James Cameron sat down with George Stroumboulopoulos (lol?) for CBC’s The Hour. During the 14 minute interview he spoke about his upcoming sci-fi epic Avatar. I don’t recall watching him speak about it before (although he probably has done), we usually just get quotes from websites, so to actually see him talking about it is quite cool. Other movies that pop up during the interview are Aliens, Titanic and Terminator. If you are a fan of Cameron then you’ll enjoy this interview.

(The Avatar stuff starts around the 4 minute 30 seconds mark)

When it was revealed that McG would be directing Terminator Salvation most people were a little pessimistic, considering the fact he was the man behind Charlies Angels and its sequel. However, on a number of occasions we were told by McG that he had the blessing of James Cameron, who directed the first two Terminator films all those years ago. This made people feel at ease. If James Cameron is backing the film, why shouldn’t we?

Well now, according to an interview with Cameron, he did not give his blessing to Terminator Salvation

Q. Are you involved at all in the Christian Bale production of Terminator 4?

It could be a big steaming pile or it could be brilliant. Sam Worthington is in the Avatar and the new Terminator and he likes the script, but I never saw it. There was no blessing involved.

People thought that Cameron had something to do with Sam Worthington landing a part in the film, having worked on Avatar. Was McG just saying he had his blessing to stop the fans complaining or is James Cameron being awkward but not saying he did?

An article over at Variety looks at the budget for James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi epic Avatar. The movie started filming last April and won’t be released until December 2009, but it was originally set to be released next summer.

Variety say that the budget is between $250-$300 million, which is more then what Sony plunged into Spider-Man 3. However, Sony knew Spidey would make that money back, where as Fox are not guaranteed that profit.

Sources close to the studio admit there was a time when it was terrified that Cameron’s process wouldn’t work. Execs relaxed a tad when they got to see finished footage. Giving Cameron and Weta Digital in New Zealand (where substantial rebates make everything cheaper) extra post-production time made sense.

The later release date leaves exhibitors time to add more 3-D screens. The movie could go out on a three-tiered basis: high-ticket super-charged Imax 3-D, regular 3-D and old-fashioned 2-D — unless Cameron gets his way and refuses to show the movie on 2-D. That’s a tough one, as there are about 1,000 North American screens and only a few hundred 3-D screens overseas.

More are scheduled to be built in the next year, but several senior execs at rival studios predict that Cameron will persuade Fox to push the movie back, because the prospect of releasing a $300 million movie on 1,500 screens worldwide is too nerve-wracking.

Despite all the money being put behind this thing there is hardly any proof of it’s existence (none for us us normal people anyway)

James Cameron is set to be inducted this Saturday into the Toronto-based Walk of Fame by Avatar star Sigourney Weaver, and he spoke to The Canadian Press about upcoming film.

“It makes ‘Titanic’ look like a picnic,” Cameron said recently during an interview from Los Angeles, where he is working furiously on the new film.

“It’s this form of pure creation where … if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements and the production design,” Cameron said.

“It’s simultaneously the most vexing and the most rewarding type of production that I’ve done yet,” Cameron says of the project, due in theatres Dec. 18, 2009.

Sounds good….

RELEASE AN IMAGE!!!

My most anticipated movie at this point in time is James Cameron’s Avatar. Cameron is known for his groundbreaking technology and when the Avatar actors describe the CG technology as ‘20x more advanced than Beowulf‘ you know we have something to look forward to.

Here’s Emily:

She isn’t real.

Avatar producer Jon Landau spoke about this technology that will be used in the film:

“Image Metrics’ revolutionary technologies for performance-driven character animation require neither complex motion-capture hardware, nor specialist technical knowledge. Their animation solutions put the performer at the heart of the process, dramatically enhancing the creativity and reducing post-production time. It is this type of innovation that will again allow us to present to the consumer, stories that could not otherwise be told.”

This technology will mainly be used on Zoe Saldana, Laz Alonso, CCH Pounder and the rest of the actors playing the Na’vi alien race.

The Times Online also has a cool article on “Emily” and the technology behind her.

James Cameron’s Avatar is still 17 months away, yet with every small bit of news my anticipation rises. Cameron spoke to THR about the filming process, and said it was the most challenging film he has ever made.

When completed, Cameron expects “Avatar” to be about 60% CG animation, based on characters created using a newly developed performance capture-based process, and 40% live action, with a lot of VFX in the imagery.

“It is the most challenging film I’ve ever made,” Cameron said.

Still, the innovative filmmaker and digital 3-D pioneer and champion has never shifted his emphasis from storytelling.

“You have to make a good film that would be a good film under any circumstances,” he said. “You have to put the narrative first. The reality is no matter how many (3-D) screens we get, you are still going to have a large number of people — possibly the majority of people — who see the film in a 2-D environment.”

To read the rest of the article click here!

We haven’t had anything officially released yet. No footage, no images, nothing. I don’t expect we will get a teaser trailer until at least 90% of the footage is complete. Cameron wouldn’t put out anything that is half finished.

James Cameron talked today at Microsoft Advance ‘08 about Avatar, and Search Engine Watch have a rundown of what he had to say:

“‘Avatar’ will make people truly experience something,” said Cameron. “One more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed. All the syn-thespians are photo-realistic. Now that we’ve achieved it, we discovered CG characters in 3D look more real than in 2D. Your brain is cued it’s a real thing not a picture and discounting part of [the] image that makes it look fake.”

