Like a Boss

As Avatar gets closer to release, the James Cameron interviews begin to roll in. Cameron is one of those guys who I wish I had just 1% of their drive to get my shit together and make something of myself. He’s a hardcore man, but if one is gonna be responsible for the type of work Cameron puts out, its a necessity to be nothing less. I plan on catching this a few times, hopefully in 3-D each outing. Hit me up if you want in on some repeat (or initial) screening action. You know i’m down!

First up is a snippet from the (shorter) Vanity Fair interview:

Yeah, what is the good part?

Tickets sell $15 in 3-D and $12 in 2-D, so movies—whether it’s Avatar or any other movie—are still the best value for your money, and the ratio of the bargain goes up the higher the budget of the film, which is why Hollywood has become a blockbuster business. The independent business is not a great business—you have a few breakout films every year that make some money with, but the rest … it’s not a business for these studios anymore, unfortunately, which is sad, it’s a sad thing. The reality is the type of film I make is the type of film that’s keeping Hollywood alive in rough times.

How do you not let this technology—which everyone is already talking about—overwhelm the actual movie?

Well you don’t. I mean people talked about the scale of the sets on Titanic, and went on endlessly about the budget and how many lights we used and how the actors were all freezing in the water—which, by the way was 82 degrees—and how our safety record was horrific and we were slaughtering people left and right. And then the second people saw the movie, all that stuff went away. Or it became a footnote to the story. Because the story was the story. And right now people don’t have an actor story to tell, other than the discovery of Sam and how Zoe is like the ‘it’ Sci-Fi girl of the year, whatever that is, but the big story right now is the technology. I think that’s going to evaporate the second people see the film, because the average person doesn’t care how it’s done—they just care that it looks the way it does, and that it works the way it does, and that it works on their emotions the way it does. Will the 3-D inform the experience? Yeah absolutely, I think if you see the film in 3-D you’ll be 10 percent more impressed. The film plays as well in 2-D. It’s just, pay a couple of extra bucks and you get a little more sense of being there.

I paid $100 for a ticket to the Mary Poppins musical—I’ll pay $15.

Why would you do that?

- James Cameron interview via Vanity Fair

This is from the longer Wired story with a few Cameron quotes sprinkled about:

This was work that would never appear onscreen, but Cameron loved it. He brought in more people, hiring an expert in astrophysics, a music professor, and an archaeologist. They calculated Pandora’s atmospheric density and established a tripartite scale structure for the alien music. When one of the experts brought in the Star Wars Encyclopedia, Cameron glanced at it and said, “We’ll do better.”

Eventually, a team of writers and editors compiled all this information into a 350-page manual dubbed Pandorapedia. It documents the science and culture of the imaginary planet, and, as much as anything, it represents the fully realized world Cameron has created. For fans who want to delve deeper, parts of Pandorapedia will be available online this winter.

- James Cameron interview via Wired.com