James Cameron and the lace g-strings

"I thought Hawaii was going to be a holiday," recalls Sam. "I was going to go surfing.
"But when we got there we worked hard.
"Zoe and me were wearing nothing but a lace g-string, a couple of ears, a tail and a weird wig.
"One day this guy comes past and goes 'Mate, what are you doing?'.
" I said 'We're making a movie. This is a big budget movie'.
"He said 'Who's the director?'
"I said 'That bloke over there' and there is Jim with the handicam.
"He goes 'Is that Jim Cameron?' and I go 'Yes it is'.
"He said 'F*** he has gone downhill since Titanic'."
Sigourney Weaver, who was re-teaming with Cameron for the first time since Aliens, says the look of her Avatar surprised her, even though the director had given her renderings to look at while they were doing their performance capture.
"Grace had such a haunting face, I think because her human life (she is the scientist who runs the Avatar programme which was conceived as a way humans could interact safely with the indigenous population of Pandora) is so guarded and armoured.
"The rendering was a real inspiration to me so I was very surprised when I finally saw the movie and he hadn't done it like the rendering. Grace looked just like Sigourney, only I was 10 feet tall and blue, a much improved version of myself, years younger and could leap tall buildings in a single bound."
Cameron had remained good friends after working with her on what has been her career defining role as the alien-fighting Ripley. He presented her with a star on the Hollywood walk of fame and this week she returned the honour.
"I hadn't necessarily written the part of Grace for Sigourney when I first conceived the script in 1995," he says. "But as we got to the casting process it just suddenly struck me that she would be perfect.
"I can prove that because the name of the character was Grace Shipley and when Sigourney and I started talking about her doing the part I said 'I think we had better change the name'. So we changed it to Grace Augustine.
"Once it popped into my head that she would be perfect you suddenly have this moment when you send them the script and you hope and pray the actor will respond to it. Sigourney responded immediately and really quite effusively, not just to her character but to the intentions of the film."
Cameron drew on the past not just in casting but for the look of the film and for the themes of the story.
The aquatic hues, phosphorescent plant life and sea anemone like creatures do seem to have been inspired by Cameron's fascination with the ocean which has been evident since The Abyss.
"I just swept in every design influence I have had in my life. I've always had this deep respect for nature. A lot of my youth was spent out in the woods hiking around and being a total science geek, collecting samples.
"I have spent more then 2,500 hours underwater, a lot of that in submersibles and I have seen things that are absolutely astonishing at the bottom of the ocean, which really is like an alien planet.
"I always feel that has been a gift in my life, to be able to live out science fiction fantasy adventure for real in the diving world.
"There is a lot of the deep ocean, even the shallow ocean that acts as a guide and inspiration for the creatures and even the textures."
Memories are not the only thing that have been recycled for Cameron's green hearted epic, in which humans attempts to mine a planet for a rare mineral bringing them into conflict with the natives whose habitat they are destroying. Avatar sucks in in imagery and storylines from other cinematic, sources, history and the news.
"I think we see there is a connection to recent events," agrees Cameron. "There is a conscious attempt to evoke even the Vietnam era with the way the guys jump off the helicopters and so on.
"It is a way of connecting threads through history.
"It goes back even further than that, how Europeans have displaced and marginalised indigenous people.
"There is this long wonderful history of the human race written in blood, going back as far as we can remember - the Roman empire and even father back than that
"We have a tendency to take what we want without asking.
"I see that as a broader metaphor, not as intensely politicized as some would make it, but rather that's how we treat the natural world as well.
"There is a sense of entitlement. We're here, we've got the guns, we've got the technology, we've got the brains and therefore we are entitled to every damn thing on this planet. That is not how it works. We are going to find that out the hard way if we don't wise up."
One of the film's most striking sequences is when the humans succeed in toppling the giant tree the Na'vi call home in order that they can mine underneath. Something that has drawn comparisons with the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers.
"I think we were all kind of surprised how much it did look like September 11," says Cameron.
"I didn't think that was necessarily a bad thing because from the way the Na'vi perceive it they would feel it that devastatingly. And if that is what it takes for people to appreciate that moment in their gut...
"I am Canadian but I have lived in the United States a long time and I think of myself as an American in many ways.
"We know what it feels like to launch the missles. We don't know what it feels like to have them land on our home soil. Not in America. I think there is a moral responsibility to understand that.
"But that is only a minor part of what the movie is about. It is part of a very generalized theme of us sort of looking at ourselves as human beings and a technical society with all its ills, part of which is the ability to do warfare at a distance, at a remove which seems to make it morally easier to deal with but it is not."
The irony of the fact that he uses such advanced movie making technology to get his message across has not escaped him.
"It is not that technology is bad, it is that we need to be in control of the technical process. We are not just going to be able to rip our clothes off and run back into the wilderness. First of all there is not a lot of it left and secondly that is not going to work for eight billion people.
"We are going to have to think our way out of this. We are going to have to do it using technology, using science, but we are also going to have to be pretty human about it. In touch with our emotions and our understanding of each other."
Cameron's younger brother is a former marine who fought in the Gulf War and he incorporated his thoughts and ideas into the story.
"It was about oil then, it is about oil now and it is going to be about oil until the oil runs out.
"The unobtainium (the mineral the humans are trying to access) is just 'oil'. It could have been gold 400 years ago, diamonds in South Africa, animal pelts in Canada. I never explain what it is in the movie. It is whatever gets people to get on ships, go some place and take s*** from other people."
Avatar is now famous for big one of the most expensive films ever made, as was Titanic, but in the latter's case the investment was amply rewarded.
Cameron said he was almost wary of Avatar making money "because we'd have to do it all again".
However, he already has stories worked out for the second film and a third film, in case.
"Of course that will only happen if we make some money with the first."
He feels that the film's value also lies in the fact that it could balance out the effect that other technological advancements have had on cinema.
"I think we'll see Avatar's role, little or large, in the sort of 3D revolution that is already in progress - going back to Polar Express, which was also performance capture, and demonstrated that 3D could be very profitable.
"All of a sudden the studios are looking at this as a source of additional revenue, as a way of bringing people back to the cinema and make it exciting again.
"There is an erosion of revenues because of file sharing, downloading piracy, all of these things, and the DVD business kind of tapering down. "We need something that maybe kick starts public enthusiasm for the cinema as an experience. People seem to be growing up watching movies on smaller and smaller devices, on iPhones.
"We need to do something to reverse that trend. I set as my goal making the movie theatre the kind of sacred experience that it has always been for me my whole life and 3D is a part of that."