Avatar (2009 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Avatar, the 2009 science fiction film from director James Cameron, began with a dream he had when he was 19 years old. In the dream, he saw a bioluminescent forest. Its trees were made of fiber-optic strands, fan lizards moved through the air, and purple moss lit up wherever he stepped. That glowing forest eventually became the world of a major studio film. But the road from dream to screen was long, and it did not run smoothly. Cameron shelved his own project because the tools he needed did not yet exist. Studios hesitated. Once the film finally opened, writers argued about where its ideas really came from. This documentary asks why a director would wait so long to make the film he wanted. It asks who he found to bring blue-skinned giants to life, and what machinery it took to film them. It also asks which older stories he borrowed from, and why audiences kept returning to theaters week after week.

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• 2. Pandora and Its People

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  In 2154, Earth in the world of Avatar is suffering from resource exhaustion and ecological collapse. A company called the Resources Development Administration, or RDA, mines a valuable mineral named unobtanium on Pandora, a lush moon in the Alpha Centauri star system. Pandora is home to the Na'vi, a sapient, blue-skinned species about 10 feet tall that lives in harmony with nature. As the mining colony grows, the Na'vi face a threat to their survival. Jake Sully, a paraplegic veteran of the United States Marines, arrives on Pandora because his identical twin has died. The twin had been training to operate an avatar, a genetically engineered Na'vi body controlled remotely by a human brain. Each avatar is genetically matched to its operator, which is why Jake can replace his brother. Dr. Grace Augustine, who runs the Avatar Program, lets him take the place but considers him inadequate. Wild animals attack Jake while he explores the forest in his avatar with Grace and Dr. Norm Spellman. He flees deep into the wilderness and is rescued by Neytiri, a Na'vi woman. Wary of him, she brings him to her clan, the Omaticaya. Her mother Mo'at, the clan's spiritual leader, orders Neytiri to initiate Jake into their society. Meanwhile, Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of RDA security, offers Jake a bargain. If Jake supplies information about the Na'vi and their gathering place, the giant Hometree, the company will restore the use of his legs. Hometree sits atop a rich deposit of unobtanium. As Jake is initiated, he and Neytiri fall in love and choose each other as mates. Parker Selfridge, the RDA administrator, orders Hometree destroyed after Jake tries to disable a bulldozer near a sacred Na'vi site. Grace warns that the destruction would damage a biological neural network linking all Pandoran life. Selfridge reluctantly gives Jake and Grace one hour to persuade the Na'vi to evacuate. Instead, Jake confesses that he was a spy for the RDA, and the clan takes him and Grace captive. Quaritch's soldiers then destroy Hometree and kill many Na'vi, including Eytukan, the clan chief and Neytiri's father. Mo'at frees Jake and Grace, but Quaritch's forces imprison them again, apart from their avatars. Trudy Chacón, a pilot disgusted by Quaritch's brutality, rescues Jake, Grace and Norm. Grace is shot and fatally wounded during the escape. Jake regains the trust of the Na'vi by connecting his mind to the Toruk, a dragon-like creature that the clan both fears and reveres. With support from Neytiri and the new chief Tsu'tey, he unites the Omaticaya. They gather other clans to face the RDA's coming assault on the Tree of Souls. Before the battle, Jake prays to the Na'vi mother goddess Eywa through a neural connection with the tree. The battle costs the Na'vi and their human allies many fighters, including Tsu'tey and Trudy. Then wild animals unexpectedly join the fight and overwhelm the RDA forces. Neytiri takes this as Eywa answering Jake's prayer. Quaritch, wearing an Amplified Mobility Platform suit, breaks open the link unit holding Jake's human body and exposes it to Pandora's poisonous atmosphere. Neytiri kills Quaritch and then saves Jake from suffocating. With the war over, the RDA is expelled from Pandora, though some humans, including Jake and Norm, may stay. With help from the Tree of Souls, Neytiri and Mo'at, Jake is permanently transferred into his avatar.

