was dismissed and feels tenuous at best.

• 22:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, you have to assume someone at James Cameron's height of success is going to get a certain amount of these claims.

• 22:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he also caught some strays in a suit around the French film La Total, which was what True Lies was based on. Cameron was not accused of anything. He bought the rights in good faith. It was about the film that it was based on, not True Lies itself. So shortly after True Lies, Cameron's 40 years old, and he is gearing up to make what movie, Lizzie? The biggest movie of his career, the biggest movie in Hollywood's history it would soon become?

• 23:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, that's Lord of the Rings. How does Titanic go?

• 23:06Chris Winterbauer?

  What?

• 23:08Lizzie Bassett?

  How does Titanic go? What does the penny whistle in Titanic do?

• 23:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Every night in my dreams. That's all you need.

• 23:21Chris Winterbauer?

  There you go. He decides to revisit that bioluminescent dream from two decades prior while he's gearing up for Titanic. This movie that he's gonna write is gonna come after Titanic, and it is going to encompass all of his interests. Biology, technology, the environment, the military. And his inspirations are the pulpy sci-fi adventures of the early to mid 20th century. So this is very similar.

• 23:43Lizzie Bassett?

  L. Ron Hubbard.

• 23:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yes, Space Jazz. But it's very similar to George Lucas pulling from Flash Gordon, for example, to make Star Wars. Here's the quote from Cameron. "I've always had a fondness for those kind of science fiction adventure stories. The male warrior in an exotic alien land, overcoming the physical challenges and confronting the fears of difference. Do we conquer, exploit, integrate?" Now, the most obvious book that he's pulling from is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. This is John Carter of Mars, the film adaptation. The first book is called A Princess of Mars. And if you guys are unfamiliar with these books, they follow a late 19th century Confederate veteran, John Carter, who is whisked off to a dying world, Mars. He falls in love with a beautiful Martian princess. He has to integrate with the alien culture. Cameron told The New Yorker in 2009,

• 24:29Chris Winterbauer?

  "With Avatar, I thought, forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys adventure movie. Something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars. A soldier goes to Mars. He was tired of this dumb Titanic stuff and the girls. And Lissy's like, no, sir, please don't."

• 24:46Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what you're so good at.

• 24:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 24:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Please don't forget about that.

• 24:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there are a lot of other books that he may have pulled from. So we should mention Strugotsky's Noon Universe series. This is where the name Pandora may have come from. Robert F. Young's To Fell a Tree, Ben Bova's The Winds of Alter, Clifford Simic's Desertion, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. The point is, so much of what's in this movie has existed in so many classic works of science fiction before. So Cameron pumps out an 80-page treatment in two weeks. He says that the treatment almost wrote itself because it was a combination of ideas that he'd been percolating on for years. So Pandora was, according to Cameron, based on a drawing he made in 11th grade called "Spring on Planet Flora." That became the inspiration for the luminous planet in his script Xenogenesis, which had

• 25:35Chris Winterbauer?

  a beautiful forest with a vast network of interconnected bioluminescent trees. And the human characters cannot survive on this planet because of its deadly atmosphere. The planet is also sentient, much like Aowah, which is just an anagram for Yahweh, the word for God, in Avatar. I also do want to mention Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which kind of does something similar with the way that they lull the arriving humans into slumber and vulnerability and then attack them. Now, Josh Solley was the original name of the hero of this story, and he was based on a similar character from a short story called Absence that Cameron had written, which he had turned into a short film script called Chrysalis. This was about a cosmic journey of self-discovery and transcendence taken on by a wheelchair-bound

• 26:19Chris Winterbauer?

  man who elects to surgically remove all external sensory input so they can journey through his own mind. So a little bit more of a Buddhist approach to Avatar, one might say.

• 26:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, I was just gonna say, that's something I actually wish they had taken a bit more time to explore in Avatar, because that is such an interesting concept, that this man who's lost his ability to walk, who once, you know, thrived on his athleticism, is able to regain it by taking on a different body. And that's something that goes, I think, strangely unexplained in Avatar and unexplored. And I wish, I think they could have done a lot more with that.

• 26:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I also saw a couple of articles that pointed out tropes of ableism in Avatar, specifically the idea of a character with a disability who wasn't born with that disability, ultimately desperately seeking a magical cure for that disability. But then I saw another really interesting article from a writer who has spinal muscular atrophy, and they made the point that from their perspective, Jake Solley's goal changes from being one in which he seeks this ultimate cure to being one in which he seeks the family and community that the Navi are offering him. And they actually really felt that the scene that moved them was when Nateri picks up

• 27:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Jake's body in human form, and it's clear that she still loves him and sees him, and so the love is very much divorced from any physical form at all, and it's very much just a love for who Jake is, which was also a really interesting interpretation. So I just thought I'd point those out.

• 27:55Lizzie Bassett?

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• 28:38Lizzie Bassett?

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• 29:40Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Cameron, the concept of an alien avatar came from a story that actually served as a big inspiration for aliens. And we talked about it briefly when we were doing our aliens coverage. Lizzie, the story's called "Mother." And in this story, a xenomorph, Cameron's name for a genetically engineered alien creature, is created based on a local life form in order to serve the needs of the company. These xenomorphs are controlled via a psychic link. With an adept or an electronic link with a trained controller. And according to Duncan's book, the original treatment is actually very close to what we see in the movie. There are some names that are different. Nate Terry was Zuleika, Jake was Josh, but the big beats of the story, again, John Smith Pocahontas retold on a foreign planet, like, pretty much the same.

• 30:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So Cameron really wants to line up Avatar as the direct successor to Titanic. He says, "There was supposed to have been a continuity of work during the time that Titanic was being made to prepare us for making Avatar after." So he sends the treatment to producer John Landau. Now, Landau had been a Fox executive who had overseen the production of True Lies. And unlike nearly every other executive, it seems like James Cameron has worked with, he and Landau actually really got along. And I think that Cameron recognized that that was pretty unique. And so when Landau left Fox, Cameron sent him a secret script codenamed Planet Ice, which was not Avatar, that was Titanic. And so Landau jumps at the opportunity to work with Cameron. This lifelong partnership forms. They go and make Titanic together.

• 31:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And I would just love to know, as they're working on Titanic, which is this very grounded, sweeping romance, he gets this treatment for this militaristic, giant blue people on a planet, science fiction script. It just must have been like, really? This is... I'm sure he was thinking, "I'd follow you anywhere, James," but that's just such an interesting pivot following Titanic. But it seems like James Cameron's timing is going to be just right. So he'd founded Digital Domain, his VFX house, in 1993. It's him, Stan Winston and Scott Ross, former head of ILM, half-owned by IBM. And Steven Spielberg has just proven that you can composite something organic onto live-action plates with Jurassic Park. Now Cameron wants to do the same thing that Steven Spielberg's done, with one big difference.

• 31:45Chris Winterbauer?

  In Avatar, all of the Na'vi have to have a full range of human expressiveness in their faces, which is a lot harder than making a Tyrannosaurus Rex roar at the end of the day. So that means he needs to anchor the CGI in real performances by real actors, hence the need for, Lizzie?

• 32:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Motion capture.

• 32:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Or, as Landau and Cameron will insist, "performance capture," and they will yell at you.

• 32:08Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm fine with that. You know what?

• 32:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 32:10Lizzie Bassett?

  They're right. They're right.

• 32:11Chris Winterbauer?

  They are right. But it was called motion capture. 1995 for a reason. It was primarily limited to the movement of an actor's body. They needed to capture the face, so he starts some basic tests at Digital Domain. This is in the summer of 1996, as he is starting production on Titanic. The trades catch wind of Avatar, and a headline from The Hollywood Reporter announces, Cameron's future actors could send in the clones, synthetic stars planned for his avatar. It was said that Avatar would include at least six photorealistic CGI actors in leading roles, actors who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world. And much of the concern seems to be very similar, although I would argue misplaced at this time for a very specific reason,

• 32:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Chris Winterbauer?

  to the use of AI actors, which we're discussing right now.

• 32:57Lizzie Bassett?

  It just feels like a major misunderstanding of what motion capture was.

• 33:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it was terrifying. We talked about it a lot with The Lord of the Rings, especially the two towers and the Return of the King.

• 33:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 33:07Chris Winterbauer?

  But Cameron didn't want to replace actors. Cameron wanted to replace the time spent in makeup and prosthetics with time spent in post-production, using technology to capture their performances right down to the most minute aspects of their facial expressions. So from Cameron's perspective, performance capture should allow the actor to be more expressive than they would be able to when under a bunch of makeup. Which makes sense to me.

• 33:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 33:31Chris Winterbauer?

  But of course, I have the benefit of hindsight. I could see myself in 1997 thinking, you know, oh my God, this guy's going to replace everybody on screen.

• 33:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and we also have to remember this is before Lord of the Rings, and, you know, Andy Serkis as Gollum was a watershed moment in terms of what can be done with motion capture. Excuse me, performance capture.

• 33:48Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So Digital Domain was reportedly staffing up the project, and they were tentatively planning to start production as soon as the summer of 1997. But of course, that was not going to be the case. Now, James quickly realized that motion capture technology was years away from being able to do what he wanted to do. You talked about this, Lizzie, with Toy Story. Moore's Law, just the compute power required to do this didn't exist yet.

• 34:11Lizzie Bassett?

  But it would.

• 34:12Chris Winterbauer?

  But it would. So they pull the plug on R&D, and Cameron tosses the Avatar script back into the drawer full of those saucy drawings of 12-foot-tall blue women, and he focuses on Titanic, which had grown To become the most expensive movie of all time with a budget of $200 million. And everyone is convinced James Cameron is sunk, including James Cameron a little bit. He was pretty freaked out about his career. And then Titanic opens wide in December of 1997. And the box office receipts were outpaced only by the number of middle fingers. James Cameron was thrown at anybody who had ever doubted him. Oh my goodness. It was just a siphon directly from the box office into his ear, blowing up his head to the size of the world.

• 34:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It is amazing.

• 34:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's amazing.

• 34:55Lizzie Bassett?

  For all this crap that we give James Cameron, the things that he has achieved are incredible. Titanic is incredible. He's dropping extras down a deck and breaking their legs for this.

• 35:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. In 20 years, he goes from driving trucks.

• 35:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 35:10Chris Winterbauer?

  For a school district to making the highest grossing film of all time and getting 11 Oscar nominations.

• 35:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 35:18Chris Winterbauer?

  That's wild. That's unheard of. It's unbelievable. Again, do I want to be on that set? I don't think so. Maybe when they all got PCP drugged by the soup that one day.

• 35:30Lizzie Bassett?

  And the clam chowder, yeah.

• 35:31Chris Winterbauer?