“‘Avatar’ is the single most complex piece of filmmaking ever made,” said Cameron. “We have 1,600 shots for a 2.5 hour movie. It’s not with a single CGI character, like King Kong or Gollum. We have hundreds of photo-realistic CG characters. We were Microsoft’s sandbox for filmmaking beyond the cutting edge.”

I am pleased he is making Avatar seem like it is going to be the best movie ever made, because I want it to be. The problem is we have a year and a half to wait until we see it for ourselves, so until then we’re just gonna have to go with what he says. Hopefully we will get a trailer or first image sometime soon. If Star Trek can get a teaser trailer a year before it is released then so can Avatar!

Sigourney Weaver recently talked to the United Press about her role in the ‘not soon to be released’, Avatar. Working on the sci-fi epic meant that she would be reunited with director James Cameron, who made Weaver a household name after they worked together on Aliens back in 1986.

“It was great,” Weaver told reporters in New York Monday. “I’m so fond of him personally. He loves actors; he’s such a good director. … I can’t believe it’s been 20 years. We picked up like we’d never been apart, like an old married couple.”

“We had a long talk about what he had not been doing and what he had been doing and how he really wanted me to do this character,” Weaver recalled. “He had thought about making it a man, as well, but had decided, in the end, that he wanted it to be a woman and he wanted it to be me.

“And it’s such a great — like all of his women characters — it was a great woman character and I teased him because, to me, I’m playing James Cameron in the movie … with his kind of brilliant, scientific approach, driven, idealistic, perfectionistic, but with great heart underneath.”

The character of Ripley in the Alien movies is considered to be one of the most kick ass female characters of all time. Cameron knows how to make his female characters more then just a girl who needs to be saved, or the girl who screams constantly. The fact that Cameron could easily have made the role a man, suggests that Dr. Grace Augustine will not need any help if she is confronted by any aliens in Avatar.

Avatar director James Cameron took time out of his busy ‘making Avatar cool’ schedule to talk with HDVideoPro magazine. He mainly talks about 3D technology, and if you want to see the whole article, run over to here. However, he did talk a little bit about Avatar:

A Glimpse of Avatar

(James Cameron) “I can’t think of a better movie for 3-D - action, creatures, big aerial battles and more. It’s going to rock the house. It’s another world - a world of great beauty and savagery, a mystical place where humans, with their greed and technology, confront a virgin world of great danger and wonder. When the humans try to take what’s not theirs, as they have done since the dawn of time whenever they inhabit a new land, the land fights back. And the fight is on; the scale is off the chain. And that’s all I am saying.”

The more I hear about Avatar the more I want to see it. The fact that we have to wait nearly two years to see it makes me cry a little inside, but any movie that spends two years in pre-production with WETA will no doubt be worth the wait.

Big aerial battles, action and creatures, oh my!

There has been talk about us finally getting something Avatar related in March. It will most likely be an image as the chances of actual footage are low due to James Cameron only finishing filming this month, and they have until December next year to get the effects sorted. So until we get anything decent from the movie to make us jump with happiness, we will get be getting artwork such as below. Is this what we could be getting next month? Who knows? The image comes from Italian site Bad Taste, and is apparently taken from some kind of FOX preview material. I think it is a nice tease, and we will no doubt get bigger and better things as the months go on.

Update: James Cameron Spoke to AICN about the artwork, and gives an update on how things are going in the editing room!

Harry,

Good to hear from you.

This art is not from us. I don’t know where it comes from. More overactive fan imaginations? It’s not bad though.

Things are going well on Avatar, or at least as well as can be expected on such a ridiculously complex project. We’ve wrapped principal, and most of the live action portion of the movie is already cut. It’s starting to look and sound like a movie. I’m ecstatic with the performances and the look. The cast chemistry worked out perfectly.

I’m in New Zealand right now, working on effects, while Steve Quale shoots some second unit. We’ve worked together a lot (he did the engine room scenes on “Titanic”, plus co-directed “Aliens of the Deep” with me) and he’s the only guy I trust to shoot stuff for me, especially in 3D. We still have a little performance capture work to do with Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana in March, when we get her back from Star Trek (she’s Uhura — but of course you already knew that.) And we have a couple of days with Stephen Lang in April or May, to shoot his character’s last scene, which is so technically difficult it will take us until then to figure out how to do it.

You can see how spread out the schedule is — it’s just the nature of this type of CG animation/live action hybrid. Most of my time now is spent editing, because on this type of film you edit every CG scene twice — once to edit the raw performance capture, before it goes to virtual camera, and then again when you have the virtual camera shots, you do the final edit of the scene. It’s very complex and taxing, but the result is amazing. The Weta animators are ON FIRE, and seeing the world and the creatures come to life is what keeps us going. There’s a spirit on this film, an esprit de corps amongst the virtual team, that comes from knowing we’re doing something absolutely groundbreaking. It’s why people still have good morale after working on this thing for two years or more. And we still have more than a year and a half to go. I don’t know if this will be a good film, great film, awful film, but I can say with absolute certainty that you will see stuff you’ve never imagined, and that the process of making this film will generate a lot of interest within the technical side of the biz. When I edit with some of our early stuff, “shot” using our virtual camera system over a year and half ago, it already looks laughably crude. Our process has evolved so much, just within the making of this one movie. Of course the final standard of photoreal animation will be consistent throughout the film, because it all gets rendered in a big frenzy next year.

It’s all very exciting to be doing, and that (usually) compensates for the grind of the seven day weeks. Well, no rest for the weary. Gotta get to the cutting room. Back to Pandora.

Jim out