FILM · 2022 · USA
Avatar: The Way of Water
- Directed by
- James Cameron
- Runtime
- 192 min
- Studio
- 20th Century Studios, Lightstorm Entertainment, TSG Entertainment
412 archived facts 8 topics 1 source Last reviewed Nov 2026
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, learn the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.
412 Interesting Facts About Avatar: The Way of Water
Interesting Facts (122)
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When Sigourney Weaver first saw Kiri's initial design, she objected to it because she felt it was "too neat and pretty." She advocated for Kiri to have a messier design and for her to be a more awkward teenager pointing out that many girls simply do not feel as if they are that "pretty" on the inside. The design also bears strong resemblance to Molly Ossman. The Visual Dictionary also gives an explanation for her messy hair, attributing it becoming that way while exploring nature.
- #005
Not only did James Cameron shoot two full Avatar sequels at once, but he also waited to start filming until all the scripts for Avatar 2, Avatar 3, Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 were complete. He told Collider that his model was similar to what Sir Peter Jackson did with "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. He explained, "They took that chance to launch on all three of those films, but he had the books mapped out, so he could always show the actors what they needed to know about their character arc. So I felt I had to do the same thing. I had to play this as if the books already existed. So the only way for us to do that was to write all the scripts and let the actors read all the scripts and see where their characters were going and what it all meant. Not that that's actable in the moment, but I think it's something that the actors could work into their preparation for their characters."
- #006
The Metkayina clan is known to be inspired by the Maori people of Earth, with Maori actors from the cast of the Avatar sequels working with James Cameron to incorporate elements of indigenous New Zealand cultures into the clan's customs and traditions. Notably, Cliff Curtis and James Cameron worked together to adapt a traditional haka dance into a Na'vi-inspired dance for the clan to perform, incorporating tail and ear movement. The tattoos of the clan also resemble traditional Maori tattoos in placement and style.
- #007
James Cameron seriously considered shooting the entirety of the Avatar sequels in a higher frame rate, stating, "The 3D shows you a window into reality; the higher frame rate takes the glass out of the window". The industry standard is 24fps, and higher frame rates are at least 48fps, 60fps, or 120fps. He later opted out of this route, stating in an interview that as groundbreaking as the format is for cinema, moviegoers have always been used to a specific way to view films and altering that in any way would simply take the audience out of that experience. Instead, only certain scenes will utilize HFR technology.
- #008
Weta FX used its own data center to render most scenes of this film. However, processing capacity from Amazon Web Services was also added in the last months. Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours which is equivalent to the combined power of 3,000 virtual CPUs in a data center for an hour. At some point, all available capacity of Australian AWS data centers was used to render scenes of this movie.
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James Cameron stated that Jake and Neytiri have matured to have less reckless personalities due to being parents, clarifying, "In the first movie, Sam's character leaps off his flying creature and essentially changes the course of history as a result of this crazy, almost suicidal leap of faith. And Zoe's character leaps off a limb and assumes there's going to be some nice big leaves down there that can cushion her fall. But when you're a parent, you don't think that way. So for me, as a parent of five kids, I'm saying, "What happens when those characters mature and realize that they have a responsibility outside their own survival?"
- #011
When asked if there was a particular shot or scene or character that was the most difficult, Weta supervisor Joe Letteri stated: "The very first scene we did was the dialogue scene with Jake and Neytiri where they're in High Camp and Jake is trying to convince her to leave. And that was really bringing back the two characters from 15 years earlier, dusting them off, updating them to all the new software, the new detail in the skin, the new lighting techniques, the new hair, but also the new facial system. And that was really where we battle-tested pretty much everything except for the water, in that one scene. So we actually spent a year on that scene just to make sure we had it right and understood it. At that point, we started rolling it out to the other characters and, you know, branching out to do the rest of the shots."
- #012
Jack Champion spoke about how he was integrated into the CGI scenes, and how he had to adapt to working alongside huge Na'vi puppets in place of the other actors. He said "We had this acting troupe that would basically re-act what the actors did just for my sake," He continued "but they'd wear this giant Na'vi puppet on their shoulders, so there'd be a torso here and then a head up here, and then they'd control the arms with little sticks -- foam Na'vi that were actually 10-feet tall for us to look at."
- #013
Sigourney mentions how the role of Kiri was first offered to her by director James Cameron. "I was having lunch with Jim, and he started to talk about this forest girl, who had a special gift of connection with living things, and she's gonna be about 14. [He said,] 'You and I know how immature you are, so I think you can handle this.' I said, 'Thank you.'" For Weaver, it wasn't difficult to get back into her younger self for the role. "I don't think any of us are very far away from our 14-year-old selves," Weaver said of the part. "It's such a strong memory, how great it was and how awful it was. I just sort of fell in love with the character. Jim has this amazing ability to write straight into the heart of a character." However, it did mean Weaver had to play the character very differently from her normal roles, which she found a very rewarding experience.
- #014
When asked about how long he could hold his breath, Stephen Lang described the difference between holding your breath while acting and holding your breath while static. "I think I could do four, five minutes, but when you're acting, it's different," explained Lang. "That would be what we call a static hold. If I'm not doing anything, if I'm just hanging out in the water, I can hold my breath for a while. But when Sam Worthington pulls a knife on me 30 feet under then I can't stay under that long!"
- #015
James Cameron spoke about his decision to shoot Avatar 2 alongside the third and fourth movies. It's simple: those kids just grow up too fast. "Otherwise, you get and I love Stranger Things (2016), but you get the effect where they're supposed to still be in high school [but] they look like they're 27. "You know, I love the show. It's okay, we'll suspend disbelief. We like the characters, but, you know."
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For many of the scenes with Payakan, the art department made a large, practical fin that an actor could hold onto, such as when Lo'ak rides the creature. Then they had a spot for his eyes, so they could match the eye line during the interaction. "Sometimes we were dragging the fin through the water so you could have the proper resistance," said production designer Dylan Cole," and then other times when all the kids are climbing on him, we built a set that approximated his back with the blowholes and the plating, so that we could set that in the tank and they could perform on that."
- #018
James Cameron explains why there's so many mysteries with Kiri, revealing that it's an important part of the larger story connecting all the Avatar sequels: "We ask a lot of questions with Kiri that we don't answer, even over the course of the entire film. It's a greater story arc. It's a big journey for the audience with her. But it's okay, because you care about her. She has a luminous quality."
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James Cameron explained why he decided to portray Ronal as pregnant throughout the film. "Everybody's always talking about female empowerment. But what is such a big part of a woman's life that we, as men, don't experience?" Cameron said. He then went on to say that he wanted to explore the concept of female empowerment in the sequel. So he decided to introduce a female warrior who was six months pregnant in the battle. Cameron said, "Well, if you're really going to go all the way down the rabbit hole of female empowerment, let's have a female warrior who's six months pregnant in battle." He then explained that it might not have happened for years, but back in the day, women also had to "fight for survival" and for their children's protection. "And it didn't matter if they were pregnant," Cameron said.
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When Tsireya emerges from the water when she first appears, if one looks closely at her eyes, it can be seen that her eyes have a translucent membrane which opens up. It is also known as the nictitating membrane or "third eyelid" which members of her clan have evolved to help them see underwater.
- #023
When asked why the movie is 3 hours, James Cameron revealed in an interview with Total Film: "The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis, I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion. We didn't spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it's a longer film, because there's more characters to service. There's more story to service." Above all, however, The Way Of Water is a family story. This is because, 14 years after falling in love, Jake and Neytiri are now the proud parents of five children. "People say, 'Oh my God, a family story from Disney? Just what we want' This isn't that kind of family story," Cameron clarifies. "This is a family story like how The Sopranos is a family story."
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Supplementary material for the first movie established that the RDA had a complement of ten ISV Venture Star ships as part of their Earth to Pandora supply chain. When humanity returns in the sequel their massive invasion force is exactly ten ships--they sent their entire fleet for an all-out reclamation of Pandora.
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The digital water in the film was created by artists using Weta's latest Loki simulation software after the Weta FX team did a deep dive into understanding water. "What's the color of the water? How should the light actually travel through it?" were some of the questions they addressed, says Metkayina Village and reefs VFX supervisor Pavani Boddapati. Adds Jonathan Nixon, effects supervisor for water and fire, "A good portion of this film is computer-generated water because we just got to a point where it looked so good, it was easier just to replace [the actual water] and integrate it [into the shots]."
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James Cameron was set on shooting the (many) water sequences in actual water to make the scenes as real as possible. As visual effects supervisor, Richie Baneham, explained in an interview, "If an actor is genuinely in water, there's a viscous resistance. It informs the actor's choices. That's what makes it feel real."
- #030
Another moment, made possible through a combination of digital tools and motion-capture performance, synthesizes for writer Rick Jaffa the poignant significance of the tulkun in the film. "The first time we all saw the image of Lo'ak and Payakan with arms outstretched underwater, as if they're trying to hold hands or connect physically, we all got really emotional," he said.
- #031
For production designer Dylan Cole, who is essentially an "Avatar" zoologist, the tulkun exemplify James Cameron's obsessive attention to the biomechanics of every entity that inhabits this world: grounded in substantial real-world references but imbued with enough meticulous, original details that we might almost be convinced that these creatures actually exist somewhere out there in the universe. "I'm not only a fantasy film designer," Cole said. "I'm a National Geographic explorer on Pandora trying to report back."
- #032
Quaritch does so well fighting underwater because he also knows breath-holding techniques. The colonel is shown to exert himself while holding his breath several times in the first film. The human Quaritch got good at holding his breath because he knew that an exo-pack wouldn't always be at the ready, something he likely learned on his first day on Pandora, since whatever clawed his face clearly would've ripped his mask off.
- #033
The concept of letting Payakan express himself through his eyes was inspired by Mike Wazowski, the green one-eyed walking eyeball from Monsters, Inc. (2001) The idea originally started as a joke, but the production designers around Dylan Cole soon realized that Payakan poses the same problem of conveying expressions through only one eye.
- #034
In a interview with Esquire Middle East, James Cameron revealed he cut portions of the sequel depicting gun violence because he no longer wants to "fetishize the gun." "I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action," Cameron said. "I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I'm known as an action filmmaker."
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Director James Cameron, who has released extended versions of his movies Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and the previous Avatar (2009), has revealed that there won't be a director's cut or extended edition of this film. Although he is open to the idea of releasing a two-hour version of a future Avatar sequel theatrically and a six-hour version for streaming, producer Jon Landau has stated that "we don't have the amount of content to do that [for The Way of Water]."
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As Jake describes each milestone in English, the rest of the Na'vi communicate with one another in their native language. Their lines of dialogue are subtitled in the familiar papyrus-like font. Then, Jake self-mockingly talks about how long it took for him to speak it fluently. He concludes by saying that, now, "It might as well be English." In that moment young Lo'ak and Kiri's dialogue switches to English; the audience is meant to understand that they're all speaking Na'vi. This is a slick scripwriting/editing trick, a way to acknowledge and preserve Pandora's on-screen culture without making the actors do the entirety of their performance in subtitled Na'vi. The remainder of the film is spoken almost entirely in English, except for moments where what's lost in translation is part of the plot.
- #039
Production Designer Dylan Cole revealed the gill mantle, which is what the Metkayina use to breathe, is sort of like a jellyfish meeting a ray. It functions as a living underwater scuba. He stated: "That was an idea of Jim's. We had to kind of distill his foggy vision of it down to reality. Ultimately, it was a very beautiful thing, but how do you serve this story's needs? Let it be a beauty moment as well, where he described that as sort of like angel wings around you, and then even how it kind of grabs you around the ribs to hold on. It was both an elegant storytelling solution and an elegant visual solution, I think."
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Zoe Saldana was challenged portraying Neytiri because this time, Neytiri was confronting her own fear, and the character had a lot of anger and unresolved conflict in her heart. She also felt working with Sam Worthington was different this time because she sensed "vulnerability" from him, and the two tried to channel this fear into Jake Sully and Neytiri
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Emotional resonance in the film was something that James Cameron, as well as stars Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang, stressed throughout their conversation. "I'm a pretty logical person, so when I'm writing I get hung up on logic, and I gotta justify everything and set it all up. And we go through the shooting process, and then the editing process, and I wind up taking a lot of things out," Cameron shared. "And I realize it's like that game where you can keep pulling things out, and the tower doesn't fall down it's like Jenga! When you're cutting the movie it's not about length as much as about speed and the progression of ideas. You keep taking things out, and my logical brain keeps saying 'How are they going to understand that?' But you do, because you feel it." "It starts right at the beginning, with that blank page," Cameron continued. "We challenged ourselves at the beginning to figure out, 'How did that first film work again?' Because it really hit every culture and every language group across all different cultures around the world. It had to have been at some universal level of the human heart, and we tried to quantify it before we even started writing, because we didn't want to miss that. Science fiction sometimes is a fiction of ideas sometimes, not always, sometimes it lacks heart, so we really put an extra emphasis on that in the writing process."
- #044
The trickiest shots to achieve, according to Daniel Barrett, were those in which Payakan is at the intersection between the water and the surface, when only part of his body breaches. To make them happen, the animators had to account for the massive movement of water that would happen when a creature the size of a tulkun emerges from it, the sheets of water coming off him, and the mist as he clears his blow hole. This level of realism exists thanks to advances in CGI technology that can help with replicating buoyancy. "Without that we would have been dead in the water, so to speak," Barrett said, "because you would have lost the sense of reality without that water, which was such a big character in the film in itself and such an important part of Payakan's connection to his environment."
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During the promotion of The Way of Water, James Cameron attended a show featuring performing dolphins in Japan and during the show sarcastically said, "I'm sure everybody asked their permission to be in the series." His attendance caused controversy because many Avatar fans felt that using animals for entertainment went against the themes of the series. A week later he explained that he had felt very uncomfortable but did not want to appear rude to the Japanese people who had arranged the series for him: "A dolphin show was never mentioned. When we got on stage I literally learned it was a dolphin show. We were already among the lights and the fans were cheering. I said something dismissive into the microphone: 'I'm sure all the dolphins were asked for their permission to join the series,' or something like that. But looking back, I didn't want to make a big deal of it. But my instinct is always to meet people where they are. That's the whole point of Avatar: The Way of Water." Cameron blamed Disney for being blindsighted to the dolphin show, commenting, "When you watch the film you'll see it's about saving whales and treating them as equals. About captive dolphins. I want you to know that this was a mistake beyond my ability to foresee or prevent, and that I'm sorry for it." He also said that if people don't want to be hypocritical and instead wish to help dolphins and animals, they should "give up the damn tuna melt," give up eating meat and fish entirely, and stick to plant-based proteins as he has done for more than a decade.
- #049
For the design of the Metkayina village, production designer Dylan Cole says he referenced Indigenous cultures in the South Pacific for the design, but "the main thing was figuring out how this is engineered. And how are you reinforcing story? Something very important to the Na'vi is connectivity, and so it was very important to Jim and to us that this village is connected." That's why the walkways and dwellings resemble a neural network. "That worked thematically, [along with] showing that they live in harmony with the water."
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In the original script, it is Kiri and Spider who receive a hug from Jake at the end, with Tuk joining them. However, Lo'ak stands apart, unable to face his parents. Tsireya sees his anguish and reaches for him, but he pulls away ashamed. There was also originally no scene earlier where Jake says "I see you" to Lo'ak" nor does Jake bother to thank Lo'ak for saving him in the SeaDragon. This was likely changed in the final version to give Lo'ak more sense of peace.
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Costume designer Deborah L. Scott stated about the Recoms that they were inspired by real-world military: "They're like the Special Forces." They are also reminiscent of the MACV-SOG (whose logo features a human skull as well), which conducted the same kind of unconventional operations during the Vietnam War.
