Cameron forges into an alien, on-budget world

By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
As he begins work on Avatar, his first feature film in a decade, James Cameron is applying some titanic lessons to the new sci-fi epic.
The movie, announced Monday and due in theaters in summer 2009, is about an alien world where humans engage in remote conflict with a planet's alien population through remote-controlled bodies.

It's Cameron's first feature film since 1997's Titanic broke box-office records, and it will show off some of the state-of-the-art 3-D technology he has developed since then. He says he is mindful of lessons learned from Titanic.

Before it was the most successful movie of all time (with a worldwide box-office take of $1.8 billion), Titanic had a bedeviled water shoot and a ballooning budget ($200 million).

Then it swept through the box office, won 11 Oscars and set a new standard for blockbuster that no film has come close to matching. The headaches were forgotten in the glow of triumph. "It's like a pregnancy," says Tom Rothman, the Fox studio co-chair. "You only remember the good things."

But Cameron hasn't forgotten.

"I've spent the past five or six years really thinking through how we can do this on budget," Cameron says, recalling that his deep-sea dive documentaries and Dark Angel TV series were mostly problem-free.

Digital sets and photo-real animated landscapes, combined with motion-capture performances for the alien race similar to Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, have presented "a clever methodology for making a big, mainstream effects action picture" without many variables, he says.

The story, starring relative unknowns Sam Worthington (Hart's War) and Guess Who's Zoe Saldana, is about a soldier who is at first part of Earth's movement to conquer an alien planet and then joins the indigenous races' resistance fight when he falls in love.

Though partly paralyzed, the soldier is able to interact with the alien world by means of an avatar, which Cameron described as a "genetically engineered biological body that is remotely operated by a human consciousness."

Though the budget is still huge (Cameron says only that it's under $200 million), he says there is only a 31-day live-action shoot — a fraction of Titanic's and less even than Terminator 2's.

"The clock is already running on the visual effects," he says, noting that some motion-capture work has begun, and live-action shooting begins in April.

The 2009 release date also gives Cameron a cushion to create his epic universe. Rothman notes that "all of the problems he had on Titanic came from rushing. We all learned from that, and we're taking our time. But I wish 2009 would come sooner."