Avatar 2 Stars Reveal Why Kate Winslet Was Best at Holding Breath for Underwater Scenes

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The Avatar: The Way of Water cast grew skilled at holding their breath underwater in order to film scenes while completely submerged.

Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldaña spoke about their efforts to learn the techniques for the sequel in a conversation with director James Cameron and The New York Times.

In the interview, Saldaña, 44, noted that the "first step is you fake it till you make it" when it comes to filming underwater.

"You tell your boss, 'Yeah, absolutely, I'm so excited,' and then it's complete horror, like, 'What am I going to do?' At best, you're going to walk away with a brand-new aptitude, but I was scared," she admitted. "I come from generations of island people, and the one thing people don't know about island life is that if you're from islands that have been colonized, a great percentage of people don't know how to swim."

"Through folklore, you are taught to love the ocean as if it's a goddess, but you fear it," she added.

In an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Monday, Weaver, 73, told host Jimmy Fallon the cast was taught how to hold their breath by freediving instructor Kirk Krack "for about a year" while they worked on the movie. She revealed that she "actually got up to about six and a half minutes."

"I was not moving," Weaver told Fallon. "It's much easier to hold your breath when you're not moving."

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Courtesy of 20th Century Studios

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Saldaña noted in the Times interview that she "got almost up to five minutes," which 68-year-old Cameron called a "huge" achievement. However, it was a newcomer to the Avatar franchise who wound up learning to hold her breath the longest while making the new film: Kate Winslet.

"I'm very competitive, but we had an Oscar-winning actress in our cast that did seven minutes," Saldaña said, leading Weaver and Cameron to confirm that Winslet, 47, "was a natural" at the effort.

"Kate's a demon for prep, so she latched onto the free diving as something that she could build her character around," Cameron told the Times when asked whether he realized the actress could pull off the feat when she was cast. "Kate's character is someone who grew up underwater as an ocean-adapted Na'vi — they're so physically different from the forest Na'vi, that we'd almost classify them as a subspecies."

"So she had to be utterly calm underwater, and it turned out that she was a natural," he added.

Weaver noted in the Times interview that her six-and-a-half-minute breath hold came to "the surprise of the teacher," who she said advised the actors to "get rid of your mammalian instinct to go, 'Oh my God, my face is in the water.' "

"So you spend several minutes just putting your body back into that element and letting those land-person feelings dissolve," Weaver said.

Avatar/Twitter Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Zoë Saldana and Sam Worthington

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The actress told Fallon Tuesday that the breathing instructor referred to the desire to breathe as "the dirty villain."

"You ignore the dirty villain and you go, 'Ha! You, go away,' " Weaver said on the talk show. "You try to do all these mind games — I used to paint myself blue, you know, pretend, and I'd sing … anything you can do to keep from thinking about 'I really want to breathe.' "

Avatar: The Way of Water is in theaters Dec. 16.