Word: cameron
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...much as he could, Cameron tried to place the cast emotionally inside the environment of Pandora. He took the actors to Hawaiian rain forests and shot reference footage for them to use as sense memory. To help them feel an explosion, he boomed a noise over amplifiers, threw foam particles at them and whacked them with a padded jousting pole. To approximate Pandora's moss-covered terrain, he laid plastic sheets on the floor, forcing the cast to walk gingerly. When Zoe Saldana, who plays Jake's Na'vi love interest Neytiri, was "riding" a flying creature, she clung...
...character Jar Jar Binks, others to the '80s TV cartoon Thundercats. Those who saw the footage in theaters (it screened in select IMAX locations) were considerably more impressed, but the initial hype and interest that had surrounded the project were giving way to a backlash. This was a place Cameron had been before, on Titanic - only instead of bloggers and online commenters, back then it was the mainstream media who snickered at his ambition...
...script element Fox had initially objected to was Cameron's failure to explain unobtainium, the precious resource that sends humans to Pandora to strip-mine the planet ruinously. Unobtainium is a joke term engineers have used for decades to describe any needed material that is rare, costly or difficult to obtain. For Cameron, the specificity of unobtainium is not important, and despite Fox's objections, he never explains in the movie what makes unobtainium worth the trouble of interstellar travel. But the answer to that mystery is that the substance's room-temperature superconducting properties make...
Like all of Cameron's movies, Avatar can be watched as pure escapist entertainment or as a dire warning about humanity's current path. But here, for the first time, Cameron's future vision has not been limited by the strictures of a real-world movie set. The result is his most fantastical film, one that hews to the rules of science in its creatures and environments but not to the limitations of the physical world of props and the human body. Of course, it still needs to draw human bodies to the theater. Its trickiest special effect...
From The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. Copyright © 2009 by Rebecca Keegan. To be published by the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House...