news culture ‘The Whole Original Script Was Tossed Into The Trash’, Avatar 2 Could Have Looked Like Star Wars But James Cameron Said ‘No’
James Cameron likes to remember that there were many attempts and other sequences written before arriving at the final result. Even today, we learn that the film could have been completely different.
Summary
- Avatar 2 could have been much longer
- A deleted Star Wars sequence
Avatar 2 could have been much longer
It was only a few days ago James Cameron, director of Avatar: The Waterwayhad confessed that he did not like to cut elements of his stories. He even specified in an interview that he always tends to write too much, and this, sometimes with regret because he hates to make sacrifices.
I’ve always written more than you can fit into a conventional movie, and I don’t like interesting character developments being cut, either during scriptwriting or post-production. . james cameron
In this same interview, he notably added that it is no less than 30 to 40 minutes of Avatar 2 which were withdrawn… In other words, the film could have lasted around 3h50 compared to 3h12 today. However, even if the director does not like to delete elements already written, he still knows how to make the right decisions when it is useful.
A deleted Star Wars sequence
It was during an interview conducted by Entertainment Weekly that screenwriter Rick Jaffa (Planet of the Apes origins, Jurassic World) revealed that Avatar 2 could have contained a sequence directly inspired by the Star Wars saga. Indeed, Jake and Neytiri could have fought a fight in space. But if the proposal charmed James Cameron at first, Rick Jaffa admitted that the director decided to backtrack and completely abandon the idea so that everything remains coherent.
There was this idea of a space battle with the Na’vi. The idea caught our attention and we talked about it a lot, but it gave us a lot of trouble. How can that work with the story we’re trying to tell? James Cameron replied: “Give me a few weeks”. He left and wrote a whole new script; a brilliant script, by the way. In the end, the entire original script was thrown in the trash; it just didn’t work with what we wanted to tell. Rick Jaffa, screenwriter
