Hello pod, I'm Chris Youid and welcome to a brand new Empire podcast format.

To tie in with our Empire 30, hashtag Empire 30, birthday celebrations, we will be bringing

you across the year a series of podcast documentaries or if you will, pod

youmentaries about key films in the careers of some of our Empire 30, sorry,

hashtag Empire 30 filmmakers. And frankly, there's no better way to kick things off than with this

look back at the biggest movie of all time, Avatar featuring a man who made it, writer-director,

James Cameron. Now, what you're about to hear has been drawn together from a series of

interviews Empire conducted with Cameron over the years. Shortly before the film is released in

2009, Len and the phone in 2010, following its incredibly successful launch. And most recently,

in a hotel room in London, where I sat down and had a good old matter to him about all things Pandora.

So there might be some variation in sound quality, the archive interviews were not recorded for a

podcast, of course, but we feel what Cameron said and then was too good to leave out here. We hope

you enjoy. In the end, James Cameron's future came down to the toss of a coin. A metaphorical coin

granted not the kind you'd have any joy with down the shops, but a coin nonetheless. It was 2005.

Eight years had elapsed since Titanic had made the Canadian director, the King of the World,

bagging 11 Oscars and 1.8 billion dollars worldwide, making it the biggest movie of all time.

And since then, Cameron had largely swapped the director's chair for, amongst other things,

a cramped seat in a bathy sphere. He had called the shots in a couple of documentaries to showcase

his new passion for deep-sea diving, but not so much in the way of actual movies.

However, he had been beaving away on two major projects, and now the time had come to choose.

Heads was a manga adaptation called Battle Angel. Tales, a little sci-fi movie by the name of

Avatar. Cameron happened to fellow beam book projects for a while, anxious to explore the next frontier

...