Thirteen years ago, on December 18, 2009, the theatres were blessed with the masterpiece Avatar, directed by James Cameron. The movie made box office history and is currently sitting at the top of the list of highest-grossing films of all time. While it was briefly overtaken by Avengers: Endgame, the movie was re-released, reaching the top of the leaderboard again. The undisputed franchise is all set to break more records as it is returning with a sequel, pretty soon.
James Cameron has made so many brilliant movies in his career that one cannot help but wonder where he gets all his ideas from. Well, the director has the answer to that question. Neither books nor video games, James Cameron finds the inspiration for his masterpieces from his dreams.
James Cameron Gets Ideas for Movies From His Dreams
Also Read: Avatar: The Way of Water Projected Box Office Opening Weekend Fails To Beat Marvel, Falls Short of All 3 2022 MCU Movies
Sixty-two-year-old director, James Cameron, revealed that his dreams are the perfect place to look for inspiration for his movies. Terminator was inspired by his dream where he saw “a death figure, a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire.” Even the iconic scene involving the alien queen in Aliens came to him in a dream.
The beloved Avatar was also a fragment of Cameron’s unconscious mind. He stated that he saw a bioluminescent forest with fiber-optic-like lamps and a river that glowed. His dream also had lizards turning into rotating fans in the fairytale-like forest.
“I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fiber-optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it. And these kinds of lizards that didn’t look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something. It was all in the dream.”
Cameron further added that he was so excited about this dream that came to him at the age of nineteen, that he actually woke up and drew the whole thing on paper. He continued that this particular hand-made drawing of his saved him from a bunch of lawsuits.
“Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head. And it turned out there were 10 or 11 of them. And so I pointed at this drawing I did when I was 19, when I was going to Fullerton Junior College, and said, ‘See this? See these glowing trees? See this glowing lizard that spins around, that’s orange? See the purple moss?’ And everybody went away.”
Taking a subtle dig at popular streaming sites, the Titanic director added that his dreams are like a streaming service that only he has access to. Despite the said streaming service being just his dream, he stated that it is “better than any of that s**t out there.” Was the Cinderella lyric, “a dream is a wish your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep” penned down just for Cameron?
James Cameron’s Unique Take On Filmmaking
Avatar actress Zoe Saldana stated that while Hollywood works on a lot of creative people working together, Cameron is a lone warrior. In her own words, “without Jim’s heavy, heavy brain, this would all fall apart.”
Cameron himself has stated that even though a lot of directors start off small before moving on to bigger projects, he was always more of a big movie kind of guy. He said that he is over people asking him to make smaller movies with a smaller cast. He said that while one day he would film a scene with just two actors, the next day he would film a battle scene for the same movie with forty thousand people. That’s just how he rolls.
Avatar: The Way of Water will release in theatres on December 16, 2022.
Source: GQ