  So by the spring of 98, it crosses the $1 billion threshold. It unseats Jurassic Park as the highest grossing movie ever. At the Golden Globes, Cameron infamously says, so does this prove once and for all that size does matter? He topped that off at the Oscars when he concluded his best director acceptance speech by shouting, "I'm king of the world," quoting his own movie. Apparently, a lot of people didn't understand that he was quoting his own movie. It didn't help his reputation. I think this is where we kind of peak with James Cameron as one of the least liked men in Hollywood. Again, I would argue, to give him a little bit of leeway here, he has scaled, you know, the ladder of Hollywood from its lowest rung, you know,

• 36:14Chris Winterbauer?

  designing ships for Roger Corman 20 years prior, and now he has won best director.

• 36:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he's also, you know, there's a lot of jokes shortly after this with like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler at the Golden Globes at his expense.

• 36:26Chris Winterbauer?

  An excellent joke, by the way.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  It was a great year for film, women in film. Kathryn Bigelow nominated tonight.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  I haven't really been following the controversy over Zero Dark Thirty, but when it comes to torture, I trust the lady who spent three years married to James Cameron.

• 36:51Lizzie Bassett?

  He's an easy guy to rag on because he's nuts.

• 36:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Lizzie Bassett?

  And, you know, he has had five wives and he shouts, "I'm king of the world" in his speech. Like, it's very, very easy to make fun of James Cameron. But the problem is, he's usually right.

• 37:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and I think one of the reasons, candidly, it is a little fun to tease him or tease about him is because he's so successful. It's like the ultimate punching up.

• 37:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what I mean? And so I worry less about him taking it the wrong way than other people potentially.

• 37:25Lizzie Bassett?

  He's also like, there is a weird, I believe there is an amount of self-awareness to James Cameron.

• 37:30Chris Winterbauer?

  I think so.

• 37:31Lizzie Bassett?

  That is lacking from some other people that makes me like him despite what a kook he would be to work with.

• 37:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and you know, it's also worth mentioning that in 2022, Cameron did tell The Hollywood Reporter, "I always think of testosterone as a toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system." I think this was directly in reference to the shouting matches that he had with studio heads at the time of the making of Avatar, for example, and Titanic. But it seems like, generally speaking, he's chilled out a bit in the intervening years. So everybody's wondering, what's James Cameron gonna do next? Titanic is the biggest movie ever by commercial and critical standards. And I did some research, Lizzie. I went back to 1960 through 2025. What do you think the average gap after winning Best Director between the award-winning film and that director's next film is in terms of number of years?

• 38:22Chris Winterbauer?

  This is from the last 65 years. I only went back to 1960. I didn't go back earlier.

• 38:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Three years?

• 38:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good, three and a half years.

• 38:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 38:30Chris Winterbauer?

  That's the average gap. Do you know who holds the record for the longest gap between winning the Best Director Oscar and their next film?

• 38:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I have no idea.

• 38:38Chris Winterbauer?

  James Cameron.

• 38:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, you tricky, tricky mix.

• 38:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So 12 years, 97 to 2009. The next closest is Mel Gibson, From Braveheart to Passion of the Christ, nine years. Warren Beatty, Reds to Dick Tracy, nine years. And Robert Redford, Ordinary People to the Milagri. Beanfield War, eight years. If you notice, all three-

• 39:01Lizzie Bassett?

  All actors.

• 39:02Chris Winterbauer?

  All actors. Plenty of projects to keep them busy.

• 39:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 39:05Chris Winterbauer?

  James Cameron, not an actor, but plenty to keep him busy. So in the early 2000s, James Cameron steps away from narrative feature filmmaking for a surprisingly long time. He produced this TV series that I have never seen called Dark Angels starring Jessica Alba, which ran two seasons. It was her big star vehicle that really blew her up. He and Linda Hamilton divorced. He married Suzy Amis, actress from Titanic. They are still married. That was his fifth and last wife.

• 39:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It was a bit of an, of an escandal getting together, but who cares?

• 39:41Chris Winterbauer?

  There seems to always be an overlap whenever he divorces and remarries, it seems.

• 39:47Lizzie Bassett?

  They're very close. That one, yes, 100% there was an overlap, which Linda Hamilton has talked about. We don't have to get into it, but yeah.

• 39:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there are a lot of rumors about what he could do next. A Terminator sequel. It was done. Terminator 3, not the best, not the worst, but it was not done with Cameron. True Lies sequels, which I think he wisely probably realized we didn't need.

• 40:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't need that, yeah.

• 40:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He said everything he needed to say in that movie. A remake of Planet of the Apes that ended up being tackled by Tim Burton. A Spider-Man movie had been discussed since the early 90s, but of course, that was done by San Ranyi. Bright Angel Falling, his asteroid movie. But of course, we had Deep Impact and Armageddon. Solaris, which he did executive produce and Steven Soderbergh directed, which was a bit of a flop. Even an adaptation of Anne Rice's The Mummy, but none of them were meant to be because James Cameron had decided he was gonna disappear from the surface of the earth and go to Mars. He was very, very set on making a documentary about going to space. And he decided he was gonna do it in 3D, which was going to be the technology of the future.

• 40:51Chris Winterbauer?

  What else was he doing, Lizzie?

• 40:53Lizzie Bassett?

  He's going down.

• 40:54Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. He decides the best environment to test a 3D camera in-

• 40:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 41:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Is the crushing depths of the abyss from which James Cameron was forged. He decides he's gonna go to the- Bottom of the ocean. He made a documentary about the Bismarck and then he made two 3D documentaries. One about the Titanic, Ghosts of the Abyss, which I watched in advance of this episode. It's very hokey, very beautiful, like some of the underwater photography is incredible. And it is narrated by Bill Paxton, who is such an affable everyman in this movie. And he's just cracking jokes and these Russian scientists never laugh. He is just the whole time. He's like, so if that number goes under like 20, we're screwed, right? And the science is like, it doesn't go below 19. And he's like, yeah, but if it did, like we would say, and he's like, no, don't touch that. Don't touch it. Bill Paxton is just making jokes that nobody's laughing at. It's very good.

• 41:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Isn't that the one where Bill Paxton tells him about 9/11 when he comes up out of the water?

• 41:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, 9/11 interrupted the filming of that project. And it has been suggested in at least one source that that is why he abandoned the idea of going to space. And he ended up focusing on, on water at this point. So then he did Aliens of the Deep in 2005. But he wasn't just waiting for technology to catch up with his vision for Avatar. He was pushing it forward too. So he, and you can see this in the film, you can see the camera itself. He developed this revolutionary lightweight 3D camera system called Fusion with Vince Pace. Now Vince Pace had helped design and manufacture the underwater lighting system for the Abyss back in 1989. So Pace agrees to work with Cameron on this rig that can capture both 2D and 3D images simultaneously. And it cost $12 million to develop.

• 42:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And Cameron says it was a lot of his own money. Now, if I read this right, the stereoscopic 3D cameras that were available at the time, which Cameron had used to shoot the Terminator ride at Universal, weighed 450 pounds.

• 42:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my God.

• 42:48Chris Winterbauer?

  They actually had to have the stunt man run slower so the camera could keep up with the stunt man when they were filming that Universal ride. When you see these, it's based on the early Sony Digital Ciné Alta Cinema Camera System. You see one of the operators pick this camera up. It's about the size of a shoebox with two lenses on the front. I'm guessing anywhere from 12 to 15 pounds. He picks it up, sticks it in the rig. We're talking 1/40th the size, you know what I mean? Of the camera that had existed before. This is an enormous step forward technologically. So as early as 99, his production company Lightstorm Entertainment starts working with ILM to prepare a facial capture test for a project called Brother Termite. Unfortunate name. Basically, it's a walk and talk between a live-action actress and a CGI character,

• 43:33Chris Winterbauer?

  which is this tiny, suit-wearing alien, like a classic, you know, grays, bulbous head, almond eyes, sort of look. They're walking through a cemetery. The actor playing the alien wears a head-rigged camera to capture images of his face. ILM then used that facial capture data to animate a version of the character, and then they compared it to a keyframe animation, which would have been the classic way of animating it. Facial capture version is definitely superior, so this looks really promising. And then, Lizzie, on the other side of the world, a little studio called Weta changes the game with what movie? Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings: The Chitaus, which introduces the world to Gollum. Can you please just give it to us? The Gollum? You know it's not good, but sure. Come on. There we go. Choke it out. You do it.

• 44:18Chris Winterbauer?

  No, you're too good. No, I'm not. Played by Andy Serkis, played wonderfully by Andy Serkis, and brought to life by Joe Luteri and his team at Weta, the visual effects house, Gollum is a watershed moment, and Cameron credits that with proving to him that he is ready. The technology is ready to make Avatar. But the technology is extremely young. They could only use Serkis's performance roughly 20% of the time. They had to shoot him entirely separately from the rest of the film, but it broke this dam in Hollywood, and everybody rushes to follow. So Robert Zemeckis, The Polar Express, Peter Jackson, King Kong, Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest, arguably the greatest achievement of computer imagery in film since Jurassic Park, only surpassed by Avatar in 2009.

• 45:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it looks really good. Davy Jones looks amazing. 2006, remarkable. And the idea of avatars is very much in the zeitgeist, thanks to video games like Second Life and World of Warcraft. I'm guessing you are big fans of both of those, Lissies, and early predictions about virtual reality. There are a lot of articles kind of predicting what Zuckerberg would try to make us all join the metaverse. Not gonna happen, Mark. Also, James Cameron himself, when he's exploring the Titanic... Titanic is very much using an avatar. They use these remotely operated vehicles, these little ROVs that they send out from their submarines to explore the Titanic at the crushing depths that a human could never survive. But all of a sudden Avatar has competition because there's another project that James Cameron is rumored to be circling, Battle Angel Alita.

• 45:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Have you ever heard of Battle Angel Alita, Lizzie?

• 45:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I have, yes.

• 45:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. It is a Japanese cyberpunk manga series from the early 90s. Very similar to Ghost in the Shell, is my understanding. I have not read the series. I did watch Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of the series. I liked it. It was fine.

• 46:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I liked it too. It's Rosa Salazar, right? That one?

• 46:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 46:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's good.

• 46:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fun. Cameron is gonna direct Alita and he's gonna do it in 3D because he's doing everything in 3D. He even said he was doing his daughter's birthday party in 3D.

• 46:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Was that real?

• 46:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think so. I think he said it as a joke, but he says everything so seriously, it's hard to tell.

• 46:20Lizzie Bassett?

  You cannot tell, yeah.

• 46:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So in 2005, Cameron and Landau go to 20th Century Fox, who he had done Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic, along with Paramount with, and they make them a proposal. "We want to make Avatar and we want to make Battle Angel Alita. We don't know which one we're gonna do, and the technology isn't quite there yet. So give us $10 million and one year, and we will pioneer the research and development needed to make this movie happen." Gives Fox a nice out. They don't have to greenlight the movie until after they see the tech demo that Cameron and Landau are gonna prepare. Plus, they get to own all of the technologies that Cameron's team develops with those $10 million, and they can amortize them down the line on future projects. So Cameron's basically proposing a $10 million test film.

