James Cameron has had a change of heart when it comes to gun violence in movies.
In a new interview with Esquire Middle East, the “Avatar: The Way of Water” director revealed that he cut out a significant chunk from the film to reduce the amount of gun violence.
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“I had a bit of a crisis of faith as we were cutting the movie together. It was too violent. I wanted a balance between the beauty, the epiphany, the kind of spiritual aspect of the film, with the action, and I felt it had gotten a little too grim,” Cameron explained.
“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action. I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course,” he said. “Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”
In fact, Cameron has even changed his tune about some of the films he’s made in the past, including the “Terminator” films and “True Lies”, which featured heavy gun action.
“I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now,” the director admitted. “I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of ‘Terminator’ movies 30-plus years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”
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Cameron added, “I’m happy to be living in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago.”
Still, the director didn’t want to shy away from violence in his “Avatar” sequel, particularly in a harrowing sequence in which human characters hunt down the whale-like Tulkun.
