by Janet Wilson
Photo: Official Avatar Movie photostream via FlickrHe’s made the highest grossing film on
the
planet, but Hollywood mega-director James Cameron is now promoting
“Avatar” as
the most successful environmental film of all time, too. Really.
“There is no studio anywhere
in the world who would say an environmental message would make $3 billion … I
can’t think of any other really commercially successful ones, can you?” he said
during an interview at a Santa Monica fundraiser last Monday for the
environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council.
“‘WALL-E’, maybe?” replied his
wife, actress Suzy Amis Cameron.
It was Amis Cameron who asked
an astonished, grateful NRDC if they would like her husband to appear at a quickly arranged
fundraiser starring Cameron and his sci-fi
blockbuster, which features a mother tree deity. The film is nominated in nine Oscar categories, after all, including
best director and best picture. Hooking
up with NRDC was, if you think about, perfectly natural.
Talking to a graduate film
student at the event, Cameron warmed to
his message that he’s the greatest enviro director, comparing his work to “An Inconvenient Truth,” which he called boring with bar charts. “If it wasn’t Al Gore, nobody would have listened,” he said, but then ruefully admitted
he made four semi-successful documentaries about the ocean before plunging into
“Avatar.”
“I wanted to do a film that
had a deeply embedded environmental message … but do it in the form of a science
fiction action adventure,” Cameron told local public radio host Elvis Mitchell.
“My feeling was if we have to go four light years away to another planet to
appreciate what we have here on earth, that’s okay.”
He wanted, he said, to pack
such an emotional wallop that by the time the film’s giant, sheltering tree is
felled, everyone in the theater would feel moral outrage. Further, after the
triumph of nature’s creatures over evil military contractors, he wanted the
audience to feel hopeful enough to do something.
“Avatar” may be the most
explicitly environmental film of Cameron’s oeuvre, but he insists he’s been
making them all his life, from a high school work entitled “The Extinction
Syndrome” to his obsession with nuclear
war fears à la the “Terminator” series.
Cameron’s environmental zeal started
early. Though he spent his childhood in a Canadian farm town, he earned his
scuba certification in a landlocked swimming pool. When he was 17, his family
moved to inland southern California,
but he homed in on the beach, surfing off Huntington and Laguna, then switching
to scuba diving.
In recent years he has done group
submersible dives, exploring and noting the slow degradation of coral reefs. Oceanic
influences infuse “Avatar’s” phosphorescent lighting and dreamlike landscapes.
The giant, whirly creatures that shrivel up when Sully taps them were based on
sea worms. He had a team of the planet’s best designers, Cameron said, but every
time they invented something spectacular, they found Mother Nature had done
something better.
Cameron seems pretty well positioned to take on right-wing
climate deniers, having made “The Terminator” for Fox when Rush Limbaugh was a
California cow town radio host. At the NRDC event, he refused to debate about
Fox News commentators, however, noting he works for a different division,
though he confirmed studio executives asked him to “tone down the tree-hugger
crap.” He refused, but art imitated studio life when Jake Sully, the contract
soldier who is the main character, says he hopes “all the tree-hugger crap”
he’s being exposed to “won’t be on the final.”
Tree hugging is not, Cameron
acknowledged, in the moviemaking industry’s genetic makeup, it being a carbon-intensive
process. But, he insists, his family’s
use of hybrid vehicles, fluorescent bulbs, and other sustainable products is his
way of making a difference. Okay sure, that should even things out.
It might have been an NRDC
event, but the mobs were vintage Hollywood, even if there were high schoolers
and Amazon River activists mixed in with the “Aliens” fans and wannabe filmmakers.
One man’s daughter had attended a birthday party for one of Cameron’s’ kids and
said he’d have his child slip a copy of his documentary on soil to Cameron’s
child to pass on to him. Have your girl
call my girl. We’ll do lunch.
I joined the mob, testing Cameron’s
green chops: Wind power (he’s a huge fan), clean coal (it doesn’t exist), the
failure of Obama and other world leaders at Copenhagen (agreed), cap-and-trade,
he was acquainted with them all, even a bit directa-torial in his opinions. But
he gave as good as he got. When I noted that acid rain was still spreading
despite cap-and-trade, he retorted that it’s not spreading as fast as it would
have. He asked what a better solution might be. Tough new regulations?
Fine, “I’m willing to engage
or indulge real ideas,” he said. “But if we don’t do something, we’re all going
to die! What’s it going to take, a big fucking disaster with all kinds of
people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.”
Cameron said he has been overwhelmed
with requests from environmental groups, and will probably do more events,
since his wife told him, “Maybe more than an opportunity, maybe there’s a duty
to try to use this film for whatever good can be brought to bear.”
He added, “The environmental
message maybe got lost earlier in all the talk about 3-D … It’s time to start
having that conversation more.”
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