• 47:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, that's surprising that he would relinquish the technology to them.

• 47:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So I think the issue is that Digital Domain, Cameron basically, not exactly, but kind of exits in 99. So the movie Titanic made an incredible amount of money, but in what would become, or what was already a pattern, the VFX house saw none of those profits.

• 47:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And so Digital Domain was going to have to move more into the commercial space, and it was gonna be less Cameron's, I think, playbox, and more a full-fledged commercial production, visual effects production studio. So my guess is that Cameron, especially after spending A lot of his money on developing the 3D technology. Probably realized I should probably get somebody else to start spending the money on developing these things. And I feel confident that Fox is going to want to make one of these movies. Once they see what we can do with this technology. So he doesn't know which one he's going to do first. Fox says yes, and Cameron has to pick one of the movies that he's going to do. But he was struggling to synthesize the graphic novels for Alita into a script. He's got too much material, so he settles on Avatar in August or September of 2005.

• 48:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He's got $10 million and one year to prove to Fox that a movie about 12-foot-tall aliens is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in spend. And if anybody can do it, it's James Cameron. So he makes two teams to work concurrently, tech team and the art team. The art team works near his house in Malibu. They're brought in completely blind. He's like, this story is so original, no one can read it outside of my, my house. They arrive not knowing what the project was. They are given his scriptment to read. Everyone's really excited when they read it because they realize they're not working off of existing IP. They don't have to design it after a character that already exists. They get to make everything up, everything that James Cameron wants, obviously. His main direction, come up with flora and fauna that nobody has seen before. And so for months, they are just drawing pencil on paper.

• 48:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Cameron would even sit down and draw with them. If you guys are unfamiliar, Cameron, wonderful artist, concept artist, painter, matte painter, could make models.

• 49:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Famously, you can see his hand in Titanic drawing Kate Winslet.

• 49:04Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Well, is that his hand or did he just do the drawing?

• 49:08Lizzie Bassett?

  It's his hand.

• 49:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Got it. The inspiration that they pulled, of course, was from things in our world, which is why the Hallelujah Mountains look very familiar because that is based on a mountain range in China. These limestone formations in China, jungles and waterfalls in Venezuela, lichen, succulents, exotic flowers. They pulled from colorful marine life from Cameron's deep sea expeditions. Art from his earlier movies like Aliens in the Abyss. I think a lot of the military designs are very evocative of an evolution of aliens, for example. Illustrations of extinct animal species, for example, the, I always think of the Tasmanian tiger. When I see the viper wolf, for example.

• 49:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And then it was a delicate balance trying to predict what Cameron had in. His head and trying to bring it to life. He already had descriptions for some of the characters and Latin names for plants and animals. And he said that all the design elements had to be biologically feasible. And he brought in a CG artist to help the artist understand how these creatures would move. And the big core concept was that he wanted six-legged animals. Now, according to The New Yorker, Cameron reserved designing the Thanator for himself. That's the big, giant, six-legged tiger, like a black jaguar that attacks.

• 50:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, made me very sad when it dies at the end.

• 50:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so Neville Page, lead creature designer, said that as Jim put it in the treatment, a Thanator can eat an alien for dessert. He wanted to outdo himself, outdo the alien queen. I don't think he did. The alien queen remains one of my faves.

• 50:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Chris Winterbauer?

  But the creature that took the longest to design only had four limbs. It was the Ekron or the Banshee. The Na'vi, of course, Lizzie also have four limbs. From the beginning, they were to be tall and blue, but they started more amphibian or reptile. Would you like to see a couple of the designs that they did not use?

• 50:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 50:45Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Tell me if you would make love to any of these, because that is what James Cameron was asking his art team. Listeners, you can see what Lizzie's having to look at right now and decide for yourself. If you head to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast, we'll post all of these images for free.

• 51:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh. Uh, very pointy, very ET. I'm gonna just look. To each their own. I don't want to yuck James Cameron's yum, but not for me. If we're talking about sex and aliens, it's not these.

• 51:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's interesting. Totally agree. More alien.

• 51:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Particularly that like hammerhead shark one is not, not gonna do it.

• 51:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Much more alien, more aggressive, I think in most instances. A bit more of a Star Wars vibe, you might say, from some of them. The Mos Eisley Cantina comes to mind.

• 51:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 51:41Chris Winterbauer?

  They experiment with antenna, gills, one-eyed faces. But as I mentioned, the direction from Cameron was a bit crass. He wanted something that people would be willing to have sex with.

• 51:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he wants a fuckable alien. We can just say it.

• 51:54Chris Winterbauer?

  He does. The quote is from concept artist. Jordy Shell took his moto, and I'll read this. "I do believe at some point, he said something to the effect of, 'The audience has to want to fuck her.'" I mean, Jim is very plain in his language, so I went, "All right." So I made something that I don't know if I really particularly wanted to fuck it, but it was certainly a beautiful alien. He definitely, he wanted it, because he really prefers women that are kind of athletic and buff and stuff like that. So, you know, I designed something with big hands and feet and a big presence that felt really big and strong. End quote.

• 52:24Lizzie Bassett?

  And also boobs that are exposed the entire time. So much underboob, so much alien underboob in this. And then there's just like two, the tiniest little feathers.

• 52:32Chris Winterbauer?

  No nerves.

• 52:33Lizzie Bassett?

  There's just two little feathers that somehow sit directly over their nerves. Yeah.

• 52:36Chris Winterbauer?

  They're taped down with alien tape.

• 52:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I actually hate how little clothes they put on the Navi in this. It honestly, there's something-

• 52:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Go for it. Just make him naked at some point. Just either embrace it or don't, you know? Who cares?

• 52:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 52:50Chris Winterbauer?

  They're just aliens.

• 52:51Lizzie Bassett?

  The way that they do this, it's like that there is a consciousness of the fact that it's titillating because they're slightly covered. That somehow makes it worse for me. Like, give him a bigger loincloth.

• 53:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't really think about it. I do think Nateri's attractive, but I don't. That was not a huge part of it. It has more to do with Zoe Saldana's performance, in my opinion.

• 53:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 53:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I find Zoe Saldana more attractive than Nateri, to be clear. My sister says, "Yeah, right." Well, you know, my wife's very tall and blue. "Lest you think that that quote is hearsay, here is James Cameron on the same issue. We just kept asking ourselves, 'Well, would you wanna do it?'" To which I say, "Sir, the use of 'we' is suspect in that sentence."

• 53:32Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he is requiring his team to also ask, "Would you wanna do it?" I get it.

• 53:37Chris Winterbauer?

  "He told Playboy, 'Right from the beginning, I said, 'She's got to have tits.'" "Even though that makes no sense, because her race, the Navi, aren't placental mammals." "To your point, Lizzie, I came up with this free-floating lion's mane-like array of feathers, and we strategically lit an angled shots to not draw attention to her breasts, but they're right there."

• 53:56Lizzie Bassett?

  No, you didn't. No, you did not. This movie is just Avatar: Alien Underboob. That's like most of what's happening in this movie.

• 54:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, we had a shot in which Nateri falls into a specific position, and because she is lit by orange firelight, it lights up the nipples. That was good, except we were going for a PG-13 rating, so we wound up having to fix it. We'll have to put it on the special edition DVD. It will be a collector's item. An Nateri Playboy centerfold would have been a good idea." End quote.

• 54:23Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 54:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I didn't realize.

• 54:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm just trolling you at this point with these quotes.

• 54:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I didn't realize how much James Cameron

• 54:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He really thought about this.

• 54:32Lizzie Bassett?

  really, really wanted to have sex with an alien. A lot, I guess.

• 54:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Let me put it in a slightly less creepy way. These are not James Cameron's words. These are our researchers' words. They wanted the Na'vi to look human enough for the audience to relate to, which ultimately is what the animation team accomplishes.

• 54:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 54:47Chris Winterbauer?

  The design team and the animation team. Now, does James Cameron have a big poster, you know, in the inside of his locker? Who knows? So the design swings from something very alien, maybe amphibian or reptilian, to almost basically blue humans, and then lands somewhere in the middle with the more feline version that we get in the final film.

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• 55:49Chris Winterbauer?

  20 miles away, in Playa Vista, the tech team is hard at work under the stewardship of a What Went Wrong alum, Lizzie. Did you see Rob Legato's name in the credits on this film?

• 56:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I did.

• 56:02Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right, who had risen to fame with his work on Interview with the Vampire, and then, of course, won an Oscar for Titanic, his work with James Cameron on Titanic. So Cameron had repaired this 280,000-square-foot hangar in Playa Vista, California. It's actually in the, it's where Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose in the 1940s.

• 56:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I've been in there. The YouTube space is actually either in that or near that compound.

• 56:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, how the mighty have fallen to YouTube.

• 56:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 56:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Rob Legato had created a virtual camera while working on Martin Scorsese's The Avatar. Basically, the camera's position and perspective and motion were captured so that the operator could move it within a virtual CG landscape in real time, giving the director and the entire camera team a real-time, rough rendering of the CGI world that they were looking into. So, Lizzie, you've probably seen videos of this before. The director, James Cameron in this instance, is holding what looks like two handlebars with like an iPad in between them, right?

• 56:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 56:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So, there's no actual camera there. They're just capturing the position, and they are assigning a virtual lens. And then Cameron, through the screen, can see, oh, this is roughly what the environment looks like around my actors. This is roughly what the CG representations of my actors are. Imagine like a Nintendo 64-style graphics, very, you know, low-quality, blocky of what the scene eventually will look like. But again, it's very revolutionary because it allows for fully CG environments. So, this is not live plate photography. This is shooting in a gray room and then replacing everything. But Cameron doesn't see just gray in his monitor.

• 57:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He's actually seeing a rough version to scale of what this is gonna look like after all of the CGI is completed. So, everybody has a lot of questions because one of the reasons that Gollum, they think, maybe worked so well is because he was set against real-world backgrounds.

• 57:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 58:00Chris Winterbauer?

  This is gonna be fully CGI everything for a lot of these scenes. Fully CGI background, fully CGI characters. A lot of this movie is just fully CG shots entirely. So, the team is testing two forms of performance capture. There's the traditional dots on the actors' faces and also a version where there's a camera positioned in front of the actor's face that is mounted to their head and captures their performance. And this is the method that they decided to go with, for the most part, for the movie, which meant they had to figure out how to mount a camera to the actors' heads.

• 58:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is wild when you think about these performances, that you're looking into a camera. That's right in front of your face the entire time.

