Avatar mastermind James Cameron recently revealed that he threw away a year’s worth of work because the script wasn’t up to the mark. According to Variety, Cameron revealed that before Avatar: The Way of Water there was a full Avatar 2 screenplay that was written and then thrown into the trash.
“When I sat down with my writers to start Avatar 2, I said we cannot do the next one until we understand why the first one did so well,” the Oscar-winning director said. “We must crack the code of what the hell happened,” he added. “All films work on different levels. The first is surface, which is character, problem and resolution. The second is thematic. What is the movie trying to say? But Avatar also works on a third level, the subconscious. I wrote an entire script for the sequel, read it and realized that it did not get to level three. Boom. Start over. That took a year.”
Last year in conversation with The Marianne Williamson Podcast, Cameron elaborated more on the elements that made Avatar the highest-grossing movie of all time at the worldwide box office. “There was a tertiary level as well…it was a dreamlike sense of a yearning to be there, to be in that space, to be in a place that is safe and where you wanted to be,” he said. “Whether that was flying, that sense of freedom and exhilaration, or whether it’s being in the forest where you can smell the earth. It was a sensory thing that communicated on such a deep level. That was the spirituality of the first film.”
Avatar: The Way of Water arrives in theaters December 16.