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In a deleted scene, Neytiri repeatedly stabs one of her victims to death, and also kills a man who begs for his life. She continued to defile his body with multiple stabbings and she seems to shout, "You, you, you, you, you, you, YOUUUUUUUUUU!" When she holds Spider hostage, she truly considers killing him by cutting his throat, even after Quaritch has released Kiri, showing how much pain, anger and a desire for revenge Neytiri was feeling due to Neteyam's death. Jake, Kiri and Quaritch have to talk her out of killing Spider. The canonicity of the scene is debatable due to it being deleted, however, it is notable that blood suddenly appears on Neytiri's face when Spider looks at her face again, suggesting it did happen.
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In the original script, Spider desperately wants to join the Sully family when they hold hands in a circle after Neteyam's funeral. Kiri invites him to join, but Neytiri shoots him a look to keep out, and he does not join. This is still similar to a scene in "The High Ground" but with different context and Spider does join here.
- #061
James Cameron said, "My kids and I have a laugh about it now because of what they see as my silly attempt to portray them [in the film]. It's like each one knows which character was modeled on them, and they totally reject it. It's like, 'No, you don't understand me at all.' Which is perfect, right?"
- #062
When James Cameron put together a treatment for "Avatar 2," which he subtitled "The Higher Ground" at the time. This was, by the way, a 130-page treatment, longer than many full screenplays. However, he was so unhappy with it that he threw it out and started over. Cameron would put together what was effectively a writer's room to work on the sequels to "Avatar" with him.
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For his part, Stephen Lang appreciated exploring new depths in Quaritch that weren't necessarily in the first Avatar. "He had a strong sense of loyalty and mission; he had laudable qualities, but emotionally, I think he had long cauterized those feelings away," the actor reflected. "Here, now, in this new incarnation, I think that Jim has introduced the possibility of depth of feeling for him. That there actually is something there, and I think that this is something that is probably confusing for the character, and something that he's probably not willing to fully acknowledge."
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The total amount of data stored on the film was 18.5 petabytes, which is 18.5 * the amount used on the original Avatar, and close to 40% of the rendering was completed in the cloud. In terms of all the crew needed to accomplish this, they had a core team of probably around 500, and they had close to 1,800 artists and people working on it all over the world at any given time. On a typical film, there's usually one or two VFX supervisors and animation supervisors, but for this film, there were 10 VFX supervisors and nine animation supervisors. They began working on the motion capture way back in 2017 and started on all the VFX work right away because there was so much prep to do, including building the models, doing character studies and so on.
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Production Designer Dylan Cole said, he and his team used Payakan as the prototype for the rest of the tulkun. But getting there involved plenty of experimentation. "At first glance, yes, he's very whale-like, but every single detail and component of him is different and alien," Cole explained. One of the primary design requirements involved the audio sensors on the tulkun's crest, located on the head. Initially, the sensor mast resembled the kind of appendage found on the head of an anglerfish. But that version of the sensors was simplified and then removed as Cameron himself worked on several sketches to refine the crest shape and the way the head worked. Cole and his team took that final rendering, put the sensors back on the crest, and arrived at what we now see onscreen.
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In the original script, Ronal tries to frame Kiri's seizure as evidence Eywa has turned her back on the Sully family. This may have been removed because it can easily be seen as a low blow towards a family with one of its members in a coma, and making Ronal to unlikable would make viewers sympathize with her less when Ro'a is killed.
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Producer Jon Landau explained why they wanted the writers' room to focus on characters and character arcs. Landau also discussed how the writers' room works with the design team to inspire each other. He stated: "What we were looking for in the writers was character development and character stories that would come out of 1,500 pages of story notes that Jim had created already that touched on family and touched on Kiri, Spider, and Quaritch. It was pulling those stories out. At the same time, we did the writers room, we hired our design team, and they worked independently, but together. The writers would come up and see some of the inspirations of the early art, or an idea would come out of the writers room, we'd let the art department know, and a week later, there'd be a drawing of that. The writers could see how that played out. So there was this really organic process."
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There is a line in The Visual Dictionary which suggests Garvin knows Tonowari and may have interacted with him and the clan a few times before. It says, "Then his mobile lab can dock with the landed setup and, if he needs it to interface with olo'eyktan (clan leader) Tonowari or the Reef People, his lab can drop anchor in their cove for easy access."
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Neytiri's bigotry and disdain towards humanity and Spider has been somewhat controversial. Writer Amanda Silver said she agreed with portraying this side of Neytiri, saying it makes sense for her character given her backstory, and that she feels it is fine for female characters to have flaws because it helps portray them as being fully fleshed-out as opposed to being perfect or one-dimension.
- #089
Zachary Berger took to Twitter to show fans what it was like working on designing the Akula under James Cameron's leadership. Berger received the task of creating Pandora's shark on the first day of the job, saying that touring the Avatar art gallery "put the fear of god in me." After a conversation with Cameron, Berger began adapting a concept created a few years before his hiring, making edits here and there to add armor plating and bioluminescence. Whike the original idea was great, Berger revealed that it needed something the Avatar team calls a "reveal", which many of Pandora's creatures have. He described the concept as "some sort of shape change or unfurling of some extra appendage or something" admitting that the Akula needed "some of that Avatar secret sauce." Berger and the team focused on Akula's mouth, pitching numerous unique concepts. Ultimately, they decided on the triangular rattlesnake-like design featured in the finished film, for which they used their own arms to act out during the approval meetings.
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James Cameron said of writing the film, "It's dangerous to tell a story with a lot of characters because it can lack focus. But I just took that challenge on. There's this epic landscape with epic storytelling. I was trying to emulate a 'Star Wars' universe or 'Lord of the Rings.' Something that's a persistent world that people can come back to and enjoy over time."
- #096
James Cameron cited The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022) as an influence on the Avatar sequels, "with those multiple storylines and interesting characters, that's what I was aspiring to. But they had a guide; I didn't. I had to write my own 'Silmarillion' or 'Lord of the Rings' in the form of notes. But I also didn't want to do it all alone. I knew that I was going to do multiple movies, so I created a little writers' room like you would for a TV show."
- #097
Neteyam was supposed to restrain Lo'ak when he attempts to warn Payakan, prompting Lo'ak to punch Neteyam off. Neteyam would then restrain Lo'ak, causing Lo'ak to apologize, but he manages to escape when Neteyam is off-guard. In the original script, the scene was intended to be even more physical: "Lo'ak spins and clocks Neteyam in the face. It's a nasty right cross with all of Lo'ak's anger and hurt behind it. Neteyam staggers back--then recovers and tackles Lo'ak, taking him down. The brothers go at it, rolling around, yelling and punching. Blows landing." Tsireya then sees the brothers beating up each other and she is horrified. She tries to encourage Aonung and Roxto to stop them, but the two refuse, viewing it as a brother thing.
- #098
James Cameron said, "I wrote the first film in 1995. And I wasn't thinking about being a husband, father, family guy or any of that stuff. But sitting down [for the sequel] in 2012, I said, 'What story do I want to tell?' Of course, I'm going to go back to Pandora - I'm going to go back to Jake and Neytiri. And it's like: What if Romeo and Juliet didn't die? What if they married and had kids, and they had a family, and they had to think about something besides each other?"
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When Quaritch is watching the video of his human self, a woman can be seen with an outfit resembling Walker's. She also has no tattoos, unlike Zdinarsk, suggesting it very well could be Walker as a human. She is also seen touching Lyle Wainfleet, suggesting they could be a couple or close friends.
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Fike was supposed to live longer in the original script and was the one who attacked the Ta'unui Olo'eyktan with his rifle butt. In an unused extended version, Prager does this instead. Also originally in the script, Fike dies during the skirmish at the Three Brothers but it is not specified how.
- #104
James Cameron and his crew worked with a virtual camera system. The camera rig allowed Cameron to walk around a space and directly control the scene that's been rendered, but can also be adapted to simulate different things that a regular camera system might perform, like a dolly or handheld shot. All of this provides Cameron with an incredible amount of freedom to film complex action and movement scenes by hand.
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Although Amrita has replaced unobtainium as Pandora's MacGuffin and unobtainium isn't mentioned in this movie at all, its presence is felt in one way, when Jake's family pull off their train job, you can tell from the design of the tracks that it's a maglev line, requiring superconducting magnets made with unobtainium.
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Quaritch's awakening in his Recom body shares some parallels to Jake Sully's awakening as an Avatar. Both had a very excited awakening in their new bodies, though Quaritch's was more violent compared to Jake. In both of these scenarios, doctors attempted to sedate them but did not succeed. Both were astonished from examining their new forms and quickly adapted to them as well.
- #109
The character of Spider played by Jack Champion was of a human teenage boy aged about 15 or 16 raised amongst the Na'vi and dressed identically to them being nothing more than a small loin cloth. Champion was thus required to appear in every scene shirtless. To ensure he was as athletic and ripped as possible, he had to undergo a considerably intensive workout regimen. Given that the actual physical live action filming didn't commence until Jack was well into his 14th year, all through his 15th year and into his 16th, he commenced the training when he turned 13 and barely into adolescence and by his own admission not a particularly muscly kid. Famous celebrity trainer Josh Murillo worked with Jack intensively for almost 2 years through the earlier performance capture filming with weights, a strict protein heavy diet and cardio so that he was in shape for the live action filming that went on for 2 more years until Jack was 16. Murillo kept working with Jack all through the live action filming to ensure he maintained his athletic look throughout the movie.
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The film is dedicated to the memories of two of James Cameron's longtime collaborators, James Horner and Bill Paxton, who both died during pre-production, in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Horner had composed the score for Avatar (2009), and was eager to return for the sequels before his death.
- #114
Recombinant Mansk's appearance became the subject of internet memes parodying the American south and conservative/right-wing politics, due to his army outfit and sunglasses, which are commonly worn amongst the aforementioned demographics. An early occurrence of this meme was on Twitter on January 3, 2023, including a picture of Mansk with the caption "U know the burgers and dogs are insane if this guy is on the grill"
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The final duel between Jake Sully and Miles Quaritch mirrors Steven Spielberg's Hook (1991): after Jake recovers his children that they were kidnapped by Quaritch (as Captain Hook had kidnapped Peter Banning's children), Jake tries move away with them to put safe, but Quaritch threatens Jake with to pursue and kill them that if he goes, forcing Jake to fight against Quaritch to stop him once at all.
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While the original English version brought back almost all the original cast, despite the decade-long wait, the same cannot be said in some foreign dubs: In the Japanese dub, due to the death of Kazuko Yanaga, Grace Augustine is voiced by Gara Takashima in her place, while Kiri is voiced by Saori Hayami. In the Latin American Spanish dub, Miles Quaritch is voiced by José Luis Orozco due to the death of José Lavat in 2018. Norm Spellman also changed voice actors from Luis Daniel Ramírez to José Ángel Torres due to the former being banned from the dubbing studio, Taller Acústico, following several accusations of sexual harassment. In the European French dub, Miles Quaritch is voiced by Xavier Fagnon, replacing Jean-Bernard Guillard who voiced him in the first Avatar.
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According to writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, there's one moment in the film that they believed to be a "high-wire act" because if it wasn't done correctly, viewers may have thought it was too crazy and not bought into it the friendship exploration of Lo'ak and the giant Tulkun, Payakan.
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Production Story (73)
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According to James Cameron, the Avatar sequels were such a massive undertaking that he divided the four scripts between the writing team of Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman, and Shane Salerno. Cameron delves further explaining the story process: "I think we met for seven months and we whiteboarded out every scene in every film together, and I didn't assign each writer which film they were going to work on until the last day. I knew if I assigned them their scripts ahead of time, they'd tune out every time we were talking about the other movie."
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The daisy anemone that Kiri manipulates to destroy the Mako submersible, there is a similar creature in reality called the "urticina piscivora" which likely served as inspiration, although it is the size of one's palm. There is another called the "cereus pedunculatus" which is also called the daisy anemone. While the Pandorapedia categorizes it as flora, it can also be considered zooplantae.
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James Cameron said, "I wrote the first film in 1995. And I wasn't thinking about being a husband, father, family guy or any of that stuff. But sitting down [for the sequel] in 2012, I said, 'What story do I want to tell?' Of course, I'm going to go back to Pandora - I'm going to go back to Jake and Neytiri. And it's like: What if Romeo and Juliet didn't die? What if they married and had kids, and they had a family, and they had to think about something besides each other?"
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In a interview with Esquire Middle East, James Cameron revealed he cut portions of the sequel depicting gun violence because he no longer wants to "fetishize the gun." "I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action," Cameron said. "I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I'm known as an action filmmaker."
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James Cameron explains why there's so many mysteries with Kiri, revealing that it's an important part of the larger story connecting all the Avatar sequels: "We ask a lot of questions with Kiri that we don't answer, even over the course of the entire film. It's a greater story arc. It's a big journey for the audience with her. But it's okay, because you care about her. She has a luminous quality."
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The Metkayina clan is known to be inspired by the Maori people of Earth, with Maori actors from the cast of the Avatar sequels working with James Cameron to incorporate elements of indigenous New Zealand cultures into the clan's customs and traditions. Notably, Cliff Curtis and James Cameron worked together to adapt a traditional haka dance into a Na'vi-inspired dance for the clan to perform, incorporating tail and ear movement. The tattoos of the clan also resemble traditional Maori tattoos in placement and style.
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The film is dedicated to the memories of two of James Cameron's longtime collaborators, James Horner and Bill Paxton, who both died during pre-production, in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Horner had composed the score for Avatar (2009), and was eager to return for the sequels before his death.
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James Cameron cited The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022) as an influence on the Avatar sequels, "with those multiple storylines and interesting characters, that's what I was aspiring to. But they had a guide; I didn't. I had to write my own 'Silmarillion' or 'Lord of the Rings' in the form of notes. But I also didn't want to do it all alone. I knew that I was going to do multiple movies, so I created a little writers' room like you would for a TV show."
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According to writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, there's one moment in the film that they believed to be a "high-wire act" because if it wasn't done correctly, viewers may have thought it was too crazy and not bought into it the friendship exploration of Lo'ak and the giant Tulkun, Payakan.
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Costume designer Deborah L. Scott stated about the Recoms that they were inspired by real-world military: "They're like the Special Forces." They are also reminiscent of the MACV-SOG (whose logo features a human skull as well), which conducted the same kind of unconventional operations during the Vietnam War.
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For the design of the Metkayina village, production designer Dylan Cole says he referenced Indigenous cultures in the South Pacific for the design, but "the main thing was figuring out how this is engineered. And how are you reinforcing story? Something very important to the Na'vi is connectivity, and so it was very important to Jim and to us that this village is connected." That's why the walkways and dwellings resemble a neural network. "That worked thematically, [along with] showing that they live in harmony with the water."
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On the "Inside Pandora's Box" featurette included with the digital release, James Cameron offered insight into his inspirations and creative process when developing the sequels and his pitch to the studio:"I went to the studio and said, 'Let's not do a sequel. Let's launch ourselves on a big story arc.' All the world-building that we do, all the character-building that we do. Let's not just do another movie. Let's do Star Wars. Let's do Lord of the Rings. Let's swing for the fences."
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While the original English version brought back almost all the original cast, despite the decade-long wait, the same cannot be said in some foreign dubs: In the Japanese dub, due to the death of Kazuko Yanaga, Grace Augustine is voiced by Gara Takashima in her place, while Kiri is voiced by Saori Hayami. In the Latin American Spanish dub, Miles Quaritch is voiced by José Luis Orozco due to the death of José Lavat in 2018. Norm Spellman also changed voice actors from Luis Daniel Ramírez to José Ángel Torres due to the former being banned from the dubbing studio, Taller Acústico, following several accusations of sexual harassment. In the European French dub, Miles Quaritch is voiced by Xavier Fagnon, replacing Jean-Bernard Guillard who voiced him in the first Avatar.
