‘Avatar’ Director Emphasizes Environmental Message
By MICHAEL CIEPLY“I was asked to sort of tone it down,” the director James Cameron said on Monday evening.
He was referring to the blatant call to environmental activism that is just beneath the adventure-story surface of his science-fiction epic “Avatar.” The revelation came during a fund-raiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council — held on the lot of 20th Century Fox, whose executives, he said, were nervous about the preachy element in his blockbuster.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ ” Mr. Cameron said, recalling his response to the executives’ request. The subject came up during a question-and-answer session with the film critic Elvis Mitchell, after a screening of clips from the film.
To some extent, this may have been a bit of Oscar campaigning.
The ballots are still out, and with “The Hurt Locker” racking up awards from various guilds and professional organizations (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts honored it over the weekend), Mr. Cameron was promoting “Avatar” as a movie with a message.
Speaking to several hundred Hollywood types and others at the fund-raiser, the silver-haired director — in jeans, a sport coat, and a turtleneck — said he had deliberately designed “Avatar” to move the masses with a kind of emotional appeal that documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth” and his own undersea adventures could never deliver. “I wanted to have these messages of opening our eyes and changing our perceptions,” he said.
Mr. Cameron cited climate change as a major concern. “All the climate scientists in the world have pretty much locked arms on this thing,” he said.
For his own part, Mr. Cameron said he was proudly anticorporate, though not anti-American. “It’s the nature of business, it’s the nature of all the economies of the last thousand years,” he said, to “just take” what they want.
“ ‘Avatar’ asks us all to be warriors for the earth,” he continued.
Still, he acknowledged, not everyone had bought the movie’s message in its entirety. “Right-wingers,” he said, had criticized the film, often without seeing it.
Then there was an Ecuadorian tribal leader who, having watched the movie, took issue with its seeming insistence on armed resistance, rather than mere dialogue, in defense of the environment.
“This movie needed a better message,” Mr. Cameron recalled being told by the elder.
“Wow!” he added. “I’ve been schooled.”
