Posts Tagged ‘jon landau’
James Cameron’s Avatar has surpassed $2.35 billion worldwide, and keeps on going. A sequel is almost definite, but won’t be seen on the big screen for a couple of years, at very least. But that doesn’t mean we have to wait until 2012 or 2013 to return to Pandora. Producer Jon Landau revealed to MTV that Cameron plans to write a novel set within the world created in Avatar, a prequel to the story of the film. The plan is to get the book in stores by the end of the year.
Here is what Landau said:
“It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn’t have time to deal with — like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake’s brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that.”
The photo above is from one of the deleted scenes from the movie that was actually shot on future earth (read more about it on marketsaw). Cameron’s original 114-page scriptment almost reads like a novel, and contained a lot more information about life in the 22nd century.
According to the treatment, population of Earth has tripled, and the planet is dying due to a combination os “overpopulation, over- development, nuclear terrorism, environmental warfare tactics, radiation leakage from power plants and waste dumps, toxic waste, air pollution, deforestation, pollution and overfishing of the oceans, global warming, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity through extinction” The scriptment explains that the human race has learned to keep itself alive, but has “lost almost all contact with the natural world, which it has strangled and crushed out of existence.” The United States is covered with cities, crowded and gray, described as “a cross between THX-1138 and a Calcutta train station.” National Parks no longer exist. Jake (named “Josh” in this earlier draft) lives in a “tiny cubicle of an apartment in a vast government housing project” in a small room “reminiscent of a cell at a federal prison”. Paralyzed due to his involvement in “a stupid little war people barely remember,” Jake is described as “a hopeless guy in a hopeless world.” Sully’s brother Thomas died in a Boston subway fire, one of over 100 people asphyxiated in the not-so-unusual accident. Of course, none of this is explained in the theatrical film.
And that is just a bit of the information revealed in the first page or two. I would love to hear more about the world of Pandora, and find out what became of Jake’s brother Tommy, and the future of our home planet, Earth.
During the press junket events for Avatar in London last week, I was lucky enough to get 15 minutes chatting with Jon Landau. That full interview is available as a video below the break.
Landau was the film’s producer and is James Cameron’s partner in Lightstorm Entertainment. Should Cameron go ahead with Avatar 2 next, or maybe even Battle Angel Alita, the one collaborator we can guarantee will be by his side is Landau. Indeed, the producer must already know a great deal more about those projects than he could ever tell. Of course, that doesn’t stop him dropping the odd tantalising hint.
Here’s the video. I’ve been using YouTube lately to host my videos for /Film but I used Vimeo this time to get a running time of over ten minutes without having to split the clip.
So tell me… is fifteen minutes a good running time for something like this? Or would you like longer pieces?
You’ll probably agree that junket interviews tend towards a repetitive and characterless nature, though I should say this is through no fault of the subjects or interviewers. Landau must have spoken to a good number of people that day and it was very unlikely he’d be able to get any real idea of the flavour, style, interests and intent of each of these people’s outlets. As such, you might sense that some of the earlier questions in this video lead towards concise and soundbite-friendly answers that would work on any kind of website. Going onward, though, I think we managed to break out of that somewhat and hopefully created something more suitable to /Film’s informed and inquisitive readers.
Don’t forget that both David and myself published our own personal reviews of Avatar here on the site last week.
The World Premiere of James Cameron’s Avatar is set for December 10th, just 20 days from now but as of Wednesday, “around 30 minutes of the movie remain incomplete”. Cause for concern?
According to Jon Landau, the film’s producer, the scenes need work ranging from sound mixing through colour timing along to visual effects. What isn’t clear is how many minutes of FX work need to be locked, and how much of that floating half hour is requiring the more final post production polish only.
Landau’s big argument, though is that on a film like Avatar, there’s ” little meaningful difference between principal photography and special effects” - that’s The Wall Street Journal paraphrasing him, but the point stands. There really weren’t any non-FX shots, so of course the schedule will include FX work down to the wire. Imagine the editing room a couple of weeks from completion on a Pixar film - it’s not film editing their doing, but image rendering and sound mixing. The cutting on films so heavily CG reliant needs to be done at an earlier stage.
Marketsaw have reported that Weta have completed their work on the film. If that’s true, it indicates another reason to be sit back and be cool.
Besides the New Zealand masters there are six other FX houses working on the film which proves an awareness in the production that the load needed to be shared. Once again, nothing that alarms me.
For me, the key quote in the article comes when Landau says “Every shot we get back raises the standard for what follows”.
If that’s true, and I’m happy to take it on face value, then I find it hugely encouraging. Even under the big Fox gun and up against the tyranny of a rapidly approaching release date, the production are feeling inspired by their own work. They like what they see, and they want to keep their standards on an upwards curve. Isn’t that what we want our filmmakers to be like?
Another juicy nugget at the foot of the article claims that “Mr. Cameron and a business partner also covered some of those costs out of their own pockets”, further compounding the filmmaker’s faith in what they’re creating.
The article tells us that the film is expected to run between 2hrs 30 and 40, before credits. This error margin almost certainly won’t be down to unfinished assemblies of individual scenes, for reasons I explained above, but because of the possibility of whole scenes being left in or pushed out.
I’m as excited as the next man to see Avatar, but having read about this last month post production sprint, I’m jealous of the buzz that must be racing through the film’s post production team.
Jon Landau has collaborated with James Cameron in producing both Titanic and Avatar and, with a bit of luck and a following wind, will go on and collaborate with him further in the future. But on which projects, exactly? Talking to the French magazine Le Film, Landau has given some indication of which pictures Cameron is planning to tackle next: his long awaited manga adaptation Battle Angle Alita, underwater romance The Dive and even a sequel to Avatar.
After the break, how Landau pitched the premise for that follow-up to this year’s most hyped movie.
Of course, he didn’t say much but Landau did offer a tantalising hint of what premise the sequel might have. Here’s my translation:
If the public likes Avatar, it’s a possibility. After all, here we are exploring the surface of the planet Pandora. The interior remains to be seen.
Beneath the Planet of the Na’vi, anyone? Yes please.
Cameron has definitely spent a lot of time on painstakingly creating an ecosystem for his fictional world. If it truly is holistic, then he must already have some idea of what lurks beneath the crust.
This is all dependent on Avatar being a suitably successful picture, of course… but what ’suitably successful’ means for a film with such a mammoth budget, I don’t know and can hardly dare guess. Will he have to outdo his own Titanic smash? Is that even possible?
Here’s Landau on the other two projects, both of which are talked about as though set in stone, though I’ve learned the hard way to never trust such promises, especially in translation:
We’ll go on to Battle Angel Alita and The Dive, a love story in the middle of a dive. James is directing both projects.
Beautiful. I’m assuming The Dive will be one of his tank-based projects with actors submerged below real water, far away from the relative comfort of the motion-capture ‘volume’. He must be craving a bit of physical danger round about now, surely?
Via French Premiere (story one and story two).
