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Ich hatte gerade keine Zeit, deswegen haben meine Kollegen von The New Yorker das Interview mit James Cameron geführt. Einer für seinen Perfektionismus gefürchteten Regisseure in Hollywood (Mitarbeiter tragen folgende T-Shirts: „Ich habe keine Angst. Ich habe für Cameron gearbeitet.“). Und da sich Cameron schon in seinen Filmen nicht kurz fassen kann, füllt das 12-seitige Interview bestimmt auch die ganze Frühstückspause.

Wieder versucht Cameron mit seinem Film AVATAR sowohl Männer wie Frauen anzusprechen. Das Plakat zu „Titanic“ zeigte das Liebespaar Kate und Leo und drüber stand die klar Botschaft: „Vom Regisseur von Aliens, T2 und True Lies“. Liebesfilm für die Chicks, knallige Action für die Kerle. Auch das dürfen wir in AVATAR wieder erwarten:

Jake, through his avatar, falls in love with a Na’vi princess, who teaches him to live in harmony with nature, and then he leads her people in an insurrection against the colonists. “Of course, the whole movie ends up being about women, how guys relate to their lovers, mothers—there’s a large female presence,” Cameron said. “I try to do my testosterone movie and it’s a chick flick. That’s how it is for me.”

Auch wenn einige Bilder im Trailer sehr nach Videospiel anstatt nach organischer Welt aussehen, ahnt man den Aufwand, der in die Erschaffung von Pandora geflossen ist. Ein einzelnes Bild hat 30 Stunden gerendert. Und ihr könnt davon ausgehen, dass dort eine riesige Renderfarm am Werke war.

Back in his office, Cameron played an unfinished scene from “Avatar” on a large screen. The renderings were crude, like paper cutouts: the graphic sophistication of a nineteen-nineties video game. Neytiri—hipless, lean, with proportions to make Barbie look like a Cabbage Patch Kid—crouched on a tree limb high above the forest floor. She spotted Jake’s avatar for the first time, and took aim. The next shot was much more evolved. Neytiri’s skin was tactile and radiant; her eyes were huge and green and flecked with light, like five-dollar marbles from Conran. “This is ninety or ninety-five per cent done,” Cameron said. “By the way, we didn’t have the equipment when we started this. It took nine months to build the computer model and to get it right. It’s incredibly computationally complex, but now we’re able to replicate the interaction of muscle under skin.” He stopped the footage on a closeup of Neytiri’s face. “She exists only as a big string of ones and zeroes,” he said, as if he could not quite believe it himself. “Computing a single frame of this takes thirty hours.” He paused. “Everybody in this building has had more college than I have.”

Und natürlich gibt es auch einiges zu lesen über stereoskopisches 3D, beispielsweise die Entwicklung des eigenen Kamerasystems zusammen mit Vince Pace:

Ten years ago, with Vince Pace, who had worked on “The Abyss,” Cameron started to develop a 3-D camera. He wanted to use it to shoot a dramatic, gritty, realistic Mars movie that would present a compelling case for planetary exploration. At the time, stereoscopic cameras weighed four hundred and fifty pounds and were the size of washing machines—so cumbersome that when Cameron shot a 3-D short for a “Terminator” ride at the Universal theme park the stuntmen had to run at half speed for the camera to keep up with them. Cameron challenged Pace to come up with what he called a “holy-grail camera”: lightweight, quiet, and capable of shooting in 2-D and 3-D simultaneously.

Das vollständige Interview gibt es unter diesem Link.