• 58:38Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So they had carbon fiber helmets molded to the head of each actor. And in late 2005, they tested a prototype on two actors, not in the final film, to act out the scene in which Nateri saves Jake Sully from the viper wolves. Daniel Bess plays Josh Sully at the time. And Yoonjin Kim from Lost and more recently K-pop Demon Hunters plays Nateri or Zuleka at the time. So ILM helped with the CGI and they brought in Richard Baynham, an animator who had worked on Gollum. So Lizzie, I would love to play you the avatar motion capture test, which was available on the special edition release of the film. And again, we will link to on our Patreon.

• 59:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Yoonjin Kim so much. I think she's a really great actor. I'm sorry to tell you, Chris, he's better than Sam Worthington.

• 59:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Definitely a different approach, Daniel Bess, for this character.

• 59:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it works better for me with the performance capture.

• 59:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't agree, but to each their own. And a lot of people on Reddit really liked his performance, too, I will say.

• 59:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I also, that reminded me so much of the SNL sketch, Papyrus.

• 59:45Chris Winterbauer?

  We will get to Papyrus.

• 59:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, great.

• 59:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, don't worry. It's on the agenda.

• 59:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 59:51Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get there. So sometime at the end of 2005, Cameron and Landau present this 37 second prototype to Fox. Fox is impressed, but they have concerns. Let's talk about them. The test is compelling, but it wasn't photo real, which, Lizzie, you can confirm. You just saw it.

• 1:00:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:00:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Looks good, does not look as good as the finished film.

• 1:00:12Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it looks, the background looks a bit animated.

• 1:00:15Chris Winterbauer?

  They worried that an audience would not lock in emotionally with blue aliens for an entire movie. Okay, they're concerned about the tails, just general concern about the tails.

• 1:00:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree with that note.

• 1:00:27Chris Winterbauer?

  There are residual concerns from Titanic, which had ballooned, of course, from 110 millions to $200 million. Who knows what this movie will end up costing at the end of the day? So Cameron and Lando are like, are we good? And Fox says, maybe. Basically, until they see a budget and a script, there is no way they are going to greenlight this thing. So with a maybe. Fee in hand, Cameron and Landau and the tech team and the art team continue working on Project 880, as it was called at the time. Sometime in late 2005, Landau flies to New Zealand to show the script to Weta. They're fresh off Lord of the Rings, they're wrapping up King Kong, and they apparently, again according to Landau, they love Avatar, but there's no green light. But Weta, again according to Landau, decides to pass on two firm offers for very big shows to wait on Avatar.

• 1:01:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So meanwhile, James Cameron's trying to finish the script. He cranks it out across the first four months or so of 2006. It's over 200 pages. He cuts it down to 148. Keep cutting. Cuts it down to nine pages. Good, you're done. It's unclear when this happens, but Cameron claims he also agreed to cut his usual fee in half and take a lower percentage of the film's revenues if Avatar wasn't profitable. If you remember, he did do that on Titanic as well. Yes. According to some sources, it was 153 pages long when he shows it to Fox in mid 2006. And what happens next depends on who you ask. James Cameron claims Fox passed on Avatar. They told us in no uncertain terms that they were passing on the film. Peter Chernin, then the head of Fox, disagrees.

• 1:01:58Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Cameron, Chernin asked him, "Is there any way you can get the kind of tree-hugging hippie bullshit out of it?" To which Cameron replied, "Peter, I'm at a point now in my career and in my life where I can pretty much make any movie I want, and I chose to make this story because of the tree-hugging hippie bullshit." Yeah. Cameron, according to Cameron, went on to say, "And I said, 'Now you know before your taillights are out of sight, I will be on the phone with Dick Cook at Disney who wants this, and we'll make a deal, and that'll be that. And then whatever happens, happens. And you might look like a big dick if it makes a lot of money.'" And you can kind of see him recoil, because that's the moment that all studio executives absolutely are terrified by, that you pass on something.

• 1:02:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Like Casey Silver passed on Titanic at Universal, right? He looked like a dick later, just for that one thing. Case is a good guy, but that was a flinch. He said, "Nope, we're passing." Now, Peter Chernin, to be clear, disagrees with this telling. He does not remember saying "tree hugging hippie bullshit", and he says that they technically didn't pass. They just said, "We're not gonna give you the budget you're asking for. Come back with a lower number."

• 1:03:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Certainly, he will not.

• 1:03:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Fox co-chair Jim Gianopolis later said, "There was no way we were gonna let this go by. Like, there's absolutely no way we're gonna let Avatar get out of our hands." But, of course, James Cameron and John Landau decide to go rogue instead. So Disney had produced James Cameron's two 3D underwater docs, and Cameron claims they called up Bob Iger, Dick Cook, and Alan Bergman, and invited them to Playa Vista to watch the tech demo that Fox had paid $10 million to make.

• 1:03:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:03:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is just the hubris.

• 1:03:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, just remember, if James Cameron is making a phone call, you're getting fucked.

• 1:03:49Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Alan Bergman later said, "We walked out of that, and we said, 'We have to have it.' Sitting there in that screening room, I'd never seen anything like it. The world, Jake's character, it was so unique. I'm sure also Disney could see the theme park tie-ins that Fox could not."

• 1:04:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:04:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Fox had first right of refusal, though. So Fox brings in partners to distribute the risk. Dune Entertainment, which is part of a New York-based private equity fund, and Ingenious Media, which was a film financing fund. They'd been involved in Shaun of the Dead, Night at the Museum, Live Free or Die Hard. It takes some convincing, but with Dune and Ingenious on board, Fox is now gonna be responsible for less than half of Avatar's proposed $237 million budget, which would make it the most expensive film of all time. Now, I think it's important, for reference. 2005, we have King Kong, which costs $207 million, distributed, produced by Universal. It's an enormous success. Also, the most expensive movie of all time up until that point,

• 1:04:48Chris Winterbauer?

  and importantly, based on IP. Then we have Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which cost $150 million, distributed by Warner Brothers. Again, part of a major franchise, the fourth entry. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, $113 million. George Lucas-funded. Fox distributed Chronicles of Narnia, the Lion Witch and the Wardrobe, $180 million. Again, franchise Disney, Buena Vista, War of the Worlds IP, $132 million. And then the most expensive original film I found, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, $110 million, New Regency and Fox. Now, Fox is not playing in the big franchise space in the way that rival studios were, with the exception of Star Wars, and this was not IP.

• 1:05:31Chris Winterbauer?

  But in October of 2006, they green light Avatar. Cameron has claimed that a studio executive told him, "We don't get the giant blue guys with the tails, but we believe in you and want to do this movie with you." Which is just like such a ringing endorsement. So, the game is on, they need a cast, and they need to figure out what the hell the cast is gonna say. So Cameron had made up a bunch of Navi words in his scriptment, pulling heavily from Polynesian languages, but he needed a real linguist. So he hires USC professor Paul Frommer, who's a PhD in linguistics, and he's stuck teaching at the School of Business. He gets an email saying, "We need somebody to create an Anglian language for a major motion picture directed by James Cameron." And he says, "Oh my god, yes, absolutely. He's in, he's stoked, and he is determined, we're gonna beat Klingon. We're gonna out-Klingon-Klingon.

• 1:06:14Chris Winterbauer?

  We're gonna have a more detailed and well-thought-out language than Klingon." Maybe they did, but more people speak Klingon, I believe, today than they do Navi. So he came up with more words, he comes up with three sound palettes for Cameron to choose from, and Cameron chooses the one that includes, or he wants it to include, ejectives, which are the popping sounds that you hear in some Native American, African or Asian languages. And he didn't want it to have the sounds buh, duh, guh, cha, or shuh. By the time the movie came out, Frommer had come up with the structure and all the rules of the language, which was over 1,000 words strong. Now, the language wasn't done in time for casting, so casting director Marjorie Simkin had the actors audition by making up their own languages. Oh no, that's my absolute nightmare. You would not have been chosen.

• 1:06:59Chris Winterbauer?

  They would come into the room, they would do it in the sort of limited English, and then I would ask them to do the scene and make up a language, even if they ended up just doing A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D. It was like an acting exercise to play the scene without English words. And Joel David Moore, Norm Smellman, said his audition went terribly, but his character is not supposed to- Speak Navi like a native, so maybe that was fine. But Simkin said the ability to make up a language really is what separated the people who embraced the process and landed the roles like Laz Alonso, who plays Suteh, Wes Studi, CCH Pounder, who play Aju Khan and Moat, respectively. Now, I'm sure Fox was like, Jim, we're spending so much money on this movie. We need some big stars. We, we need some big stars for the leads of your movie. And he said, no, absolutely not.

• 1:07:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I want Zoe Saldana as Nate Terry, who was cast before Sam Worthington and is basically an unknown at this point in time. So we talked about her briefly in Pirates of the Caribbean, Lizzie. Drumline, 2002.

• 1:07:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Center stage.

• 1:07:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Center stage, crossroads with Britney Spears, not a giant star. She screened tests in the summer of 2006 and she's cast a few months later that fall.

• 1:08:04Lizzie Bassett?

  I will say she is a bigger part in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.

• 1:08:08Chris Winterbauer?

  She is.

• 1:08:09Lizzie Bassett?

  She's not unknown. Yeah.

• 1:08:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, fair, but she has not been a lead actress yet.

• 1:08:13Lizzie Bassett?

  No, not for a franchise like this.

• 1:08:15Chris Winterbauer?

  No, and Star Trek would come out right before Avatar and kind of blow her up, I think, in a big way. But this was a huge leap for her. Now, Marjorie Simkin has said that it came down to Saldana and a blue eyed, blond haired actress whose name she has not revealed. Kate Winslet? I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:08:32Lizzie Bassett?

  She's not blonde typically.

• 1:08:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that's true. It's, it wouldn't make sense for her anyway. So Jake Sully was much harder to find. Simkin says that they saw hundreds of actors in the United States. A couple of the big names, Jake Gyllenhaal and Matt Damon, both reportedly turned down the role. In fact, years later, Matt Damon said, I was offered a little movie called Avatar. James Cameron offered me 10% of it. I will go down in history. You will never meet an actor who turned down more money.

• 1:09:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I'll say.

• 1:09:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great story and it seems that Cameron definitely offered Damon the role or maybe was interested in him for it. But he recently disputed Damon's recollection and says there is no way that he ever offered him anywhere near that level of profit participation. And for what it's worth, I have a harder time imagining Damon in this role. I think maybe it's just an age thing. He's a little older than I imagined the character. But I think Gyllenhaal would have been really good.

• 1:09:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I actually think both could have been really good. I guess you're right about Matt Damon's age, but I-

• 1:09:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He just feels a little older, that's all. Listeners, tell us how you feel. Cameron said about Damon and Gyllenhaal that he didn't go out and try to woo them. He said that maybe they sensed my lack of 100% commitment to them. And he thinks maybe it's the subject matter. This is a big Star Wars-type movie. These are both serious actors, to which Jake Gyllenhaal says, "Hold my beer, I'm gonna go do Prince of Persia," to which Matt Damon says, "Hold my beer, I'm gonna go do The Great Wall." But Cameron had his heart set on a man down under: Australian hunk, Sam Worthington.