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• 3. The Long Wait

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  In 1994, James Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for Avatar, drawing on science fiction books he had read as a child. The plan was for filming to follow his 1997 film Titanic, with a release in 1999. In August 1996, he announced that he would direct Avatar after Titanic, using computer-generated characters. The visual effects studio Digital Domain joined, and production was meant to begin in mid-1997. But Cameron felt that available technology had not caught up with his vision. He put Avatar on hold for several years. During that time he worked on refining the necessary technology and on making documentaries. Three digital characters finally helped change his mind: Gollum in 2002, King Kong in 2005 and Davy Jones in 2006. They convinced him that he could now realize the film. 20th Century Fox had committed to produce Avatar, but the studio feared the cost overruns and delays that had plagued Titanic. Fox fronted $10 million so that Cameron could make a proof-of-concept clip, which he showed to executives in October 2005. According to Cameron, they were excited by the clip but wanted a shorter script and a smaller budget than he had proposed. Cameron responded by combining several characters in the screenplay. He also offered to cut his salary in half and to take a lower percentage of the revenues if the film failed commercially. Even so, according to Cameron, Fox decisively declined to produce the film in mid-2006. Cameron then showed his clip to Walt Disney Studios, including Disney CEO Bob Iger, then-studio chairman Dick Cook, and Alan Bergman. When Disney tried to take over the project, however, Fox exercised its right of first refusal and committed to the film in October 2006. Ingenious Media agreed to back Avatar, which reduced Fox's financial exposure to less than half of the official $237 million budget. Fox also planned to spend $150 million on marketing and to use about $30 million in tax credits to ease the impact on the studio and its financiers. After Fox accepted the film, one skeptical executive told Cameron, "I don't know if we're crazier for letting you do this, or if you're crazier for thinking you can do this..." Some later estimates put the production cost alone at between $280 million and $310 million.

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• 4. Designing Pandora

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  Long before Avatar, Cameron's mother told him about a dream in which a blue-skinned woman stood 12 feet tall. He liked the image. For his first screenplay, written in 1976 or 1977 and never produced, he created a race of tall, beautiful blue people with golden eyes. He painted some of them, and when he developed Avatar he drew on that early work for the Na'vi. In later interviews he added that the blue skin connects the Na'vi to Hindu deities. To turn the sketches into designs, Cameron recruited the fantasy illustrator Wayne Barlowe and the concept artist Jordu Schell. They worked in paintings and physical sculptures, because Cameron felt that 3D renderings were not capturing what he imagined. Work on the Na'vi language began in 2005, led by Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC. The language has a lexicon of about 1000 words, and about 30 of them came from Cameron himself. Its sounds include ejective consonants similar to those found in Amharic. Cameron began developing the screenplay and the fictional universe in early 2006. In July 2006, Cameron announced a mid-2008 release, with principal photography to begin in February 2007. Designer Stan Winston, who had worked with Cameron before, joined the production, as did the visual effects studio Weta Digital. Avatar had two production designers, Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg, and two art departments. One focused on the plants and animals of Pandora, and the other on the human-made machines. The team also consulted Jodie S. Holt, a professor of plant physiology at the University of California, Riverside. She offered ideas about how scientists such as Grace Augustine might study plants on an alien world. She also helped the designers imagine how Pandoran organisms could communicate with one another. In June 2007, production designers visited the Clyde Boudreaux oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. They photographed, measured and filmed every part of its interior, and the mining colony's interiors were later replicated with computer graphics. According to production designer Dylan Cole, the floating Hallelujah Mountains were inspired mainly by karst limestone formations in the Guilin, Huangshan and Zhangjiajie regions of China.

