James Cameron geeft nieuwe details Avatar sequels

Regisseur James Cameron’s plannen voor de Avatar sequels zijn al enkele jaren gespreksonderwerp, maar de regisseur is nu eindelijk klaar om volle stoom vooruit te gaan. In een gesprek met Vanity Fair sprak Cameron over de sequels en zijn samenwerking met Titanic hoofdrolspeelster Kate Winslet.

“She’s very excited about it. She blazed through for a couple of days of rehearsals and saw the world that we had created, and how we do the work, and she’s very excited. She plays a character who’s part of the Sea People, the reef people. The one thing she did do is demand that she do all her own water work. I said, ‘All right, that’s fine, we’ll have to teach you how to free dive.’”

Cameron liet vervolgens nog wat informatie los over een recente scene met kindacteurs en onderwater opnames:

“The other actors are up to three- and four-minute breath holds. We’ve already been doing underwater capture. We did a scene last week with six teenagers, well, actually five teenagers and one 7-year-old underwater holding their breath for a couple minutes and acting, actually doing a dialogue scene under water because they speak kind of a sign language.”

De regisseur sprak tevens over het aantal vertragingen van de film:

“I wouldn’t call them delays. It was highly optimistic that we could start quickly until scripts are written. If there’s no scripts, there’s nothing, right? The scripts took four years… We’re doing very well because of all the time that we had to develop the system and the pipeline and all that. We weren’t wasting time, we were putting it into tech development and design. So when all the scripts were approved, everything was designed. Every character, every creature, every setting.”

Tevens leek Cameron voor de zekerheid voorzichtig te zijn over de vierde en vijfde films die gepland zijn, waarbij hij opmerkt dat het publiek moet terugkeren voor de tweede en derde film:

“Let’s face it, if Avatar 2 and 3 don’t make enough money, there’s not going to be a 4 and 5. They’re fully encapsulated stories in and of themselves. It builds across the five films to a greater kind of meta narrative, but they’re fully formed films in their own right, unlike, say, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where you really just had to sort of go, ‘Oh, sh*t, all right, well I guess I better come back next year.’ Even though that all worked and everybody did.”

De eerste Avatar verscheen in 2009 en is nog steeds de bestverdienende film ooit. Wereldwijd haalde de film ruim $2,78 miljard (ruim €2,04 miljard) op. Hoofdrollen in de sequels worden gespeeld door Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver. Stephen Lang, Joel David Moore, Matt Gerald, Cliff Curtis en Oona Chaplin.

20th Century Fox en Lightstorm Entertainment kondigden eerder de releasedatums aan voor de vier Avatar-sequels. Avatar 2 komt op 18 december 2020 naar de bioscoop en wordt op 17 december 2021 gevolgd door Avatar 3. Avatar 4 en Avatar 5 moeten op 20 december 2024 en 19 december 2025 in première gaan.