Avatar Re-released....Special Edition....Never Before Seen Footage

Yahoo Movies' Sean Philips interviews James Cameron:

 So, a lot of people have seen Avatar.
Cameron: I think there are some mud men in New Guinea that haven't seen it.

 Ah, so that must be why it's coming out in theaters again.

JC: Actually, when I was down in Brazil I was meeting these guys, these indigenous people that live way out in the rain forest and we had to take a boat, like for a couple days to go meet with them. And they hadn't heard of Avatar, they hadn't heard of me. It was really refreshing. It was nice, you know. They couldn't care less about movies. What they cared about was that their ancestral homelands were being destroyed by a hydroelectric dam, and they got their bows and arrows together and they were going to go to war to stop it.

 It's like real life. "Avatar" for real.

JC: Like really for real. Not those guys, but some other ones even farther south in the upper Shingu [River] actually took a hundred construction workers on another dam project hostage -- with bows and arrows. And it's not that they are using bows and arrows to make some kind of point in the media. That's what they hunt with.

So when we see "Avatar," and it's about that at a thematic level and it's really what the stakes of the whole story are about, it's what they're fighting for, then it actually does resonate. I'm just worried that thirty years from now it wouldn't even resonate with people. That we will have become so disconnected from nature that there is no resonance anymore. And maybe nature is so distressed at that point with so many animals extinct, maybe its not 30 years, maybe it's fifty years -- but the coral reefs are destroyed and so many of the animals are threatened. They're either extinct or so threatened that they have to be separated from the human experience. Then we'll have lost that connection forever. And that's the future of "Avatar." That's what the people coming from earth, that's what they're living. They're out a future if we don't do something about it.

 So are you working on any other projects right now? Or maybe these are just some of the expanded themes for the sequel?

JC: It's a vein that's going to run through the second and third film, and what that all means and how it resolves. It's really a collision of civilization. It's a collision between technical civilization and a philosophy or a value system that actually values nature. And values life in a way that we don't. So yeah, that's going to continue through the sequel and the sequel to the sequel. I mean, "Avatar" will go on as long as it needs to. I'll direct at least one more, maybe two. And then after that, it might get turned over to others. It's an open-ended story, it's an open-ended universe. So why not?

 Is there anything specific that you can tease us with that we might expect?

JC: I'm not going to say too much about the sequel because, frankly, I think the fun is in the discovery. The fun is in the journey. If you know where you're going, you don't have to go, sort of thing. But I've already sort of teased with the idea that the ocean is going to be a big part of the second film. And that's true. Frankly, that's a fun design challenge. It's an exciting design challenge to do. Think about the diversity and the color palette and the amazing forms that exist in our ocean here, and then you extrapolate that farther to Pandora to a fantasy biosphere.

 You can even get a sense of that with the world you created on land.

JC: Well, that's true. The terrestrial forms felt very aquatic, but that's just because I've spent so much damn time underwater. I've always said: the aliens all exist here on earth already, they just might be that big [puts his thumb and index finger together]. And they might be underwater. But all the amazing forms are already here. It's pretty hard to be more inventive than nature, and that was one of our big challenges when we were designing the films -- how are you more inventive than nature is right here? You can't.