James Cameron may have been in the depths of the ocean for the past decade, but his imagination was soaring through the vastness of the universe to a distant planet called Pandorum, populated by enormous monsters, exotic plants and the intelligent, blue-furred Navi.
Cameron has been working actively working on
Avatar for the past four years, but he says that the idea has been with him for much longer than that; he only needed the technology to catch up with his imagination. Cameron debuted footage of
Avatar at the San Diego Comic-Con to the roaring approval of the audience, and he recently screened even more footage for the press. In a recent interview, Cameron said that working on an unknown, original concept has its
strengths and weaknesses:
Avatar means something to that group of fans that know this film is coming, but to the other 99% of the public it’s a nonsense word and we have to hope we can educate them. Well, I shouldn’t say a nonsense word – it doesn’t mean anything specific in terms of a brand association. And in fact there may be even a slight negative one because more people know about the Saturday morning cartoon, the anime, than about this particular film. We’ve got to create that (brand) from scratch. On the other hand, ultimately, it is probably the film’s greatest strength in the long run. We’ve had these big, money-making franchise films for a long time,
Star Trek and
Star Wars, you know,
Harry Potter, and there’s a certain sort of comfort factor in that; you know what you’re going to get. But there’s no kind of shock of the new that’s possible with that."
Cameron said that the true fans will help decide the fate of
Avatar:
"There are a lot of fans of this kind of science fiction and fantasy film, and I think it's pretty fertile soil for us. I don’t want to sound like, you know, 'Pride goeth before the fall,' or too much hubris, but I think we get those fans to support this. I think our greater challenge is the wider public, which isn’t as predisposed to embrace the movie like those fantasy and sci-fi fans. We need to talk to that audience and make them believe that this is a must-see even if they aren’t sci-fi fans. And I’m not putting down Comic-Con fans. When I go down there I’m among my peeps. It’s a great place to unveil Avatar."