During his Ask Me Anything session on Reddit on Saturday, director James Cameron revealed that the screenplays for the next three Avatar movies are just weeks away from completion.
“The second, third and fourth films all go into production simultaneously,”; Cameron wrote. “They’re essentially all in preproduction now, because we are designing creatures, settings, and characters that span all three films. And we should be finished with all three scripts within the next, I would say, six weeks.”;
Other topics which Cameron addressed during his session included Prometheus, climate change, extraterrestrials, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the missing Malaysian plane.
Regarding Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s hotly debated prequel to the Alien trilogy (to which Cameron contributed the second instalment), Cameron said that he was impressed with the film’s visual style, but shared the widely-held view that Damon Lindelof’s screenplay didn’t quite come together.
“I thought it was an interesting film,”; he wrote. “I thought it was thought provoking and beautifully, visually mounted, but at the end of the day it didn’t add up logically. But I enjoyed it, and I’m glad it was made. I liked it better than the previous two Alien sequels. And it was done in native 3D and I’m a big fan of Native 3D done by directors who embrace it as an art form, like Ridley, Scorsese, Ang Lee.”;
Asked if he credits himself with launching Leonardo DiCaprio’s career, Cameron said that DiCaprio probably still would’ve gone on to become the same world-class movie star that he is now had he turned down Titanic, it just would’ve taken him longer. “I think Leonardo, when I cast him in Titanic, he was well on his way. I think I helped him skip a rung or two on the ladder maybe, but he certainly would have gotten there on his own because he’s one of the most talented actors of his generation. Do I still talk to him? Yes, occasionally. We’re friendly but we’re not close friends.”;
Cameron also offered some counter-intuitive advice on how to reduce one’s carbon footprint. Rather than go out and buy a Prius, Cameron argued that it is far more important to cut down on one’s consumption of animal meat.
“This may surprise you, because it surprised me when I found out, but the single biggest thing that an individual can do to combat climate change is to stop eating animals,”; he wrote. “Because of the huge, huge carbon footprint of animal agriculture. I was shocked to find out that animal agriculture directly or indirectly accounts for 14.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions, compared to all transportation – every ship, car, truck, plane on the planet only accounts for 13%. Less than animal agriculture. So most people think that buying a Prius is the answer, and it’s certainly not wrong, but it’s not the biggest agent of climate change.”;
Cameron went on to note that he has been on a strict vegan diet for two years now, and feels as though he has “set the clock back 15 years.”;
Regarding the question of whether or not humanity would get wiped out if a technology advanced civilization were to discover our planet, Cameron was pessimistic. “I believe that human history and the history of evolution on this planet indicates that our first contact with alien species might not be as benign as Steven [Spielberg] thinks. The history on our planet is whenever a superior technology society encounters a society with lesser technology, the superior technology supplants the lesser society. There has never been an exception. So if the aliens come to us, it probably won’t go well for us. A thousand years from now, if we’re the ones going to where the aliens are (like the story told in Avatar) it won’t go so well for the aliens.”;
Since he has considerable experience exploring the depths of the ocean, it was inevitable that someone would ask Cameron about the search to recover the missing Malaysian plane. It was on this topic that Cameron offered his most detailed answer.
“Well, I know how it will be done,”; he began. “If these pings that they’re receiving are confirmed as being from the flight recorders, then they’ll triangulate the acoustic data that they have so far, and they’ll generate what’s called a search box. I don’t know how big that will be, but it might be 25-30 miles on a side, it might be a very large piece of ocean. Then there are a suite of tools that can operate at the kind of depth we’re talking about, I believe between 4000-5000 meters. My ultra-deep submersible would not be required at those levels, that’s half of the level it’s designed for.”;
Cameron continued: “The next step would be to use an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle, and have it run at 400 or 500 feet above the bottom and do a sonar profile of the bottom, it does that by running a search pattern, kind of like mowing the lawn. That takes days or weeks to do. Then you analyze any signatures that are anomalous, that don’t look like flat bottom, and you say are those rocks, is that geology or does that look like the piece of an aircraft? And then once you have those targets, you know where they are on the bottom, then you go back, either with that type of vehicle or an ROV (a remotely operated vehicle) that would be hanging down from a ship on a cable. And you’d take a look essentially with a videocamera. And then you’d be able to identify whether that target was in fact the aircraft you are looking for. So that’s how it would be done. But it all hinges on whether or not those pings are actually from the black box, and not from something else, like a scientific instrument that’s drifted off course or whatever.”;
To read Cameron’s full AMA session, click here.
