Avatar: The Way of Water throws the Sully family into a new adventure. Taking place over ten years after the events of the first movie, Avatar: The Way of Water sees Jake Sully and Neytiri as the leaders of their clan, with a family of four children. When humans return to Pandora, Jake and Neytiri must decide how to best protect their family from this dangerous threat.
Jon Landau has been a longtime collaborator with James Cameron, having worked with him on Titanic, Avatar, and now Avatar: The Way of Water. Landau has been an important part of the creative process of Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar 3, and Avatar 4 when it comes to pushing Cameron's vision forward.
Screen Rant spoke with Avatar: The Way of Water producer Jon Landau about the newest addition to the franchise. Landau explains why there was such a long wait between Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water. He also discusses Jake Sully and Neytiri's development and shares a behind-the-scenes memory from a dive on a reef in Hawaii.
Jon Landau on Avatar: The Way Of Water
Screen Rant: Jon, I almost feel that James Cameron shot this movie on another planet. It's immersive and gorgeous. Can you talk to me about the world-building process from the development of the script to shooting the actors with virtual cameras?
Jon Landau: You nailed it right on the head. The world building starts right with the script, and we had our choice where do we want to play these movies. Other people might want to go to a water planet for oceans or a snow planet for ice. We said, "Use Pandora as a metaphor for the world in which we are in."
And we defined our story, and then we challenged our designers to look at real world things that could be inspirations for creating a world that most audiences couldn't even imagine, and then we challenged Weta Effects to deliver that at a photo real level where people will question, "Well what oceans did they go to do this? What did they do to do that?" And create something that I believe is a must-see on the big screen experience.
I know that James is very knowledgeable about the ocean, and he's a big advocate for conservation. Can you talk to me about how the ocean inspired this world of Avatar that we're seeing and this new culture?
Jon Landau: Well, look, I think our world inspires so much. Both Jim and myself are avid scuba divers. Jim has also gone to the Marianna's Deep, but going on trips like we did to Truck Lagoon where we scuba dived both during the day and at night, and we saw the difference between the two. The idea of being able to recreate that for other people who can't experience what we were lucky enough to experience, except do it on steroids. That that's really what we want to do to take those personal experiences and offer them to audiences.
You guys have a lot of Avatar movies planned, and I think you guys have three more scripts essentially done. How important is it for you to lay out the story first before you get into production and start shooting?
Jon Landau: Look, people say, "What took so long?" The first thing that took time was writing four scripts. We couldn't just write one and go, "Okay, we're satisfied." We had to write all four. Why was that important? Several reasons. One, we wanted our actors to know where their characters go because the decisions they make early on are going to impact later decisions.
Then there were logistical reasons why in our story. Let's just talk about the kids. We know the kids grow up in real life. Well if movies two and three, they're basically the same age, we had to shoot that all at the same time, so it was very important for us to define those scripts at a level that Jim would be happy to direct them.
I related to these characters so much. It's been 13 years since the original, and I was 27 years old at the time. Now I'm 40 with a 7-year-old daughter, and the center of this story is really about family. What does that mean to you, and how do we see Jake Sully and Neytiri grow in that process?
Jon Landau: One of the great things that Jim Cameron always does is write universal themes into his movies, and there's no more universal theme than family. And at the center of these movies is the Sully family. We saw in the first movie, Jake and Neytiri fall in love, and now they've had children, but they are not perfect parents. They are parents who have to find out how to really, what does it mean to parent? What are the lengths that you go to make sacrifices?
Also, they're in a mixed race family. All of those dynamics, and how does that impact their kids? But it's not just told I think from the parents' perspective. We have characters that we've spent time developing their stories that are teenagers. Struggling to find their own place in this world. What is their identity? How many teenagers are going through that? So I think to me, movie going is an experience that is sometimes done alone, but oftentimes done in a shared, and people will identify differently with each one of these characters. But family is important.
And also they become refugees. Where they're forced to flee and seek, refuse with a clan. They're Na'vis, just like we're all human, but they look different. Their skin is different. Their bodies have developed differently. And it was very important for us to introduce that idea to audiences that, don't judge people by how they look. You have to look inside of them. We have an expression, Oel ngati kameie. I see you. And to me that means so much more than literally seeing someone. And that's what these movies are about.
You've worked with James a ton in the past. Can you talk to me about his evolution as a director and how you've seen him evolve throughout this process?