• 1:10:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:10:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Very handsome Sam Worthington. So Simkins had expanded the search to include English, Irish, and Australian actors, and in the pile of 20 to 30 tapes from Australia, they found Sam Worthington, who was basically an unknown in the United States at this point in time. But he'd found a lot of success in Australia. He was in 2004's Somersault, which won all 13 categories at the Australian Film Institute Awards, including Best Actor for Worthington, was very praised by critics, also directed by Kate Shortland-

• 1:10:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:31Chris Winterbauer?

  -who directed Black Widow most recently. She's a really, really good director, and I have a friend who was her assistant on Black Widow, and she sounds like a lovely person as well. Worthington had found some bit parts in American films: The Great Raid and Hearts War. But even though he had come close to international stardom, Lizzie, he was a finalist for James Bond in Casino Royale.

• 1:10:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, he would have been quite young. That's interesting.

• 1:10:56Chris Winterbauer?

  He would have. I think he would have been like 28 or 29 at this point in time.

• 1:11:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Huh.

• 1:11:01Chris Winterbauer?

  He does look a bit like Pierce Brosnan, if you put their photos next to each other.

• 1:11:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I can see that.

• 1:11:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very interesting.

• 1:11:08Lizzie Bassett?

  If his hair were a little longer, like the bad wig at the beginning of this. Anyway, continue.

• 1:11:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so harsh. Not only did Barbara Broccoli bring in Sam Worthington for a screen test, she went to his hotel room and she gave him a haircut. And that's the haircut that he has in Avatar. I'm just kidding. He said, and I totally believe this, he could really pull off the James Bond-as-a-killer vibe that they were going for with the reboot, but he did not have the debonair suave side, by his own admission.

• 1:11:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:11:35Chris Winterbauer?

  He was like, "I just couldn't..." Couldn't pull off that side of it. So even though he had only found arguably a small amount of fame in a global sense, he really hated it. And he was having a really hard time before he read for Avatar. He was actually living out of his car by his choice. I sold everything I owned to my mates because they didn't like who I was. I needed to get the heck out. I was living in Sydney and every time I would go to the bar, people would recognize me. I was rebelling against that. So when Worthington got the call to audition, he was not into it. They didn't give him the script and they didn't even tell him who the director was. They just gave him the sides for the scene. So he decides he's gonna fuck around during the audition. When he's supposed to say yes, he would just say, uh huh. And then at one point, he even spit his gum at the camera in defiance.

• 1:12:17Chris Winterbauer?

  So a week later, he gets a call and he thinks he's gonna be in trouble and they say, James Cameron wants to meet with you. By the way, that was for his movie, the audition that you just did. Over the next six months, he flies to LA multiple times because James Cameron loves his fuck you attitude. Because it's the exact attitude that James Cameron has about everything in his life as well.

• 1:12:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I say one thing about this?

• 1:12:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:12:41Lizzie Bassett?

  And this is not a criticism of James Cameron or Sam Worthington, but one of our full stop supporters, actually Ben Schindelman, shout out to Ben, who we met at the live show. Recently sent us the interview that Kristen Stewart just did with the New York Times and it's really good. It's worth listening to. She's very charming. She's very fun to hear. But one thing that came up was the things that male actors get away with. Whether it's sort of like a celebration of method acting or, you know, something like this where it's like, you got the part because your attitude was, I don't give a shit about the part. All I want to say is I just, I don't know that a female actor would get the same treatment had they shown up with that attitude in the audition. I don't know.

• 1:13:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, we don't know.

• 1:13:22Lizzie Bassett?

  That's all I'll say is go listen to that interview. I think it's an interesting take on male versus female actors and sort of what is required of them. Anyway, continue.

• 1:13:30Chris Winterbauer?

  My guess, broadly speaking, absolutely true. And maybe one of the only exceptions might be Cameron.

• 1:13:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 1:13:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Who just likes the piss and vinegar in everybody. So who knows? But a hundred percent, if you're an actress and you do that, you get labeled difficult immediately. And if you're a guy, you're a genius.

• 1:13:51Lizzie Bassett?

  You're a star.

• 1:13:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you took a shit during the audition. This guy's gonna be huge. Cameron presents Worthington to the studio. By the way, Worthington, he flies to LA multiple times. He's screen tests with Zoe Saldana. I'm sure he has stopped spitting his gum by this point in time. The studio has two reservations. He's not a big name and he has an enormous Australian accent. Cameron has said he sounded like Crocodile Dundee when we brought him in. Cameron thinks he can deal with one of these things. He'll hire a dialect coach to train the accent out of Worthington. They get most of the way there by the time of the movie.

• 1:14:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fine. It's not distracting, in my opinion.

• 1:14:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It's totally fine.

• 1:14:29Chris Winterbauer?

  In the end, it comes down to three actors. Sam Worthington, Channing Tatum, and Chris Evans.

• 1:14:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:14:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Tatum is the one to me that maybe like, but Evans too. They're all good actors. I don't know.

• 1:14:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Those are all good choices.

• 1:14:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think they all could have been good.

• 1:14:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I think the one thing with both Channing Tatum and Chris Evans that Sam Worthington seems to lack almost entirely is a sense of humor. I don't know whether or not that's necessary for the role, but that does feel like the big difference between those three.

• 1:14:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I can't tell. In the end, Sam Worthington has a great screen test opposite Zoe Saldana. He gets some help from a dialect coach and he lands the part. And of course, they can't reach him to tell him. Because according to John Landau, he was just on a mountaintop somewhere with no cell service and they could not reach him to tell him you landed the role in Avatar. And at this point, he's probably thinking he didn't even get it if he's going up against Channing Tatum. But he did. He got it. Now, a couple of other casting notes. Cameron was hesitant to cast Sigourney Weaver because she played a similar role in Aliens. And her character's name in Avatar was Grace Shipley and she had played Ellen Ripley.

• 1:15:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Cameron realizes, I'm being an idiot. She's a great actress. She's great for the part. So he casts her and he changes the name to Grace Augustine. He changed it to Schmellin Schmipley. Before Weaver was cast, he was considering Aliens in the Abyss alum, Michael Bean, for the role of Colonel Miles Korich.

• 1:15:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, would've been good.

• 1:15:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Bean kinda thought he had the part, but Cameron didn't want to do an Aliens reunion. He calls Bean to tell him that he can't move forward with him after casting Weaver, and instead, gives it to Stephen Lang, who we discussed briefly in Tombstone. He had auditioned for the role of one of the Space Marines in Aliens 20 years prior.

• 1:16:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:16:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So it came full circle, and this really broke Stephen Lang out, and I really like Stephen Lang.

• 1:16:12Lizzie Bassett?

  He's great.

• 1:16:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And his character is written as such a caricature, but Lang really commits to it, and the physicality of the role, he's in amazing shape. I really like him in this movie. I think he's a good villain.

• 1:16:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too. He's at least having fun, which is more than you can say for Giovanni Ribisi. Yeah.

• 1:16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Giovanni Ribisi doesn't know what he's doing on this set. I love Giovanni Ribisi. He's a great actor.

• 1:16:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too, but he's not good in this.

• 1:16:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the character is not particularly well-written, because he's a little bit neither here nor there. He just exists in this gray zone between Korich and our heroes, and so he feels wishy-washy, and so I just think it's a problem with the way the character's written, more than anything else.

• 1:16:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not his fault at all. It's not a great character.

• 1:16:52Chris Winterbauer?

  In January of 2007, the trades announce Avatar: Greenlight, $195 million budget, and Sam Worthington, who has landed the lead role. But before they can capture their motion, the actors have to train a lot. Horseback riding, archery, military training with James Cameron's brother, former Marine, some of his comrades. They bring in choreographer Lula Washington, who creates and teaches several big dance numbers, most of which were cut from the movie. And movement coach Terry Notary, a Cirque du Soleil alum, came in to help the actors learn to walk and gesture like the Navi. Now, he had done How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Planet of the Apes, but you have probably seen him in the excellent 2017 film, The Square. That amazing send-up of the art world from Ruben Oshland.

• 1:17:35Chris Winterbauer?

  He's the director of Force Majeure and Triangle of Sadness. Terry Notary has this great role in The Square. He plays a performance artist performing as a chimp. And there is a wonderful set piece at the end of the film, where he is effectively testing the social boundaries of everybody in the room by literally attacking somebody as a chimp and seeing if they will stop his performance art. It's really good. Oh, wow. He has, of course, done extensive work on the most recent Planet of the Apes reboot. He is an amazing physical performer. So the actors also had to learn Na'vi. They worked with fromer and dialect coach Carla Mayer, Pirates of the Caribbean, Pearl Harbor, Aaron Brockovich, Air Force One. Like, the credits of the folks on this movie are incredible. In February of 2007, Cameron takes Saldana Worthington, Joel David Moore, and Sigourney Weaver to Kauai.

• 1:18:20Chris Winterbauer?

  The performance capture is going to be taking place in this lifeless void of a room called a volume. So he needs to give them a reference for the environment that they're going to be in, in the final CGI. So he goes, "Put on these loincloths, put on these fake tails, these tiny bikinis, take these bows and arrows and run through the forest while I videotape you with a mini DV camcorder." Which is a wild image. Sam Worthington, in a thong and loincloth, is running through the forest, shoots across a path. There's a dog walker. He, like, draws his bow back, according to Cameron, nearly shoots the poodle, runs off. And the walker goes, "What are you doing?" And Sam goes, "We're making a movie, mate." And he runs off. Now, Landau adds a little more color to this story. He says he was with James Cameron, following with the camcorder. Worthington apparently said,

• 1:19:05Chris Winterbauer?

  "We're making a movie with James Cameron, the guy who did Titanic." At which point, the dog walker looks over at James Cameron, like Jim in The Office, and goes, "He's gone fucking downhill from there, hasn't he?" Not realizing he's talking to James Cameron in that moment. That's amazing. So in April of 2007, virtual cameras finally roll. They're basically shooting two movies. There's the performance capture portion of the film with all the CG scenes, and then the live-action portions of the film that involve the humans. So they're going to do all the performance capture, for the most part, in Playa Vista. And then they're going to shoot the live action down at Stone Street Studios in New Zealand, next to Weta. There is a lot of trial and error. Apparently, a crew member wrote the set catchphrase on the whiteboard. It's Avatar, dude, nothing works the first time.

