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Sea of Avatar: James Cameron talks about the real science behind his fictional world

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Sea of Avatar: James Cameron talks about the real science behind his fictional world

Director James Cameron behind the scenes of 20th Century Studios' Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron dived into the depths of an alien world this time.

The filmmaker and ocean explorer's latest sci-fi epic, Avatar: The Way of Water, promises to transport viewers to a planet 25 trillion miles from Earth, with vibrant aquatic ecosystems, and a level of detail comparable to that of a documentary.

This new film continues the story of the 2009 blockbuster "Avatar", which tells the story of human beings who clashed with a native named Pandora Star Junami in their attempts at space travel, the exploitation and plundering of resources from other worlds while colonizing. In the first film, the Na'vi in the world's rainforests finally win the battle to defend their homeland with the help of a human scientist who sympathizes with their cause.

And the movie "Avatar: The Way of Water", Cameron used his life experience to lead the audience to explore the sea of Pandora.

Cameron was the inspiration for the creative thinking behind The Abyss and Titanic, as well as the executive producer of National Geographic's Secret of the Whale and an explorer for National Geographic. In 2012, Cameron performed the feat of making the first solo dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench on the Deep Sea Challenger expedition.

To tell the story of life under the sea in Pandora, Cameron and his team dreamed of building a zoo that was both strange and familiar. In the film, a Pandora-hybrid of puffer fish and lionfish can be seen drifting next to recognizable coral reefs, resembling creatures from Earth's ancient seas, long-necked steeds called plesiosaurs, giant alien hybrids resembling damselfish that serve as Na'vi war mounts, huge, highly intelligent Earth cetaceans, and so on.

What inspired these creatures and how did Cameron and his team bring them to life? Here's Cameron's answer.

Sea of Avatar: James Cameron talks about the real science behind his fictional world

Why go into the water?

As you know, as a current ocean explorer, an avid scuba diver for many years before that, and as a marine explorer when I was younger, I have been associated with the ocean all my life. This includes spending thousands of hours in shallow water, hundreds of hours in deep water, and multiple dives into the Titanic. They say, 'Write what you know,' and I know a lot about the ocean, and I love it. I thought, why not put two things together that I love? I wish the film was about the way water was: how the place where life on Earth was born evolved over time, and the wonders we see there today.

We live in a changing baseline, and the oceans we see today are not what they used to be. The film is also an opportunity to show us what our oceans might have been like 300, 400, 500 years ago, before we were really busy moving towards industrial civilization. In this film, in addition to the drama and human relationships of the Sally family (the protagonists of the film) and all these major dramatic conflicts, there is also the colorful mysterious life that people love, and hopefully the film will reconnect them with what we currently have lost on this planet.

Sea of Avatar: James Cameron talks about the real science behind his fictional world

What inspired you as you flesh out this aquatic ecosystem and the alien cultures that live in it?

We have these people called Metkayina, a clan spread over many villages. Metkayina is a regional indigenous culture: they may have diverged from the terrestrial forest Na'vi (first film) tens of thousands of years ago and were physically more adapted to the sea. Their tails are actually used for propulsion, just like the way they swim, like seals and otters. They are air breathing apparatus, so they have adapted to be able to hold their breath for a long time. They have eye masks, a bit like crocodiles and owls, which protect their eyes when they ride Iru into the water at high speed, and they tame these creatures and establish this symbiotic relationship with them.

They also have a culture of symbiosis with intelligent species of ocean air breathing apparatus: we might look at it and say, oh, that's a whale's big animal. But, of course, it's not a whale - it's a Pandora version. This group is full of indigenous peoples on the planet, and they have an extremely rich and diverse connection to water. How did these cultures inspire Metkayina? In fact, it is a very advanced society, although their progress is all spiritual. They don't have technology because they don't have hands that we can manipulate. They rely on Na'vi to do anything that requires that kind of physical manipulation, but they're quite advanced mentally: they have complex language, they have math, they have music, and so on.

Sea of Avatar: James Cameron talks about the real science behind his fictional world

The planet is full of indigenous peoples who have an extremely rich and diverse connection to water. How did these cultures inspire Metkayina?

We have done a lot of research on authentic indigenous cultures that are closely related to the ocean. We studied Polynesian culture, which is a culture of canoe trade. Apart from some canoes used locally, we decided not to do canoeing. The nautical nature in our films – I can't talk about future cinema – is not the [Polynesian] seafaring culture using the big canoe or waka, as they say here in New Zealand.

Like, how do we bring the indigenous culture of our planet into Pandora's lens? Indonesia has [Sama-Bajau] people who live in stilt houses and rafts.