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Director James Cameron, who has released extended versions of his movies Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and the previous Avatar (2009), has revealed that there won't be a director's cut or extended edition of this film. Although he is open to the idea of releasing a two-hour version of a future Avatar sequel theatrically and a six-hour version for streaming, producer Jon Landau has stated that "we don't have the amount of content to do that [for The Way of Water]."
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As Jake describes each milestone in English, the rest of the Na'vi communicate with one another in their native language. Their lines of dialogue are subtitled in the familiar papyrus-like font. Then, Jake self-mockingly talks about how long it took for him to speak it fluently. He concludes by saying that, now, "It might as well be English." In that moment young Lo'ak and Kiri's dialogue switches to English; the audience is meant to understand that they're all speaking Na'vi. This is a slick scripwriting/editing trick, a way to acknowledge and preserve Pandora's on-screen culture without making the actors do the entirety of their performance in subtitled Na'vi. The remainder of the film is spoken almost entirely in English, except for moments where what's lost in translation is part of the plot.
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Not only did James Cameron shoot two full Avatar sequels at once, but he also waited to start filming until all the scripts for Avatar 2, Avatar 3, Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 were complete. He told Collider that his model was similar to what Sir Peter Jackson did with "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. He explained, "They took that chance to launch on all three of those films, but he had the books mapped out, so he could always show the actors what they needed to know about their character arc. So I felt I had to do the same thing. I had to play this as if the books already existed. So the only way for us to do that was to write all the scripts and let the actors read all the scripts and see where their characters were going and what it all meant. Not that that's actable in the moment, but I think it's something that the actors could work into their preparation for their characters."
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The concept of letting Payakan express himself through his eyes was inspired by Mike Wazowski, the green one-eyed walking eyeball from Monsters, Inc. (2001) The idea originally started as a joke, but the production designers around Dylan Cole soon realized that Payakan poses the same problem of conveying expressions through only one eye.
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In the original script, it is Kiri and Spider who receive a hug from Jake at the end, with Tuk joining them. However, Lo'ak stands apart, unable to face his parents. Tsireya sees his anguish and reaches for him, but he pulls away ashamed. There was also originally no scene earlier where Jake says "I see you" to Lo'ak" nor does Jake bother to thank Lo'ak for saving him in the SeaDragon. This was likely changed in the final version to give Lo'ak more sense of peace.
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Producer Jon Landau explained why they wanted the writers' room to focus on characters and character arcs. Landau also discussed how the writers' room works with the design team to inspire each other. He stated: "What we were looking for in the writers was character development and character stories that would come out of 1,500 pages of story notes that Jim had created already that touched on family and touched on Kiri, Spider, and Quaritch. It was pulling those stories out. At the same time, we did the writers room, we hired our design team, and they worked independently, but together. The writers would come up and see some of the inspirations of the early art, or an idea would come out of the writers room, we'd let the art department know, and a week later, there'd be a drawing of that. The writers could see how that played out. So there was this really organic process."
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Production designer Dylan Cole said that the design for the Skimwings was fairly clear early on for director James Cameron. He explained: "It's basically a giant flying fish. It actually glides using a wing-in-ground effect, which is how the SeaDragon works as well. What I really wanted to push was the head design. I felt early designs were too derivative of an ikran, but Jim said they are cousins. But I still wanted to explore further afield.'' Cameron said that the skimwing propels its movement with its tail and not its wings. The production studied flying fish and how they worked for the design. They also based the mouth on a billfish, which include marlins, sailfish, and spearfish, all of which have a sort of extended, thin mouth area. In addition, Cameron mentions gars, which have long and thin but less pointy mouths, and compares them to the "splayed teeth on a long bill as a Rhamphorhynchus and Pteranodon did." He even compared them to "a giant pair of chopsticks with teeth that can snatch things many times." The head structure ended up being similar to that of a gar, but it could have been different. Cameron says of the design: "We had head designs for the skimwing that looked like everything from dragons to T. rexes to all kinds of things. We wound up going with the gar idea. I brought a plastic casting of a gar skull in as inspiration for the skimwing. When we saw it, we just went, 'Oh, that's great. That's scary."
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When Sigourney Weaver first saw Kiri's initial design, she objected to it because she felt it was "too neat and pretty." She advocated for Kiri to have a messier design and for her to be a more awkward teenager pointing out that many girls simply do not feel as if they are that "pretty" on the inside. The design also bears strong resemblance to Molly Ossman. The Visual Dictionary also gives an explanation for her messy hair, attributing it becoming that way while exploring nature.
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James Cameron spoke about his decision to shoot Avatar 2 alongside the third and fourth movies. It's simple: those kids just grow up too fast. "Otherwise, you get and I love Stranger Things (2016), but you get the effect where they're supposed to still be in high school [but] they look like they're 27. "You know, I love the show. It's okay, we'll suspend disbelief. We like the characters, but, you know."
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For Payakan's most prominent eye, his most anthropomorphic feature, the approach entailed creating a cross between an elephant eye and a human eye, with a familiar iris and pupil. Separately, the sclera, the eye's outer layer, would most closely resemble those of horses and cows and include a nictitating membrane, the built-in goggles that make it possible to see underwater. The goal with all of these details was to elevate Payakan above a mere creature and give him a personality. "Payakan was probably the hardest creature for us to crack because it's not just a creature, it's a character," Cole said. "He really needed to be relatable and emote." The animators in turn focused their efforts on manipulating the movement of the eye, and the skin around it, to help with performance. "We needed to get as much out of that as possible because that's what Lo'ak connects with: this enormous eye, cheek and brow," said Barrett, the animation supervisor. In terms of the mechanics of the tulkun's locomotion, the animation team used humpback whales as a key reference. For Payakan's more playful moments, however, the inspiration came from seals, particularly their expressive tails. In one instance that Barrett calls "the puppy shot," the influence is clear as Payakan swims around Lo'ak.
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James Cameron seriously considered shooting the entirety of the Avatar sequels in a higher frame rate, stating, "The 3D shows you a window into reality; the higher frame rate takes the glass out of the window". The industry standard is 24fps, and higher frame rates are at least 48fps, 60fps, or 120fps. He later opted out of this route, stating in an interview that as groundbreaking as the format is for cinema, moviegoers have always been used to a specific way to view films and altering that in any way would simply take the audience out of that experience. Instead, only certain scenes will utilize HFR technology.
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In a interview with The Hollywood Reporter, James Cameron revealed that he has plans for both an Avatar 6 and 7, should there be enough demand for it. "I'd be 89 by then," Cameron joked, taking a shot at how long it's been since the first Avatar and its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water. "Obviously, I'm not going to be able to make Avatar movies indefinitely, the amount of energy required. I would have to train somebody how to do this because, I don't care how smart you are as a director, you don't know how to do this."
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For production designer Dylan Cole, who is essentially an "Avatar" zoologist, the tulkun exemplify James Cameron's obsessive attention to the biomechanics of every entity that inhabits this world: grounded in substantial real-world references but imbued with enough meticulous, original details that we might almost be convinced that these creatures actually exist somewhere out there in the universe. "I'm not only a fantasy film designer," Cole said. "I'm a National Geographic explorer on Pandora trying to report back."
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In 2013, Cameron, armed with thousands of pages of notes expanding the world of Pandora, decided on the aquatic setting and set a team of writers to pen the sequels. But Jon Landau, who has produced all of Cameron's films since Titanic (1997), immediately foresaw a problem: The technological processes used to capture actors playing Na'vi on dry sets did not yet exist for capturing them wet. "Right away we started doing R&D," he said, "because no one had ever done performance capture underwater." all of which the cast and stunt teams performed, outfitted with special wet suits and facial capture camera rigs, while free diving in the water.
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When James Cameron put together a treatment for "Avatar 2," which he subtitled "The Higher Ground" at the time. This was, by the way, a 130-page treatment, longer than many full screenplays. However, he was so unhappy with it that he threw it out and started over. Cameron would put together what was effectively a writer's room to work on the sequels to "Avatar" with him.
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Production Designer Dylan Cole said, he and his team used Payakan as the prototype for the rest of the tulkun. But getting there involved plenty of experimentation. "At first glance, yes, he's very whale-like, but every single detail and component of him is different and alien," Cole explained. One of the primary design requirements involved the audio sensors on the tulkun's crest, located on the head. Initially, the sensor mast resembled the kind of appendage found on the head of an anglerfish. But that version of the sensors was simplified and then removed as Cameron himself worked on several sketches to refine the crest shape and the way the head worked. Cole and his team took that final rendering, put the sensors back on the crest, and arrived at what we now see onscreen.
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Zachary Berger took to Twitter to show fans what it was like working on designing the Akula under James Cameron's leadership. Berger received the task of creating Pandora's shark on the first day of the job, saying that touring the Avatar art gallery "put the fear of god in me." After a conversation with Cameron, Berger began adapting a concept created a few years before his hiring, making edits here and there to add armor plating and bioluminescence. Whike the original idea was great, Berger revealed that it needed something the Avatar team calls a "reveal", which many of Pandora's creatures have. He described the concept as "some sort of shape change or unfurling of some extra appendage or something" admitting that the Akula needed "some of that Avatar secret sauce." Berger and the team focused on Akula's mouth, pitching numerous unique concepts. Ultimately, they decided on the triangular rattlesnake-like design featured in the finished film, for which they used their own arms to act out during the approval meetings.
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Fike was supposed to live longer in the original script and was the one who attacked the Ta'unui Olo'eyktan with his rifle butt. In an unused extended version, Prager does this instead. Also originally in the script, Fike dies during the skirmish at the Three Brothers but it is not specified how.
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The casting of Spider posed special challenges because of the lengthy gap between the initial casting and the actual filming. As the only human amongst the main characters, the Casting Director Margery Simpkin had to work around the filming of Spider's scenes which had to follow all the performance capture work done with all the actors who were Na'vi avatars. Spider's character is mid-adolescent (15/16 years old) but the casting period and the required CGI computer generated performance casting shooting took 3 years so the directors had to screen test a 12 year old boy and then estimate what he would mature like in 3 years PLUS they needed to ensure the correct strength and chemistry between Spider and all the main Avatar characters. When Jack Champion was cast, Simpkin's team had to research Jack's family to see the height of his parents and prior maturation patterns of his siblings to estimate how Jack would go through puberty and estimate how he'd look on screen as a 15 year old which was his age through the bulk of the 2nd two years of the live action production shooting.
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James Cameron said of writing the film, "It's dangerous to tell a story with a lot of characters because it can lack focus. But I just took that challenge on. There's this epic landscape with epic storytelling. I was trying to emulate a 'Star Wars' universe or 'Lord of the Rings.' Something that's a persistent world that people can come back to and enjoy over time."
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Kate Winslet had previously worked with James Cameron on the set of Titanic (1997), and after enduring a rigorous filming schedule as well as many hardships and bruises on that film, she said "You'd have to pay me an awful lot of money to work with James Cameron again". However, Cameron then assisted her and fellow Titanic collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio during a fundraiser in France in July 2017, and offered her a part in The Way of Water; she accepted out of a combination of her love for the first Avatar film, an attraction to the well-written and strong female role she was offered, a love for being on the water and to work with Cameron and the film's cast. She also commented that her role was "relatively small comparative to the lengthy shoot", as she would only have one month of shootings, but would still be playing "a pivotal character in the ongoing story".
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When asked why the movie is 3 hours, James Cameron revealed in an interview with Total Film: "The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis, I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion. We didn't spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it's a longer film, because there's more characters to service. There's more story to service." Above all, however, The Way Of Water is a family story. This is because, 14 years after falling in love, Jake and Neytiri are now the proud parents of five children. "People say, 'Oh my God, a family story from Disney? Just what we want' This isn't that kind of family story," Cameron clarifies. "This is a family story like how The Sopranos is a family story."
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Rick Jaffa, who served as the film's co-writer along with his wife Amanda Silver, as well as Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, detailed his experience working with James Cameron when he appeared as a guest on the Really? No, Really? podcast. Jaffa admitted that the writers were "a little nervous and intimidated" by Cameron and his wealth of experience: "We were all a little nervous and intimidated, I think. But the thing about Jim, in terms of the writer's room, is that you have to remember he's a writer also. I mean, you think of him as a director or just technological genius and this bigger-than-life character. But in a writer's room, he's just one of the writers. One of the guys, as it were." Jaffa continued, saying that Cameron made an effort to make make the writers "really comfortable" so that they'd feel safe revealing "a lot of personal stories:" "He wanted us all to be really comfortable, also. Because, I go back to the family saga of it all, you know, obviously Amanda and I have two kids, Josh [Friedman] has a son, Shane [Salerno] was the only one in the room without kids. But when we got into the room it required being open and telling a lot of personal stories, and opening up not just about our kids but, my relationship with my brother, you know who had passed away a year before we'd gotten into the room." "I think Jim realized if we'd felt so intimidated, like, am I really going to talk about my brother? Am I really going to suggest this dynamic because it was the way it was for me growing up? Or things like that." Addressing whether the writers experienced any of James Cameron's more notorious behaviors, Jaffa said they were "fortunate we never saw it:" "So it felt like a very safe room. So we never saw any of those kinds of behavioral [issues]. I'm sure they're true, by the way. I'm sure they are, but we were fortunate we never saw it." However, the writer did admit there were times they'd "start to argue" with Cameron: "There did get a couple of times where we'd start to argue. There was one time he and I were arguing a story point and Shane at the end of the table, just leans down the table and says, 'Stay down Luke, stay down.'" Jaffa explained that it was difficult to change Cameron's mind in an argument but that often they would "plant the seed" of an idea that the director would eventually accept: "Usually you can't change his mind in the moment. A lot of times, though, the right idea finds its way and it will become his idea. But that's human nature though. That's a big part of our job, me and Amanda, is to a lot of times introduce things that then can become... planting the seed." "It wasn't always apples to apples, sometimes you'd suggest something and it would become, you know, Jim's banana."
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While Landau declined to reveal the cost of the research and development phase for the sequels the first film has an estimated budget of $350 million, he credits studio 20th Century Fox with meeting the production's unique needs. ( The first Avatar (2009) scored a lifetime gross of $2.92 billion, still the box-office champ of all time. "I learned a lesson on Titanic (1997) where we didn't push to get the R&D money enough for the sinking of the ship from different angles, and it caught us a little bit by surprise," Landau said. "That lesson taught me that if you push for the R&D money now and you do it right, you're going to end up with a much more efficient process." "Yes, our movies are big movies," he said. "But I honestly believe that if you look back at the movies that we've done, at the end of the day for what is up on the screen, they were done as efficiently as anybody could possibly do them."
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Neteyam was supposed to restrain Lo'ak when he attempts to warn Payakan, prompting Lo'ak to punch Neteyam off. Neteyam would then restrain Lo'ak, causing Lo'ak to apologize, but he manages to escape when Neteyam is off-guard. In the original script, the scene was intended to be even more physical: "Lo'ak spins and clocks Neteyam in the face. It's a nasty right cross with all of Lo'ak's anger and hurt behind it. Neteyam staggers back--then recovers and tackles Lo'ak, taking him down. The brothers go at it, rolling around, yelling and punching. Blows landing." Tsireya then sees the brothers beating up each other and she is horrified. She tries to encourage Aonung and Roxto to stop them, but the two refuse, viewing it as a brother thing.
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Discussing the character of Tuk in a February 2019 interview, James Cameron mentioned that she was eight years old, and that the film would feature a scene between Jake and Neytiri taking place from Tuk's perspective: "There's a three-page argument scene between Jake and Neytiri, a marital dispute, very, very critical to the storyline. I wound up shooting it all from the point of view of the 8-year-old hiding under the structure and peeking in. Having gone through the experience with [Sam Worthington] on Avatar, I now knew how to write the Jake character going forward across the emotional rollercoaster of the next four movies."
