‘Avatar’ Auteur James Cameron Teases “Character” Over Spectacle for ‘Avatar 3’

James Cameron’s sights may be set on Christmas 2025 and beyond as he continues marching through his five-film Avatar saga, but for a brief moment in December, the visionary filmmaker paused his efforts in order to look back more than 30 years. On December 6, Disney re-released Cameron’s 1989 effort The Abyss in theaters, ahead of a wider Cameron filmography vault dump that will see that film plus Aliens, both Avatar films, True Lies and Titanic release on 4K home video formats. As antiquated as home video releases may seem, it still registers as a somewhat momentous occasion when it concerns a filmmaker who has staked their whole career on advancing the visual and technological capabilities of the medium like Cameron has. (Case in point: the recently released Oppenheimer 4K disc sold out across all major retailers when it dropped at the end of November.)

It’s hardly a Hot Take to declare The Abyss Cameron’s most underrated or even least-seen film. Cameron himself admits he hasn’t screened it since around 1992, while his producing partner Jon Landau said—in commiserating with me admitting Dec 6 would be my first time—that they held a screening for a handful of the Avatar 3 crew in New Zealand who had also never seen it before.

Despite a reputation for always looking forward, Cameron isn’t above or uncomfortable with rewatching his own work like some of his auteur peers, stating that his children are usually the catalyst for most of his trips down memory lane. “You go through different stages where each kid gets to a point where they're ready to see a certain film depending on its rating. And I ask them to not just watch them with friends, but to let me share that experience with them,” Cameron says. “And the farther you get away from having made the film, the more you can appreciate it like an audience member, but I still remember where I was standing in every setup. It's the strangest thing. It's like, I know I was standing over there against the wall here, [or] That one, I had my hand on the back of the magazine and I was shaking the camera. It never goes away.”

Cameron wisecracks that, having recently sat through it for the first time in 30 years, The Abyss “holds up pretty well,” while adding that this re-release emphasizes the “original intention of what I set out to make.” But there’s an unexpected throughline between his least-seen film and his upcoming one. “People think of [The Abyss] as an effects movie, when it really isn’t. It’s all about this,” he said as he made a gesture of framing an extreme close-up, while praising the performances of stars Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

It’s a strange line to tow for a film about the vastness of the deep sea that’s best seen on the biggest screen possible and won an Academy Award for Visual Effects, but Cameron maintained that same energy when teasing what he has in store for the third of five Avatar films, due Christmas 2025. He capitulated that despite having a career full of show-and-prove moments where studio execs and casual filmgoers alike doubted his ROI—all the way through his latest, last year’s Avatar sequel The Way of Water—most of his big swings deserved a raised eyebrow or two.

“Well, the first Avatar, we asked the studio for millions of dollars just to do a test clip that I think was only 40 seconds long. We had to show them what the movie was going to look like and how we were going to make it because it was so hypothetical,” Cameron said. “And I'm not saying that they don't lose faith partway through the process. When you're two and a half, three years into the process, and all they can see on the screen is people running around in black tights with marker dots all over them, there's a moment of existential panic—but then the shots start to come in and they start to see the movie coming together and then everybody relaxes.” The process was even more relaxed, relatively, with Disney, who took on Avatar after purchasing Twentieth Century Fox. “Working with Disney on The Way of Water, we got that all in miniature. There was concern, but there was never panic. And as they started to see the scenes coming together, they trusted us. And it was a great creative dialogue as well.”

But when asked to tease what new technological innovation he and Landau have up their sleeves as they cross the halfway mark on Avatar 3 post-production, Cameron—the wizard who’s changed how blockbusters are made with practically every film he’s had his name on—pivots from visual spectacle altogether. “The big [creative] advance in this movie is just going to be greater character depth. We're seeing new cultures, new creatures—all the same stuff you'd expect from an Avatar movie, but the whole idea of this cycle of films is to live with these people and go on this epic journey with them. So I think it's not about, ‘We're going to show you the best water [VFX] ever done’—but you get more into the heart and soul of the characters. And there's some very interesting new characters that come in as well. This is a journey over time. It will play out through movie three, into movie four and movie five. There's an epic cycle to the whole thing.”

It’s an interesting third act for a filmmaker whose calling card has long been grand spectacle, often through the lens of a future world that imagines Earth’s worst possible outcome. In the Avatar films, yes the Earth is “toast,” as Cameron puts it, but the overall vibe is much less nihilistic than, say, Terminator, or even Strange Days. “The Terminator [films were] warnings, which is what science fiction is good at. But I feel like with the Avatar films, we want to emphasize what's great about us,” Cameron admitted, laughing at his past reputation for creating dystopias. “The Na'vi are that which we used to be, or that which we can maybe still be—[you can] step outside ourselves and see ourselves in a more positive light. The colors pop in the Avatar films. They feel rich. There's a period of time where movies, especially dystopian science fiction films, were just desaturated. They were dark. They were like all blue or all cyan, and the whole thing was depressing. And we went exactly the opposite with Avatar, and obviously the second film as well, to remind people that there is beauty in the world and there can be beauty in cinema no matter how dark the story gets.”

Originally Appeared on GQ