Avatar Secrets That Won't Make You Blue

How James Cameron Literally Dreamed Up Avatar

The director of Titanic, The Terminator and Aliens had a dream that made him feel blue, in a good way.

"I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fiber-optic lamps," James Cameron told GQ in 2022, "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."

Then he set to putting his vision on paper (a talented artist, that's Cameron's hand sketching Kate Winslet's Rose in Titanic), drawings that "saved us from about 10 lawsuits," he added. "Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head."

Cameron wrote the screenplay for the first Avatar film—as well as came up with the seeds of the Na'vi language—and then turned over his 800 pages of world-expanding notes to married writing partners Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who wrote the next two movies.

Josh Friedman is the credited writer, along with Cameron, on the presently titled Avatar 4, while Shane Salerno worked on Avatar 5.

Studios Wanted a Movie Without a Message

Matt Damon Turned Down Avatar

Damon was in the middle of shooting 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum when he was "offered a little movie called Avatar," the actor said during a 2021 Cannes Film Festival masterclass. "James Cameron offered me 10 percent of it. I will go down in history…you will never meet an actor who turned down more money."

Sam Worthington ended up taking the part of Jake Sully and, as Damon surely knows, Avatar made $2.7 billion worldwide on a $237 million budget.

Asked about that missed opportunity, Damon explained on Who's Talking to Chris Wallace in 2023 that he didn't want to leave the Bourne crew in the lurch by leaving early to shoot Avatar.

"I desperately wanted to work with Cameron," the actor said. "I mean, because he worked so rarely."

The Na'vi Were Inspired by Cats

"Obviously, we took a lot from feline anatomy and feline behavior," Cameron told the New York Times in 2025 of the blue-hued inhabitants of Pandora known as Na'vi. "We have a whole vocabulary for Neytiri's tail."

Neytiri is the 9-foot-tall Na'vi princess played by Zoe Saldaña, who since the first Avatar came out has had three children, starred in five Marvel movies and won an Oscar.

You Can Learn How to Speak Na'vi

Retired USC professor Paul Frommer created the Na'vi conlang (an invented language intended for human communication), which Cameron memorably invoked when he won his second Golden Globe for directing in 2010, translating what he said as, "I see you, my brother and sisters."

To align with Cameron's vision, "Na'vi had to be entirely new," Frommer told Campfire Writing in 2024. "It had to sound 'nice'; it had to stay consistent with the thirty-some-odd words he had already come up with—mainly names of characters and animals."

It had to be a language humans could actually learn, as some do in the film. And, since Frommer figured a few people might see Avatar, "I wanted to make sure it was interesting, unusual and would stand up to scrutiny."

The professor made workbooks, including "a word-for-word gloss and an English-y 'phonetic' transcription that some actors found useful," he said. "But the crucial tools were the mp3 recordings, which they could download and use for practice."

Then he tutored them in person, he said, to "fine-tune the pronunciation and make sure the sentence intonation was appropriate. On a few occasions, a spontaneous sound an actor came up with became a canonical war cry. And one time, an actor unwittingly coined a new word."

Why Did It Take So Long to Make the Second Avatar Film?

In 2012, Cameron spent a reported $16 million on 2,500 acres of farmland by Lake Pounui in New Zealand's Wairarapa Valley to serve as his home base for the making of his still-planned four Avatar sequels.

Noting that he was "in the very early stages" of working on the second and third Avatar films, Cameron told E! News at the time, "We've spent the last two years building tools and software to make it a very smooth pipeline for what will be a very big and difficult project."

And before the title Avatar: The Way of Water was revealed, the deep-sea exploration pioneer shared that the oceans of Pandora would set the scene for the sequel.

"Basically, whenever you add water to any problem, it just gets 10 times harder," Cameron told Collider in 2017. "So, we've thrown a lot of horsepower, innovation, imagination, and new technology at the problem, and it's taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we're going to do it."

After 18 months of performance-capture work in L.A., which they finished in November 2019, Cameron planned to get rolling on live action filming in New Zealand in early 2020. Production was shut down that March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, then resumed in June and wrapped in September 2020.

How the Stars of Avatar Really Feel About the Long Process

"Good things take time, I think, and Jim understands that," Worthington, still committed to what will ultimately be a two-decade-long experience playing paraplegic ex-Marine turned Na'vi warrior Jake, told E! News ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water's release in 2022. "This was his labor of love."

And when Cameron described his idea for the sequel in 2013, noted costar Saldaña, who plays Na'vi princess Neytiri, "it had only been three years since we had released the [first] movie."

"And here's the beautiful thing," the actress continued, "if there's anyone who has complete and utter respect for audiences and fans, it's James Cameron. Yes, he could've taken advantage of the momentum of Avatar 1 and whipped out a formulaic Avatar 2— and then it would have lost its purity, the essence of what made it so special. So, good things do take time. He did have to take a break and go live his life."

Saldana recalled Cameron calling them to his studio in 2015 to share the rest of his plan.

"And that's when we learned it's not just a sequel," she told E!. "It's four more chapters of this beautiful saga."

A Few Billion to Break Even

Acknowledging Avatar: The Way of Water's colossal budget, Cameron told GQ in 2022 that "you have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history" to make any money. "That’s your threshold. That’s your break even.”

Sources told The Hollywood Reporter the sequel cost anywhere from $350 million to $400 million to make, not including marketing costs that put the film in billion-dollar budget territory.

As it turned out, though, the film's $2.34 billion haul did make it the third highest-grossing film ever, behind only the first Avatar ($2.9 billion, including re-release returns) and Avengers: Endgame ($2.8 billion).

Come for the Visual Effects—and Stay for Them, Too

Avatar had an estimated 2,500 visual effects shots, while 2022's Avatar: The Way of Water had 3,250, achieved by a team of 1,300 artists.

