James Cameron explains “the true spirituality of Avatar” to Marianne Williamson

Marianne Williamson gained a reputation for being kinda hippy-dippy out there on the campaign trail. Sounds like James Cameron is right there with her.

Marianne Williamson has a long career as an activist and self-help guru, but she really blew up while running for president in 2019. She got attention during the Democratic primary debates by warning of “dark psychic forces” and generally being pretty out there in a way people didn’t know whether to take as charming or alarming.

Her days as a presidential candidate are over, but she still has her self-help empire, and that includes a podcast. Just the other week, none other than James Cameron stopped by to talk about his work on the forthcoming Avatar sequels. (Apparently Williamson is a huge fan of the original movie; she fan-girls pretty hard at several point throughout the interview. Now that she’s on a podcast and not running for president, I think I can safely find it endearing.)

To start, Cameron talked about the process of coming up with ideas for the new movies. “I said ‘I don’t want to hear anybody’s new ideas or anybody’s pitches until we have spent some time figuring out what worked in the first film. What connected and why it worked.’”

And so the director screened the original film and talked about it with his team. They concluded that the basic plot worked and that the themes of “spiritualism, capitalism and imperialism, colonialization, human rights abuses” resonated. But that wasn’t the secret ingredient. “There’s a level that’s dreamlike,” Cameron said. “That you couldn’t really express in a sentence…it didn’t have any ‘isms’ to it.”

"It was just a dream like sense of yearning. A yearning to be there experiencing that thing. Being there in a place that’s safe and where you wanted to be. And whether that was flying—that sense of freedom, that sense of exhilaration, accomplishment—whether it was being in the forest where you could practically smell the Earth, it was a sensory thing that communicated on such a deep level. Which, to me, was the true spirituality of the film. The yearning you can’t give a voice too…We actually created and rejected many storylines for the second and third film because they didn’t take us to that transportive, dreaming with your eyes wide open, aspirational feeling."

Cameron is sounding a little like Williamson herself here — apparently he and his wife are big fans, which is why he agreed to go on her podcast. And that might also explain why she’s such a big fan of his. These two work together.

As for what he’s saying about “the true spirituality of Avatar,” it’s a little hard to picture exactly what he means, but we’ll find out more when the first Avatar sequel comes out on December 16, 2022, with the following three to come out every other year after that.

Yes, Cameron is working on four Avatar sequels. That’s a lot of true spiritual bliss.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels

h/t Io9