“You don’t really expect scenes like that in a blockbuster”: James Cameron, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington, Stephen Lang and Oona Chaplin on Avatar – Fire and Ash
At the European press conference for Avatar: Fire and Ash, James Cameron and his cast showed little interest in discussing the film’s scale, budget or ambition. Instead, the conversation repeatedly returned to grief, family fracture and the emotional consequences of survival – a clear insistence that the third Avatar film, due for release on 19th December, is less about escalation than about aftermath.
Cameron framed the film as a continuation of concerns that have always underpinned the series. The world of Pandora, he suggested, exists to hold ideas that are fundamentally human. “I want to deal with things that are kind of universal in human experience – family, identity, purpose, duty to your family, duty to your community,” he said. With Fire and Ash, those themes sharpen through the children of Jake and Neytiri, who are now old enough to grapple with belonging themselves. The movie, he added, reframes the Sullys as a displaced family – “essentially immigrants” – forced to renegotiate who they are after loss.
That emotional focus, Cameron suggested, is sustained by an unusually long and intimate creative process. “I pass the baton,” he stated, turning to the actors, “It’s up to you to bring that character to life.” What follows is not a brief shoot but years of shared labour. The Way of Water and Fire and Ash were developed side by side, with the cast working together for around 18 months. “The conflict is between the characters, not between the people behind the characters,” Cameron said, describing a working environment built on trust.
For Oona Chaplin, a new addition to the franchise as Varang, that atmosphere was immediately tangible. Walking into her first table read, she recalled, “the room felt thick with family – it was a space where people were trusting each other and encouraging each other and challenging each other.”
Sigourney Weaver, returning once again in the radically different role of Kiri, spoke about how that environment enabled one of the most demanding performances of her career. Playing a teenager required her to revisit a vulnerable emotional state, but Cameron’s approach made the risk feel supported rather than exposed. He “gives us such a feeling of safety and encouragement in exploring every aspect of a scene,” she said – an approach that allowed her not simply to act young, but to reconnect with that inner space authentically.
Zoe Saldaña focused on the physicality of Neytiri, a character who processes experience through instinct rather than reflection. “She feels first,” Saldaña said, describing scenes of grief as “very traumatic to shoot”. Sam Worthington expanded on how unusual that vulnerability is within a film of this scale. Pointing to scenes of marital strain and morally difficult choices involving the children, he noted that “you don’t really expect scenes like that in a blockbuster”. Yet those moments, he argued, are essential. Without them, the spectacle would be weightless. The feature’s visual enormity, he suggested, only works because it is tethered to emotional consequence.
The hardest day of the shoot, Cameron recalled, was filming a death that underpins much of Fire and Ash. The atmosphere on set was subdued, almost reverent. What emerged was something “primal” and “shocking” – not because of its scale, but because of its restraint. The new film, Cameron said, is shaped by what comes after that moment: “It’s a movie about grief; it’s a movie about loss; it’s a movie about trauma; it’s a movie about how you heal and how you go forward; how you pick up your pack and you march on, and how you break the cycle of violence that is created by the hatred that comes from that loss, and we’re seeing that playing out in the world today.”
Christina Yang
Avatar: Fire and Ash is released nationwide on 19th December 2025.
Watch the trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash here:
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