James Cameron filmed Avatar 3 and Avatar 4 together and desired to make sure that the audience didn’t feel estranged from the characters as the real-life actors aged over the years of time.
James Cameron’s sequel to Avatar was a decade in filming and writing. The Academy Award-winner delivered special attention to the underwater visual effects and wanted to make sure that there was a powerful script to follow the 2009 film with three successive releases. The director had before revealed that Avatar 3 and Avatar 4 were filmed sequentially, and the destiny of those two sequels was conditional on how Avatar: The Way of Water was achieved at the global box office. James has opened up about the potential reason for filming all three films jointly.
James wanted to make sure that the audience didn’t feel estranged from the characters because of the void between movies, and where the actors would age in actual life. “I just love Stranger Things from the depth of my heart, but you obtain the Stranger Things effect where they’re speculated to still be in high school, and they glance like they’re 27. Jack Champion shot up like a weed when he was with us. We shot with Jack when he was 14 and 15, nearly up to 16. So we were filming him over an 18-month period.” expressed the director in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
With the pandemic, there was a six-month interlude in production as well, when James thought that the project would never fall into place. “I pictured plans where we don’t go around to the job for a year and a half, and we’re exhaustively tightened because he’s aged out, and then we might go around and reshoot with another guy. It was just like, ‘Just hand me the gun.’ But fortunately, it didn’t function that way. We were able to plead to the New Zealand government to let in a little group of our key actors so we could get the production back,” the director expressed.
Avatar: The Way of Water is the sequel to the 2009 blockbuster Avatar which wowed audiences with pioneering 3D technology. It honors the retrieval of actors Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana as Jake Sully and Neytiri a decade later as parents of five children. Their tranquil life is interrupted when the Sky People, the Navi name for humans, return to go after Jake. The film also stars Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver from the original star cast while Kate Winslet is a new expansion. The film has a long runtime of 192 minutes.
