James Cameron returns to sweep the box office with ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’, although it still lacks to reach the revenue figure that he himself indicated for the film to start to be profitable. Now the filmmaker has revealed that this long-awaited sequel to the highest-grossing film in history was about to be even longer and more violent of what already is.
“It had become too gloomy”
The also director of ‘Titanic’ has chatted with Esquire about different aspects of ‘Avatar 2’. Undoubtedly, the most striking of all was when he revealed that during the assembly phase had a little crisis of faith which led him to cut 10 minutes of footage to make it less grim:
I had a bit of a crisis of faith while we were editing the film. It was too violent. I wanted to balance beauty, epiphany, and the more spiritual side of the film with the action, and felt it had become too bleak. In fact, I cut out about 10 minutes of the film dedicated to gun action. You have to have conflict, of course. Violence and action are the same, depending on how you look at it. It’s every action filmmaker’s dilemma, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.
Cameron himself acknowledges that right now perhaps he would not make some of the most mythical films of his entire filmography, since he has no interest in fetishizing the use of firearms. This is partly due to how widespread its use is in certain countries of today’s society:
When I look back and see some movies I’ve done, I don’t know if I would want to do them now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did in a couple of Terminator movies over 30 years ago, in our world today. What is happening with guns in our society turns my stomach. Glad to live in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after the horrible mosque shooting a couple of years ago…
funny that he says this when you recently stated that you were considering relaunching the ‘Terminator’ franchise, the truth…