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The casting of Spider posed special challenges because of the lengthy gap between the initial casting and the actual filming. As the only human amongst the main characters, the Casting Director Margery Simpkin had to work around the filming of Spider's scenes which had to follow all the performance capture work done with all the actors who were Na'vi avatars. Spider's character is mid-adolescent (15/16 years old) but the casting period and the required CGI computer generated performance casting shooting took 3 years so the directors had to screen test a 12 year old boy and then estimate what he would mature like in 3 years PLUS they needed to ensure the correct strength and chemistry between Spider and all the main Avatar characters. When Jack Champion was cast, Simpkin's team had to research Jack's family to see the height of his parents and prior maturation patterns of his siblings to estimate how Jack would go through puberty and estimate how he'd look on screen as a 15 year old which was his age through the bulk of the 2nd two years of the live action production shooting.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
One of the hardest designs for production designer Dylan Cole was the inside of Payakan for a scene when he invites Lo'ak to tap into his large, colorful membrane to glimpse the creature's most tragic memory. "It's Jonah, right? Going into the mouth of the whale," Cole said. "But it's also an enchanted cave from old fantasy stories. So it's sort of combining those two things and getting that bioluminescent pattern. The roof and the sides of the mouth are our kind of standard bioluminescent colors -- the cyan and blues. And then what we did is just concentrate on it to give you a focal point where we start getting into some of the purples and then when it unfurls it becomes gold. It was important for their relationships that [Lo'ak] understand the history of Payakan."
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Contains a major spoiler — show
In the original script, Ronal tries to frame Kiri's seizure as evidence Eywa has turned her back on the Sully family. This may have been removed because it can easily be seen as a low blow towards a family with one of its members in a coma, and making Ronal to unlikable would make viewers sympathize with her less when Ro'a is killed.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
In the original script, Spider desperately wants to join the Sully family when they hold hands in a circle after Neteyam's funeral. Kiri invites him to join, but Neytiri shoots him a look to keep out, and he does not join. This is still similar to a scene in "The High Ground" but with different context and Spider does join here.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
In a deleted scene, Neytiri repeatedly stabs one of her victims to death, and also kills a man who begs for his life. She continued to defile his body with multiple stabbings and she seems to shout, "You, you, you, you, you, you, YOUUUUUUUUUU!" When she holds Spider hostage, she truly considers killing him by cutting his throat, even after Quaritch has released Kiri, showing how much pain, anger and a desire for revenge Neytiri was feeling due to Neteyam's death. Jake, Kiri and Quaritch have to talk her out of killing Spider. The canonicity of the scene is debatable due to it being deleted, however, it is notable that blood suddenly appears on Neytiri's face when Spider looks at her face again, suggesting it did happen.
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Behind the Scenes (61)
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Two scenes in the film don't contain VFX according to VFX animators Joe Letteri, Daniel Barrett, and Eric Saindon at the BAFTA's (British Academy Film Awards), where the group revealed the identity of the two scenes in question. "There's one of Spider's [Jack Champion] eyeball and there's one of the bottom of the ocean and just some ripples in the bottom of the water," revealed Snider. Sandon went on to add, "There's lots of live action, lots of characters with CG but every other scene, VFX shots were touched."
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Sigourney Weaver trained in breath-holding to shoot the film's aquatic motion-capture sequences. She also joined her younger co-stars in learning underwater sign language and parkour, for scenes of Na'vi teens running along tree boughs or racing to the tops of floating mountains. "I was determined to be able to do everything they did. I didn't want anyone to say, 'She's kind of an old lady,'" Weaver says. "We all had to be really fit, and parkour is a very good way of getting there." Other cast members participated in knife-fighting and archery lessons, but "Kiri is not a fighter," Weaver adds. "She's a very gentle person. She can be filled with rage, and she's very sensitive to injustice and cruelty, but she doesn't use weapons. She has other powers."
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The total amount of data stored on the film was 18.5 petabytes, which is 18.5 * the amount used on the original Avatar, and close to 40% of the rendering was completed in the cloud. In terms of all the crew needed to accomplish this, they had a core team of probably around 500, and they had close to 1,800 artists and people working on it all over the world at any given time. On a typical film, there's usually one or two VFX supervisors and animation supervisors, but for this film, there were 10 VFX supervisors and nine animation supervisors. They began working on the motion capture way back in 2017 and started on all the VFX work right away because there was so much prep to do, including building the models, doing character studies and so on.
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To capture these interactions between Payakan and the Na'vi boy, the production built segments of the tulkun's body with fiberglass and foam to give Britain Dalton, who plays Lo'ak, an eye line and a physical reference while filming in the water tank. For underwater shots, there were devices that could move through the water, with a flipper for the actor to hold onto. The sophisticated tank could also generate a strong current to emulate Payakan's speed.
- #202
James Cameron and his crew worked with a virtual camera system. The camera rig allowed Cameron to walk around a space and directly control the scene that's been rendered, but can also be adapted to simulate different things that a regular camera system might perform, like a dolly or handheld shot. All of this provides Cameron with an incredible amount of freedom to film complex action and movement scenes by hand.
- #203
Director James Cameron and cinematographer Russell Carpenter spoke about Jack Champion's role as Spider in the sequel. When asked how difficult it was to film Champion in this movie's various environments, both filmmakers explained that it was "hideously difficult". Carpenter stated: "No, I would say painstakingly difficult. Because he was in so many scenes and so many different environments. You really had to nail down exactly when, and where, and how the light is and maybe where shafts of sunlight are hitting. If any of those cues are off, the audience is gonna think something's out of whack. And so, we worked really, really hard."
- #204
Z-Dog's iconic bubblegum was added via reshoots after it was suggested by someone on set and James Cameron approved of it. The face-cam footage of Alicia Vela-Bailey chewing and popping it was overlayed on top of her existing performance capture. The gum Vela-Bailey chewed during shoots was the Extra brand watermelon flavor.
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Another new tool gave actors reference for eyelines and performance, with a cable-suspended camera system, but the team replaced the camera with a monitor. Says Letteri: "All the live-action characters, when they had to interact with CG characters, had something flying around the set with the performance in the right place in space. [It provided] the ability for the live-action characters to play live off their CG counterparts. "These are just all tools to build this story," he concludes. "We knew it was going to be a big story and a lot of emotional beats with the characters, and that's really where we were putting all the effort."
- #209
The film's producer Jon Landau revealed that Kate Winslet left production astounded when she managed to hold her breath underwater for nearly seven minutes. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Landau said: "Kate broke a free-diving record among the cast. It was six minutes 50-something -- but for Kate we agreed to call it seven. "She was phenomenal." Bailey Bass, who plays Winslet's daughter Tsireya in the film, added: "Kate holds the record she set it during training. I managed six minutes and 30 seconds."
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As with the 2009 movie, when filming on set, James Cameron shot native 3D; Letteri notes that they also innovated on these sets. "Basically [we developed] live depth compositing," he explains. "What that meant is that when Jim was walking through the set and a character was interacting with a virtual character, that virtual character could appear in the live feed, but in the proper place in [3D] depth." This was enabled by newly developed AI-driven software that effectively took the images from the camera system and calculated 3D depth on the fly.
- #212
Another moment, made possible through a combination of digital tools and motion-capture performance, synthesizes for writer Rick Jaffa the poignant significance of the tulkun in the film. "The first time we all saw the image of Lo'ak and Payakan with arms outstretched underwater, as if they're trying to hold hands or connect physically, we all got really emotional," he said.
- #213
When asked if there was a particular shot or scene or character that was the most difficult, Weta supervisor Joe Letteri stated: "The very first scene we did was the dialogue scene with Jake and Neytiri where they're in High Camp and Jake is trying to convince her to leave. And that was really bringing back the two characters from 15 years earlier, dusting them off, updating them to all the new software, the new detail in the skin, the new lighting techniques, the new hair, but also the new facial system. And that was really where we battle-tested pretty much everything except for the water, in that one scene. So we actually spent a year on that scene just to make sure we had it right and understood it. At that point, we started rolling it out to the other characters and, you know, branching out to do the rest of the shots."
- #214
Production designers Dylan Cole, Ben Procter, and the art department populated an entire ocean from the sea floor up, from many species of coral and water plants (many bioluminescent) to dozens of fish designs, covering bait fish to apex predators. Though their main reference for the akula was a great white on steroids, the source for the mouth was something scarier -- to Cole, at least. "Speaking from a personal fear, I don't like snakes," Cole added. "So I wanted to think of like a rattlesnake. And the way it really opens wide up top and even going further than a snake where the top of its mouth bifurcates open. And so to stick that kind of head on a shark, we tweaked the body."
- #215
The digital water in the film was created by artists using Weta's latest Loki simulation software after the Weta FX team did a deep dive into understanding water. "What's the color of the water? How should the light actually travel through it?" were some of the questions they addressed, says Metkayina Village and reefs VFX supervisor Pavani Boddapati. Adds Jonathan Nixon, effects supervisor for water and fire, "A good portion of this film is computer-generated water because we just got to a point where it looked so good, it was easier just to replace [the actual water] and integrate it [into the shots]."
- #216
For the role of Payakan James Cameron stated "We have an acting troupe that surrounds our key cast, and they fill in. They'll play members of the crowd, or, they'll wear many, many hats. I think Kevin [Dorman], we counted 22 or 23 characters that he plays in this film, and there are other members of this troupe that do similar things. So Kevin put his hand up to play Payakan, and I said 'Just vocalize the way you think Payakan might vocalize. It won't necessarily be that in the end, but express your emotion.' Lo'ak is mostly talking to Payakan's eye, so Kevin would just get where Payakan's eye is supposed to be and go '[whale noise],'" Cameron told the audience to laughter. "It sounds kind of dumb, but it's the consensus, right? Britain was there, and he'd be balling, he'd be pleading with him, and there's scenes yet to come, beyond what's in this film, but they've formed a relationship. It's about letting your relationship put you there emotionally."
- #217
Weta FX used its own data center to render most scenes of this film. However, processing capacity from Amazon Web Services was also added in the last months. Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours which is equivalent to the combined power of 3,000 virtual CPUs in a data center for an hour. At some point, all available capacity of Australian AWS data centers was used to render scenes of this movie.
- #218
Jack Champion spoke about how he was integrated into the CGI scenes, and how he had to adapt to working alongside huge Na'vi puppets in place of the other actors. He said "We had this acting troupe that would basically re-act what the actors did just for my sake," He continued "but they'd wear this giant Na'vi puppet on their shoulders, so there'd be a torso here and then a head up here, and then they'd control the arms with little sticks -- foam Na'vi that were actually 10-feet tall for us to look at."
- #219
The character of Spider played by Jack Champion was of a human teenage boy aged about 15 or 16 raised amongst the Na'vi and dressed identically to them being nothing more than a small loin cloth. Champion was thus required to appear in every scene shirtless. To ensure he was as athletic and ripped as possible, he had to undergo a considerably intensive workout regimen. Given that the actual physical live action filming didn't commence until Jack was well into his 14th year, all through his 15th year and into his 16th, he commenced the training when he turned 13 and barely into adolescence and by his own admission not a particularly muscly kid. Famous celebrity trainer Josh Murillo worked with Jack intensively for almost 2 years through the earlier performance capture filming with weights, a strict protein heavy diet and cardio so that he was in shape for the live action filming that went on for 2 more years until Jack was 16. Murillo kept working with Jack all through the live action filming to ensure he maintained his athletic look throughout the movie.
- #220
The wave tank used during filming was described as two 500 horsepower 480 volt electric motors spinning 25 feet long 6-inch diameter solid-steel shafts running two 5-foot diameter brass propellers at 800 RPM. That's just part of the engineering and technoloy orchestrated by special effects supervisor JD Schwalm and his crew at Innovation Workshop which allows for water flow to reach 20 to 30 knots. In addition, a wave generating system built by Schwalm and team for the production consisted of two 19,000 pound steel 'wave making' wedges motivated by an 800 horsepower 400 gallon per minute electric hydraulic system. This feat of water engineering was realized in a custom built above ground 120x60x30 foot tank holding more than 250,000 gallons of water in a studio space at Manhattan Beach Studios, where on-water and underwater performance capture for the sequel took place. The water effects generated were essentially for reference, since Weta FX would ultimately realize a majority of the water digitally. Still, Cameron wanted the 'performance capture' water waves and currents to be as accurate as possible, necessitating a major practical effects effort.
- #221
James Cameron was set on shooting the (many) water sequences in actual water to make the scenes as real as possible. As visual effects supervisor, Richie Baneham, explained in an interview, "If an actor is genuinely in water, there's a viscous resistance. It informs the actor's choices. That's what makes it feel real."
- #222
To get the vital facial performances, Weta FX developed a new stereo camera head rig, and accompanying software for facial capture, to bring the actor's undiluted performances to their characters. Explains Letteri: "The software is a neural network that webuilt as an animation tool that let's us try to figure out how the muscles react to each other. It gives the animators a lot more control in interpreting a performance than we've ever had before." Emphasizes Cameron: "It's 100 percent actor-driven. Sometimes our biggest challenge can be in a simple two-character dialouge scene. You have to have every nuance of what the actor does. As a director and working with the actors, it's a very pure art form. It's like a stage rehearsal."
- #223
Neteyam as an infant that Jake presents to the Omatikaya at the beginning, is played by Oliver Moore, the then 3-month-old son of Joel Moore. Moore mentioned in an interview that Zoe Saldaña (mother of three sons) took care of Oliver on set and that he started crying while shooting the scene because it was his son. The scene was completed after two or three takes in a single day.
- #224
Alicia Vela-Bailey was the stunt double for Sigourney Weaver in some of Kiri's scenes, including her leap up onto the amnio tank that contained Grace's avatar and the scene in which Kiri met Grace in the spirit world. James Cameron delegated the responsibility to Sigourney to ask Alicia to do things that she could not physically do, and to direct Alicia how to do those things for her.
- #225
The trickiest shots to achieve, according to Daniel Barrett, were those in which Payakan is at the intersection between the water and the surface, when only part of his body breaches. To make them happen, the animators had to account for the massive movement of water that would happen when a creature the size of a tulkun emerges from it, the sheets of water coming off him, and the mist as he clears his blow hole. This level of realism exists thanks to advances in CGI technology that can help with replicating buoyancy. "Without that we would have been dead in the water, so to speak," Barrett said, "because you would have lost the sense of reality without that water, which was such a big character in the film in itself and such an important part of Payakan's connection to his environment."
- #226
When asked about how long he could hold his breath, Stephen Lang described the difference between holding your breath while acting and holding your breath while static. "I think I could do four, five minutes, but when you're acting, it's different," explained Lang. "That would be what we call a static hold. If I'm not doing anything, if I'm just hanging out in the water, I can hold my breath for a while. But when Sam Worthington pulls a knife on me 30 feet under then I can't stay under that long!"
- #227
Since the tulkun have armor-plated bodies that are meant to articulate very flexibly, the art department and the animators collaborated to create plates that would move without crashing into each other when the creatures twist into various shapes. That outer shell couldn't function like that of a sea turtle, for example; it had to be broken up into distinct sections that would allow for what Cameron was envisioning. "One pose Jim drew was the tulkun arching its back with its pectoral fins all the way touching," Dylan Cole said. "He was imagining these dance-type poses." Cameron had also written that the tulkun were mouthbrooders, which in this case meant that newborn offspring of the female tulkun reside in her mouth. The artists designed the mouth which reveals a large pouch when opened as if it were an enchanted cave, since that's where Lo'ak interacts with Payakan's "kuru," the word for the tendrils that allow creatures on Pandora to mentally communicate with one another. Cole and his team landed on an unfurling fern coil with many points of contact for the design of Payakan's kuru. "We were trying to show that by having all those different kuru connections, their connections with others are that much more powerful," Cole said.
