《阿凡达》导演詹姆斯．卡梅隆访谈录

The making of 'Avatar' is a story of trial and error. Director James Cameron created the film's planet Pandora in a completely digital environment and developed new cameras and methods for capturing and transferring his actors' performances into believable computer-generated creations. It took three years before Mr. Cameron saw one completed shot that he liked.

No stranger to challenge, Mr. Cameron has long pushed at the boundaries of production design and visual effects-as seen in 'The Abyss' and 'Titanic'-but Hollywood and the media often jeered at his risk-taking and high budgets. Now that the Oscar-nominated 'Avatar' has become the biggest box-office hit of all time, with more than $2.5 billion in ticket sales worldwide, the filmmaker hopes that people will shift their focus from the movie's cost and technology and instead take a closer look at its pro-environment and spiritual themes-ideas that the director says are close to his heart.

Mr. Cameron recently sat down with The Wall Street Journal to discuss the making of 'Avatar' and the implications of making such big Hollywood hits.

WSJ: There's a saying that films aren't finished, they're abandoned. Is 'Avatar' the movie you first envisioned in your head?

Mr. Cameron: This movie exceeded my expectations and at the same time was pried out of our fingers because of time. We had a release date and a thousand shots to complete in the last month. You get very, very narrowly focused-laser-fine-when dealing with it on a shot-by-shot basis. Now when I see the film in its entirety, all of my little concerns have gone away because in the flow, it works just fine.

WSJ: You've described the filmmaking process as trench warfare. When you're making a movie if you're not in some way feeling tested every day-if it is easy-do you feel uncomfortable?

Mr. Cameron: Well, I've never done an easy movie, so I don't know what that would feel like. It's not that I try to find ways to make it hard, it's just that I go after goals that are by definition difficult. And I think that my crew loves that. I think they love the challenge-they know that they're going to be doing their personal best on the film and I know that it is going to be a personal best moment for me. I want to try and challenge myself beyond what I've done before. It makes it hard, it makes it stressful, but I find that I work best under stress. I work best at the solving of real-time problems that couldn't be anticipated. Maybe in another life I could have been an ER triage guy.

WSJ: Does it frustrate you that the media is often quick to focus on the technology and the budgets of your films rather than the story lines?

Mr. Cameron: It's not frustrating because I'm communicating directly with a global audience and the global audience is telling me what I need to know, which is that communication has been successful. The media kind of gets it wrong in the sense that they only tell part of the story. They tell the story of the form, not the content. They talk about the 3-D and the visual effects. But the audience isn't connecting to the movie…because of the 3-D or because of the visual effects. They're connecting because the whole thing works for them as an emotional, cathartic experience.

The Wall Street Journal: One of the reoccurring motifs in your work is the use of 'James Cameron blue,' an icy blue light that fills many of your scenes. In 'Avatar,' for instance, when Jake Sully goes into the avatar pod, he's illuminated by the blue light before transforming into a blue alien. Is there any significance to this blue?

James Cameron: I guess I just like the color blue. I mean it's the color of night, it's the color of the ocean and as a scuba diver I've spent a lot of time looking into the deep blue, the pelagic blue. It's just a gorgeous color and it's a great accent color for the human face. Now, doing blue characters was interesting because it turns out you can't light them like you would light human skin. We had to use green light as an accent color. We had to figure out how to light the blue skin, to make blue faces beautiful. It took a bit of testing to work that out.

WSJ: Have you thought about channeling the environmental message in 'Avatar' into some kind of organization or initiative?

Mr. Cameron: I think there's an opportunity here. And I don't mean an opportunity for a business perspective or in some kind of mercenary way. Actually, my wife expressed it best because she's very tuned into environmental causes. She said, 'You don't only have an opportunity, you have a duty,' which is actually kind of interesting. Everybody looks for a cause or a duty, I think. And maybe this is my mission, in a sense, that I can take this fantasy, this crazy fantasy that takes place on another planet, and somehow use it to raise awareness, raise funds and focus people's energy.

WSJ: Can you watch your older films and enjoy them?

Mr.Cameron: Yeah. I watch 'Terminator', which was made for $4 million below the line, in 1984. It was my first film, and I see every mistake, every hang-nail in the whole picture, but I still appreciate it as a piece of story telling. Then I get to the later films, probably 'T2' on, and I see the technique that still holds up. But we get constantly better. So it's actually hard to watch the old films because I'm like, 'I could do that so much better now.'