Cameron reveals Avatar sequel script plans

Filmmaker shares Avatar sequel script plans and his insights into the challenges of finding missing flight MS370

James Cameron revealed on Saturday how things were going on the widely anticipated sequels to Avatar in an ‘Ask Me Anything’ interview with the Reddit community.

“The second, third and fourth films all go into production simultaneously,” the director told Reddit user ‘AvatarFanatic.’ “They’re essentially all in pre-production now because we are designing creatures, settings and characters that span all three films. And we should be finished with all three scripts within the next, I would say, six weeks.”

“There’s always pressure, whether it’s a new film or whether it’s a sequel, to entertain and amaze an audience,” he added. “I’ve felt that pressure my entire career, so there’s nothing new there. The biggest pressure I feel right now is cutting out things I love to get the film down to a length that is affordable. There hasn’t been a problem finding new and wonderful things to include in the movie.”

Cameron dished on numerous other topics, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leonardo DiCaprio and his hardest movie to film. One Reddit user asked how he would go about finding the missing Malaysian Airlines plane.

sonofashoe: “Given your experience with submersibles, do you have any insight into the challenges of finding flight MS370?”

Cameron: “Well, I know how it will be done. If these pings that they’re receiving are confirmed as being from the flight recorders, then they’ll triangulate the acoustic data that they have so far, and they’ll generate what’s called a search box. I don’t know how big that will be, but it might be 25-30 miles on a side, it might be a very large piece of ocean. Then there are a suite of tools that can operate at the kind of depth we’re talking about, I believe between 4,000-5,000 metres. My ultra-deep submersible would not be required at those levels, that’s half of the level it’s designed for. The next step would be to use an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle, and have it run at 400 or 500 feet above the bottom and do a sonar profile of the bottom, it does that by running a search pattern, kind of like mowing the lawn.

That takes days or weeks to do. Then you analyze any signatures that are anomalous, that don’t look like flat bottom, and you say are those rocks, is that geology or does that look like the piece of an aircraft? And then once you have those targets, you know where they are on the bottom, then you go back, either with that type of vehicle or an ROV (a remotely operated vehicle) that would be hanging down from a ship on a cable. And you’d take a look essentially with a videocamera. And then you’d be able to identify whether that target was in fact the aircraft you are looking for. So that’s how it would be done. But it all hinges on whether or not those pings are actually from the black box, and not from something else, like a scientific instrument that’s drifted off course or whatever.”