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Production Designer Dylan Cole revealed the gill mantle, which is what the Metkayina use to breathe, is sort of like a jellyfish meeting a ray. It functions as a living underwater scuba. He stated: "That was an idea of Jim's. We had to kind of distill his foggy vision of it down to reality. Ultimately, it was a very beautiful thing, but how do you serve this story's needs? Let it be a beauty moment as well, where he described that as sort of like angel wings around you, and then even how it kind of grabs you around the ribs to hold on. It was both an elegant storytelling solution and an elegant visual solution, I think."
- #229
Supervising master diver John Garvin, stated that more than 200,000 dives had gone into making what he thought was the "most complicated diving movie ever made." In the interview, he expressed that this number includes the amount of free dives, which were also difficult to log because some of them ranged from 30 to 60 seconds, while others were consistently longer. Garvin explained that on a typical busy shoot day, you'd see 26 scuba divers and free divers in the water at once, going up and down like yo-yos. That's not forgetting about the grip and lighting department who were forever submerging to tweak something on the set.
- #230
A pivotal scene in the film comes when Jake and Neytiri decide to leave their jungle home and search for safety elsewhere in Pandora, a scene that James Cameron and Sam Worthington say was emblematic of this kind of process. Zoe Saldana and Worthington improvised a scene to get into the emotional headspace before they got into the words on the page. "We started minutes ahead of time," Cameron said. "It was just like 'Okay, it's a husband, it's a wife, you guys are in the kitchen, taking.'" "We did the scene, emotional beats are popping up like you want, you're truthfully starting to settle into the scene," Worthington continued. Thanks to the mocap process, the characters and the sets come and even the camera angles come after filming, prompting the trio to compare filming the actual scenes to black-box theater. "Months later, this is where the genius comes in, months later, Jim talks to me on set, and goes, 'That scene, I could play that conventionally, but I think I want to see it from the kids' point of view. Yes, it's great work what you guys did, but I'm gonna also see it from the outside, and hear it from the outside,'" Worthington continued. "So now, to me, that's great storytelling, because you're seeing how the family and how the emotion of the family ripples."
- #231
The role of Spider played by Jack Champion is of a Tarzan or Mowgli type character with his character being clad in nothing more than a small loin cloth for all scenes. To maintain the native reality of this costume, Champion could only wear a small thong underneath the loin cloth. Various scenes involved Spider jumping, climbing and fighting, all actions where his loin cloth could and would fly up. To preserve the modesty of a 15 year old boy (Champion's age during the majority of the 2nd real scene filming) clad so scantily, any physical scenes where there was the possibility of his revealing what was under the loin cloth however briefly, the set was strictly limited to the bare minimum number of essential staff to preserve his privacy.
- #232
During the "Inside Pandora's Box" featurette from the film's digital release, director James Cameron and producer Jon Landau explain how they learned to improved the quality of the motion and performance capture for "The Way of Water", by simply capturing more motion (and therefore more performance), which they accomplished by incorporating more cameras: Jon Landau explained: "One of the big advances that we made technologically in the sequels is the facial performance capture. In the first movie, we used a single standard camera to record a person's face. On the sequels, we're using two high-definition cameras and we are capturing a much higher fidelity performance." James Cameron stated: "The reference cameras are a very important part of this because I need to edit with something, and I can't edit with the raw feed that's coming out of the facial cameras. So I insisted we get close-ups of every actor. So you can imagine in a group scene, this turns into a lot of cameras - up to 16."
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For the tulkun's design and how it moved, production designer Dylan Cole referenced whales, sharks, and seals. "It was almost like more sea turtle/whale/seal because its tail could bifurcate and then fold down and flatten like a seal," he told IndieWire. "And so a lot of the movements weren't trying to have it move like a whale. If you notice, it twists a lot -- it curves on itself."
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After the proof-of-concept stage, two massive tanks were engineered at Cameron and Landau's Lightstorm Entertainment hub at Manhattan Beach Studios, one used for training and more intimate character scenes. The larger second tank the "Swiss Army knife of water tanks," measuring 120 feet long, 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep with a 250,000-gallon capacity was outfitted with powerful wave and current machines, used to capture the film's more action-packed sequences involving Na'vi characters. Performance capture cameras were set up around the tanks' perimeter along with safety cameras for monitoring those in the water. To control light reflection from above, the water's surface was covered with small, white floating balls, inspired by an L.A. Times article Champney read about shade balls deployed in the Los Angeles Reservoir to reduce evaporation, and from a similar method Cameron used on his 1989 film "The Abyss." "Once we got it working, they started putting in vehicles and safety divers and waves and everything else. I was like, 'OK, we didn't test any of that.' But we made it work!" Champney said. "That's the good thing about Jim. He pushes it until it breaks and comes back a little bit, and then he says, 'Now work on the part that broke.'" To capture the underwater action with sufficient clarity, it was not possible for anyone in the tank to use scuba gear, because air bubbles might interfere with the accuracy of the sensors. So how could Cameron keep his cast in the water long enough to capture their performances the solution was both simpler and more complicated than the alternatives: Everyone including new and returning actors like Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Kate Winslet, reference camera operators, grips, and the safety divers accompanying each actor would have to work while holding their breath under water, requiring extensive training, additional safety procedures, and ample time.
- #237
For many of the scenes with Payakan, the art department made a large, practical fin that an actor could hold onto, such as when Lo'ak rides the creature. Then they had a spot for his eyes, so they could match the eye line during the interaction. "Sometimes we were dragging the fin through the water so you could have the proper resistance," said production designer Dylan Cole," and then other times when all the kids are climbing on him, we built a set that approximated his back with the blowholes and the plating, so that we could set that in the tank and they could perform on that."
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Sigourney Weaver trained in breath-holding to shoot the film's aquatic motion-capture sequences. She also joined her younger co-stars in learning underwater sign language and parkour, for scenes of Na'vi teens running along tree boughs or racing to the tops of floating mountains. "I was determined to be able to do everything they did. I didn't want anyone to say, 'She's kind of an old lady,'" Weaver says. "We all had to be really fit, and parkour is a very good way of getting there." Other cast members participated in knife-fighting and archery lessons, but "Kiri is not a fighter," Weaver adds. "She's a very gentle person. She can be filled with rage, and she's very sensitive to injustice and cruelty, but she doesn't use weapons. She has other powers."
- #240
In 2013, Cameron, armed with thousands of pages of notes expanding the world of Pandora, decided on the aquatic setting and set a team of writers to pen the sequels. But Jon Landau, who has produced all of Cameron's films since Titanic (1997), immediately foresaw a problem: The technological processes used to capture actors playing Na'vi on dry sets did not yet exist for capturing them wet. "Right away we started doing R&D," he said, "because no one had ever done performance capture underwater." all of which the cast and stunt teams performed, outfitted with special wet suits and facial capture camera rigs, while free diving in the water.
- #241
Z-Dog's iconic bubblegum was added via reshoots after it was suggested by someone on set and James Cameron approved of it. The face-cam footage of Alicia Vela-Bailey chewing and popping it was overlayed on top of her existing performance capture. The gum Vela-Bailey chewed during shoots was the Extra brand watermelon flavor.
- #242
Director James Cameron and cinematographer Russell Carpenter spoke about Jack Champion's role as Spider in the sequel. When asked how difficult it was to film Champion in this movie's various environments, both filmmakers explained that it was "hideously difficult". Carpenter stated: "No, I would say painstakingly difficult. Because he was in so many scenes and so many different environments. You really had to nail down exactly when, and where, and how the light is and maybe where shafts of sunlight are hitting. If any of those cues are off, the audience is gonna think something's out of whack. And so, we worked really, really hard."
- #243
Alicia Vela-Bailey was the stunt double for Sigourney Weaver in some of Kiri's scenes, including her leap up onto the amnio tank that contained Grace's avatar and the scene in which Kiri met Grace in the spirit world. James Cameron delegated the responsibility to Sigourney to ask Alicia to do things that she could not physically do, and to direct Alicia how to do those things for her.
- #244
Supervising master diver John Garvin, stated that more than 200,000 dives had gone into making what he thought was the "most complicated diving movie ever made." In the interview, he expressed that this number includes the amount of free dives, which were also difficult to log because some of them ranged from 30 to 60 seconds, while others were consistently longer. Garvin explained that on a typical busy shoot day, you'd see 26 scuba divers and free divers in the water at once, going up and down like yo-yos. That's not forgetting about the grip and lighting department who were forever submerging to tweak something on the set.
- #245
Neteyam as an infant that Jake presents to the Omatikaya at the beginning, is played by Oliver Moore, the then 3-month-old son of Joel Moore. Moore mentioned in an interview that Zoe Saldaña (mother of three sons) took care of Oliver on set and that he started crying while shooting the scene because it was his son. The scene was completed after two or three takes in a single day.
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On the special features included with the film's digital release, James Cameron reflects on the long wait between the first and second more, explaining how it ultimately improved Sam Worthington and Zor Saldaña's performances. Much like their characters in the film, both Worthington and Saldaña got married and had children in the years following the release of Avatar (2009). The director stated: "I don't think they realized how much they had been in training for this movie for the past 13 years as parents. We couldn't have planned it better if I'd said, 'Okay, what I need you guys to do is find somebody you really love and get married and that's your prep for the next movie.' I think they started to get it when they read the script but I don't think they really got it until they were on set with the young cast that play their children, and they realize, 'Oh yeah, I've said that.'"
- #248
A pivotal scene in the film comes when Jake and Neytiri decide to leave their jungle home and search for safety elsewhere in Pandora, a scene that James Cameron and Sam Worthington say was emblematic of this kind of process. Zoe Saldana and Worthington improvised a scene to get into the emotional headspace before they got into the words on the page. "We started minutes ahead of time," Cameron said. "It was just like 'Okay, it's a husband, it's a wife, you guys are in the kitchen, taking.'" "We did the scene, emotional beats are popping up like you want, you're truthfully starting to settle into the scene," Worthington continued. Thanks to the mocap process, the characters and the sets come and even the camera angles come after filming, prompting the trio to compare filming the actual scenes to black-box theater. "Months later, this is where the genius comes in, months later, Jim talks to me on set, and goes, 'That scene, I could play that conventionally, but I think I want to see it from the kids' point of view. Yes, it's great work what you guys did, but I'm gonna also see it from the outside, and hear it from the outside,'" Worthington continued. "So now, to me, that's great storytelling, because you're seeing how the family and how the emotion of the family ripples."
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In a interview with The Hollywood Reporter, James Cameron revealed that he has plans for both an Avatar 6 and 7, should there be enough demand for it. "I'd be 89 by then," Cameron joked, taking a shot at how long it's been since the first Avatar and its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water. "Obviously, I'm not going to be able to make Avatar movies indefinitely, the amount of energy required. I would have to train somebody how to do this because, I don't care how smart you are as a director, you don't know how to do this."
- #251
The wave tank used during filming was described as two 500 horsepower 480 volt electric motors spinning 25 feet long 6-inch diameter solid-steel shafts running two 5-foot diameter brass propellers at 800 RPM. That's just part of the engineering and technoloy orchestrated by special effects supervisor JD Schwalm and his crew at Innovation Workshop which allows for water flow to reach 20 to 30 knots. In addition, a wave generating system built by Schwalm and team for the production consisted of two 19,000 pound steel 'wave making' wedges motivated by an 800 horsepower 400 gallon per minute electric hydraulic system. This feat of water engineering was realized in a custom built above ground 120x60x30 foot tank holding more than 250,000 gallons of water in a studio space at Manhattan Beach Studios, where on-water and underwater performance capture for the sequel took place. The water effects generated were essentially for reference, since Weta FX would ultimately realize a majority of the water digitally. Still, Cameron wanted the 'performance capture' water waves and currents to be as accurate as possible, necessitating a major practical effects effort.
- #252
As with the 2009 movie, when filming on set, James Cameron shot native 3D; Letteri notes that they also innovated on these sets. "Basically [we developed] live depth compositing," he explains. "What that meant is that when Jim was walking through the set and a character was interacting with a virtual character, that virtual character could appear in the live feed, but in the proper place in [3D] depth." This was enabled by newly developed AI-driven software that effectively took the images from the camera system and calculated 3D depth on the fly.
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Characters & Cast (29)
- #257
As Lo'ak is almost an exact mirror of his father Jake, Aonung serves a very similar role to Tsu'tey in Lo'ak's personal arc. Much like Tsu'tey's rivalry and eventually friendship with Jake, Aonung started out disliking Lo'ak for being an outsider and treats him horribly. He's close with a lovely young Na'vi that his rival is smitten with (though in this case, Tsireya is his sister, not his betrothed). And ultimately, Aonung comes to respect Lo'ak and becomes akin to brothers-in-arms with him.
- #258
For his part, Stephen Lang appreciated exploring new depths in Quaritch that weren't necessarily in the first Avatar. "He had a strong sense of loyalty and mission; he had laudable qualities, but emotionally, I think he had long cauterized those feelings away," the actor reflected. "Here, now, in this new incarnation, I think that Jim has introduced the possibility of depth of feeling for him. That there actually is something there, and I think that this is something that is probably confusing for the character, and something that he's probably not willing to fully acknowledge."
- #259
Zdinarsk has many colorful tattoos on her arms, neck, and chest. They include: A chimera on her neck, an eagle on her back with the Latin motto "AUT VINCERE AUT MORI" which means "conquer or die". It also has the number 33 which is known as an "angel number" that calls for people to cleanse their life and mind of negativity, her right arm has a skeleton reaper on the bottom and an angel on the top, her left arm has a snaked wrapped around a skull with "DEATHLESS" on it, the bottom portion is the most difficult to interpret as it looks very Hindu in nature with many strange symbols.
- #260
Sigourney mentions how the role of Kiri was first offered to her by director James Cameron. "I was having lunch with Jim, and he started to talk about this forest girl, who had a special gift of connection with living things, and she's gonna be about 14. [He said,] 'You and I know how immature you are, so I think you can handle this.' I said, 'Thank you.'" For Weaver, it wasn't difficult to get back into her younger self for the role. "I don't think any of us are very far away from our 14-year-old selves," Weaver said of the part. "It's such a strong memory, how great it was and how awful it was. I just sort of fell in love with the character. Jim has this amazing ability to write straight into the heart of a character." However, it did mean Weaver had to play the character very differently from her normal roles, which she found a very rewarding experience.
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Miles seems to be skilled with the bow, apparently being his weapon of choice. There is also almost a running gag of sorts with Spider using fire extinguishers. He uses a fire extinguisher to break his way out of his cell in The High Ground, then he uses a fire extinguisher to knock Ward unconscious.
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Rotxo is commonly confused to be one of the boys who bullied Kiri and later pranked Lo'ak due to the bully having a very similar hairstyle. However, the bully seems to be younger, has a different voice and appears in the background in the same scene with Rotxo when the Sully family arrived in Awa'atlu. Rotxo also carried no bruises after the physical confrontation.
- #265
On the special features included with the film's digital release, James Cameron reflects on the long wait between the first and second more, explaining how it ultimately improved Sam Worthington and Zor Saldaña's performances. Much like their characters in the film, both Worthington and Saldaña got married and had children in the years following the release of Avatar (2009). The director stated: "I don't think they realized how much they had been in training for this movie for the past 13 years as parents. We couldn't have planned it better if I'd said, 'Okay, what I need you guys to do is find somebody you really love and get married and that's your prep for the next movie.' I think they started to get it when they read the script but I don't think they really got it until they were on set with the young cast that play their children, and they realize, 'Oh yeah, I've said that.'"