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• 5. Casting the Leads

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  For the role of Jake Sully, the filmmakers considered Chris Evans, Chris Pine, Chris Pratt and Channing Tatum. Matt Damon was a candidate, but Avatar's schedule conflicted with his work on The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). 20th Century Fox pushed for Jake Gyllenhaal, who was focused on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010). Sam Worthington, then a relatively unknown actor, grew frustrated after several secretive auditions. He was not told what the film was about or who was directing it. He had an angry outburst, which caught the attention of Cameron, who wanted an actor with some "grit". With the list narrowed to Evans, Tatum and Worthington, Cameron compared how each read Jake's rallying speech to the Na'vi near the end of the film. He felt Worthington's reading was the best. Cameron said Worthington had two contradictory but necessary qualities, toughness and vulnerability. Worthington also appears briefly as Jake's deceased twin, Dr. Tom "Tommy" Sully. When he was cast, he signed on for potential sequels. Before Zoe Saldaña won the role of Neytiri, Cameron considered Q'orianka Kilcher. Because Saldaña was cast early, she helped screen-test actors auditioning for Jake, including Worthington. Like all the Na'vi, Neytiri was created with performance capture, so her outward appearance is entirely computer generated. Saldaña also signed on for potential sequels, and Cameron felt she and Worthington had "great chemistry". Cameron approached Josh Brolin for Colonel Quaritch, but Brolin did not want to commit to a lengthy shoot. Stephen Lang, who had unsuccessfully auditioned for a role in Cameron's Aliens (1986), was cast instead. Michael Biehn, who had worked with Cameron on Aliens, The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), was also briefly considered. Sigourney Weaver played Grace Augustine, and Giovanni Ribisi played the corporate administrator Selfridge. Michelle Rodriguez played the pilot Trudy Chacón, and CCH Pounder played Mo'at. Wes Studi played the chief Eytukan, and Laz Alonso played the warrior Tsu'tey. Joel David Moore played Norm Spellman, Dileep Rao played Dr. Max Patel, and Matt Gerald played Quaritch's right-hand man, Corporal Lyle Wainfleet. Alicia Vela-Bailey appears in three uncredited roles: Ikeyni, leader of the Tayrangi clan; Saeyla, a young Na'vi hunter; and a woman harassed in a bar. She also served as Saldaña's stunt double.

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• 6. Performance Capture

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  Principal photography for Avatar began in 2007, split between two continents' worth of stages. Motion capture took place at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, while live-action filming happened in Wellington, on the soundstages of Weta Digital. The actors trained in archery, horseback riding, firearm use, hand-to-hand combat and the Na'vi language. Cameron sent the cast to Hawaii to get a feel for a rainforest before shooting began. In line with his environmental convictions, he made on-set catering 100% plant-based. Cameron called the film a "true hybrid", a fully live-action shoot combined with computer-generated characters in both digital and live-action environments. By his account, the finished film is 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action. He hoped audiences would be unable to tell the difference. In September, The Washington Post reported that Cameron would film in 3D with his own Reality Camera System, which put two high-definition cameras in a single body to create depth perception. The live-action footage was shot with a modified version of the Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. In January 2007, Fox announced that 3D filming would run at 24 frames per second. Cameron believed that 3D needs a higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable. Cameron also used a virtual camera system, a new way of directing motion-capture performances. He compared it to "a big, powerful game engine". It let him view actors in digital settings in real time, and he could "turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50-to-1 scale." He invited the directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson to test it. Spielberg called motion capture "digital makeup, not augmented animation." The visual effects team introduced a new system for lighting massive areas like Pandora's jungle. They built a motion-capture stage six times larger than any used before, and an improved method for capturing facial expressions. Actors wore skull caps fitted with a tiny camera in front of their faces, which sent their expressions and eye movements to computers. Cameron said this allowed 100% of an actor's physical performance to reach the digital character. Numerous reference cameras gave artists multiple angles of each performance. Weta Digital, the lead effects company, at one point employed 900 people on the film. Microsoft built a custom cloud and Digital Asset Management system called Gaia to synchronize data for remote crew members. Rendering ran on a 10,000-square-foot server farm with 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers, and The Foundry developed a texturing and paint system called Mari with Weta. Creating the Na'vi and Pandora required over a petabyte of storage, each minute of final footage occupies 17.28 gigabytes, and a single frame could take several hours to render. To finish on time, other companies joined, including Industrial Light & Magic. ILM worked alongside Weta on the battle sequences, handled many of the vehicles, and devised a new way to make CGI explosions. Joe Letteri was the film's visual effects general supervisor. James Horner composed the score, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic. With the ethnomusicologist Wanda Bryant, he created a music culture for the Na'vi, and in March 2008 he recorded a small chorus singing in the Na'vi language. Horner promised to work on nothing else, and he reportedly worked from four in the morning until ten at night. He called it the most difficult score he had written, built as two scores merged into one, one reflecting Na'vi sound and one traditional. Leona Lewis sang the theme song, "I See You". Its music video, directed by Jake Nava, premiered on MySpace on the 15th of December 2009, three days before the film reached American theaters.