The films start in the Los Angeles area, where Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment production company is headquartered. On that end, Cameron gets the lighting, performances and camera angles he wants, after which a team from Peter Jackson's Wellington, New Zealand-based Weta FX (formerly Weta Digital) handles the special effects.

“It’s not animation in a Pixar sense where they’re just making stuff up,” Cameron, who started living in New Zealand full-time during the pandemic, told GQ in 2022. “The actors already defined what they did, but it has to be translated from the captured data to the 3D-CG character. And there’s all sorts of AI steps in there."

And, suffice it to say, Avatar: Fire and Ash blows both out of the water, effects-wise.

Also Stay for the Story About Family

"I just wish everybody would realize the last thing in the world I want to talk about is the technology," Cameron told the South China Morning Post in 2022. "I'm a writer, I want to talk about the characters, I want to talk about the actors, I want to talk about the cast and how they interpreted those characters, and the dramatic and emotional impact that that creates."

And it's a family that was at the heart of this ocean tale.

"What do two characters who are warriors, who take chances and have no fear, do when they have children and they still have the epic struggle?” Cameron put it to GQ, referring to how Avatar: Way of Water picks up with Jake and Neytiri being parents of four. “Their instinct is to be fearless and do crazy things. Jump off cliffs, dive-bomb into the middle of an enemy armada, but you’ve got kids. What does that look like in a family setting?”

What Performance Capture Is—and What It Means to James Cameron

“On a performance-capture set, we take as long as we need to," Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Avatar: Fire and Ash's December 2025 release, pushing back against the characterization of his films as being heavy on AI. "There’s no worrying about the camera, about the lighting; I’m not coming in with a shot list. For me, it’s about getting to the emotional core of the scene. They say it’s not ‘real acting’—that’s the most bulls--t thing in history, [as if] ‘real acting’ is stage acting where you’re whispering loud enough to be heard 30 rows back.”

To have their performances captured, the actors wear spandex unitards and dots are applied to their faces. Cameras strapped to their helmets record their facial expressions and then all the data is fed into a software program that turns the stars into their Na'vi characters.

The result: Oscar wins for Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water's visual effects, as well as Academy Awards for art direction and Mauro Fiore's cinematography on the first Avatar.

Kate Winslet Never Lets Go

To play hydrophilic Metkayina warrior Ronal in Avatar: The Way of Water, Winslet learned to free dive and held her breath underwater for seven minutes and 14 seconds. That feat broke a previous film-production record set by Tom Cruise, who held off from breathing for six minutes while making 2015's Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation.

"There was just no way I was going to say no," Winslet told ScreenRant about reuniting with Cameron 20 years after Titanic. "When he first talked to me about playing this part, and he described Ronal, he said, 'Look, she's the matriarch, she's the female goddess warrior leader of her clan.' I mean, who writes roles like that for women? And it's not just that they're strong women, it's that these women that he conceives of in his mind are physically bionic."

Regrouping After a Big Loss

Cameron's longtime producing partner Jon Landau died in 2024, and Winslet—back for Avatar: Fire and Ash—asked if she could do anything to help. He asked her to watch an early cut of the third film and give notes.

"Now that's a different Jim," the actress told the New York Times ahead of the film's December 2025 release. Since they made Titanic, she explained, "he's much more open, much less resistant to someone trying to offer up an idea of how something might be better."

But Landau's death was a blow, Cameron telling The Hollywood Reporter, "It's like when my parents died. It's like I've got nobody left to be proud of me, or to judge me if I f--k up."

In turn, Fire and Ash—which picks up Jake and Neytiri's story after the death of their son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in the previous film—is dedicated to the late producer.

The franchise also lost Oscar-nominated editor John Refoua, who worked on Avatar: Fire and Ash right up until the final weeks of his life before his death from bile cancer in May 2023, according to his wife.

The Truth About James Cameron's Temper

Cameron recalled working on the visual effects for Apollo 13 with director Ron Howard, "and I just watched what a great guy he was," he told GQ. "I'm like, 'I'm a total a—hole compared to Ron Howard. I have to get in touch with my inner Ron Howard.'"

While he didn't deny the reputation he developed early in his career for being volatile on set, he said he was more inclined to get upset "like twice a year" these days, rather than every couple of weeks, as he once did.

James Cameron Considered Quitting Avatar

After Avatar was a raging success, Cameron admittedly wasn't sure if he wanted to put his life on pause again to make another one, let alone four more.

"I knew how all-consuming it would be," he told GQ. "It basically took over my life for four years. I had no other life for four years making the first film. And I thought, Do I really want to do this again? It's the highest-grossing film in history; can't I just tag that base and move on?”

But he hadn't yet told the full story in his head, so he was compelled to keep going. "And anything I need to say about conservation and sustainability and all of these themes," Cameron added, "the pros and cons of technology and where the human race is headed and all that sort of thing, I could say within that greater landscape.”

In Case Avatar: Fire and Ash Is the Final Film…

Depending on how it does at the box office, "This can be the last one," Cameron told THR of his third Avatar film. "There's only one [unanswered question] in the story. We may find that the release of Avatar 3 proves how diminished the cinematic experience is these days, or we may find it proves the case that it’s as strong as it ever was — but only for certain types of films. It’s a coin toss right now."

Meaning, Disney will see how much money it makes and then decide on the fate of Avatar 4.

And in Case There's More Avatar…

Should he get the greenlight, Cameron told THR, "I won't go down the rabbit hole of exclusively making only Avatar for multiple years. I’m going to figure out another way that involves more collaboration. I’m not saying I’m going to step away as a director, but I’m going to pull back from being as hands-on with every tiny aspect of the process.”

A different Jim, indeed.