James Cameron’s 'Avatar' Could Change Film Forever,the way George Lucas did in '77!

[Brian Damage]

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/1...tar_cameron/2/

James Cameron wanted to make Avatar, and he wanted to do it in digital 3-D. Unfortunately, theater chains were not adopting the technology. It would cost approximately $100,000 per theater, and exhibitors had to be convinced it would pay off. They needed some high-profile 3-D films that could generate enough revenue to justify the conversion.

So Cameron decided to let other directors test his system. The first was Robert Rodriguez, who shot Spy Kids 3-D using the new camera. The picture would still have to be viewed wearing old-fashioned red-and-blue glasses, but Cameron hoped it would demonstrate demand for more 3-D movies and goad theater owners into investing in next-gen projection systems. Released in the summer of 2003, Spy Kids 3-D made $200 million worldwide, but exhibitors remained reluctant to invest in the technology.

Cameron decided to talk to theater owners directly and showed up at their annual convention in March 2005. ShoWest, at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, was in full swing, and Cameron was ready to proselytize. He laid it on thick, telling exhibitors that the world was “entering a new age of cinema.” And in case the inspirational approach didn’t work, he tried something more ominous, telling them that those who didn’t switch would regret it. By the end of the year only 79 theaters in the entire country could show digital 3-D movies. But exhibitors had gotten the message: Between 2005 and 2009, they added some 3,000 screens capable of showing digital 3-D.

However, the lack of 3-D theaters wasn’t the only thing holding Cameron back. Special-effects companies were still struggling to create fully photo-realistic animated characters. That had begun to change in 2002, when Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital in New Zealand debuted Gollum, a stunningly believable computer-generated character who held his own against the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Cameron finally felt the time had come to try to build a CG world that would be indistinguishable from reality.

So in the spring of 2005, he met with Fox and asked for a few million dollars to prove he could create just such a world. The executives had some initial concerns, not all of which were technical. For instance: The tails — were the tails on the aliens absolutely necessary?

“Yes,” Cameron said flatly. “They have to have tails.”

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. The Fox executives stopped asking questions and agreed to pay for the test. Cameron’s Hollywood clout was intact.

The director spent five weeks putting together the 30-second test scene. It depicted an alien and an Avatar running through a forest and talking. Lucas’ own Industrial Light & Magic did the effects work, and it was enough to persuade Fox that the project was feasible. The studio agreed to a budget of $195 million, and Cameron was finally back in the director’s chair.


On December 18, Avatar arrives in theaters.