• 1:19:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So this was a really big deal to other directors. Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Gore Verbinski, they started visiting the set to watch James Cameron using this new technology, this virtual camera system, to capture performances. In fact, they actually set up a screening room at the studio where people could watch in real time what Cameron was seeing onstage when he was doing the virtual capture. Now, it doesn't look like much in the volume, and you can see this a lot more in capturing Avatar, the documentary. They would bring in crude props to stand in for environmental elements and CGI creatures, planks of wood, you know, plants sometimes for them to move through. But one of my favorite things that they did to enhance the reality is they brought in real horses wearing their own performance capture equipment. Oh, cool. So cool.

• 1:20:33Chris Winterbauer?

  But the problem is they had to keep the horses contained because if the horses crossed certain boundaries, the computer would crash and it would take a half hour to reboot everything. And the computers were crashing a lot because, Lizzie, do you remember how many characters were in that R and D scene that they tested for Fox? Two. Oh, yeah. They had created the entire workflow based on two characters. Whoops. So animation supervisor Richard Baneham said that anything past five characters would really short circuit the system, let alone involving, you know, trying to render real-time CGI light and world around them. And this process is so complicated. They have 102 cameras on the stage capturing the data, 56 markers on each actor's body,

• 1:21:15Chris Winterbauer?

  and then they'd stream that CGI rough through Motion Builder, which is this industry-standard viewing tool live on set. And Motion Builder became the, like, thorn in James Cameron's side and also the saving grace for the crew. James Knight, who worked for Giant Studios, they were the performance capture provider on the movie, said that basically Motion Builder crashed all the time. And if it was the software, James Cameron wouldn't freak out. But if it was someone being slow and not doing their job, he would freak out. So he said that anytime it crashed, we'd just say it was Motion Builder, no matter what whose fault it was. He said, you know, you hear stories about how hard Jim is to deal with, but he was actually pretty cool on set. Every now and then, he'd throw his toys out of the pram and we'd all giggle like daddy's having a bad moment.

• 1:21:56Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a fun, a good, healthy way to have it. Yeah.

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• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  This December, the magic of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol returns to Virginia Repertory Theater in downtown Richmond. Experience the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge as he's visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, and rediscover the joy and true meaning of the holiday season. Performances run November 18th through December 27th. Tickets on sale now at virginianrep.org or by calling 804-282-2620.

• 1:23:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So they have this brain bar at the end of the room. It's all these computer monitors. It's 20 techs from Giant Studios, LightStorm, Weta. And this is revolutionary, right? Weta's providing the hero characters, the facial system that allows the projection of the facial performance on the CGI character. LightStorm does the pre-vis environments. And they would film long hours. James Knight references two 26-hour days that they had, and they wouldn't see the results for months. John Lando said they sent their first scenes to Weta in early 2007 and didn't get them back until May of 2008.

• 1:23:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:23:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And I do want to mention, it seems like there's the experiential self and the remembering self, right? If you were to write down your experience in a moment, it'll differ from your recollection later. And the sense I get is that the remembering self for a lot of the crew of these James Cameron films is relatively generous and positive because the result is so good, but the experiencing self is pretty miserable a lot of the time.

• 1:24:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That would be my guess, yeah.

• 1:24:06Chris Winterbauer?

  So over two years into the making of Avatar, it's time to shoot the live action portions of the movie. So they go halfway around the world to Wellington, New Zealand at the end of October 2007. And this is still using extensive green screens because all of the backgrounds are either set extensions or again, fully CGI. But there's a lot of practical builds that I want to call out. A massive full-size AMP suit, the AMP suit, like the power loader that you mentioned, the one that Stephen Lang climbs into, that's a practical build. It looks amazing. Oh, I love it. So many of the sets, most of what you see the characters interact with, 100% real, and then they're being extended beyond them. But just fantastic production design, incredible fidelity. They're shooting constantly. Now, Landau says it's seven days a week. I don't actually know if that's legal.

• 1:24:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure it was seven days a week for Landau and Cameron. I just don't know if it was for the crew. There's also a moment in Capturing Avatar where Cameron says, "I think when people rap on time, it's because they ran out of ideas, so don't count on that." And I was just like, "Oh, God." Yeah. Where's the tea lady? Now, Zoe Saldana, who was very vocal about not having a good time on Pirates of the Caribbean, Curse of the Black Pearl, as we mentioned, said that she actually had a good time on Avatar and she didn't feel objectified on the shoot. She said it took a lot of toughness to survive a Cameron shoot, but he's very much empowering and enabling his actors. And all of the technology is meant to serve the actors. Yeah, I believe that. Alonso, who plays Sute, recalled these 15-hour days and they'd come back the next morning and James Cameron was still there, editing the footage from the day before and would pull them in and say, "Hey, look how good your performance is. Look how cool this is gonna look."

• 1:25:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Which on the one hand, oh my God, but on the other hand, that's really cool that the director's so invested in what you're doing. I literally could never. No. I could not function. I don't understand people like James Cameron. I think he may not need very much sleep physiologically to survive. He mustn't because of the stuff that he's been able to do. So post-production is running in parallel to production, of course. And it had to be done twice, according to Cameron, because they're combining so many elements. First, you edit the performances and take, say, Sam from take four, Zoe Saldana from take two, and maybe the master of all the characters from take three. Then you do all the camera work. So then you reposition the camera within all of these shots. And once you've done all that, you have the virtual Shots that you can actually cut with for the first time several months into the process.

• 1:26:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And if when you're cutting, the camera work doesn't work, you have to do the whole thing all over again. So the original release date for Avatar was set for May of 2009. Fox pushed it back to December. That could be for two reasons. It could be they needed more time in post, but also they needed more time to retrofit theaters for 3D in front of the release. So there's an incredible amount of CGI in this film. James Cameron said of the 2,000 shots in the film, probably less than two minutes is free of visual effects.

• 1:26:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:26:46Chris Winterbauer?

  He said 15 shots in the whole film. Of course, that includes like paint outs, digital mats, compositing. The New Yorker actually pegged the total number of VFX shots at 3,000, so could be anywhere between those two numbers. And the movie was long. So Lizzie, you mentioned two hours, 43 minutes. That's the theatrical cut. There have been longer releases, the extended cut. And there are roughly 40 minutes of deleted scenes available online, many of which are fairly complete.

• 1:27:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Of what?

• 1:27:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let's talk about it. So there's Jake's life on Earth before he goes.

• 1:27:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't care.

• 1:27:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I do think it gives a little more context as to why Pandora is so precious.

• 1:27:19Lizzie Bassett?

  No, you're right. I shouldn't say don't care. That actually might be useful. Continue.

• 1:27:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually think a lot of the deleted scenes fill in a lot of the gaps in the story and do make it a slightly more nuanced. Still not that nuanced, but slightly more nuanced experience. There's more culture and dance with the Navi. There's kind of like an ayahuasca style trip that Jake goes on as part of his rite of passage. He also tells Sigourney Weaver's character that he's spying on her at some point. It's not just assumed that she knows. That I think is more interesting. It's nothing 100% necessary, but it does fill in some gaps. So Cameron and Landau show a rough cut to ex-wife director Catherine Bigelow, Rob Legato, several other VFX artists. They do more screenings at Lightstorm and they get some audience feedback. And this leads to some cuts for clarity. So like audiences weren't clocking that the Navi only had four fingers. And there were some specific lines that reference this that they ended up cutting.

• 1:28:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And the sex scene was more graphic because Jake and Nateri connected the fibers of their hairtail things. And folks didn't love that, which is funny. I had like a Berenstain Bears moment. I swear they did that in the theatrical release, but apparently they didn't.

• 1:28:22Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I thought they did too.

• 1:28:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but maybe that was when, I think they do do that in one of the extended cuts, and maybe I'm just misremembering that. The studio's got some notes. It's too long, there's too much flying around on the banshees. What are we doing on these banshees? And James Cameron says, you know what? I made Titanic. This building that we're meeting in right now, this new half-billion-dollar complex on your lot, Titanic paid for that, so I get to do this. And he went on to say afterward that they thanked him for not cutting the banshee scenes. I don't know if that is true.

• 1:28:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Even if it's true, you know they did it through gritted teeth.

• 1:28:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So, James Horner comes on to do the music. He and Cameron had patched things up on Titanic after not-so-great an experience on Aliens. And in July of 2009, The New Yorker visits Cameron during post to document a moment between him and the sound engineers as they prepared a 25-minute section of the movie for a pre-release screening at Comic-Con. And James Cameron says to one of the sound engineers, quote, "If we had to ship this thing in like two hours, I'd send the fucking temp," meaning the temp sound that he had made with the editor. "It was built with a real opinion, and that opinion is not gonna change, cuz I personally cut it myself. My advice to you: listen to it, study it, match what's there. Your principle, like a surgeon with a Hippocratic oath, should be do no harm." And then Cameron walked out of the room, and the sound engineer said, "This is going to be a long day.

• 1:29:39Chris Winterbauer?

  He gave us the same thing on Terminator, but he was much nicer about it then." End quote.

• 1:29:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he has fuck-you money at this point.

• 1:29:47Chris Winterbauer?

  So let's talk about the logo, Lizzie. Let's talk about...

• 1:29:50Speaker 05

  Papyrus!

• 1:29:51Chris Winterbauer?

  So, according to Peter Stugard, the former senior vice president of creative advertising for 20th Century Fox, a design firm called BLT Communications sent Cameron 75 to 90 potential logos.

• 1:30:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:30:03Chris Winterbauer?

  They were apparently all chrome and futuristic and just not right, and time was running out. Now, Stugard just happened to bump into Cameron, and he spotted a copy of his script, which had a cover page that said Avatar in a font that was...

• 1:30:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Papyrus.

• 1:30:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Papyrus. Stugard makes some small changes, including making the letters thicker. And Cameron was like, "Yes, that's it. That's the font."

• 1:30:26Lizzie Bassett?

  So it's literally the SNL sketch?

• 1:30:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Hold on. He started to request it for everything. It's not gonna just go on the theater post. But at the end of the first teaser trailer, the end title sequence, the subtitles. The design firm responsible for delivering the end title sequence tried to move away from the font. But in the end, one of the designers said that they doubted whether the custom font that they submitted was actually used. I don't know if they used my files or based it on my files, but they definitely changed my font back to Papyrus and stretched it vertically. Maybe they were getting frustrated that we weren't just making it Papyrus, which I think is so likely, given what we just heard Cameron telling the sound engineer. Go back to my temp.

• 1:31:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:31:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, couldn't you just imagine saying, just use fucking Papyrus, like, at the end of the day?

• 1:31:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's what they did. And then, of course, in the follow-up SNL sketch, the second one, he realizes all they've done is just make it bold for the way it water.

• 1:31:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So the designer responsible for creating the original Papyrus font back in 1982, Chris Costello, spots the influence when he sees the movie. He says, "The A was a little different, and they made a couple of small changes, but I know what I did because I labored over each character." And he also reportedly said that the subtitle font was just straight Papyrus. So the title font was slightly different.