- #266
Quaritch does so well fighting underwater because he also knows breath-holding techniques. The colonel is shown to exert himself while holding his breath several times in the first film. The human Quaritch got good at holding his breath because he knew that an exo-pack wouldn't always be at the ready, something he likely learned on his first day on Pandora, since whatever clawed his face clearly would've ripped his mask off.
- #267
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Zoe Saldaña, expressed her own gratitude for returning to the world of "Avatar," highlighting her adoration for Cameron and the action heroines he helped cement with "The Terminator" and "Aliens." "I got to work with my idol at a very early stage of my career. If it wasn't for Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, these iconic characters of the '80s, where would I be?" Saldaña said. "There are so many themes that will resonate with people, starting with the power of family... Family is not just the one that you're born into, but it's also the one that you choose or chooses you."
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Zoe Saldana was challenged portraying Neytiri because this time, Neytiri was confronting her own fear, and the character had a lot of anger and unresolved conflict in her heart. She also felt working with Sam Worthington was different this time because she sensed "vulnerability" from him, and the two tried to channel this fear into Jake Sully and Neytiri
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Stephen Lang discussed the way Quaritch had changed between the first film, released in 2009, and its sequel. "In the original film, there was a wonderful, colourful character, but he really was primarily there as a function of evil. You know, he was there to be the conflict," he said. "And now I think he is that. He still is the source of conflict. But he's also something else again, as he becomes part of the landscape. He becomes part of Pandora, in a way, and that operates on him in very confusing ways."
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Since Stephen Lang stated that Quaritch could redeem himself in later installments it is possible on what would lead to his redemption is the humans betraying him, since he was a man-made creation for them to do what they want him to do, furthermore he's got nothing else left for himself, as most of his comrades are gone and is on the brink of forever losing any attachment with his son, not only that but he does his work because he serves for mankind that he sees himself as one of, when he is no longer human anymore, not to mention that the humans have no concern over his wellbeing or safety.
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Jake and Neytiri's adopted teenage daughter, Kiri, is the biological daughter of Grace, the scientist played by Weaver in Avatar (2009). To get the character just right, assembled photos of Weaver as a teenager, as well as footage from some of her early movies, to give the team nuanced references in how her face moved at that age.
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Neytiri's bigotry and disdain towards humanity and Spider has been somewhat controversial. Writer Amanda Silver said she agreed with portraying this side of Neytiri, saying it makes sense for her character given her backstory, and that she feels it is fine for female characters to have flaws because it helps portray them as being fully fleshed-out as opposed to being perfect or one-dimension.
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Kate Winslet had previously worked with James Cameron on the set of Titanic (1997), and after enduring a rigorous filming schedule as well as many hardships and bruises on that film, she said "You'd have to pay me an awful lot of money to work with James Cameron again". However, Cameron then assisted her and fellow Titanic collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio during a fundraiser in France in July 2017, and offered her a part in The Way of Water; she accepted out of a combination of her love for the first Avatar film, an attraction to the well-written and strong female role she was offered, a love for being on the water and to work with Cameron and the film's cast. She also commented that her role was "relatively small comparative to the lengthy shoot", as she would only have one month of shootings, but would still be playing "a pivotal character in the ongoing story".
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During a 2024 interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Kate Winslet addressed some of her films, but forgot one major blockbuster: Avatar: The Way of Water, which Fallon reminded her of. The actress, who previously worked with director James Cameron on Titanic, joined the cast of the cast of Avatar for the second installment. She said, "When you mentioned Avatar, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm in Avatar, okay, I forgot I'm in Avatar."
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For the role of Payakan James Cameron stated "We have an acting troupe that surrounds our key cast, and they fill in. They'll play members of the crowd, or, they'll wear many, many hats. I think Kevin [Dorman], we counted 22 or 23 characters that he plays in this film, and there are other members of this troupe that do similar things. So Kevin put his hand up to play Payakan, and I said 'Just vocalize the way you think Payakan might vocalize. It won't necessarily be that in the end, but express your emotion.' Lo'ak is mostly talking to Payakan's eye, so Kevin would just get where Payakan's eye is supposed to be and go '[whale noise],'" Cameron told the audience to laughter. "It sounds kind of dumb, but it's the consensus, right? Britain was there, and he'd be balling, he'd be pleading with him, and there's scenes yet to come, beyond what's in this film, but they've formed a relationship. It's about letting your relationship put you there emotionally."
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The role of Spider played by Jack Champion is of a Tarzan or Mowgli type character with his character being clad in nothing more than a small loin cloth for all scenes. To maintain the native reality of this costume, Champion could only wear a small thong underneath the loin cloth. Various scenes involved Spider jumping, climbing and fighting, all actions where his loin cloth could and would fly up. To preserve the modesty of a 15 year old boy (Champion's age during the majority of the 2nd real scene filming) clad so scantily, any physical scenes where there was the possibility of his revealing what was under the loin cloth however briefly, the set was strictly limited to the bare minimum number of essential staff to preserve his privacy.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
Kate Winslet was impressed upon hearing that Ronal would be a fierce pregnant Na'vi because she felt pregnant women are often not represented enough in media despite that many women will become pregnant throughout their lives, and even if they are represented, they are often portrayed as being merely passive baby carriers who do little to nothing to impact the story. In The Way of Water, Ronal saves Kiri's life and helps out on the battlefield.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
According to Jack Champion, Miles has spent months with Recom Quaritch throughout the film, which only shows the more important scenes. This is one of the main reasons why Miles saves Quaritch, as he has been building up his relationship with his father figure for months instead of days.
Easter Eggs & References (69)
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Audiences taking notice of costumes and accessories in the first film may notice that the necklace Grace Augustine wears is Na'vi jewelry. Not only is Grace wearing a Na'vi necklace, but she also received it from Neytiri's late sister. Of course, Grace isn't exactly back in the sequel in the same sense as Quaritch; her daughter, Kiri, adorns the same necklace throughout the film. The nod to the character's reverence for Na'vi culture and taking place as her daughter's heirloom is a heartwarming and touching detail that might have been missed.
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Recombinant Mansk's appearance became the subject of internet memes parodying the American south and conservative/right-wing politics, due to his army outfit and sunglasses, which are commonly worn amongst the aforementioned demographics. An early occurrence of this meme was on Twitter on January 3, 2023, including a picture of Mansk with the caption "U know the burgers and dogs are insane if this guy is on the grill"
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Although Amrita has replaced unobtainium as Pandora's MacGuffin and unobtainium isn't mentioned in this movie at all, its presence is felt in one way, when Jake's family pull off their train job, you can tell from the design of the tracks that it's a maglev line, requiring superconducting magnets made with unobtainium.
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According to The Visual Dictionary, Neteyam's neckpiece is stylized after the classic neckpieces that the legendary warriors of his clan would wear, including Tsu'tey, showing Neteyam's desire to be a strong warrior. Neteyam also made it himself, since making one's own clothing or being given clothing by loved ones is very important to the Na'vi, meaning their clothing and accessories are very symbolic.
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Fans noticed reused and recycled footage from the first film that made its way into the sequel While several of the details are changed, such as Jake Sully's facial markings and the beast he's riding, the motion capture footage for Sam Worthington's performance is the same between both films. The shot composition is even carried over from the first Avatar. Jake Sully is seen diving through the air on the back of a skimwing in Avatar 2, letting out a battle cry. His face is replicated from a shot of him riding the massive orange banshee known as Toruk in the original movie, with this sequel developing a number of new characters to use alongside Jake and his family. Additionally, Zoe Saldaña's Neytiri also reuses motion capture data from the first Avatar in the sequel too. She is seen riding her own banshee into battle during Avatar 2's opening scene, holding up her arms while letting out the same battle cry that she did in the final battle from the first movie. The final battle shows off another look at Jake Sully riding his new skimwing that is taken from another shot from the previous film, which also came during that movie's final battle.
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When Tsireya emerges from the water when she first appears, if one looks closely at her eyes, it can be seen that her eyes have a translucent membrane which opens up. It is also known as the nictitating membrane or "third eyelid" which members of her clan have evolved to help them see underwater.
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When Quaritch is watching the video of his human self, a woman can be seen with an outfit resembling Walker's. She also has no tattoos, unlike Zdinarsk, suggesting it very well could be Walker as a human. She is also seen touching Lyle Wainfleet, suggesting they could be a couple or close friends.
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The Maori people, the inspiration source of the Metkayina clan, have traditionally regarded whales as important figures such as being incarnations of Tangaroa (the water god), Taniwha (mystical beings), and as tribal guardians. Additionally, there are a number of whale-related legends, including the famous Whale Rider which is etymologically similar to The Tulkun Rider, the alleged title of Avatar 4. It might be noted that Cliff Curtis (Tonowari) played the father of the title character in Whale Rider (2002).
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Amrita may be a reference to sperm oil, a clear yellowish colored liquid wax produced from the cranial melon in sperm whales. It is a natural antioxidant and heat-transfer agent, prized as an illuminant in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for its bright, odorless flame, and as a popular lubricant for its low viscosity and thermal stability. It was also used as a rust inhibitor to protect metals, and saw widespread use in the aerospace industry. With the 1987 international ban on whaling, sperm oil is no longer legally sold.
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Quaritch's awakening in his Recom body shares some parallels to Jake Sully's awakening as an Avatar. Both had a very excited awakening in their new bodies, though Quaritch's was more violent compared to Jake. In both of these scenarios, doctors attempted to sedate them but did not succeed. Both were astonished from examining their new forms and quickly adapted to them as well.
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Supplementary material for the first movie established that the RDA had a complement of ten ISV Venture Star ships as part of their Earth to Pandora supply chain. When humanity returns in the sequel their massive invasion force is exactly ten ships--they sent their entire fleet for an all-out reclamation of Pandora.
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Spider is very similar to the fictional character Tarzan. They are both teenagers with dead parents, were raised in the wilderness by another species, have dreadlocks, wear loincloths, have strong climbing abilities, and have compassion for animals. They both have to challenge a man who has hatred for the species that raised them (Quaritch and Clayton) both can also be considered Disney characters as well as Disney holds some IP rights to the Avatar series.
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At 1:56:54 the leader of the tulkun poachers calls for his picadors. In classical bullfights, picadors prep the bulls for the matadors. The picadors stab the bulls with short bayonets to weaken and infuriate the animals. Continuing the bullfighting theme, the poachers' boat is the Matador (literal translation is Killer) the person who ultimately kills the bull.
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Ronal doesn't want to bother teaching her ways to people who won't be receptive or capable. "They will be like babies," Ronal counsels her husband. This is a callback to the first "Avatar," when Neytiri tells Avatar Jake that he has a strong heart but is otherwise like a baby. What she meant was that he was loud, clumsy, and unaware of his impact on the world around him. When her mother charged her with teaching Jake the ways of the Na'vi, she bristled, reasoning that they'd essentially have to start from scratch. While Ronal's daughter, Tsireya, is noticeably more up for the challenge, Ronal still realizes that it won't be easy for the forest Na'vi to fit in at the reef. Her comment is both a statement of prejudice and a reasonable attempt at isolating her clan from danger. The flip side of Ronal's line is Jake's answer to it. "We will adapt," he tells the Metkayina and his family. This short line can be read three ways. Literally, he uses himself as an example. He was born human, was injured and paralyzed, adapted to the use of a wheelchair, then adapted to the use of a Na'vi Avatar, and was finally accepted into Na'vi society with the permanent, true Na'vi body of his own. Jake is also pointing out that, on a long enough timeline, the Na'vi physically adapt. It's obvious that evolution has made the Na'vi distinct from each other depending on the habitat in which they live. The Metkayina have evolved to have lighter and slightly greener skin, thicker and flatter tails, muscular, almost finned wrists, and the ability to hold their breath for an extended period of time
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According to James Cameron, the Avatar sequels were such a massive undertaking that he divided the four scripts between the writing team of Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman, and Shane Salerno. Cameron delves further explaining the story process: "I think we met for seven months and we whiteboarded out every scene in every film together, and I didn't assign each writer which film they were going to work on until the last day. I knew if I assigned them their scripts ahead of time, they'd tune out every time we were talking about the other movie."
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Production designers Dylan Cole, Ben Procter, and the art department populated an entire ocean from the sea floor up, from many species of coral and water plants (many bioluminescent) to dozens of fish designs, covering bait fish to apex predators. Though their main reference for the akula was a great white on steroids, the source for the mouth was something scarier -- to Cole, at least. "Speaking from a personal fear, I don't like snakes," Cole added. "So I wanted to think of like a rattlesnake. And the way it really opens wide up top and even going further than a snake where the top of its mouth bifurcates open. And so to stick that kind of head on a shark, we tweaked the body."
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For Payakan's most prominent eye, his most anthropomorphic feature, the approach entailed creating a cross between an elephant eye and a human eye, with a familiar iris and pupil. Separately, the sclera, the eye's outer layer, would most closely resemble those of horses and cows and include a nictitating membrane, the built-in goggles that make it possible to see underwater. The goal with all of these details was to elevate Payakan above a mere creature and give him a personality. "Payakan was probably the hardest creature for us to crack because it's not just a creature, it's a character," Cole said. "He really needed to be relatable and emote." The animators in turn focused their efforts on manipulating the movement of the eye, and the skin around it, to help with performance. "We needed to get as much out of that as possible because that's what Lo'ak connects with: this enormous eye, cheek and brow," said Barrett, the animation supervisor. In terms of the mechanics of the tulkun's locomotion, the animation team used humpback whales as a key reference. For Payakan's more playful moments, however, the inspiration came from seals, particularly their expressive tails. In one instance that Barrett calls "the puppy shot," the influence is clear as Payakan swims around Lo'ak.
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Audiences taking notice of costumes and accessories in the first film may notice that the necklace Grace Augustine wears is Na'vi jewelry. Not only is Grace wearing a Na'vi necklace, but she also received it from Neytiri's late sister. Of course, Grace isn't exactly back in the sequel in the same sense as Quaritch; her daughter, Kiri, adorns the same necklace throughout the film. The nod to the character's reverence for Na'vi culture and taking place as her daughter's heirloom is a heartwarming and touching detail that might have been missed.
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Amrita may be a reference to sperm oil, a clear yellowish colored liquid wax produced from the cranial melon in sperm whales. It is a natural antioxidant and heat-transfer agent, prized as an illuminant in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for its bright, odorless flame, and as a popular lubricant for its low viscosity and thermal stability. It was also used as a rust inhibitor to protect metals, and saw widespread use in the aerospace industry. With the 1987 international ban on whaling, sperm oil is no longer legally sold.
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Another new tool gave actors reference for eyelines and performance, with a cable-suspended camera system, but the team replaced the camera with a monitor. Says Letteri: "All the live-action characters, when they had to interact with CG characters, had something flying around the set with the performance in the right place in space. [It provided] the ability for the live-action characters to play live off their CG counterparts. "These are just all tools to build this story," he concludes. "We knew it was going to be a big story and a lot of emotional beats with the characters, and that's really where we were putting all the effort."
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To capture these interactions between Payakan and the Na'vi boy, the production built segments of the tulkun's body with fiberglass and foam to give Britain Dalton, who plays Lo'ak, an eye line and a physical reference while filming in the water tank. For underwater shots, there were devices that could move through the water, with a flipper for the actor to hold onto. The sophisticated tank could also generate a strong current to emulate Payakan's speed.
