Avatar director: home 3D coming soon
Updated on 11 December 2009
Avatar director James Cameron says 3D technology will become a regular feature in people's homes and help combat piracy.
Speaking ahead of the premiere of his £300m science-fiction movie tonight, Cameron said the film would herald a new era in 3D film, which would soon lead to people’s living rooms.
He said: : “I think 3D is here to stay, it is going to become more and more ubiquitous, because it’s going to be used in more and more films.
“It is going to move into the home, we will be watching our sports in 3D.
“It was absolutely one of our drivers also that not only would this help combat piracy, and the tendency for people to download films onto smaller and smaller devices, but to create big screen immersive cinema as well.”
Cameron previously directed block-buster hits such as Titanic and Aliens, but says his new film Avatar is the most striking yet.
The 55-year-old is renowned for his use of new technologies and techniques in film. He said:
“I sat down to write Avatar in 1995; I just had this urge to write this epic science fiction story. To just get to use all the techniques we have been working on over previous years: computer-generated imagery, creature creation - that sort of thing.
“I just wanted to do my pipedream visual effects project, with the ideas and images that I had had since I was a kid – it’s very much a dream project, in that I have always wanted to do this type of film, because I have never quite done it – it had always missed by a little bit.
“The newest and freshest thing that we did in this film was that we created a technique for performance capture, which allowed us to capture the reality from the actors – because a film lives or breathes on the effect of close ups on the audience.
We were able to transfer 100 per cent of the emotions in the actors into the computer generated characters.
“I think Aliens would have been a very different film with the techniques we have now – just more real.”
Avatar is set 150 years in the future, on an alien planet on which humans are trying to exploit natural resources at the expense of the indigenous people.
A new form of Avatar is created to help the humans mix with the indigenous people – by taking their form, ten foot tall blue animals, with cat-like features.
Cameron said: “I wrote this film before the term Avatar had been co-opted by cyberspace. At that moment [1995] I was going back to the original Hindu meaning of the word, which is a fleshy incarnation of a spiritual being.
“But in the film that’s not really what’s happening, what’s happening is that beings are projected through a new technology that they have in the future – and projecting their minds into genetically-engineered bodies.
“I think there’s a great congruence between the ideas in Avatar and what’s happening in our world, we are living more and more virtually.”
But Cameron rejected the nickname the film has earned in some circles – dances with wolves with smurfs – by saying: “I think that’s going to go away pretty quickly when people see the film.”
