After decades of silent films and talkies in black-and-white came a revolutionary era of Golden Age Hollywood that simply kept getting better with time. From James Dean’s teenage angst, Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns, George Lucas’s Star Wars, Martin Scorsese’s mob dramas to James Cameron’s Terminator, Titanic, and Avatar – it has simply been an impossible trajectory of Hollywood greatness one after the other, with each genre-defying project superceding the one that came before it.
The latest in the unquantifiable list of visual masterpieces: the sequel to Cameron’s 2009 epic, Avatar, makes for one incredibly layered narration. Although essentially serving as an extension of the first film, Avatar: The Way of Water does more than fight for survival, it plays with the dynamics of a family.
In this story that has been 13 years in the making, there languishes in the shadows hundreds of behind-the-scene stories that offer a look into what went behind the making of some of the greatest cinematic pieces of all time.
James Cameron’s Avatar 2 Gets Inspired By Clint Eastwood
The visionary director who gave his audience Titanic and Avatar, found among his talented cast and crew the perfect balance between subtlety, perfection, and vision as his actors worked in tandem with the visual effects team and the costume department to reproduce one of the most iconic films of the decade.
In relation to Sam Worthington‘s developing and ever-changing get-up that showcased a poncho-like apparel in Avatar: The Way of Water, Deborah L. Scott, the Academy Award-winning costume designer revealed the amount of pop-culture inspiration that played into the creation of the leading man’s wardrobe:
It’s a protective piece, and [James Cameron] was like, ‘I want him to look like Clint Eastwood here.’ So, we came up with that, and in his mind, those are the things that are related. I think it’s because Clint had ponchos in some of those movies. That’s going to stay with Jake into [Avatar 3] a little bit, so it’ll get a little bit more airplay.
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The poncho that inspired James Cameron in the film is from Clint Eastwood‘s ubiquitous Man With No Name films that depicted the Western lone gun-slinging action star travelling from place to place wearing a garb protecting him from the desert heat with a cowboy hat in place. Despite what little is known about the later Avatar films, it looks like Jake Sully’s style, too, may evolve more as he goes from battle to battle in an ultimate war to win back his adoptive planet and protect his family from archenemy, Quaritch.
What To Expect From James Cameron’s Upcoming Films?
When it comes to Avatar, it is about the complex dualities of human nature. In the first film, the complexity was shown foremost in the lives of the twin brothers that found Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully being thrown into the world of Pandora. Moreover, it was the world he was born into that paralyzed and shunned him against the world he was forced into that accepted and loved him.
Also read: “A master at the peak of his powers”: James Cameron Breathes Relief After Guillermo del Toro Calls Avatar 2 a Masterpiece as Film Needs To Earn More Than $2 Billion To Make a Profit
The dualities that are presented in Avatar 2 are striking as well: a child [Lo’ak] feels displaced and ostracized by his own clan while a human boy [Spider] feels more at home among the aliens than with his own kind. Even Pandora reflects this duality by painting broad brushstrokes of how the world which is worshipped as a sanctuary and its natural reserves treated with respect is now being destroyed by fire and weapons wrought down upon this land by the greed and expansionist policies of mankind.
As James Cameron moves further into the lore and mythologies of Avatar 3, 4, and 5 – it will become interesting to see what else is in store for the Sully clan and the world of Pandora as it dives deeper into the war to protect their family while also exploring the limitless natural beauty of the world.
Avatar 3, 4, and 5 will premiere on December 19, 2025, December 21, 2029, and December 19, 2031 respectively.
Source: Slash Film