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• 7. Borrowed Worlds

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  Cameron has listed the John Carter and Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs among the books that shaped Avatar, along with stories by Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard. He acknowledged shared themes with The Emerald Forest (1985), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991) and Princess Mononoke (1997), all about clashing cultures. He also named Dances with Wolves, in which a soldier is drawn to the culture he was meant to fight. Princess Mononoke influenced the ecosystem of Pandora, and the idea of a "world mind" came from the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. Cameron said he learned the word "avatar" from the cyberpunk novels Neuromancer by William Gibson and Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling. The remotely controlled avatars were influenced by the manga Ghost in the Shell, the short story "In the Imagicon" by George Henry Smith, and the novel The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. He intended Jake and Neytiri as star-crossed lovers in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, and he acknowledged echoes of Jack and Rose in Titanic. Neytiri, he said, was inspired by Pocahontas. Cameron wanted the film to entertain, but he also hoped it would make viewers think about how they relate to nature and to each other. He described the Na'vi as the "higher selves" or "aspirational selves" of the audience, and the humans as an allegory for humanity's short-sighted destruction of the Earth. He acknowledged that the film implicitly criticizes the role of the United States in the Iraq War and the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare. He also said the fiery fall of Hometree resembles the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Critics split sharply over these themes. Armond White of the New York Press felt the film used villainous American characters to misrepresent militarism, capitalism and imperialism. Adam Cohen of The New York Times called its message a 22nd-century version of the American colonists against the British. Ross Douthat of The New York Times described the film as an "apologia for pantheism", while Maxim Osipov of The Hindustan Times found its message consistent with the Hindu teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. Annalee Newitz of io9 saw a recurring "fantasy about race", in which a white outsider becomes the most awesome member of a non-white culture. Among the specific comparisons, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe called Avatar "the same movie" as Dances with Wolves. Others pointed to "Call Me Joe", a 1957 novelette by Poul Anderson in which a paralyzed man uses his mind to control an artificial body on Jupiter. Cinema audiences in Russia noted common elements with the 1960s Noon Universe novels of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, set in the 22nd century on a forested world called Pandora. NPR's Ulabi Neda described the film as a montage of tropes, made by mixing film scripts "in a blender". Some comparisons turned into lawsuits. In 2012, responding to several suits alleging that he had used other people's ideas, Cameron filed a 45-page legal declaration tracing the origins of Avatar. He pointed to his own life, his earlier films, unproduced projects, and the European colonization of the Americas. He said the script and concept art for Xenogenesis, a project that was only partly produced, as a short film, were the basis for many of Avatar's ideas and designs. In 2013, the artist Roger Dean sued Cameron and Fox, claiming that Pandora was inspired by 14 of his images and seeking $50 million in damages. His case was dismissed the following year. The Hollywood Reporter noted that Cameron had won multiple Avatar idea-theft cases.

