Cameron was born in Canada, and grew up in a small town not far from Niagara Falls. (He revoked his application for American citizenship after Bush won the election in 2004.) His father was an engineer for a paper company; his mother brought up five children, and told stories of racing stock cars and joining the women’s auxiliary of the Canadian Army.
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At fourteen, Cameron saw the movie that made him want to make his own: Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the first cinematically exquisite treatment of what had traditionally been B-movie material.
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All directors have a God complex; Cameron takes his unusually seriously. For “Avatar,” he worked with a linguist to develop the Na’vi language, inspired by fragments of Maori he picked up in New Zealand years ago. He based Pandora, and its myriad flora (spike tears, cliff slouchers, stinger ivy) and fauna (direhorses, banshees, slinths), partly on the creatures of the coral reefs and kelp forests he has seen at the abyssal depths. He hired a team of artists to execute his ideas, but reserved one creature for himself: the thanator, a six-legged black pantherlike beast, twenty-four feet long, covered in plate scales, with a reptilian double set of jaws and a threat display resembling that of a fan lizard. “The thanator is the baddest, meanest predator the planet had to offer,” Neville Page, the lead creature designer, said. “As Jim put it in the treatment, a thanator can eat an Alien for dessert. He wanted to outdo himself, outdo the Alien Queen.”
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Cameron’s imagination was shaped by the Cold War; the threat of nuclear annihilation is a recurring theme. But he also admires the military and its accessories. “I suppose you could say I believe in peace through superior firepower,” he told me. “I don’t believe that the human race is going to suddenly evolve to the point that we can all join hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ ”
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Gale Anne Hurd, Cameron’s second wife, and the producer of his first three films, says that Cameron always found women more interesting than men as protagonists. “He felt that they were underutilized in sci-fi, action, and fantasy,” she said. “And that just about everything you could explore in a male action hero could be explored better with a woman.”
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“Mars is one of your better planets,” Cameron says. “Because you could actually land there, and it’s close enough to get to, and it’s close enough to the sun that it’s not a big ball of ice.” He is a member in good standing of the Mars Society, a private organization whose membership includes science-fiction writers and astronauts (Gregory Benford, Buzz Aldrin), and whose purpose is to advocate for the human exploration and settlement of that planet. “We should ultimately have colonies on Mars, for purposes of expanding the footprint of the human race,” Cameron says. He shares with the Mars Society the opinion that NASA—on whose advisory council he sat for three years—has become too risk-averse. “We’ve become cowards, basically,” he says. “As a society, we’re just fat and happy and comfortable and we’ve lost the edge.”
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At Comic-Con, “Avatar” was shown in Hall H, which seats more than six thousand. The room was full. The audience put on 3-D glasses that had been handed out at the door—black plastic frames, somewhat reminiscent of Ray-Ban Wayfarers—and the lights went down.
Jake’s avatar—wasp-waisted, nine feet tall, blue—walked through a dusky forest thick with purple, green, pink, and cyan plants that pushed past the boundary of the screen and gently grazed the air, like plastic foliage poking out from a busted terrarium. Night fell, and a pride of slinking, starved, oil-black beasts attacked; he parried and lunged with a torch before Neytiri appeared, a skimpy feather neckpiece, like a primitive bikini, draped across her chest. She killed the beasts in a series of gravity-defying martial-arts moves, then ran away. He gave chase through a forest now aglow with stands of pink man-o’-war-like plants, and over lichen that lit up spearmint green under his feet. As she was just about to disappear again, a cloud of milky spores surrounded him, alighting delicately on his shoulders, head, and hands, and dangling like dust motes in midair. When Neytiri spoke in Na’vi, subtitles appeared, layered unobtrusively in the 3-D space.
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Cameron is in his element in post—fine-tuning, needling, nitpicking, expounding, and finally convinced that the movie will come out. When he arrived at the mixing stage, the engineers cued up a scene: Jake’s avatar squaring off against a big, rhinolike creature with the facial structure of a hammerhead shark. “You bitch,” Jake said, quoting Ripley.
Lenghty article at The New Yorker.
This movie is going to be soo good ;)
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