Jon Landau: I think the way Jim has first evolved more than as a director is as a person. When I met him originally in 1994, he wasn't a father of a family structure. Now, he's a father in a family structure and that you now see represented in these films.
But what Jim also does, he never rests on the laurels of his past. He challenges himself, and he challenges the others around him to progress things to raise the bar, and that's one of the really exciting and daunting things about working with Jim. But what happens is the people around us, they find that they can do things they never knew they can do, and it makes our movies better.
Kate Winslet said that acting in this film, especially with the underwater capture, was one of the most freeing experiences and really truest forms of acting that she's done. Can you talk to me about shooting some of these underwater scenes?
Jon Landau: We wanted to create an actor director centric process when we set out to make the first Avatar and continue with the second Avatar, so we created what we call virtual production where the director and the actor are in what we call a Volume for performance capture. That performance capture can be above the water on a stage or below the water. And in that moment, we're not waiting for lighting, we're not waiting for a dolly track to go down. It's Jim working with the actors and the actors working with each other to give us the best performances.
Once we have those performances, our editors then put together a cut, and we look at what we think are the best performances. Then a month later, two months later, a year later, we go back and say, "Play back those selected best performances." And Jim picks up a virtual camera and when he looks through the lens of the camera, it's as if not the actor is standing there right in front, their character is standing. And then on this barren stage, he creates the shots.
But when he looks around the stage, he doesn't see the stage, he sees the world of Pandora. And all the time we take the initial performance, the reference cameras that we shot of the actors and carry that all the way through the pipeline to make sure that when you see it on the big screen, it's Kate's performance. It's Zoe's performance. It's Sigourney's performance.
That is incredible. The world of Pandora is so beautiful. We obviously see the water and the reef people here. What other parts of Pandora are you excited to explore in the future?
Jon Landau: One of the things I tell people is we could spend our whole life traveling Earth and not see all of the wonders it holds. Both from a location standpoint and from a cultural standpoint. So what I'm excited about as we move on in the sequels, each sequel will take us to new places. Each sequel will introduce us to new cultures and new clans of Na'vi.
And to me that's exciting because again, it allows us to reflect on our world and throughout the process, we want to continue with this idea of connectivity on Pandora, that we are all connected, whether it's through Eywa or other ways. And to remind people here that we are connected and that our actions have an impact on people around us and the world around us.
That's incredible. What has been the biggest challenge of bringing Avatar: The Way of Water to the screen?
Jon Landau: The biggest challenge of The Way of Water is right in the title, water. No one had ever done performance capture before. No one when they work with actors has really ever asked them to do free breath holding, and we had to do that. So we hired this gentleman by the name of Kirk Crack, who is a world-renowned free dive instructor. And I remember Sigourney going, "Jim, I can't hold my breath for 20 seconds." Day one with Kirk, she got up to over a minute and a half. Kate ended up doing close to seven minutes.
And out of that, though, we wanted to also then take the cast to Hawaii for a rehearsal there because we're on our stage where we're doing our performance capture. So we went out and free dove the shallow reefs of Hawaii as a sense memory experience, but then we donned scuba gear, and we did what might be perhaps the most Pandora like thing you could do on earth. We went on a night dive. And we were sitting 30 feet below the surface of the water in the dark with lights just shining up. And out of the abyss comes these Pandoran like creatures, giant manta rays.
And they're swimming right around us. Circling the cast is reaching up, touching their bellies as they swim over. When we finished, we had trouble getting Cliff Curtis to come up because he just wanted to stay down there. But when you see the film, and you see Sigourney as Kiri on her first swim and a Pandoran stingray swims by her, and she reaches out to touch it, she's conjuring up what she experienced that night.
About Avatar: The Way of Water
Over a decade after the events of Avatar Jake Sully and Neytiri are living on Pandora with their family leading their people. However, when a familiar threat returns to restart a war they thought had ended years ago they must once again work together to protect their planet, their people, but most importantly their family.
Check out our other Avatar: The Way of Water interviews here:
- James Cameron
- Zoe Saldaña & Sam Worthington
- Sigourney Weaver
- Kate Winslet
- Stephen Lang
- Jack Champion & Trinity Jo-Li Bliss
- Jamie Flatters & Bailey Bass
Avatar: The Way of Water will be playing in theaters on December 16.
