James Cameron on the lure of Atlantis and ‘making Avatar 2, 3, 4 and 5’

This time around the Kapuskasing, Ont.-born Cameron is teaming with Israeli-Canadian journalist Simcha Jacobovici (recipient of the Gordon Sinclair Award for Broadcast Journalism at the 2017 Canadian Screen Awards) to try and figure out if the lost city of Atlantis actually existed in Atlantis Rising. The documentary premieres Sunday on Discovery.

The search takes off in a sailboat that goes across the Mediterranean including the islands of Santorini, Malta and Sardinia. 

Since the success of Avatar in 2009, Cameron, 62, has been strangely invisible. He has worked consistently as a writer and producer on passion projects such as his documentaries but hasn’t directed a major motion picture since. (He certainly doesn’t need the work: Forbes has estimated his wealth to be in the $700-million range.) But it turns out he’s not been exactly inactive. This year Cameron may well be the busiest man in Hollywood.

The Star caught up with him as he launches the estimated $500-million Pandora: The World of Avatar at Disney World in Orlando this May and preps for his highly anticipated four-sequel shoot for Avatar.

Condolences, first of all on your friend Bill Paxton. I was thinking of Paxton while looking at your relationship with Simcha Jacobovici in the documentary. You’re sending Simcha to the ends of the Earth to find Atlantis. However, Bill was your first roving reporter. In Ghosts of the Abyss, your documentary on the Titanic, you sent him deep underneath the sea.

That was fun. That was on our second Titanic expedition. We had done Titanic the movie together and for that film I had dived the wreck 12 times. I was always telling him what an amazing experience it was. And we had been on dive trips in the past, but just to scuba depths. I said, ‘Come on Bill, you love adventure.’ He jumped on and became the everyman voice of that show. He loved history and the arts in general and storytelling. He had such a respect for the history of Titanic he brought a real gravitas to that film. He was such a great human being. You felt the tragedy through his eyes.

Your relationship with Simcha reminded me of the dynamic between J. Jonah Jameson and Peter Parker in Spider-Man (a movie that Cameron was once slated to direct). The whole idea of the crusty editor and the overly enthusiastic reporter. You keep reining him in and telling him to “go west.”

(Laughs) That’s a pretty good analogy. Simcha and I always joke I’m the skeptic and he’s the starry-eyed theoretician that comes up with all these connections. It’s a good throttle-and-brakes relationship.

He was obviously the Energizer Bunny on this one. I wasn’t out there doing the investigation myself, which I would have loved to do. The idea was to shed a light on areas not understood and not well funded . . . I’m kind of shameless about using my media credentials to get the attention directed toward archeology, especially marine archeology. You would imagine there are multi-billion-dollar programs to do this, but there really isn’t.

Plato was the first to write about Atlantis. And as you say in the documentary, he may have been doing a bit of “world building.” So was Plato just the first great science fiction writer?

It infuriates Simcha. (Laughs) But Plato was doing what science fiction writers like me do. We build worlds. But we base them on things that really happened. So when I’m doing something like Pandora for the Avatar films I’m basing that on existing cultures and traditions. Plato was likely telling a parable that had meaning for his time and his society.

Did he draw on things that really happened? Absolutely. He was doing things that resonated with his audience and would have been familiar. Is there some thread of truth there? I think there must be. Our program tries to put that in perspective.

At the end of the show you did find some ancient artifacts. Did that give you pause that you found evidence of Atlantis?

Simcha did something interesting. He said, ‘Let’s follow the myth. We know there is some evidence of a major city offshore. What can we find that is evidence of a trading culture?’ There is very little evidence for a big trading civilization at that time period. This raises some eyebrows. But is it Atlantis? (Laughs) I’m putting my skeptic hat on back on for that one. We need to do a lot more investigation.

What I always wonder in your work is at what point does your documentary and scientific exploration inform your dramatic, artistic, work? Will we see echoes of Atlantis, for example, in the next Avatar sequels?

Probably not. The Avatar films are very specific about certain themes. In a very broad sense if you stand way back, Avatar is about human hubris and how we use up the resources of our world and try to take it over. Did the Atlanteans do something like that? I do know that pride goeth before a fall. I’ve got nuclear war in the Terminator films. You have the Titanic going into an iceberg where they thought they were lords over nature and had total dominion. The Avatar films are about our sense that we can dominate nature, when we should really learn to be a part of nature. Or we simply won’t survive. So there are thematic connections.

And again, I think Atlantis is this enduring myth around this great enigma. How could they have vanished without a trace? I certainly believe the Greek concept of hubris, when you think you know everything, that will precede your collapse. I see that happening now in our civilization. I see the need for a more enlightened approach to our integration and the natural world and our connectedness. . . . Right now everyone is isolating. The nations of the world are separating from a sense of community. Only through an international community are we going to solve problems like climate change which affect all of us. I see us heading for a precipice if we don’t change our ways.

You have a major theme park ready to launch and, of course, the sequels to Avatar. The last we heard was that there was to be a 2018 release. What can you tell us about the development so far?

Well, 2018 is not happening. We haven’t announced a firm release date. What people have to understand is that this is a cadence of releases. So we’re not making Avatar 2. We’re making Avatar 2, 3, 4 and 5. It’s an epic undertaking. It’s not unlike building the Three Gorges dam. (Laughs) So I know where I’m going to be for the next eight years of my life. It’s not an unreasonable time frame if you think about it. It took us four-and-a-half years to make one movie and now we’re making four. We’re full tilt boogie right now. This is my day job and pretty soon we’ll be 24-7. We’re pretty well designed on all our creatures and sets. It’s pretty exciting stuff. I wish I could share with the world. But we have to preserve a certain amount of showmanship and we’re going to draw that curtain when the time is right.

But there is a very high degree of enthusiasm at 20th Century Fox for these projects. And certainly here in house. We’re just loving it. We’re loving being able to immerse in this world in so much more detail than people can imagine. When you imagine what Avatar movies will be like from where we were. You won’t be able to imagine where we’re taking this. And for me, that’s the fun of getting to reveal it in it’s time.