Last time director/writer/producer James Cameron set the record for the highest-grossing film in history, he closed on a shipwreck and a 101-year-old woman. Titanic didn’t leave much room for a sequel.
For Avatar, however, Cameron created an entire living planet, and he’s been promising since the film’s December 18 release that the story of Pandora and the Na’vi is anything but finished.
In an interview with MTV’s Josh Horowitz on Friday, Cameron revealed that a lot still needs to be worked out.
“‘Avatar 2… we’re still working on deals,” Cameron said. “We don’t start the movie until we get the deals worked out.” He added:
I’m making notes. I’m not sitting idle, but really, what I’m working on primarily is the novel.
I never had a chance to get the novel done while we were making the movie, and I always intended to. I didn’t want to do a cheesy novelization, where some hack comes in and kind of makes s–t up. I wanted to do something that was a legitimate novel that was inside the characters’ heads and didn’t have the wrong culture stuff, the wrong language stuff, all that.”
And fanfiction writers can rejoice. Cameron isn’t entirely against the legions of Avatar lovers who want to put their own spin on his alien world:
“Ideally that becomes a kind of bible for any other writers that want to come along and riff-off with other Avatar based stories.” he said. “The film is pretty spare when it comes to a lot of specific details. That all needs to be filled in before other writers can come in and run with it. I don’t mind opening the universe, but I just don’t want that to happen until I’ve got more meat on the bones.”
It’s easy to imagine that, after breaking movie grossing records twice in a row, Cameron would be too busy with other projects to devote as much time to the sequels in the planned trilogy as he gave to Avatar (which took 16 years from scriptment to screens). Luckily, the technological nature of his CG filming process would allow him to get most of the physical work done in one quick block of time, leaving much of the digital work for later.
“That is something that makes a lot of sense, given the nature of these productions, because we can bank all the [motion] capture and then go back and do cameras over a period of time,” Cameron said. “The way these back-to-back productions fall apart is that you’re trying to do two live-action films back to back, and you’re working on it for a year and a half, shooting. Everyone is dead. It’s not humanly possible. This type of film, it absolutely would work.”
No details yet on when to expect the book or the new movies, but now you can feel free to get excited.
[Source: MTV]
Would you read an Avatar novel written by James Cameron? Do you think it will make the sequels even better than the first movie?