Welcome to a special online edition of the treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell, and my guest is Avatar writer-director James Cameron.

The conversation was taped before a live audience at an event of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Watching this again, I mean, you talked about fear, and the movie works first and foremost, as all your movies do, on an incredibly primal level.

What do you do to get that across?

I mean, I think back to the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter of Mars, and Carson of Venus, which were about the white man's burden going in and conquering a land. And this is like a more humane take on all that. Right, right. Yeah, no, I mean, you have to create characters and you have to have the audience, you know, walk a mile in their shoes and really kind of know where they're coming from.

But it's more than that.

I mean, it's part of the reason I think people respond to this movie, the story aside, is in sheer filmmaking terms,

it's just like watching Ahab wrestle with the whale.

I mean, the audience really takes away on an instinctive level what you're working with.

And I wonder how conscious you are of that as a

filmmaker. Well, I think, you know, we're conscious that we needed to go beyond a normal

filmmaking experience. So we brought every bit of craft that we had available, plus we created some

new stuff in terms of the CG, in terms of the 3D, all of that, to just make it a feast for the eyes and draw people into the world.

And, you know, the 3D alone has the effect of drawing you through a window into an alternate reality.

But also, especially in watching the documents you've done, it's immersive very slowly.

I mean, the lights have even come up from the ground the way they do underwater. And it's really incredible the way you've done, it's immersive very slowly. I mean, the lysos even come up from the ground

the way they do underwater. And it's really incredible the way you've made an analog of the aquatic

world in visual terms. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, like I've spent an awful lot of time underwater

throughout my life. I learned to dive at a very early age. and then I was just a scuba freak.

I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater and then probably 500 hours in submersibles.

And so between the coral reef environments where you can see at a very, very tiny scale, things that we blew up to a macro scale in the film.

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