James Cameron on finding an actor to play an armored alien whale and how creating Avatar: The Way Of Water is like Jenga

As its title suggests, Avatar: The Way Of Water introduces audiences to elements of Pandora they haven’t seen before; specifically, the planet’s oceans and the seafaring Na’vi clans that call them home. The Way Of Water also introduces audiences to the tulkuns, an intelligent and friendly whale-like ally of the Na’vi. Though the telkuns don’t exactly speak English (or Na’vi), they can still communicate with their blue cat-like friends, which we see when Jake Sully and Neytiri’s son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) befriends Payakan, a telkun loner.

While the subtitles (and in fact the whole body of Payakan) were added in post-production, Dalton still had a bit more to work with than, say, Emilia Clarke and her “dragons.” As director James Cameron shared at a screening in New York City last night, a member of the Avatar acting troupe pretended to be a whale while they shot Dalton’s mocap.

“We have an acting troupe that surrounds our key cast, and they fill in. They’ll play members of the crowd, or—they’ll wear many, many hats. I think Kevin [Dorman], we counted 22 or 23 characters that he plays in this film, and there are other members of this troupe that do similar things. So Kevin put his hand up to play Payakan, and I said ‘Just vocalize the way you think Payakan might vocalize. It won’t necessarily be that in the end, but express your emotion.’ Lo’ak is mostly talking to Payakan’s eye, so Kevin would just get where Payakan’s eye is supposed to be and go ‘[whale noise],’” Cameron told the audience to laughter. “It sounds kind of dumb, but it’s the consensus, right? Britain was there, and he’d be balling, he’d be pleading with him, and there’s scenes yet to come, beyond what’s in this film, but they’ve formed a relationship. It’s about letting your relationship put you there emotionally.”

Emotional resonance in the film was something that Cameron, as well as stars Sam Worthington (Jake Sully) and Stephen Lang (Colonel Miles Quaritch), stressed throughout their conversation.

“I’m a pretty logical person, so when I’m writing I get hung up on logic, and I gotta justify everything and set it all up. And we go through the shooting process, and then the editing process, and I wind up taking a lot of things out,” Cameron shared. “And I realize… it’s like that game where you can keep pulling things out, and the tower doesn’t fall down… it’s like Jenga! When you’re cutting the movie… it’s not about length as much as about speed and the progression of ideas. You keep taking things out, and my logical brain keeps saying ‘How are they going to understand that?’ But you do, because you feel it.”

“It starts right at the beginning, with that blank page,” Cameron continued. “We challenged ourselves at the beginning to figure out, ‘How did that first film work again?’ Because it really hit every culture and every language group across all different cultures around the world. It had to have been at some universal level of the human heart, and we tried to quantify it before we even started writing, because we didn’t want to miss that. Science fiction sometimes is a fiction of ideas… sometimes, not always, sometimes it lacks heart, so we really put an extra emphasis on that in the writing process.”

For his part, Lang appreciated exploring new depths in Quaritch that weren’t necessarily in the first Avatar. “He had a strong sense of loyalty and mission; he had laudable qualities, but emotionally, I think he had long cauterized those feelings away,” the actor reflected. “Here, now, in this new incarnation, I think that Jim has introduced the possibility of depth of feeling for him. That there actually is something there, and I think that this is something that is probably confusing for the character, and something that he’s probably not willing to fully acknowledge.” One scene, in particular, comes when (minor spoiler) the resurrected Avatar-Quaritch finds the human-Quaritch’s skeleton in the Pandora jungle and crushes its skull—a scene that Cameron revealed was actually the actor’s idea.

“We’re only confined by the limits of what we can imagine. Jim creates this imaginary world and then we film it with all our tech gear on,” Worthington shared. “It’s basically just a blank space, but we have to fill in the gaps between the blank space and the imaginary world that Jim has come up with.”

A pivotal scene in the film comes when Jake and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) decide to leave their jungle home and search for safety elsewhere in Pandora—a scene that Cameron and Worthington say was emblematic of this kind of process. Saldana and Worthington improvised a scene to get into the emotional headspace before they got into the words on the page. “We started minutes ahead of time,” Cameron said. “It was just like ‘Okay, it’s a husband, it’s a wife, you guys are in the kitchen, taking.’”

“We did the scene, emotional beats are popping up like you want, you’re truthfully starting to settle into the scene,” Worthington continued. Thanks to the mocap process, the characters and the sets come and even the camera angles come after filming, prompting the trio to compare filming the actual scenes to black-box theater. “Months later—this is where the genius comes in—months later, Jim talks to me on set, and goes, ‘That scene… I could play that conventionally, but I think I want to see it from the kids’ point of view. Yes, it’s great work what you guys did, but I’m gonna also see it from the outside, and hear it from the outside,’” Worthington continued. “So now, to me, that’s great storytelling, because you’re seeing how the family and how the emotion of the family ripples.”

Avatar: The Way Of Water is now in theaters.