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The "immune response" around the Hallelujah Mountains (i.e. Eywa sending hordes of Ikran and who knows what else to attack any human vehicles besides the ones directly aligned with the Na'vi that spend too much time there) is obviously the reason why the RDA doesn't attempt to bomb the Tree of Souls this time around. On the other hand, why wouldn't they simply use an ISV's exhaust plumes to burn the Tree off the map, as they did with the landing site for Bridgehead City, It's likely because of the risk to the ISV itself. The Hallelujah Mountains are made of huge chunks of superconductive Unobtanium ore, held aloft by insanely powerful and sometimes unpredictable magnetic fields (noted in the previous film to wreak havoc on instruments). Unobtanium-focused magnetic fields are also the very thing used to direct the antimatter-fuelled plasma streams in an ISV's drive. If there were even a chance that the mountains' magnetism could twist or redirect the plumes of a landing ship - which would unbalance the ship and have disastrous consequences - it stands to reason that the RDA's spacefaring department would nix any such attempt.
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During the "Inside Pandora's Box" featurette from the film's digital release, director James Cameron and producer Jon Landau explain how they learned to improved the quality of the motion and performance capture for "The Way of Water", by simply capturing more motion (and therefore more performance), which they accomplished by incorporating more cameras: Jon Landau explained: "One of the big advances that we made technologically in the sequels is the facial performance capture. In the first movie, we used a single standard camera to record a person's face. On the sequels, we're using two high-definition cameras and we are capturing a much higher fidelity performance." James Cameron stated: "The reference cameras are a very important part of this because I need to edit with something, and I can't edit with the raw feed that's coming out of the facial cameras. So I insisted we get close-ups of every actor. So you can imagine in a group scene, this turns into a lot of cameras - up to 16."
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Fans noticed reused and recycled footage from the first film that made its way into the sequel While several of the details are changed, such as Jake Sully's facial markings and the beast he's riding, the motion capture footage for Sam Worthington's performance is the same between both films. The shot composition is even carried over from the first Avatar. Jake Sully is seen diving through the air on the back of a skimwing in Avatar 2, letting out a battle cry. His face is replicated from a shot of him riding the massive orange banshee known as Toruk in the original movie, with this sequel developing a number of new characters to use alongside Jake and his family. Additionally, Zoe Saldaña's Neytiri also reuses motion capture data from the first Avatar in the sequel too. She is seen riding her own banshee into battle during Avatar 2's opening scene, holding up her arms while letting out the same battle cry that she did in the final battle from the first movie. The final battle shows off another look at Jake Sully riding his new skimwing that is taken from another shot from the previous film, which also came during that movie's final battle.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
When Jake finds Neteyam injured on the ground after the train raid goes awry, he first checks his son's back before carrying him to safety. He also scolds Lo'ak that he almost got his older brother killed. In the third act, Neteyam gets shot, and Jake checks his back only to see that the shot has pierced through his back, meaning the wound is fatal and there's no saving him. Lo'ak later blames himself for Neteyam's death, as Neteyam was only trying to keep him out of harm's way.
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Deeper Meaning (43)
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Tsireya's lesson is meant to make Lo'ak feel as though he's a part of something bigger than himself and his family, and more broadly, it's meant to teach the forest-dwelling Sullys about her clan's specific philosophy when it comes to the "great balance" that Jake speaks of the great balance that Earth's humans don't respect. These Metkayina sentiments are religious in-world, but they likely represent the environmentally-conscious Cameron's personal philosophy in a metatextual way. It's the way of water that saves Jake's life. Lo'ak explains the idea to his father before the pair escape the sinking ship. The movie also ends with Jake and Neytiri bonding with the Metkayina spirit tree as they're fully accepted into this new way of life.
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The clan having more cyan-colored skin instead of midnight blue is meant to parallel humanity's different skin colors, with producer Jon Landau commenting, "That's part of our world, [and] we look at what we're doing as a metaphor for our world." For example, the scene where the Sully family is bullied for their different physical attributes can be seen as a metaphor for racism.
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James Cameron stated that Jake and Neytiri have matured to have less reckless personalities due to being parents, clarifying, "In the first movie, Sam's character leaps off his flying creature and essentially changes the course of history as a result of this crazy, almost suicidal leap of faith. And Zoe's character leaps off a limb and assumes there's going to be some nice big leaves down there that can cushion her fall. But when you're a parent, you don't think that way. So for me, as a parent of five kids, I'm saying, "What happens when those characters mature and realize that they have a responsibility outside their own survival?"
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James Cameron explained why he decided to portray Ronal as pregnant throughout the film. "Everybody's always talking about female empowerment. But what is such a big part of a woman's life that we, as men, don't experience?" Cameron said. He then went on to say that he wanted to explore the concept of female empowerment in the sequel. So he decided to introduce a female warrior who was six months pregnant in the battle. Cameron said, "Well, if you're really going to go all the way down the rabbit hole of female empowerment, let's have a female warrior who's six months pregnant in battle." He then explained that it might not have happened for years, but back in the day, women also had to "fight for survival" and for their children's protection. "And it didn't matter if they were pregnant," Cameron said.
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It is a widespread misconception that the Metkayina knows English despite their lack of contact with humans, to the degree fans have mentioned it as a plot hole while leaving negative reviews for the film. However, it is not stated anywhere that the clan knows English and it is likely their language is simply translated for the sake of the audience, while they are still canonically speaking Na'vi in the story. In the beginning of the film, Jake watches his children argue in Na'vi and then they switch to the audience's language, commenting that Na'vi language is like English to him (at least in the English version of the film).
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Emotional resonance in the film was something that James Cameron, as well as stars Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang, stressed throughout their conversation. "I'm a pretty logical person, so when I'm writing I get hung up on logic, and I gotta justify everything and set it all up. And we go through the shooting process, and then the editing process, and I wind up taking a lot of things out," Cameron shared. "And I realize it's like that game where you can keep pulling things out, and the tower doesn't fall down it's like Jenga! When you're cutting the movie it's not about length as much as about speed and the progression of ideas. You keep taking things out, and my logical brain keeps saying 'How are they going to understand that?' But you do, because you feel it." "It starts right at the beginning, with that blank page," Cameron continued. "We challenged ourselves at the beginning to figure out, 'How did that first film work again?' Because it really hit every culture and every language group across all different cultures around the world. It had to have been at some universal level of the human heart, and we tried to quantify it before we even started writing, because we didn't want to miss that. Science fiction sometimes is a fiction of ideas sometimes, not always, sometimes it lacks heart, so we really put an extra emphasis on that in the writing process."
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James Cameron was adamant that the Tulkuns were not whales "I nearly got through the whole film without calling it a whale in front of Jim," said Dan Barrett, who served as senior animation supervisor on the film as part of Weta FX, the famed visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand. "I did once, and you were immediately corrected." Enormous in size, and definitely whale-like in their general shape, these creatures have unique anatomical characteristics that set them apart from cetaceans here on planet Earth. Still, they call to mind the whales we're familiar with in their extraordinary intelligence, their complex systems of communication, and their intricate social structure. According to Rick Jaffa, one of the screenwriters of "The Way of Water," the tulkun collectively embody one of the film's main thematic undercurrents: the notion of interconnection with those around us, and with the natural world at large. Conceiving of their look and attributes was critical in this second installment of the "Avatar" franchise. As Jaffa and his co-writers, Cameron included began shaping the story and the characters, the art department (located right above their office at Lightstorm, Manhattan Beach Studios, in California) would incorporate those ideas into the designs of the creatures, readjusting as they went along. "You felt like you were watching evolution in front of your own eyes," Jaffa said.
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Lo'ak, trying to make his father sound like a hero for once, remarks, "My dad came from a star." It shows that Lo'ak not only views his once-human father as a true Na'vi, but that he's mythologized his origin story to an extent that he'd probably never actually admit. But in the past 30 years, what appeared to be falling stars turned out to be spacecraft from Earth, sent for mostly nefarious purposes. It's the white light of a ship burning its way into Pandora's atmosphere, alerting Jake and Neytiri to the return of the humans at the start of the film. And since the audience knows that Earth is dying and humans have little choice but to take over this distant moon by any means necessary, it's not the last time these young Na'vi will see an ominous star in Pandora's sky. " contains invalid characters
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the Metkayina tattoos are given to the people as a gift from the tribe as a chronicle of their life, accomplishments, and ranks. It's hinted that this begins with a coming of age ceremony of some kind because Ao'nung is noted as too young for ceremonial tattoos at the age of 15. This suggests that the Metkayina tattoo the Tulkun as a sign of kinship and shared stories. Payakan being a young bull would have been like Ao'nung, too young for tattoos at the time of his incident.
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Spider's character has received controversy within the Avatar fanbase, with Polygon calling him the most controversial character in the film. Despite that he does what he can to protect the Sully family, some viewers dislike him anyway, especially due to his moral choice to save Quaritch which can seem bizarre to those who don't think about why Spider decided to do that. They also feel that he is out of place with the universe. However, Spider's status has an awkward out of place character, torn between two worlds, can be seen as fitting perfectly within the themes of the Avatar series, scene with the characters such as Jake in the first film and Teylan from the video game Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (2023).
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The "immune response" around the Hallelujah Mountains (i.e. Eywa sending hordes of Ikran and who knows what else to attack any human vehicles besides the ones directly aligned with the Na'vi that spend too much time there) is obviously the reason why the RDA doesn't attempt to bomb the Tree of Souls this time around. On the other hand, why wouldn't they simply use an ISV's exhaust plumes to burn the Tree off the map, as they did with the landing site for Bridgehead City, It's likely because of the risk to the ISV itself. The Hallelujah Mountains are made of huge chunks of superconductive Unobtanium ore, held aloft by insanely powerful and sometimes unpredictable magnetic fields (noted in the previous film to wreak havoc on instruments). Unobtanium-focused magnetic fields are also the very thing used to direct the antimatter-fuelled plasma streams in an ISV's drive. If there were even a chance that the mountains' magnetism could twist or redirect the plumes of a landing ship - which would unbalance the ship and have disastrous consequences - it stands to reason that the RDA's spacefaring department would nix any such attempt.
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The Maori people, the inspiration source of the Metkayina clan, have traditionally regarded whales as important figures such as being incarnations of Tangaroa (the water god), Taniwha (mystical beings), and as tribal guardians. Additionally, there are a number of whale-related legends, including the famous Whale Rider which is etymologically similar to The Tulkun Rider, the alleged title of Avatar 4. It might be noted that Cliff Curtis (Tonowari) played the father of the title character in Whale Rider (2002).
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Amrit or Amrita is a concept from Hindu mythology: it is a drink or food which makes the consumer immune to death, or, metaphorically, which addresses serious issues leading to death, such as antitoxins, vaccines, antidotes to poisons, etc. For example, vaccines have been called Amrit, as have revolutionary treatments like chemotherapy. This is a concept running through Hinduism from Vedic times.
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Stephen Lang discussed the way Quaritch had changed between the first film, released in 2009, and its sequel. "In the original film, there was a wonderful, colourful character, but he really was primarily there as a function of evil. You know, he was there to be the conflict," he said. "And now I think he is that. He still is the source of conflict. But he's also something else again, as he becomes part of the landscape. He becomes part of Pandora, in a way, and that operates on him in very confusing ways."
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According to The Visual Dictionary, Neteyam's neckpiece is stylized after the classic neckpieces that the legendary warriors of his clan would wear, including Tsu'tey, showing Neteyam's desire to be a strong warrior. Neteyam also made it himself, since making one's own clothing or being given clothing by loved ones is very important to the Na'vi, meaning their clothing and accessories are very symbolic.
- #373
James Cameron was adamant that the Tulkuns were not whales "I nearly got through the whole film without calling it a whale in front of Jim," said Dan Barrett, who served as senior animation supervisor on the film as part of Weta FX, the famed visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand. "I did once, and you were immediately corrected." Enormous in size, and definitely whale-like in their general shape, these creatures have unique anatomical characteristics that set them apart from cetaceans here on planet Earth. Still, they call to mind the whales we're familiar with in their extraordinary intelligence, their complex systems of communication, and their intricate social structure. According to Rick Jaffa, one of the screenwriters of "The Way of Water," the tulkun collectively embody one of the film's main thematic undercurrents: the notion of interconnection with those around us, and with the natural world at large. Conceiving of their look and attributes was critical in this second installment of the "Avatar" franchise. As Jaffa and his co-writers, Cameron included began shaping the story and the characters, the art department (located right above their office at Lightstorm, Manhattan Beach Studios, in California) would incorporate those ideas into the designs of the creatures, readjusting as they went along. "You felt like you were watching evolution in front of your own eyes," Jaffa said.
- #374
Zoe Saldaña, expressed her own gratitude for returning to the world of "Avatar," highlighting her adoration for Cameron and the action heroines he helped cement with "The Terminator" and "Aliens." "I got to work with my idol at a very early stage of my career. If it wasn't for Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, these iconic characters of the '80s, where would I be?" Saldaña said. "There are so many themes that will resonate with people, starting with the power of family... Family is not just the one that you're born into, but it's also the one that you choose or chooses you."
- #375
the Metkayina tattoos are given to the people as a gift from the tribe as a chronicle of their life, accomplishments, and ranks. It's hinted that this begins with a coming of age ceremony of some kind because Ao'nung is noted as too young for ceremonial tattoos at the age of 15. This suggests that the Metkayina tattoo the Tulkun as a sign of kinship and shared stories. Payakan being a young bull would have been like Ao'nung, too young for tattoos at the time of his incident.
- #376
Since the tulkun have armor-plated bodies that are meant to articulate very flexibly, the art department and the animators collaborated to create plates that would move without crashing into each other when the creatures twist into various shapes. That outer shell couldn't function like that of a sea turtle, for example; it had to be broken up into distinct sections that would allow for what Cameron was envisioning. "One pose Jim drew was the tulkun arching its back with its pectoral fins all the way touching," Dylan Cole said. "He was imagining these dance-type poses." Cameron had also written that the tulkun were mouthbrooders, which in this case meant that newborn offspring of the female tulkun reside in her mouth. The artists designed the mouth which reveals a large pouch when opened as if it were an enchanted cave, since that's where Lo'ak interacts with Payakan's "kuru," the word for the tendrils that allow creatures on Pandora to mentally communicate with one another. Cole and his team landed on an unfurling fern coil with many points of contact for the design of Payakan's kuru. "We were trying to show that by having all those different kuru connections, their connections with others are that much more powerful," Cole said.
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The clan having more cyan-colored skin instead of midnight blue is meant to parallel humanity's different skin colors, with producer Jon Landau commenting, "That's part of our world, [and] we look at what we're doing as a metaphor for our world." For example, the scene where the Sully family is bullied for their different physical attributes can be seen as a metaphor for racism.
- #380
Zdinarsk has many colorful tattoos on her arms, neck, and chest. They include: A chimera on her neck, an eagle on her back with the Latin motto "AUT VINCERE AUT MORI" which means "conquer or die". It also has the number 33 which is known as an "angel number" that calls for people to cleanse their life and mind of negativity, her right arm has a skeleton reaper on the bottom and an angel on the top, her left arm has a snaked wrapped around a skull with "DEATHLESS" on it, the bottom portion is the most difficult to interpret as it looks very Hindu in nature with many strange symbols.
- #381
To get the vital facial performances, Weta FX developed a new stereo camera head rig, and accompanying software for facial capture, to bring the actor's undiluted performances to their characters. Explains Letteri: "The software is a neural network that webuilt as an animation tool that let's us try to figure out how the muscles react to each other. It gives the animators a lot more control in interpreting a performance than we've ever had before." Emphasizes Cameron: "It's 100 percent actor-driven. Sometimes our biggest challenge can be in a simple two-character dialouge scene. You have to have every nuance of what the actor does. As a director and working with the actors, it's a very pure art form. It's like a stage rehearsal."
