‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hey, Jim Cameron here. I’m the director of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” So this is Varang, played by Oona Chaplin. And she’s sharing with Quaritch, now that he’s in this altered state of consciousness, her backstory about how the volcano erupted. She doesn’t use the term “volcano.” She says the fire came from the mountain. We can fill that in for ourselves, destroyed her homeland, she says, “burned our forests.” And she talks about the plight of her people. So this is Oona imagining flame. There’s no flame. And we even went back and did a pickup on this line — “But Eywa did not come.” — because I wanted something punchy that I could really zoom in tight on her face because we really fell in love with her character, the look of her character. People need to remember there’s actually zero photography going on here. There’s a hundred percent performance capture. So when we see this P.O.V., of how Quaritch is perceiving her, which is his altered state due to the hallucinogenic truth powder that she shot up his nose with her blowpipe. This is me with my virtual camera just playing, just having fun. Just seeing what a 9 millimeter lens would look like, just seeing what would happen if I jitter the zoom so it kind of flutters and fluctuates a little bit. And then we created shaders that would have the surface kind of boiling with these fractal patterns. And we created lags and all that. So I did a little research ahead of time on this back in college. [Laughs] No more said on that. And so this is Oona and Stephen Lang. And they didn’t do a lot of preparation. We didn’t rehearse the scene very much. We just kind of plunged into it. But you see two really consummate actors working here and just bouncing off each other, just feeding off each other’s energy. So Stephen approached it that he was on some kind of hallucinatory drug but he actually — he was playing it that he thought she was kind of amazing and almost goddess like. And that’s why we play with the scale and the size of her with the wide lens here, and that he actually thinks it’s kind of amazing and even funny at times, some of the things she says. Now, meanwhile, we’re supposed to think he’s in a lot of danger here. He’s lost his overwatch guy: Wainfleet, his sniper. He’s hidden from him. He’s on his own with her. She’s got a knife. She’s picking up his kuru. We’ve already seen her sever the kurus of many other people. Yeah, we’re past the point of peak jeopardy here, where we fake out the audience that she’s going to cut his kuru off, which we’ve also been told is worse than death for them. Oona’s performance is extremely detailed here. I’ve got an awful lot of respect for what she did. I don’t recall us doing a lot of takes. But at this point the power starts to shift. He said, “I can give you the one thing you’ve never had, which is an equal, ” and that stops her in her tracks. And then he starts to paint this picture of what he can do for her with human technology: guns and various advanced tech. And because he’s on a truth serum, she must believe everything that he says. And that’s what’s wonderful about this scene, because he can’t be lying. It will happen the way he describes it. And then she’s looking out into a future where she has the kind of power that she’s always dreamed of. And that’s when she says, “I see you,” meaning I see what you’re saying. “You need me.” “I see you.” And he closes with “damn right you do.” Which is — It’s been his plan all along to walk in there and do that. So all that time you thought he was in jeopardy. He was actually just setting her up. Now it starts to play out. So cinematically, I love this scene. I like the slow motion, I like the wind. I like the fact that you don’t hear any true sound here other than just the music, this incredibly pounding, driving thing. It’s almost like the music of a destiny playing out. And when his technology meets her lust for power, it becomes almost sexual here, her glee. It’s actually written in the script that she’s like a girl with her first pony. You know what I mean? Like, she’s just so happy with what he’s brought for her. But it’s actually quite a dark moment because you see the tumblers in the lock of destiny are kind of turning and locking in. And I had a bunch of dialogue here where he says, “So, are we partners?” And she says, “This is not the way we become partners,” but it just turned out to be unnecessary. And so it became a very stylized kind of cinematic approach. [GUNSHOTS]