James Cameron, director Avatar: The Way of Water, the current biggest movie in the world that is rocketing closer and closer to $1 billion at the global box office, made some of the most influential films in history, including Aliens, Terminator and Titanic–but some of that potential influence he regrets, he revealed to Esquire Middle East.
It turns out that Cameron, who is known as an action filmmaker, he admits, believes that his films have often been too violent, and the heavy amounts of gun violence that play into films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day and True Lies he believes have no place in moral moviemaking in the current state of the world.
Why James Cameron might regret his most violent films
“I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30+ years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach,” says Cameron to Esquire Middle East.
“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,” he adds as an aside.
Cameron grappled with his current aversion to gratuitous violence while making Avatar: The Way of Water, deciding in the end to cut out a lot of gun action that he deemed unnecessary.
“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. 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,” says Cameron.
That doesn’t mean that Avatar: The Way of Water, of course, is actionless. In fact, the film has perhaps the most difficult to watch scene in Cameron’s filmmaking history, in which we watch the slow, methodical hunting of one of the Tulkun, with glee on the faces of its hunters and an unconvincing grimace on the face of the accompanying scientists.
“That’s excruciating , but it serves a purpose,” I pose to Cameron.
“Yes, exactly. There’s a moral crime.”
In the end, while the film does have a final battle, it doesn’t work like the first film.
“The first film has the good guys and the bad guys seemingly equally opposed, and then the good guys get crushed and defeated and many of the heroes die. Then there’s this almost ‘deus ex machina’ where Jake invokes the forces of nature—a ‘deus ex machina’ I think is earned by the way. The second film doesn’t work that way at all. The battle is not even a battle, it’s a rout. It’s the revenge of the Na’vi and the Tulkun. The real challenge, and the real defeat, and the thing that must be recovered from, happens after the battle,” says Cameron.
Read more on James Cameron and the making of Avatar: The Way of Water here.