• 1:31:41Lizzie Bassett?

  So funny.

• 1:31:43Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, so they're gearing up for the release, and it's, this is very, very important. And it's just, it's important to understand Fox's position in the studio landscape at this moment. So in 2008, 20th Century Fox did not have a film crack the top 10 in box office receipts. So Warner Brothers, The Dark Knight is number one, Paramount cleans up with Iron Man: Indiana Jones, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar 2, Disney has WALL-E and Prince Caspian, Sony has Hancock, Quantum of Solace, even Universal has Mamma Mia. And 2007 hadn't been much better. Fox snuck in at number eight with The Simpsons movie. But again, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Shrek, Transformers 300, Ratatouille, I Am Legend, Sony had Spider-Man 3.

• 1:32:24Chris Winterbauer?

  They all have franchises, and if Avatar does well, it will presumably birth a franchise. So despite a planned December release, Fox decides to build hype over the summer. They show 24 minutes of the movie to an audience of more than 1,000 people at the Cinema Expo in Amsterdam, which is an expo for distributors. Most is from the first third of the movie, but they pull some unfinished portions from the end. He doesn't want to do spoilers. And the response was great. Lando said, "This really proved it, that you could not just sell this movie in 30-second bytes. You gotta give people context." They then show another version, about 25 minutes, at Comic-Con in July of 2009. And apparently, the studio was underwhelmed by the audience's response. So distributors got excited, but maybe comic book fans, not so much.

• 1:33:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So Cameron and Lando come up with the idea that August 21st should be Avatar Day. They invite audiences from around the world to come watch 15 minutes of the movie in 3D IMAX for free. And they also released the trailer on apple.com, and a lot of people watched it, 4 million people. And they get a lot of harsh feedback. Message boards are flooding with some descriptions that might be recognizable to you, Lizzie. "Dances with Wolves in Space", "Smurf porn", "Pocahontas meets Halo", and there are comparisons to Thundercats and references to Jar Jar Binks. Yeah. Now, the online trailer suffers a bit from its format. It's very small, it's not in 3D, and a lack of context. And unfortunately, reactions to the Avatar Day 3D screenings were also somewhat underwhelming.

• 1:33:53Chris Winterbauer?

  So Fox is getting nervous. According to Cameron, after one of the screenings, one Fox exec begged him to shorten the movie with a, quote, "stricken cancer diagnosis expression." According to Cameron, here was his reply. And David, if you could just give me some Colonel Quaritch backup music here, because this quote... Here we go. "I think this movie is going to make all the fucking money. And when it does, it's going to be too late for you to love the film. The time for you to love the movie is today. So I'm not asking you to say something that you don't feel, but just know that I will always know that no matter how complimentary you are about the movie in the future when it makes all the money..." And that's exactly what I said, in caps, "ALL THE MONEY", not "some of the money", "ALL THE FUCKING MONEY".

• 1:34:38Chris Winterbauer?

  "I said, 'You can't come to me and compliment the film or chum along and say, 'Look what we did together.' You won't be able to do that. At that point, that particular studio exec flipped out and went bug shit on me. And I told him to get the fuck out of my office, and that's where it was left." End quote. Fun times at Fox.

• 1:34:57Lizzie Bassett?

  God, to have the confidence of James Cameron and to also be able to back it up, what a gift. What I wouldn't give.

• 1:35:05Chris Winterbauer?

  What a gift. Now, the whole industry was nervously awaiting the Avatar release because they were wondering, is 3D gonna provide a renaissance for Hollywood?

• 1:35:14Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I hate it.

• 1:35:15Chris Winterbauer?

  DVD sales were on decline, theater attendance was in decline. According to The New Yorker, there would be 4,500 3D screens by the time of the release of Avatar. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of DreamWorks Animation, said at the time, "When you look at the history of film, there have been two great revolutions: sound and color. This will be the third great revolution." Maybe. The problem, from some perspectives, was that Avatar wasn't based on existing IP, so its originality could be a liability. And just a few days ahead of Avatar's release, in early December, Time Magazine ran a headline that laid out the stakes. "Can James Cameron Be King Again? The Movie Industry Hopes Its Immersive Special Effects Spark a Big Screen Renaissance. Fans Crave the Next Star Wars. It's a Heavy Burden,

• 1:35:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Even for a Man Who Seems to Enjoy Only Doing Things That Are Hard." Very true.

• 1:36:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, seriously.

• 1:36:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So Avatar premieres in London on December 10, 2009, and rolls out worldwide between the 16th and the 18th of December 2009. According to CinemaBlend, 90% of the advanced ticket sales were for 3D screenings, and reviews were generally positive. They praised the effects, the action, the technical elements, some of the performances, but they did criticize the simplicity of the story. The New York Times called it "glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged. Movies rarely carry us away if you even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. What's often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance." Interestingly, the Chicago Tribune, Lizzie, felt the exact opposite of you. They thought the first 90 minutes were great, and the other 72 less and less terrific.

• 1:36:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they are categorically wrong.

• 1:36:50Chris Winterbauer?

  The movie was criticized by indigenous groups for cultural appropriation and stereotyping, as well as employing the well-trod white savior complex. All things that James Cameron has publicly said he did in the movie. He has specifically said he was referencing the Native American interactions with early settlers, the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, or at least a simplified version of it. Not to condone it necessarily, but it was all there on the surface. There's no hiding it.

• 1:37:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's an interesting choice to make Jake Sully white, to be totally honest. And I don't know, like clearly he's aware of it. And I'm not saying like you shouldn't have, I'm not saying you shouldn't have written it like this. I'm not saying you shouldn't have a white actor play this part, none of that. I just think like there could be maybe a little bit more depth to explore with that character. If he were himself an outsider, or you know, as he calls himself, an immigrant or alien in this versus just being your like jarhead marine coming in and you know, going native, as I think has been described in the past. It feels too simple for James Cameron. And I think these are the elements of this movie that really do disappoint me.

• 1:37:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I presume James Cameron's argument would be that it is Jake Sully's disability that separates him from his clan, the Marines at the beginning, which is what enables him ultimately to connect so much with the Navi, because he can be part of their community in the way that he no longer can with the Marines. Regardless of whether or not you buy that, the audience may have agreed, but it didn't seem to stop them from coming out for the movie in droves. Avatar pulled in $77 million its opening weekend domestically. It destroyed the competition. It seems like honestly, the rest of the studios actually pulled their competition because they didn't want to go up against Avatar. The only other movie opening that day was Did You Hear About the Morgans? Which I had not.

• 1:38:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope.

• 1:38:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker, never seen it. Avatar made $137 million its opening week in the United States. That grew to $146 million its second week. And then it just kept raking it in. It crossed $1 billion worldwide on the 19th day of its release. The fastest film to ever do so. I believe it was the fastest film to gross $600 million domestically. By the end of January, it was the first movie to gross over $2 billion worldwide. It just crushed it. In fact, 20th Century Fox Korea later released a 4D version, moving seats, smells of explosives, sprinkling water, laser lights, and wind.

• 1:39:20Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't want smell-a-vision. I don't want the Disney park ride of this.

• 1:39:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So Avatar was nominated for a total of nine Oscars. It won three: cinematography, visual effects, art direction. It lost Best Picture, directing, film editing, music written for motion pictures, original score, sound mixing and sound editing. Famously, Kathryn Bigelow took home her Oscar that night, and The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar. And I believe there is a somewhat infamous quote where Cameron said that he felt Avatar should have won, if only because, basically, it made more money and more people worked on it, and so it is a bigger accomplishment than the smaller films that it went up against that year. Returning to the bigger is better.

• 1:40:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's not how it works, Jim.

• 1:40:06Chris Winterbauer?

  But there is a moment that I actually think, knowing the relationship between Bigelow a little bit and Cameron, was taken out of context, which he pantomimed strangling her at the Oscars when she beat him.

• 1:40:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I think they like each other.

• 1:40:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I think they love each other, and he was the first person she sent the script for The Hurt Locker to when she was considering it, and he said, "You absolutely have to do this." And so, I think, I guarantee that's an inside joke between them.

• 1:40:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, James Cameron's ex-wives are so interesting. I don't know about the first one. I know with both Gail Anne Hurd and Kathryn Bigelow, he remained on good terms with them. I don't think as good with Linda Hamilton.

• 1:40:39Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think so either. I don't think that was a good relationship. Now, Fox immediately wanted a sequel. Cameron said he was the one who was actually unsure. He said, "You've kind of put the brakes on it for a minute." But, just a few days before the movie came out, he had told The New York Times that "Recent screenings bode well for a sequel, and if there is no sequel, it means we didn't make any money." Of course, Avatar remained the highest grossing film of all time. Without adjusting for inflation, that is an important distinction, it was briefly dethroned by Avengers: Endgame, but there was an Avatar re-release. It reclaimed its top spot at $2.9 billion.

• 1:41:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And Avatar: Way of Water, released in 2022, holds the number three spot, not adjusted for inflation, at $2.3 billion. Although some people think that Titanic actually sold enough DVDs and VHS tapes and played enough on television that if you include all ancillary markets, it's possible that Titanic is the highest grossing film of all time without adjusting for inflation. And if you do adjust for inflation, Gone with the Wind remains the highest grossing film of all time, with Avatar in second place. And Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third installment, is coming out this December 19th. Yeah. And I know a fourth has been written. Cameron's talked about that script a little bit, but the fourth and the fifth are contingent

• 1:42:02Chris Winterbauer?

  on the financial success of the second and third. So we will find out theoretically very soon. Now, I need to close the loop on something. I mentioned accusations of plagiarism that dogged James Cameron earlier in his career with some of his earlier films. And of course, that happened after the release of Avatar. He was sued by at least two individuals. Eric Ryder is the name that I'll mention because he'll come back in a second. Both of these lawsuits were dismissed. One in summary judgment back in 2012, 2013, the judge felt that Cameron had not stolen their story ideas for his screenplay. The one by, one of the byproducts of these lawsuits

• 1:42:45Chris Winterbauer?

  was Cameron produced this extensive, you know, amount of documentation detailing where all of the ideas for Avatar came from. And that's how we know about the dream that his mother had had about the 12-foot alien and all of these plants and bioluminescence and sentient planets, et cetera, from childhood, teen years, et cetera. Eric Ryder did sue James Cameron, I believe, again, just earlier this year, ahead of the release of Fire and Ash. But this is specifically about The Way of Water. He alleges that there are elements of that movie that were also stolen from a movie that he developed, allegedly with or in conjunction with Lightstorm, I believe, back in the 90s. If you guys are interested in any of that, check out the trades, variety.

