Cameron with Lucid Dreams

[JakeFanGirl]

This is a very nice long interview with James.

“Earth Day is exactly the right time to premiere the disks.” Cameron explains “I’m not trying to sort of sell DVDs on the back of the hardship of the planet as much as I’m hoping that continued conversation around AVATAR and around the needs and the issues will actually kind of elevate consciousness and help us to get the things done that need to get done. That’s kind of my new mission.”
He continues, “I actually almost see it as an opportunity for AVATAR to be helpful as opposed to for things to help AVATAR. My wife said ‘Honey, this is more than an opportunity here, this is a duty, a responsibility.’ I’ve always been an environmental activist, but I’m going to a whole other level now.”

Cameron and Landau emphasize that on the DVD you will find “purely movie.” Because of the length of the movie, any extraneous material takes down the bit rate, degrading the image quality. He jokes “I have this unwritten deal with Fox that anytime any one of my movies makes more than a billion dollars, they leave all the crap trailers off.

A character in itself, the lush and inviting rainforest of Pandora beckoned audiences back to the theaters. Cameron feared that if the rainforest looked too alien. It could be off-putting to audiences. So he decided to “have the rainforest look more like we would expect a rainforest to look here on Earth with some exotic plants and then at night, it transitions into a much more alien looking place.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this film,” says Cameron, “and maybe why it’s connected to people so much, and I’ve kind of realized that what I was trying to do was create dream imagery, create a lucid dream state while you’re watching the film. I think that most people dream of flying at some point and when we’re kids we dream of flying and I certainly did, and still have a lot of flying dreams and I thought that if I can connect to an audience, to a kind of collective unconscious in almost the Jungian sense, then it bypasses all the politics and all the bull****, and all the culturally specific stuff and all the language specific stuff around the world and connects us all to that kind of childhood, dreamlike state when the world was magical and infinite and scary and cool and you could soar. So that was the concept behind these scenes. And for me, personally, this was the part of the movie that I like the best, that I can watch over and over again.”

“I think there’s a real opportunity here,” says Cameron, “around the, you know, slightly elevated consciousness around a movie that’s a piece of entertainment and I have no illusions about an entertainment movie saving the world or anything like that, but I do think that people are thinking about this and they’re talking about it and they’re emotionally open to it… I think that not only is there opportunity for me personally around this movie, I think it’s almost coming at me as a duty or responsibility to take advantage of this moment. And it’s not about trying to make more money for AVATAR, it’s trying to leverage the good that could be created out of AVATAR, if you will. And it may even work against making more money for AVATAR, I don’t care, y’know?

Cameron with Lucid Dreams as Avatar Blu-ray Bows on Earth Day 4/22 | Hollywood Today