James Cameron has made it clear that Avatar: The Way of Water has been made exactly as he wants it, from the design, to the script, to the direction. However, there was one scene in the movie that star Sigourney Weaver actually directed, and Cameron was happy to hand over the director’s hat. While discussing the film during a Q&A session, Cameron explained that having Weaver direct one of her scenes was the only way to capture her performance perfectly. He said:
“I think about the day when she was in the spirit world, and she was meeting her mother, and Sigourney had to quickly switch back and forth between them. Grace is this very competent, scientific person, but also quite loving, and then switch to the daughter who just needed some emotional support. She’s playing a scene with herself! So, we had a very trusted double, Alicia Vela-Bailey, that Sigourney worked with. We did an interesting thing, which was… Alicia would do some of the things that Sig couldn’t physically do like leap up onto the tank like a… 15-year-old Na’Vi gazelle girl. I said, ‘Okay, I don’t want to direct Alicia, I want you to direct Alicia. I wanted you guys to sort of go off and create a relationship of trust, where the things you couldn’t physically do, you could tell Alicia how to do it for you. That was my memory of it. And so I basically said, ‘Okay, that director role, I assign to you,’ so that Alicia would do how you saw Kiri acting and moving, and so on for the bit. Now Sigourney did about 90% of her own stuff, including everything underwater and all that sort of thing. But there are a few things.”
Avatar: The Way of Water Set to Become the 4th Highest Grossing Movie of All-Time
20th Century Studios
Despite some initial uncertainty about exactly how well Avatar: The Way of Water would do at the box office, it took only a few days for the sequel to become one of the highest-selling movies of all time. Avatar: The Way of Water has been at the top of the daily domestic box office chart every day since its release, except for one pesky interception of M3GAN, which beat the movie on its first day of release. The film now looks likely to hold onto that spot until the arrival of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania unless the re-release of Oscar contender Everything Everywhere All At Once can sneak in for a while.
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James Cameron is now moving to Avatar 3, which is scheduled to arrive in theaters in December 2024. While the majority of filming has been completed on the sequel, there will likely be some small reshoots needed, and a lot of visual effects must be worked on before the release date. Whether Avatar 3 can match the success of its predecessors is something that will become clear in two years’ time.