• 1:43:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Just search James Cameron, Avatar, plagiarism. You'll find it. And so. That kind of brings us to the end. A couple of just brief, where are they now? Sam Worthington never really broke out beyond Avatar. I again, like him in these movies. I think he's well suited to them. I think they were kind of remained his legacy. Zoe Saldana did, I think, to a much greater extent. The Avatar franchise has brought in some unusual castings. Kate Winslet is unusually cast in Way of Water.

• 1:43:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58Chris Winterbauer?

  No matter how you slice it. It's just an odd choice for a number of reasons. And as has been said ad nauseam elsewhere, despite making so much money, it's unclear what the cultural imprint of these movies is. They are kind of huge events and then they don't seem to linger in the zeitgeist or in our memory at the end of the day. And so I guess what I'm left with is it's odd. I couldn't think of another example of a movie that made so much money. And this is his most financially successful movie and combines these movies will make more than all of his other movies combined. And yet I don't think they'll be the films that so many of us remember him for, but maybe that's a generational thing. Maybe they will for younger people and it's just because I was raised on earlier iterations of Cameron.

• 1:44:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think so. And I think, you know, maybe part of what people are really enjoying about these is that they are truly an escape and they're not asking a ton of the audience. It's not a particularly thought provoking.

• 1:44:54Chris Winterbauer?

  They're theme park rides at the end of the day.

• 1:44:55Lizzie Bassett?

  They are theme park rides and I think as our world becomes more fragmented, more stressful, more driven by sort of short form anxiety. I understand the appeal of this and I understand the enduring appeal of leaving it at the door as soon as you walk out of the theater. And I think that's what people like about these. They look great.

• 1:45:14Chris Winterbauer?

  One last thing I'd like to mention, because a lot of has been made of the white savior trope and other just again, long used elements of this movie. I think that this movie was interestingly complicated by Jordan Peele's Get Out in 2017. And look, I'll be honest, when I saw this in 2009, I didn't give a lot of this movie a second thought. And I did not think about it critically. I just didn't think about it much at all after I saw it. And when I watched Way of the Water after watching Get Out, what I thought was really interesting is there's a very dark interpretation of this movie that I don't think is entirely fair. But the one way that you could interpret it is the suggestion of the film is that the ultimate version of the hero is the white man,

• 1:45:58Chris Winterbauer?

  the human, but the white man's mind.

• 1:46:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Fully assimilated.

• 1:46:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Fully assimilated into the body of the indigenous person, which is of course

• 1:46:05Lizzie Bassett?

  You're right.

• 1:46:05Chris Winterbauer?

  what Get Out is doing in that movie. Like, that is the perspective of the villains in Get Out. And so I just think that's kind of interesting.

• 1:46:13Lizzie Bassett?

  You're so right. And I think that is at the core of what bothers me about this. I wonder, I wonder what Jordan Peele thinks of Avatar.

• 1:46:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't know. I bet you Jordan Peele appreciates the craftsmanship of the technological side, but I don't know. I don't, I would never want to speak for him. But he's a brilliant storyteller and I think he really thinks long and hard about those things in a very interesting way.

• 1:46:34Lizzie Bassett?

  What's frustrating is James Cameron does too. And that's why I'm like, you know.

• 1:46:37Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, again, and from Cameron's perspective, I think both things can be true. I think James Cameron truly believes that he is honoring native people and native groups in depicting a version of their struggle here. I don't think it's a super compelling presentation, but I'm just saying that is the position he has taken. And I think he believes that to his core.

• 1:46:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, get him in a room with Kevin Costner.

• 1:47:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure, right. But I think.

• 1:47:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Can you imagine a grumpier room?

• 1:47:03Chris Winterbauer?

  No, that would be a grumpy room. But again, filmmakers like Jordan Peele kind of take those ideas and then they flip them and they put them into really interesting perspectives. And so, yeah, like the Get Out Avatar double screening is a really interesting one.

• 1:47:18Lizzie Bassett?

  You're so smart, Chris. That's such a great parallel to draw. Yeah, it makes me want to re-watch Get Out, which I've seen so many more times than Avatar and will continue to see.

• 1:47:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Get Out's great. Jordan Peele is great. I thought Nope was great. I thought that was underrated. All right, guys. That brings us to the end of our coverage of Avatar. So we have to say, what went right?

• 1:47:39Lizzie Bassett?

  You know what? I want to give it to a lot of the cast. In particular, I would love to give it to Zoe Saldana.

• 1:47:46Chris Winterbauer?

  She's so good in this movie.

• 1:47:48Lizzie Bassett?

  She's really good. And this is, you know, this is such an easy thing to overlook when you can't see the human form of the actor, but I think it must be so much harder to do this. As you pointed out, she's on a soundstage this entire time with a camera pointed in her face. She's not dressed in the clothes. She's not interacting with any of the physical things. And yet she turns in an incredibly moving, emotionally rooted performance. And she does so much with her face and her eyes and her voice. And I just think this movie really doesn't work without her performance. And the only times I felt myself getting emotionally involved were with her.

• 1:48:30Chris Winterbauer?

  She's wonderful. And I do think there are a lot of good performances in this movie, but she does so much, like you said, Lizzie, with very little.

• 1:48:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:37Chris Winterbauer?

  She does so much outside of the dialogue. And I would like to just extend that what went right, if I may, I'll use it to jump to mine, which is just the incredible animators that worked on this movie. Yes, they are capturing the performance of the actors. But again, you can see this online, the amount of work and artistry required on the backend by the animation teams at Weta, at Lightstorm, to then realize in the highest fidelity, under the scrutiny of seeing this on a hundred-plus-foot screen in 3D in IMAX. It's just an incredible achievement. It is so tedious. It took years to make this movie. And, you know, working under someone extremely difficult, an extremely difficult person,

• 1:49:20Chris Winterbauer?

  James Cameron, a hard person to work with by his own admission and as other people have told us. And they do so, and they pull off something that's virtuosic, but also very human.

• 1:49:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Cameron has all these quotes about, you know, sexualizing the characters. But I think what he's really saying is like, make them as human as possible. And they do it. And I think those quotes, you know, he's speaking to Playboy, are definitely meant to titillate.

• 1:49:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally. We're going to get to this in the new year, but of a spoiler alert, we're going to cover Don't Worry Darling, and that was a downfall of that.

• 1:49:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 1:49:49Lizzie Bassett?

  But it's not to say that it wasn't something that had been done many, many times before it happened on that movie. And yes, that is what he's doing here.

• 1:49:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but the artists do such a good job in finding the micro-movements of the face and the humanity, and they never let the spectacle overwhelm the humanity in the portrayal visually of these characters. And that's really impressive, especially when so many times the spectacle does overwhelm the story, but they don't allow it to overwhelm the performances. So to everybody at Weta and all of the artists on this film, thank you. It's beautiful. I agree. All right. If you guys are enjoying this show, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can tell a family member or friend, "Check out What Went Wrong. They just did an episode on Avatar. It's almost as long as Avatar." Just kidding, but it's close. You can sign up for bonus content on both Apple Podcasts and our Patreon. You can subscribe

• 1:50:38Chris Winterbauer?

  on Apple Podcasts for $4.99 a month to get at least one bonus episode a month. We primarily are doing those on new released films, so it's not really a standard episode. It's kind of a hybrid review. And you may have noticed that we just released one of these in front of the paywall, a review of Ryan Johnson's new film, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives-Out Mystery. We did that so you guys could get a sense of what these reviews are like. So if you're curious, go ahead and listen to our Wake Up Dead Man review. Again, that is free in front of the paywall. And then, if you want to get something like that, but focused on Avatar: Fire and Ash, we're going to be dropping our Avatar: Fire and Ash review on Patreon and for our Apple subscribers on December 26th. It's coming the day after Christmas. Santa's coming one day late for y'all. And we also offer a shout out, just like one

• 1:51:22Chris Winterbauer?

  of these, for our $50 Full Stop Patreon patrons. We have so deeply enjoyed making this podcast for all of you this year. It's really been an honor. So we thought we'd end it with a call to James. Come home from Pandora, James. You don't need the digital tools. Sometimes all you need is a guitar and a song from the heart.

• 1:51:45Chris Winterbauer?

  When I was just a boy, my mother sat me down. She said, "James, listen close to the story that I tell." Last night, I dreamed a dream, a woman 12 feet tall, and oh, she had six breasts, and I saw them all.

• 1:52:06Speaker 06

  I've held that image close for close to forty years. I've conquered time and space and Hollywood. I'll drink your fucking tears. And when the dream I dreamt, it finally hits the screen, it'll be too late for you, your studio shills who doubted me. I'm James Cameron. Oh. I've been the bad and I've always been right. Yes, I'm James Cameron. Now let me entertain you with these contents of my Titanic mind. You've got your Disney Plus and Netflix.

• 1:52:50Speaker 06

  You don't compare to that good shit I'm running every night. Yes, I'm James Cameron. I'll terminate the competition with the help of all of my wives.

• 1:53:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Mary Poses Humans, There Is No Spoon, Frankenstein, DB Smith, Angeline Renee Cook, Evan Downey, Jose Salto, Amy Olgeschlager McCoy, Nathan Centeno, Jory Hillpiper, Felicia G., Jared Pronounced, uh, Jen, Scott Oshida, Karina Kanaba, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindelman, The Provost Family, where the Os sound like Os, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, David Friskelanti, Film It Yourself, Chris Isaka, Kate Ellington, Emzodia, C. Grace B., Blaze Ambrose, Ruljurr, Nate the Knife, Lena, LJ, Half Grey Hound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter,

• 1:53:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Peng, Correa, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Steve Winterbauer, Don Schiavel, Rosemary Southward, Jason Frankel, Somon Chinani, Michael McGrath, and Lydia Howes. Thank you so much to everybody who listened to What Went Wrong this year, and especially our Full Stop supporters. It is an honor to serve you.

• 1:54:13Speaker 06

  And what the future holds, only James Cameron knows. We're going blind, my friends, into this dark abyss of the unknown, where all our lies are true and life may run out too. We'll make the best of it, we know we can, as long as we have you.

• 1:54:35Speaker 07

  Come home, James Cameron. Oh. Give us something new from that Titanic mind. Come home, James Cameron. Come back and entertain us. Tell us a story, don't worry about size. I'm tired of my Netflix. But I'm missing all that good shit you keep in to yourself. Come home, James Cameron. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

• 1:55:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you, guys, so much for listening. We will see you in a couple of days for Avatar: Fire and Ash, and then we will see you in the new year.

• 1:55:21Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:55:22Chris Winterbauer?

  For a little film about memory. Lizzie?

• 1:55:25Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Chris is gonna be gracing us with memento.

• 1:55:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I already forgot what it's about. All right. Until then, have a happy new year, a wonderful holiday season. Travel safe. If you have children, prepare to get sick.

• 1:55:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And we will talk to you in 2026.

• 1:56:06Speaker 08

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Basset and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krupshaw.