Director James Cameron talks ‘Avatar,’ expectations and diving Lake Erie

“I’m not my best right now,” Cameron said on a Zoom call this week, just hours before the splashy premiere he was not able to attend.

Whether that bit of bad luck is ultimately just a hiccup or a sign of things to come for the massively anticipated sequel remains to be seen.

The film’s release this week starts the real test for the sequel to 2009’s “Avatar,” which is currently No. 1 on the all-time worldwide box office chart. Cameron also lays claim to the No. 3 film on that list, 1997’s “Titanic,” and he’s the director of “The Terminator” and “T2,” so by now there should be no doubting him or his track record.

Yet “The Way of Water” is somehow the riskiest film of the 68-year-old’s career, a test of his might and instincts, as well as the future of the franchise and Hollywood as a whole.

Early signs are positive: reviews have been glowing, both the film and Cameron were nominated for Golden Globes this week and box office projections are calling for an opening weekend of $150-200 million.

But the weeks and months ahead will ultimately tell the story of “The Way of Water,” and whether it washes over viewers the way the first one did. Whether it can count on repeat viewings, and if moviegoers return and bring their moms and grandparents and children with them to slide on those 3D glasses and escape to Pandora again and again.

And that part is beyond even Cameron and his grasp.

“The final test is if the Gods of cinema will smile or not,” says Cameron, down but far from out due to his bout with COVID. “That’s always the case with any movie. Maybe when you get to the third or fourth ‘Avengers’ movie there’s a certain expectation, or the third or fourth ‘Star Wars’ movie, if the quality has been kept up, and there’s enough cultural momentum. But we don’t have that in our favor, there’s too much of a discontinuity between the first movie and the second movie. So we’ve got to earn that all over again.”

Return to Pandora

That discontinuity is fully on Cameron, and yes, he’s heard everything that’s been said about the first “Avatar’s” lack of a cultural footprint.

The rap is this: while the film itself — about the military colonization of the planet Pandora, which is home to the Na’vi, a race of 9-foot-tall alien beings who are deeply connected to nature — was a massive phenomenon, pulling in a gargantuan $2.9 billion worldwide, its legacy is coated in amber and stuck in the year 2009, a time when Barack Obama was in his first year as president, the Black Eyed Peas ruled the charts for a full six months and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was only two films deep. The lack of “Avatar” in the cultural conversation has made it rife for mocking on “SNL” and in other media.

“No movie’s going to leave much of a cultural footprint if you don’t follow up,” says Cameron, dressed casually in a black long sleeve T-shirt and speaking from inside an L.A. hotel room. He’s in good spirits, and even took it in stride when this reporter accidentally hit the wrong button and hung up on him on Zoom. “Take 2!” he announced, using his hands like a clapboard, once the call was reconnected.

“Avatar” is not a franchise yet, Cameron says, bringing up the MCU — the modern model of franchise success — as a comparison.

“’Iron Man’ makes money, you make another ‘Iron Man’ within two years, and then another one, you tie it into ‘Avengers’ and then they’ve got that momentum,” he says. “I think they’ve played it consummately well in optimizing the commercial and zeitgeisty impact of the MCU. So I’m going to try to do the same thing with ‘Avatar,’ but obviously on a smaller scale.”

It might be the only time you ever hear Cameron talk about doing anything “smaller.”

About those 13 years of downtime: an “Avatar” follow-up was originally due in 2014. But after the release of the first film — which was nominated for Best Picture but ultimately lost out to Cameron’s ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” — Cameron finished construction on his Deepsea Challenger, a vessel he designed to travel the full depth of the ocean, which he had started work on during the making of “Avatar.” (His fascination with the sea is well documented and is a recurring theme in his work, from 1989’s “The Abyss” through “Titanic” and up to “The Way of Water.”)

Cameron piloted the vehicle to the bottom of the Marina Trench, nearly 36,000 feet below the surface in the Pacific Ocean, in March 2012. When he came back up for air, he had to decide whether he wanted to continue the story of “Avatar.”

He devised a plan for not one movie but a trilogy, “Lord of the Rings”-style, where he could “really get down to a deeper level with the characters,” he says.

In mid-2013 he entered a writer’s room with a stack of binders with notes on characters, plots, ideas, specs, etc. for the films and got to work. There was the small matter of creating the technology to make more “Avatar” films, which use deeply immersive 3-D technology and next-next level visual effects.

