More recently, thanks to the Chinese distribution , Avatar has regained its title of the box office leader of all time. The fantastic adventure of James Cameron is still considered one of the brightest events in modern cinema. And the director plans to repeat the success with the rest of the Pandora story, for which the creative team of the sequels had to work hard.
The director spoke about this when he visited The Marianne Williamson Podcast . With the sequels, Cameron has focused on preserving what made the first film successful, inspiring and impressing audiences around the world. And for this, the scriptwriters had to be kept in check – up to the threat of dismissal.
When I started scripting the sequels, I knew there would be three, and later, as it turned out, four. I put together a writing team and said, “I don’t want to hear anybody’s new ideas until we figure out what worked in the first film, what responded to the audience and why.” They kept talking about new stories and ended up threatening to fire them all. (laughs) After all, they kept on creating new stories. I reminded them that we must figure out the secret of the film’s relationship with the audience and save this ember, this fire.
The idea was a success – the script team revised the first film and singled out three levels of the story, which were the key to its unprecedented success. The first level is purely a plot, the second turned out to be the themes of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, violation of human rights, the syndrome of lack of communication with nature, but the third level turned out to be decisive.
We all agreed that this is a ghostly level that cannot be described in one sentence. There are no “-isms” in it. It gives an enchanting feeling of acute longing for that world, a safe place where you are drawn. These are flights with their sense of freedom and joyful excitement, and walks through the forest, filled with the smell of the earth. It is a sensory sensation that resonates in us at a very deep level. This is the spiritual layer of the first film.
And when all the deep secrets of the first “Avatar” were unraveled, Cameron finally allowed the writers to bombard him with new ideas for the plot of the sequels, but the magical third level has since become a real guiding star for all the authors of the project.
We created and rejected a lot of plots for the second and third films, because they did not give us the same feeling that you are in a fairy tale in reality. James Cameron, Dream Architect
