The next December 16 ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ will finally hit theaters, the long-awaited sequel to the film that leads the list of the highest grossing films of all time. In fact, we already have first opinions about it that describe it as “a visual masterpiece“, but also at Espinof we had the opportunity to attend the press conference to present the new work of James Cameron.
The difficulty of keeping up
Both its director and the producer participated in the press conference Jon Landau and several of the stars of the show, but obviously it all started with Cameron. He himself highlighted that making a sequel is much more complicated than it may seem at first glance, highlighting the following:
It seemed obvious that if you raise a lot of money you’re going to make the sequel. Well, Steven Spielberg didn’t make a sequel to ‘ET, the Extra-Terrestrial’, the highest-grossing film in history at the time. It is not a piece of cake, it is very difficult to live up to it. But we had this amazing cast to come back to and this amazing family of artists and team workers. We bonded and enjoyed the process. That was a huge incentive for me to go back and do it again.
In addition, the filmmaker highlighted that “It’s important that a sequel honor what people loved about the experience with the first, but also catch them off guard, do things that they don’t expect.“In this regard, it is worth remembering other statements of his in which he promised us that ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water'”it is not foreseeable“. We’ll see if it’s true.
On this point, it is striking that Cameron himself acknowledges that “the characters and story were simpler in the first. It also inspired me that Zoe and Sam are parents, I have five children, and we wanted to get into the family dynamic, the responsibility of having children. And in the perspective of children“, while Landau stressed the importance of transmitting “a message about a new world” and of “accept people for their differences“.
New characters and others that have evolved
For his part, Zoe Saldana pointed out that return to this world “It was scary, when something is too similar to you, you can’t see it. Neytiri and I in certain aspects have had parallel lives“, while Sam Worthington revealed this:
James sent me the script for what was ‘Avatar 1.5’ which in itself was great. That was a story about being warriors and fighting between clans, but what we wanted was to explore that family dynamic, but with this another god gave a good point of reference in terms of the gap that was missing between the two films.
In turn, Saldaña explained that “In my personal life, when I became a mother, fear entered my life. You spend a lot of your life creating these what-if scenarios… When I read the script for ‘Avatar 2’ that was Neytiri, but I didn’t see it then, I see it now, because my job wasn’t to see it, it was to play it.“, which led Cameron to have the following revelation:
You make me fearless when I don’t have children, but you learn to be afraid when you have children, because you have something more important than yourself that you can lose. That’s what your characters have to deal with. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but it’s exactly like that.
Among the novelties of this second installment, the signing of Kate Winslet, who meets Cameron here 25 years after ‘Titanic’. She herself recognized that when she agreed to participate in ”Avatar: The Sense of Water'”I expected the best in everythingand detailed the following:
What appealed to me the most was the characters he created. James has always written female characters who aren’t just strong, they’re leaders. They lead with their heart, with integrity, they earn that power. They also have a physical power that is admirable.
Also very unexpected is the return of Sigourney Weaver into a completely new character about which he noted that “when we first talked about it it was in 2010, about a girl who was more comfortable in the forest with the creatures, the flora and fauna, but he wanted to create a complex character, with great things but also some deficits“Her character is a teenager and there are several throughout the film, and about that, Cameron said the following:
I think we’ve had the opportunity to talk about a teenager. I have a daughter who I’ve seen go through that, the confusion and wondering who I am, who listens to me and all that stuff. I already researched it for ‘Titanic’ and then I lived it as a father.
On this point, Worthington insisted that “Jake’s journey was always about how he fits into this world, about finding something worth fighting for. Here he has children and they are trying to find out, with Jake being the ideal person to help them, but being his father sometimes you can’t find that empathy, you have to learn to have it.“.
Cameron is happy
Lastly, Cameron He was very proud of the end result.as he believes that they have been able to perfectly reflect his ambitious intentions:
What impressed me the most when I saw it was the work, the performances, the people. I look beyond the show and the designs. I’m not only proud of the work, but also of the whole team and how they kept everything together. There is even a scene in which the dialogues are not with words, but through the eyes. That they’ve managed to keep the subtlety of that gives us permission to be as detailed as we want, because if you just be generic, that’s not the kind of challenge we wanted at this point in our careers. I am proud not only of what we created, but of how we have been able to maintain it.