As it now stands, the third “Avatar” film is shot and is due to be released in December 2024, and “Avatars” 4 and 5 are fully designed and fully written. “So if we’re successful in the marketplace right now, we’ve got a lot of momentum going into that,” Cameron says — and there’s your cultural footprint.

But the fate of those fourth and fifth movies depends on the success of the second, and between the doubters and the financial realities in front of him, Cameron is in a unique position: the sequel to the biggest hit of all-time is a bit of underdog.

That’s the way he likes it, he says.

“I think of it as fun,” he says. “We want to create magic. Magic ain’t easy. How do you do magic these days? How do you do something that seems almost unfathomable? How do you dazzle? You’ve gotta go beyond. You’ve gotta try harder.”

The Sublime Ego, and the King of the World

Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, a smallish town in northern Ontario, located about seven hours north of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. He is the oldest of five children, and has two brothers and two sisters.

By high school his family had moved to Orange County, California, and at age 14 he remembers being blown away watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in a theater, which he calls the most formative moviegoing experience of his lifetime.

“I had two epiphanies,” says Cameron. “Epiphany No. 1 was wow, a movie can be art. I was an artist, I thought in art terms, but I never thought of movies as art. It was a ‘duh’ moment, but I was 14. The other epiphany was, how did they do that? I wanted to find out how they did that. It was the first time I ever got up off my ass after watching a movie and wanted to go become a practitioner. And as soon as you’ve mad that cognitive leap, every other step after that decision is secondary.”

He bought a book on how “2001” was made, started building his own models, began playing with his own visual effects and started on his path. He studied physics in college and drove a truck after dropping out, all the while spending his spare time devouring every piece of information about filmmaking he could find.

He got his start in Hollywood in the late ‘70s. After writing and directing the short film “Xenogenesis” in 1978, he worked on a series of genre films: he was a production assistant on 1979’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” and a member of the art department on 1980’s “Battle Beyond the Stars” and 1981’s “Escape From New York.” In 1982, he directed his first film, “Piranha II: The Spawning,” which for years he disavowed but has since reclaimed as his own.

Then in 1984 he directed Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator,” which became a massive hit in the early days of home video. After that he was off to the races: 1986 brought “Aliens,” and five years later came “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” its $100 million budget making it the most expensive film of all-time, at the time.

Things have only gotten bigger since, and he famously declared himself “The King of the World” after “Titanic’s” 11 Oscar wins in 1998. (He was quoting Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the movie, but the label stuck with him.)

He’s always been brimming with confidence, he says, something that was ingrained in him at an early age.

“Anybody that thinks they’ve got something to say has got what Ray Bradbury called ‘The Sublime Ego,’” Cameron says. “(Bradbury) said people are always negative about ego, but there’s no art without ego. Because the difference between an artist and a non-artist is somebody’s got the ego to think they’ve got something to say.

“I think anybody that sets down the path to be an artist a filmmaker or a writer has a certain degree of confidence, or they never get to the point where they’re being interviewed by somebody someday to talk about their body of work. I think it’s a delicate equipoise between being humbled before the craft and realizing the scope of the challenge, and getting the best people around you.”

Cameron currently lives in New Zealand with his fifth wife, Suzy Amis Cameron. When he’s not making films, deep sea diving remains an all-in hobby, and he says Lake Superior is on his wishlist.

“I’ve always wanted to dive the Edmund Fitzgerald,” says Cameron, a father of four. “It’s not that deep” — in Cameron’s world, 530 feet is small fries — “and it’s a hell of a lake. Superior is basically an ocean.”

Typically an ocean dweller, the only lake Cameron has dived is Lake Baikal in Siberia, which is bigger and deeper than Superior, which is perfectly in keeping with his MO of doing things big or not doing them at all.

Right now his focus is on the task ahead: for Cameron and “Avatar,” it truly is sink or swim.

He’s done his part, and now the rest is up to those fateful Cinema Gods.

“This is kind of the biggest challenge we could imagine for ourselves,” he says. “Fortunately I’ve got a team that isn’t daunted by that, that in fact quite likes it, because they know they’re breaking new ground, visually and technically. And everybody that plays on our team loves that.

“There’s nothing logistically or technically bigger that I can imagine than making a movie like ‘The Way of Water,’” Cameron says. He pauses, but only for a second. “Other than maybe ‘Avatar 3’ or ‘Avatar 4.’”

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‘AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER’

Rating: PG-13 (for sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language)

Running time: 3:12

How to watch: In theaters.

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