Avatar: Fire and Ash director James Cameron shares how this film about loss helped him process his "true grief"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

James Cameron operates at the kind of scale usually reserved for plagues and empires. For instance, for his latest “very expensive” Avatar sequel, Fire and Ash, to be considered successful, “I don’t have to affect every single person on the planet,” he says, modestly. “I only need about 3 per cent.”

If you’re wondering, that equates to about 240 million people: over three times the population of the UK. And if they all buy a ticket for $10 each, then that translates to a gross of $2.4 billion: placing it in the top three highest-grossing films of all time. “It is the stupidest business model in the world,” he laughs. “We’ve made a movie that fails if it’s not in the top ten in history. That’s ludicrous, right?”

Ludicrous for most directors, perhaps. But not James Cameron. This is the man who directed the 1997 phenomenon Titanic, a blockbuster so over budget that at one point it looked as though it would sink his career.

Instead, it became the highest-grossing film of all time. And then there’s 2009’s Avatar. Back then, it was a baffling prospect: a surreal 3D science-fiction extravaganza made almost entirely on a virtual soundstage, about a distant planet of blue aliens called the Na’vi. It overtook Titanic to became the highest-grossing film of all time.

And yet, even by Cameron’s standards, the 71-year-old director admits that he has played a “dangerous game” with his two Avatar sequels, which were filmed back to back in New Zealand. “That was a big bet,” he says. “Because we had to assume that the second film would be successful enough to warrant the finishing of the third.” The first sequel, The Way of Water, was released in 2022 amidst scepticism as to whether audiences still cared about Avatar. It grossed $2.3 billion: placing it in the top three highest-grossing films of all time. More than enough to justify this third instalment, Fire and Ash.

Avatar’s status as a worldwide phenomenon is often attributed to its spectacle. The CGI alien world of Pandora, the home planet of the Na’vi, is so astonishingly vivid that in 2010, CNN reported that some fans had developed “post-Avatar depression syndrome”, a condition caused by how unsatisfying the real world felt in comparison. While the Na’vi, in the words of Cameron, “might be ten feet tall, blue and have cat ears and tails, but they’re almost more expressive than we are.” A marvel achieved through groundbreaking performance capture technology: the kind that allows the 76-year-old Sigourney Weaver to play a 14-year-old alien girl.

But Cameron, speaking to RT from his office in New Zealand, his voice a soft Canadian drawl, prefers to attribute Avatar’s appeal to the universal theme of family. The director has been married five times – most recently to former actor Suzy Amis in 2000 – and has five children.

Notably, that’s the same number of kids as the series’ lead character, Jake Sully (played by Aussie actor Sam Worthington). A paraplegic human marine who had his consciousness transferred to a synthetic Na’vi body (known as an Avatar) after falling in love with Na’vi warrior Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), Jake has now settled down and is primarily concerned with protecting his family.

“These films have to sit at the top of the pyramid in terms of revenues,” says Cameron. “So I was like, ‘All right, how can I cast as wide an emotional net as possible?’ I’m a father. Every adult has parents. Everyone is part of a family. This is going to be a family story. But it’s not going to be a family story like a Disney story where the dog dies. It’s going to be a family that gets challenged, that gets ripped apart, that goes to dark places.”

Hence – spoiler alert – the death of Jake and Neytiri’s first-born son Neteyam at the end of The Way of Water, where the teenager is killed during a battle with the antagonistic colonial forces of humanity.

“Grief is often used in commercial film-making as a motivator for people to lay waste to the bad guys,” says Cameron, explaining how the loss continues to haunt the characters during Fire and Ash. “But there never seems to be a real heartfelt consequence to it, the way there is in the real world.”

Grief is a theme that is especially pronounced for Cameron. Last year the director lost his close friend Jon Landau, his dedicated producing partner of more than 30 years, during the production of Fire and Ash. Landau had worked on all the Avatar films – in fact, RT interviewed him in 2022 for the last movie.

“We’ve all had to process our true grief while making a movie about loss,” says Cameron. “In a funny way, it’s been cathartic.” In his younger days, like when Cameron and Landau were steering Titanic, the director had a reputation for being a cranky perfectionist. But today he cuts a more reflective figure. “I’ve had a lot of loss in my own personal life in the last ten years,” he says. “Friends, my brother, my parents. You realise that it’s an inescapable part of life, just like your own mortality. It’s never easy and it never goes away.”

Just like Cameron, Jake and Neytiri find that life does not stop for grief. A few weeks after the death of Neteyam, their family is tested by the emergence of an aggressive Na’vi tribe called the Ash, led by Oona Chaplin’s vengeful Varang. The volcano-dwelling Ash people act as a counterpoint to Jake’s adopted Metkayina clan (a nautical tribe led by matriarch Ronal, played by Kate Winslet).

They are also intended to explore, as Cameron explains, whether, “humanity has contaminated the purity of the Na’vi culture.” A complex question with profound consequences for Neytiri, “who becomes what you could only refer to as racist,” says Cameron. “I want to challenge the audience.”

Fire and Ash is technically the midpoint in an ambitious five-part film series. But Cameron has also built in a fail-safe: he has designed the series so that its first three films feel like a complete trilogy. “If it all ends with this film that’s OK,” he says. “Because it’s not a cliffhanger ending. It all resolves in a very satisfying way.”

If they do happen, he says, the fourth and fifth Avatar films will involve a six-year time jump and would feature Neytiri making her way to a dystopian Earth. The scripts are written (“they’re pretty good!”), and a portion of Avatar 4 has been filmed, but for now their fate depends on the box-office performance of Fire and Ash.

“I would love to make those movies,” says Cameron, sounding uncharacteristically cautious. “But I’m a bit more pessimistic than I normally would have been.” His fear is that the media landscape has changed. “Cinema has become a few selected films that people believe will be an experience that’s worth leaving their homes for,” he says. “Post-Covid and post-streaming, it’s a depressed industry right now. And it doesn’t seem to be bouncing back.”

For Cameron, Fire and Ash represents a crossroads. Will he be spending his 70s making two more Avatar movies? Or will he concentrate instead on projects such as The Last Train to Hiroshima, his mooted adaptation of Charles R Pellegrino’s book about a Japanese man who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings?

“We’ll look at it when the dust settles,” says Cameron. “I have no doubts about Fire and Ash as a film. We’ve done test screenings. People cry. I’ve achieved my goals, artistically. If this one falls on its ass, it’s going to be because of forces beyond my control.”

The stakes are big, the odds are long; but if there’s one inviolable rule of modern Hollywood, it’s that you don’t bet against James Cameron.

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Avatar: Fire and Ash is set for release on Friday 19th December 2025.

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