- #382
- #383
Tsireya's lesson is meant to make Lo'ak feel as though he's a part of something bigger than himself and his family, and more broadly, it's meant to teach the forest-dwelling Sullys about her clan's specific philosophy when it comes to the "great balance" that Jake speaks of the great balance that Earth's humans don't respect. These Metkayina sentiments are religious in-world, but they likely represent the environmentally-conscious Cameron's personal philosophy in a metatextual way. It's the way of water that saves Jake's life. Lo'ak explains the idea to his father before the pair escape the sinking ship. The movie also ends with Jake and Neytiri bonding with the Metkayina spirit tree as they're fully accepted into this new way of life.
- #384
At 1:56:54 the leader of the tulkun poachers calls for his picadors. In classical bullfights, picadors prep the bulls for the matadors. The picadors stab the bulls with short bayonets to weaken and infuriate the animals. Continuing the bullfighting theme, the poachers' boat is the Matador (literal translation is Killer) the person who ultimately kills the bull.
- #385
Lo'ak, trying to make his father sound like a hero for once, remarks, "My dad came from a star." It shows that Lo'ak not only views his once-human father as a true Na'vi, but that he's mythologized his origin story to an extent that he'd probably never actually admit. But in the past 30 years, what appeared to be falling stars turned out to be spacecraft from Earth, sent for mostly nefarious purposes. It's the white light of a ship burning its way into Pandora's atmosphere, alerting Jake and Neytiri to the return of the humans at the start of the film. And since the audience knows that Earth is dying and humans have little choice but to take over this distant moon by any means necessary, it's not the last time these young Na'vi will see an ominous star in Pandora's sky. " contains invalid characters
- #386
The daisy anemone that Kiri manipulates to destroy the Mako submersible, there is a similar creature in reality called the "urticina piscivora" which likely served as inspiration, although it is the size of one's palm. There is another called the "cereus pedunculatus" which is also called the daisy anemone. While the Pandorapedia categorizes it as flora, it can also be considered zooplantae.
- #387
Production designer Dylan Cole said the design of the Skimwings was initially quite clear to director James Cameron. He explained: "It's basically a giant flying fish. It actually glides using a wing effect on the ground, and the SeaDragon works the same way. What I really wanted to emphasize was the head design. I felt the first designs were too derived from the ikran, but Jim said they were cousins. But I still wanted to explore further out." Cameron said that it propels the gliding wing motion with its tail rather than its wings. The production team studied flying fish and how they work for the design. In addition to the mouths of billfish, which include marlins, sailfish and spearfish and have a kind of long, thin snout, Cameron mentions gars, which have long, thin but less pointed snouts, and compares them to "splayed teeth on a long bill as a Rhamphorhynchus and Pteranodon did." He even compares them to "a giant pair of chopsticks with teeth that can snatch things many times." The head structure ultimately resembled a gar's, but Cameron says of the design: "For the wing wing, we had head designs that looked like anything. Everything from dragons to T. Rexes. We started out with the gar idea. I brought in a plastic cast of a gar skull as inspiration for the glide. When we saw it, we said, 'Oh, this is great.' It's so scary."
- #388
- #389
On the "Inside Pandora's Box" featurette included with the digital release, James Cameron offered insight into his inspirations and creative process when developing the sequels and his pitch to the studio:"I went to the studio and said, 'Let's not do a sequel. Let's launch ourselves on a big story arc.' All the world-building that we do, all the character-building that we do. Let's not just do another movie. Let's do Star Wars. Let's do Lord of the Rings. Let's swing for the fences."
- #390
Recom Zdinarsk has a habit of blowing bubble gum. Throughout the movie, she blows a total of 3 bubble gums and each of them actually represents a celebration of victory. The first when Quaritch and the recom squad capture Spider and used him to track down Jake Sully. Second is when they burn down the Ta'unui village because the clan doesn't cooperate with Quaritch. And the 3rd time is when the Sky People capture and kill a tulkun and take the amrita from their bodies and make money.
- #391
Contains a major spoiler — show
When Sky army captures and kills a Tulkun, they extract a golden yellow fluid/elixir from its brain and referred it as 'Amrita' which will stop aging. The term Amrita is a Sanskrit word that means "immortality" which is referred within many Indian religions. This is another Sanskrit word used by James Cameron. He named this film series title as 'Avatar' which is also a Sanskrit word meaning a manifestation of divinity in bodily form. Also references the substance found in whales which is "ambergris.
- #392
Contains a major spoiler — show
One of the few differences between the Avatar bodies used by humans and the Na'vi individuals is their number of fingers. While the importance of having one less finger is never mentioned, it clearly shows their biological deviation. Jake has five fingers, while Neytiri and the other Na'vi have four. Unsurprisingly, they're called out on the fact when they seek refuge with the Metkayina clan. Two of Jake and Neytiri's biological children, Tuk and Neteyam, have four digits, while their middle biological son Lo'ak and adopted daughter Kiri have distinct five.
- #393
Contains a major spoiler — show
The film reveals the Na'vi clans of Pandora have evolved to suit their own unique environments. The Metkayina, for example, have longer tails and thicker arms to help them swim, while the Omatikaya are thinner and with different muscle-structures, optimized for swinging and climbing. There are 15 different Na'vi clans, and presumably all of them have evolved in slightly different ways. The film also offers some subtle criticisms of the Na'vi, though, showing hints of racial prejudice based on these physiological differences. Metkayina are particularly unimpressed with Jake's children, whose five fingers signify human DNA rather than Na'vi. The Messianic subplot involving Kiri is important here, though, because it is interesting to note Eywa chose to sire a child through an avatar - presumably as a bridge between the Na'vi and the Sky People. The five fingers may hint at the deliberate birth of a new species of Na'vi, one optimized for using Sky People tools and technology.
- #394
- #395
Contains a major spoiler — show
Viewers have pointed out that Lo'ak seems to exhibit symptoms of depersonalization derealization disorder in order to cope with the trauma and violence of the war. There are times throughout the film he can be seen staring expressionlessly whenever a disturbing incident occurs, such as when he's viewing his brother's body, and even when he puts his hand on Neteyam's forehead during the funeral. He stares at Neteyam's body as his parents lower him into the yellow tendrils, but the moment Neteyam's body begins to no longer be visible, Lo'ak then finally show's emotion as he realizes his brother is truly gone. In the original script, Lo'ak breaks down in sobs sooner, the moment Neteyam is submerged, instead of when Neteyam disappears out of Lo'ak's sight in the final version.
- #396
- #397
Contains a major spoiler — show
There are multiple parallels between Lo'ak and his father. *shares physical human traits with his father. *is similar to his father personality wise. *is seen as the more reckless and rebellious sibling who does not succeed in fulfilling others' expectations of him as much. *has a deceased brother who was killed by a gunshot, just like Jake's brother Tom. *has to step into his brother's shoes. Jake takes Tom's place in the Avatar Program and Lo'ak inherits responsibilities of being the oldest son. *takes a liking to the clan leader's daughter who served as his tutor. *escapes from an akula in a similar way Jake escaped from a thanator. *bonds with a tulkun, ultimately leading to the pivotal turn in the final battle similar to how Jake helped the Na'vi to defeat the RDA by bonding with a great leonopteryx.
Career & Awards (8)
- #398
This is James Cameron's sixth film to win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, after Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). The only people who have directed nearly as many winners are Richard Fleischer, Steven Spielberg, and Sir Peter Jackson, with four each: * Fleischer - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Doctor Dolittle (1967), and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) * Spielberg - Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Jurassic Park (1993) * Jackson - The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03) and King Kong (2005)
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After winning the Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon ended up being rushed out of the ceremony in order to have emergency surgery. Representatives from Weta FX informed the public that Saindon started having abdominal discomfort early in the day of the Oscars, and checked into a Beverly Hills hospital by lunchtime that day. He was cleared of appendicitis and/or kidney stones as immediate concerns, and was discharged on painkillers to attend the Oscars ceremony that evening. It was during the Oscars that Saindon started to experience more pain; he held out long enough to win his award, but had to cut his press interviews short, in order to be taken to the hospital again. Ultimately it was determined that Saindon was suffering from a ruptured small intestine.
- #401
This film and Top Gun: Maverick (2022) are the eighth and ninth sequels nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, after The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), The Godfather Part II (1974), The Godfather Part III (1990), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Toy Story 3 (2010), and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Of these nine, only Godfather Part II and Return of the King have won. Way of Water is also the sixth nominated sequel whose predecessor was also nominated, after Bells of St. Mary's, Godfather Part II, Godfather Part III, Two Towers, and Return of the King.
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After winning the Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon ended up being rushed out of the ceremony in order to have emergency surgery. Representatives from Weta FX informed the public that Saindon started having abdominal discomfort early in the day of the Oscars, and checked into a Beverly Hills hospital by lunchtime that day. He was cleared of appendicitis and/or kidney stones as immediate concerns, and was discharged on painkillers to attend the Oscars ceremony that evening. It was during the Oscars that Saindon started to experience more pain; he held out long enough to win his award, but had to cut his press interviews short, in order to be taken to the hospital again. Ultimately it was determined that Saindon was suffering from a ruptured small intestine.
- #405
Two scenes in the film don't contain VFX according to VFX animators Joe Letteri, Daniel Barrett, and Eric Saindon at the BAFTA's (British Academy Film Awards), where the group revealed the identity of the two scenes in question. "There's one of Spider's [Jack Champion] eyeball and there's one of the bottom of the ocean and just some ripples in the bottom of the water," revealed Snider. Sandon went on to add, "There's lots of live action, lots of characters with CG but every other scene, VFX shots were touched."
Life & Family (7)
- #406
James Cameron said, "My kids and I have a laugh about it now because of what they see as my silly attempt to portray them [in the film]. It's like each one knows which character was modeled on them, and they totally reject it. It's like, 'No, you don't understand me at all.' Which is perfect, right?"
- #407
During the promotion of The Way of Water, James Cameron attended a show in Japan where dolphins performed and sarcastically said during it, "I'm sure everybody asked their permission to be in the show." His attendance caused controversy because many Avatar fans felt it was antithetical to the themes of the series to use animals as entertainment. He clarified a week later about how he felt uncomfortable but did not want to seem rude to the Japanese people putting on the show for him: "There was zero mention of a dolphin show. I literally found out there was a dolphin show as we were walking out on stage. We were already out in the lights and fans were cheering. I said something snide on-mike like, 'I'm sure the dolphins were all asked for their consent to be part of the show' or something like that. I was seething. But I didn't want to create a big public incident. Maybe I should have, in retrospect. But my instinct is always to meet people where they are. Which is the whole point of Avatar: The Way of Water. To shift consciousness." Cameron blamed Disney for being blindsighted to the dolphin show, commenting "When you see the movie you'll see that it's all about saving whales, and treating them with empathy as equals. It's the pivotal message of the film, so there's obviously no way I would have agreed to standing up in front of a show based on captive dolphins.. I wanted you to know this was a faux pas outside my ability to foresee or prevent, and that I'm sorry about it." He also said if people don't want to be hypocritical and instead wish to help dolphins and animals, they should "put down the damn tuna melt", stop eating meat and fish entirely, and stick to plant-based proteins as he has for over a decade.
- #408
- #409
Ronal does not want to bother teaching her ways to people who are neither understanding nor capable. "They will be like babies," Ronal advises her husband. This is a callback to the first "Avatar," where Neytiri says Avatar Jake has a strong heart but is otherwise like a baby. What she means is that he is loud, clumsy and unaware of his impact on the world around him. When her mother tasks her with teaching Jake Na'vi customs, she is annoyed, thinking they essentially have to start from scratch. Although Ronal's daughter Tsireya is visibly more prepared for this struggle, Ronal is aware that it will not be easy for the Na'vi of the forest to adapt to the reefs. Her comment is both a statement of prejudice and a reasonable attempt to isolate her clan from danger. The other side of what Ronal says is Jake's response to it. "We will adapt," he tells the Metkayina and his family. This short line can be read in three ways. Literally, he uses himself as an example. He was born human, was wounded and paralyzed, adapted to using a wheelchair, then adapted to using a Na'vi Avatar, and was finally accepted into Na'vi society with his own permanent, real Na'vi body. Jake also points out that over a long enough timeline, the Na'vi adapt physically. It is clear that evolution has made the Na'vi different from one another according to the habitats they live in. The Metkayina evolved to have more open and slightly greener skin, thicker and flatter tails, muscular, almost fin-like wrists, and the ability to hold their breath for a long time.
- #410
Viewers have pointed out that Lo'ak seems to exhibit symptoms of depersonalization derealization disorder in order to cope with the trauma and violence of the war. There are times throughout the film he can be seen staring expressionlessly whenever a disturbing incident occurs, such as when he's viewing his brother's body, and even when he puts his hand on Neteyam's forehead during the funeral. He stares at Neteyam's body as his parents lower him into the yellow tendrils, but the moment Neteyam's body begins to no longer be visible, Lo'ak then finally show's emotion as he realizes his brother is truly gone. In the original script, Lo'ak breaks down in sobs sooner, the moment Neteyam is submerged, instead of when Neteyam disappears out of Lo'ak's sight in the final version.
- #411
As Lo'ak is almost an exact mirror of his father Jake, Aonung serves a very similar role to Tsu'tey in Lo'ak's personal arc. Much like Tsu'tey's rivalry and eventually friendship with Jake, Aonung started out disliking Lo'ak for being an outsider and treats him horribly. He's close with a lovely young Na'vi that his rival is smitten with (though in this case, Tsireya is his sister, not his betrothed). And ultimately, Aonung comes to respect Lo'ak and becomes akin to brothers-in-arms with him.
- #412
Rick Jaffa, who served as the film's co-writer along with his wife Amanda Silver, as well as Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, detailed his experience working with James Cameron when he appeared as a guest on the Really? No, Really? podcast. Jaffa admitted that the writers were "a little nervous and intimidated" by Cameron and his wealth of experience: "We were all a little nervous and intimidated, I think. But the thing about Jim, in terms of the writer's room, is that you have to remember he's a writer also. I mean, you think of him as a director or just technological genius and this bigger-than-life character. But in a writer's room, he's just one of the writers. One of the guys, as it were." Jaffa continued, saying that Cameron made an effort to make make the writers "really comfortable" so that they'd feel safe revealing "a lot of personal stories:" "He wanted us all to be really comfortable, also. Because, I go back to the family saga of it all, you know, obviously Amanda and I have two kids, Josh [Friedman] has a son, Shane [Salerno] was the only one in the room without kids. But when we got into the room it required being open and telling a lot of personal stories, and opening up not just about our kids but, my relationship with my brother, you know who had passed away a year before we'd gotten into the room." "I think Jim realized if we'd felt so intimidated, like, am I really going to talk about my brother? Am I really going to suggest this dynamic because it was the way it was for me growing up? Or things like that." Addressing whether the writers experienced any of James Cameron's more notorious behaviors, Jaffa said they were "fortunate we never saw it:" "So it felt like a very safe room. So we never saw any of those kinds of behavioral [issues]. I'm sure they're true, by the way. I'm sure they are, but we were fortunate we never saw it." However, the writer did admit there were times they'd "start to argue" with Cameron: "There did get a couple of times where we'd start to argue. There was one time he and I were arguing a story point and Shane at the end of the table, just leans down the table and says, 'Stay down Luke, stay down.'" Jaffa explained that it was difficult to change Cameron's mind in an argument but that often they would "plant the seed" of an idea that the director would eventually accept: "Usually you can't change his mind in the moment. A lot of times, though, the right idea finds its way and it will become his idea. But that's human nature though. That's a big part of our job, me and Amanda, is to a lot of times introduce things that then can become... planting the seed." "It wasn't always apples to apples, sometimes you'd suggest something and it would become, you know, Jim's banana."
Related pages
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes — Avatar: The Way of Water comes up in the facts on that page
- Kate Winslet — Avatar: The Way of Water comes up in the facts on that page
- Everything Everywhere All at Once — Avatar: The Way of Water comes up in the facts on that page
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- Wikipedia
- IMDb
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