Sea of Avatar: James Cameron talks about the real science behind his fictional world

How has your experience with ocean exploration and technology influenced the way you make films, specifically The Way of Water?

There's a lot of interconnectedness between my underwater exploration and filmmaking: both involve small teams trying to do very difficult things in a coordinated way that requires a lot of planning. I find this very similar, especially when you're creating new technology: let's say take a robotic vehicle inside the Titanic and conduct archaeological surveys of it, or build a new manned vehicle to travel to the deepest part of the Earth. That's small teams doing seemingly impossible things.

When it comes to making these Avatar movies, we're way ahead in VFX [visual effects] and performance capture, so it's an exciting challenge. I'm not trying to see this as some kind of technology demonstration; I want them to believe that we went to Pandora and made it into a big documentary. I don't want them to think about how it's actually done. So it's our responsibility to creatively try to make it seamless, to try to make everything everyone does—every movement, every horseback ride, and so on—based on real-world physics. The physics of water on another planet will be the same as here. Water of water.

We work on the idea of bringing actors into the water. We'll teach them how to freedive as part of their preparation for the role, but also just so that they can act out the scenes where we taught them to scuba.

We basically modeled creatures that could do creatures [in the way of water] and do it: running at high speeds underwater, jumping out of the water, flying over the surface, back into the water, screaming underwater – we figured out how you can actually drive something like this. That sounds almost impossible, right? Like a Harrier jet meets a submarine. We built it. I don't know if you've ever seen in resorts where people can rise up to 25 feet in these places. We used jet thruster technology to create a Harrier jet with a built-in pilot that someone could ride on, fly over the water, dive into the water, scream around, jump out of the water, and do it all over again. Dangerous as hell; We enjoyed our time in the Bahamas for about a week.

But we figured out how you can really ride such an animal, and how you can handle spears or other types of weapons at the same time. We went out and gathered all the information, got all the reference photos, brought it back to our shooting environment, taught the actors how to do it, and put it all together. At the same time, we have to come up with various computational fluid dynamics simulations so we can make their alien characters look real because they are not our entities

Sea of Avatar: James Cameron talks about the real science behind his fictional world

You talk about the fidelity you're trying to achieve in these films that makes Pandora believable and relevant. I am reminded of the floating Hallelujah Mountains in the first film and how they were partly inspired by the Chinese Yellow Mountains. What real-world locations inspire what we'll see in Waterway?

The most obvious connection between the new habitat of Waterway and what we have on Earth is tropical coral reefs and tropical atoll formations, especially in the Central and Western Pacific: where these eroded ancient volcanic groups form these atolls down these chain of atolls. I spend a lot of time diving between these atolls in the Pacific Ocean and coral reefs around the world.

All of our coral species and large, soft, invertebrates, we correspond to those in our reef ecosystem in the waterways. It's really a celebration of our reef and atoll formations. It is also a celebration of Polynesian culture that spread among the vast expatriate of all these Pacific islands. It's a celebration of our ability to enter different environments as these highly adaptive creatures.

Ultimately, everything you see in the Na'vi is the best of us, written big and blue through the lens of science fiction. In a way, they are ambitious figures. I live in an urban environment, I work 9-5, I have all this pressure, I have to pay rent, taxes –, crap, crap. I want to live like them. But how to live like them?

Well, you have to have this deep, spiritual respect for the harmony and balance of nature. We don't have it anymore, so we can't get there from where we are. We have to relearn it. We must understand what humanity once knew but has forgotten or suppressed

Sea of Avatar: James Cameron talks about the real science behind his fictional world

Going back to your earlier point: Waterways comes at a time when Earth's oceans are in a state of devastation from climate change to overfishing, and people are acutely aware of the environmental challenges we face. In this moment, how do you want the film to meet the audience?

I got on the path of making a series of films in the same universe because I thought I needed something to express artistically — communicating with people — that I could do within that framework. Clearly, moving from the first film's focus to the rainforest to the ocean, [there is] between the lines, calls to protect and celebrate our oceans. Hopefully, we can walk back from a path that puts the ocean under pressure. I don't even like to use the word "stress": it's used a lot in protection, [but] if you think of stage IV cancer as "stress," yes, it's "stress."

Coral reefs will be something that will only exist in movies in most places on Earth in 50 to 75 years. No way. When I was a child, I aspired to be a diver so that I could see this wonder and this beautiful place for myself. Then I spent decades exploring and enjoying that world. My children and my grandchildren will not be able to do this. So it's a bit like heartache if you want to say this: remember, celebrate and fall in love again, and therefore remember to protect what we're losing.

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