Empire Magazine interview with James Cameron Part 1

 

You can buy a cheap monthly subscription through the Empire app for less than $5 a month, I highly encourage it to show support for the sequels and our monthly updates we are going to get all year. Here are two new photo's shown in the full article, some Avatar Fire and Ash bts shots, I love these both.

 

 Here is some of the Q&A from the article-

So, what shape is the film in?

 
It's in strong shape, I think. I feel really good about it, at least on a scene-by-scene basis.
I haven't watched it myself from end to end in about a year, and the last time it made me want to vomit. But that's always a good reaction, the first time you screen a film for yourself. Because then you get really rigorous and disciplined about making it work. We've doubled the number of shots finished at this stage of the game than we had on movie two and the films are about equal length. So that puts us well ahead of the curve, which is something I've never, frankly, experienced before. It's always a last-minute fricking nightmare on these films with a million details. It's a little bit less nightmarish. We're getting to the point where we're actually getting good at this. Nausea but not nightmarish - sounds like a decent place to be in.
Look, there's no baby born without labor. Just some labors are not as severe as others.

You've set the bar in Hollywood for sequels.
But this is your first threequel. Does it feel different?

 
I was involved creatively on [Terminator:] Dark Fate, and that obviously didn't work out so well.
But as director, this is my first threequel. The long-play bet here is that we get people to care more about the characters than about the shock of the new. Each of the two films that people have seen already, the promise was, "We're going to show you new environments, new creatures, new species, and you're going to get to just inhabit a world." And we fulfilled that promise. The shift going into 3 is, "Yeah, there'll be plenty of new things to enjoy, but our focus really is on the characters, the throughline of their story." It's a different kind of engagement with the audience. And obviously we're betting a lot of money that it will work.

The title, Fire And Ash, seems to speak to an amped-up emotional intensity. The Sullys were left devastated by The Way Of Water's final act...

The exact quote, which is in the voiceover, is, "The fire of hate gives way to the ash of grief." I think what commercial Hollywood doesn't do well is deal with grief the way human beings really deal with it. You know, characters get killed off, and then in the next movie everybody's happy again. I've lost a lot of people, friends and family members, over the last six or eight years, and it doesn't work that way. It also doesn't make you so mad that you're going to become an army of one and gun up and kill all those motherfuckers, which is another Hollywood trope. It makes you just kind of depressed and f***ed up. I'm not saying our movie's depressed and f***ed up, I'm just saying that I think we deal with that part of life quite honestly. The [Sullys'] journey continues in a very naturalistic, novelistic way. I've sort of thought of this next cycle, meaning 3, 4 and 5, as how they continue to process the things that happen to them. Now, of course, they're not human, but this is a movie for us, by us, right? Science-fiction is always just a big mirror of the human condition.

In this film, you're introducing another clan of Na'vi, the Ash People, with a leader
named Varang.

I don't want to say too much about her, but what I can say is that Oona Chaplin, who plays her, is so good that I didn't quite appreciate how good her performance is until we got the Wetā animation back. At a certain point, the nuance and detail of the performance suddenly popped to full life. She was absolutely precise in every word, every gesture, every eye movement.
She's an enemy, an adversarial character, but [Chaplin] makes her feel so real and alive.

What else can you say about the Ash People?

Varang is the leader of a people who have gone through an incredible hardship. She's hardened by that. She will do anything for them, even things that we would consider to be evil. One thing we wanted to do in this film is not be black-and-white simplistic. Or blue-and-pink simplistic. From the Na'vi perspective, all humans are pink — they call them 'pinkskins', and they're not discriminating between light brown, dark brown, pink, whatever. So there's a racism element from the Na'vi perspective that we introduce. We're trying to evolve beyond the "all humans are bad, all Na'vi are good" paradigm.