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• 8. The Record Run

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  In July 2009, Cameron, producer Jon Landau, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver took Avatar to San Diego Comic-Con, where 25 minutes of the film played in Dolby 3D. On the 21st of August, dubbed Avatar Day, the first trailer was released, and it was viewed four million times on its first day online, a record at the time. A new trailer later premiered live during a Dallas Cowboys game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the largest live motion picture trailer viewing in history at that point. The Coca-Cola Company launched a global campaign built around the website AVTR.com, where specially marked bottles of Coca-Cola Zero, held up to a webcam, triggered augmented reality features. McDonald's urged European viewers to "Avatarize yourself" into a Na'vi. Mattel's action figures carried an "i-TAG" that revealed bonus material when scanned. Avatar: The Game, developed by Ubisoft Montreal, was released on the 1st of December 2009. Before release, many predicted a disaster. Daniel Engber of Slate praised the effects but said they suffered from the "uncanny valley" effect. Michael Cieply of The New York Times noted that Fox was releasing Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel alongside Avatar, calling it a "secret weapon" against possible losses. Box office analysts were more hopeful, and one wrote, "The holy grail of 3D has finally arrived." A "cautionary estimate" put the opening weekend near $60 million. Avatar premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on the 10th of December 2009. Fox released it in the United States on the 18th of December. The date had originally been the 22nd of May 2009, but it moved back to allow more time for post-production and for theaters to install 3D projectors. In the United States it opened in 3,457 theaters, 2,032 of them in 3D, and 90% of advance ticket sales were for 3D screenings. Internationally it opened on 14,604 screens in 106 territories. In Korea, a 4D version added moving seats, smells of explosives, sprinkling water, laser lights and wind. The film earned $77 million over its opening weekend in the United States and Canada, the largest opening for a non-franchise film. Then it barely slowed. The second weekend fell only 1.8%, to $75.6 million. Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com said most films are healthy if they lose less than 50% from the first weekend to the second, and called Avatar's small drop between its first and third weekends unprecedented. Avatar crossed $1 billion on the 19th day of its international release, the fastest of any film. On the 25th of January 2010 it surpassed Titanic to become the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, and on the 31st of January it became the first film to gross over $2 billion. It held the top spot in the United States and Canada for seven consecutive weeks. Its first theatrical run ended at $2.75 billion worldwide, and The Hollywood Reporter estimated a net profit of $1.2 billion. Analysts offered several explanations. Cameron chose a December date to avoid competition, as January has historically been when studios release their weakest films. Fox pitched the film as an event to be seen in theaters, and 3D tickets cost an average of $2 to $3 more. Entertainment Weekly credited "astronomic" word-of-mouth, and Cameron credited the immersive fantasy world. On Rotten Tomatoes, 81% of 335 reviews are positive, and Roger Ebert compared his experience to first seeing Star Wars in 1977. At the 82nd Academy Awards, Avatar received nine nominations and won three, for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects. It also won the Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Director. Adjusted for inflation, it grossed around $4 billion, second only to Gone with the Wind. The film also helped lift the popularity of 3D films and led electronics makers to release 3D televisions. Avatar's cultural afterlife has been debated. In 2014, Scott Mendelson of Forbes called it "all but forgotten", but he reversed his stance after the 2022 re-release. That year, Patrick Ryan of USA Today said it had "curiously left almost no pop-culture footprint", while Bilge Ebiri of Vulture disagreed. Luc Besson has said that watching Avatar showed him the technology existed to adapt the graphic novel series Valérian and Laureline, leading to a 2017 film. Pandora has since spread to other forms. Cirque du Soleil staged Toruk - The First Flight from December 2015 to June 2019, set in Pandora's past. Pandora - The World of Avatar opened at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, on the 27th of May 2017. The sequel Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) grossed over $2.3 billion, and Avatar: Fire and Ash followed in 2025. Two more sequels are scheduled for 2029 and 2031.

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