James Cameron
H: Since you are the director, this comes out of your mind.
"Avatar" is... ?
J: Well, it's a big action adventure movie
that takes place on another planet, but it's more than that.
Because it's also got a love story in it
and some kind of deeply felt
kind of emotional moments in the film,
and it's also got a kind of environmental theme to it,
I think without being preachy,
but I think something
that people will be able to relate to these days
with everything that's going on right now.
H: You mentioned earlier a number of themes
that run through the film.
We'll talk about the environmental theme in just a second,
because I assume that was deliberate,
given that you were behind the project.
What also is fascinating for me about the project is
to your earlier point here in this "Avatar" film,
the humans are invading.
To my mind, at least, there's some interesting—
I'm trying to find the right word here—
some interesting commentary that you allow us,
force us to wrestle with about who we are as humans—
how we treat the planet,
how we treat other beings... J: Our fellow humans...
H: Exactly. Tell me more about that.
J: Well, yeah, I think that was deliberate,
and it was one of the themes that I wanted to explore in this.
And there are obviously references to Vietnam;
there are references to Iraq;
there are references to the American colonial period.
We've got a history, and not just America obviously.
We're talking about the French, the Spanish,
the English, the Portuguese—
of just kind of invading and taking what we need
and forcing out and marginalizing indigenous cultures,
and sometimes wiping them out completely to the point
that we don't have that many truly indigenous cultures
left in this world.
They're very very tiny and there's a few in the Amazon,
a few in Papua New Guinea.
Some of these languages are going extinct
almost on a daily basis, some of the dialects.
So we have a terrible history with this.
And I sort of extrapolated even farther,
to this idea of entitlement.
We do the same thing with nature—
we take what we need and we don't give back
and we've got to start giving back.
We've got to start seriously and aggressively
accepting our responsibility for stewardship of this planet.