Yahoo News James Cameron on fighting for Avatar 2 's 3-hour runtime: 'There was a lot of tension'
From death defying stunts to mindbending special effects, Avatar: The Way of Water presented a number of challenges for director James Cameron. But according to the filmmaker, time was one of his greatest obstacles.
"I think there was a lot of tension around length," Cameron tells EW of the film's runtime. "And because it's a complicated linear narrative, which is the worst scenario for trying to shorten, you've got a complex story servicing a lot of characters, and it's like dominos falling: This has to happen for that to happen. You're not following a bunch of parallel plot lines in a way that you could take a lot out."
Solving that puzzle "was our bête noire for about a year," Cameron says of the balancing act between "keeping engagement" and "preserving beauty."
20th Century Studios Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) finds a new kind of mount in 'Avatar: The Way of Water.'
"The hardest thing when you're trying to shorten a film is to hold onto the things that don't advance the plot, that are beautiful or scary or suspenseful for their own sake," explains the director. Cameron wavered on what to include throughout the editing process, saying, "Things came out, and then if I felt the pacing was off, we put things back in."
Cameron has been tinkering with the sequel's story for over a decade. Originally slated for release in 2014, Avatar 2 has faced delays due to technological restraints (filming performance-capture scenes underwater had never been done before), but the director has also long cited storytelling challenges as one of the biggest holdups to release. When The Way of Water was delayed in 2016, the director pointed to a "very involved" writing process with co-writers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa as part of the explanation. "There's a layer of complexity in getting the story to work as a saga across three films that you don't get when you're making a stand-alone film," he told the Associated Press at the time.
Mark Fellman/Twentieth Century Fox Cameron working on 2009's 'Avatar'
Initially pitched to 21st Century Fox as a three-hour movie, Cameron tells EW he felt "morally obligated" not to change the length when the studio was acquired by Disney in 2019. Still, the director notes, "Equally important with length is pace — and the order of information and the engagement factor. As long as people are engaged, you're good to go."
Years of hard work and hundreds of millions of dollars later, Cameron feels confident The Way of Water will hold audiences' attention for its full runtime. "I feel like we managed to jump through all those hoops," he says. "People seem pretty engaged."
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