Avatar director James Cameron compares himself to J.R.R. Tolkien, Peter Jackson

It’s official: James Cameron has directed three of top four highest grossing movies of all time. In the top spot is the original Avatar from 2009, with nearly $3 billion in box office receipts. Then there’s Avengers: Endgame, which has taken in some $2.8 billion. Next is Cameron’s new film Avatar: The Way of Water, which is sitting pretty at $2.247 billion. In fourth place is Cameron’s own Titanic, which has made just a hair less money at $2.245 billion. The Way of Water recently leap-frogged both that movie and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which comes in at fifth place with $2.07 billion.

Clearly Cameron knows what he’s doing when it comes to making crowd-pleasing films. His success matches his ambition. Speaking to Time, Cameron talked about creating the world of Avatar and compared himself to be J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings books; and Peter Jackson, who adapted them into a beloved trilogy of films in the early ’00s.

"I was trying to do a simulation of, ‘OK, I’m Peter Jackson making Lord of the Rings except Lord of the Rings doesn’t exist yet, so I need to go be Tolkien and create Lord of the Rings, and then I can go be Peter Jackson.’ A little bit cheeky and ambitious, but I wasn’t adapting some big pantheon of books that existed. I had to go do that."

James Cameron wants to make another movie in between Avatar 3 and Avatar 4

You’d figure that being in charge of one of the biggest film franchises in the world would be enough for Cameron, but his ambition doesn’t stop there. Before he gets cracking on Avatar 4 (the third movie is already pretty much done and coming out next year), he’d like to adapt The Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back, a book from Charles R. Pellegrino.

“We live in a more precarious world than we thought we did,” Cameron told the Los Angeles Times. “I think the Hiroshima film would be as timely as ever, if not more so. It reminds people what these weapons really do when they’re used against human targets.”

Sure, why not add in a movie about one of the biggest disasters in human history in between visits to Pandora? It’s no big thing for Cameron.

There are only two shots in Avatar: The Way of Water that don’t involve special effects

One of the reasons the Avatar movies take so much attention and care is because of the sheer number of cutting edge special effects in them. It turns out the Na’vi are not people in blue alien suits.

In fact, there are only two shots in the entirety of Avatar: The Way of Water that don’t involve special effects, as visual effects artist Eric Saindon revealed to Metro. “There’s one of Spider’s [Jack Champion] eyeball and there’s one of the bottom of the ocean and just some ripples in the bottom of the water,” he said. There were other shots that used reality as a base, but every other shot was either “created or added to” by the visual effects team.

And the team is gearing up to do it all again for Avatar 3, which is due out on December 20, 2024.

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h/t Collider