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The cast and creators of ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ share an exclusive, in-depth look at the Windtraders as they set sail in the latest film.
James Cameron and his team reveal the deeply researched, real-world science that informs the world of Pandora, from the functionality of the Windtraders’ ships to the anatomy of the ‘Wind Rays’ that pull them. The cast reveal how this latest film brings new challenges, even compared with the groundbreaking first two films–such as Sigourney Weaver playing a 15-year-old, brought to life with the franchise’s signature performance-capture artistry. The artists and designers behind the film share how real sets and costumes had to be created to achieve the most authentic effect onscreen–“for us, pantomime is the enemy.”
James Cameron and his team reveal the deeply researched, real-world science that informs the world of Pandora, from the functionality of the Windtraders’ ships to the anatomy of the ‘Wind Rays’ that pull them. The cast reveal how this latest film brings new challenges, even compared with the groundbreaking first two films–such as Sigourney Weaver playing a 15-year-old, brought to life with the franchise’s signature performance-capture artistry. The artists and designers behind the film share how real sets and costumes had to be created to achieve the most authentic effect onscreen–“for us, pantomime is the enemy.”
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PeopleTranscript
00:00Hi, we are the cast of Avatar. Welcome to our deep dive of Wind Traders.
00:04I've just said all in Nabi.
00:10It's probably the best I've ever done it.
00:12I was just gonna say that.
00:16Hi, I'm Jim Cameron, director of Avatar Fire and Ash.
00:19I'm Richie Vaynam. I'm the visual effects supervisor, virtual second unit director.
00:23Hi, I'm Sigourney Weaver.
00:25I'm Jack Champion.
00:25I'm Zoe Saldana.
00:27I'm Sam.
00:27I'm Deb Scott.
00:28And I'm Dylan Cole.
00:29And we're here to break down a scene in detail.
00:33The Wind Traders set sail.
00:40Okay, pause.
00:41I've got a cool idea.
00:44It's one of our new clans and featuring one of our new characters.
00:49We always world build so much more than what finally winds up in the movie,
00:54but it has to make sense.
00:56On the page, it was written very much like a sailing ship, like a galleon.
01:00But we knew this was floating in the sky, didn't have to land, had to look distinctly Nabi.
01:05We had developed this sort of, you know, bent hoop under tension, almost like a rattan methodology of
01:10building with the Metcaina. We just took that to 11 for the wind traders.
01:15I remember being very involved in that. I said that Nabi would not cut down trees and shape
01:20timbers and build a ship the way we would build a ship. So we came up with this idea of tensile
01:25structures where they bend the rattan and then they stretch canvas or tarp between that and woven decking.
01:31It was very important that it feels solid, right? Because it's easy to picture these being these
01:36romantic things with a bunch of hammocks and billowing sails, but there's a lot of bad weather
01:40on Pandora. So they need to be able to close this thing up, survive a hurricane in it.
01:44Our arrangement was for the pink skin boy only.
01:47David Thewlis, he got thrown right in the deep end. It took him a while to understand the
01:52mechanics of how we shoot these things. There is stuff there. So they did build like a boat.
01:56People think there's acting on an empty stage. That is not the case at all. We built a one-to-one
02:01proxy of this whole ship so that the actors could literally run from one end to the other.
02:06And we had an above deck and a below deck section. We had rigging going up.
02:10We had the beginnings of some of the large bent hoops going up, ladders and
02:14ramps because we also had to accommodate a large action scene on this on this deck as well.
02:18It was actually the biggest performance capture set we ever built. It actually filled the soundstage
02:23from end to end, the gondola. And you have a head cam with a camera on
02:27it and all the mechanics of it. But at the same time, you're wearing a knife. You know,
02:31little accoutrements that we need to help us remember who these characters' essences are.
02:37By the end of it, he was like, this is a lot of fun. Honestly, he's one of the guys that just
02:41ring true. Not everybody's physiognomy from a facial standpoint is distinct enough that it rings
02:48true and you have to try to find idiosyncrasies. Sometimes you have to fight for an actor to come true.
02:52If you look at Mr. Thewlis, it rings true fairly strongly.
02:56We won't be any trouble. You are already trouble.
03:00David Thewlis's performance is unbelievable. And it really helped inform what I was doing
03:05with the costume as well. When I first designed the Wind Traders, Pelek was a little bit more
03:10rugged perhaps. And after seeing his performance, we sort of went back in and gave him a much more
03:16regal kind of stance. The trader must move freely. We cannot choose sides.
03:21You see here in Neytiri still in her funeral paint. And that is because she is really grieving
03:25the death of her son, Natayam. So much so that she adopts some of his clothing. Here we also see
03:30her necklace. Her little capelet was his from film two. Almost a secret narrative of what's going on.
03:36Having Taruk Makto on board cuts very close to choosing a side in this war.
03:41Once again, they're having to be these refugees. And they're scared.
03:46And they're very scared. You know, they know Taruk Makto and his family come with baggage.
03:51You can see the displacement of the Sully's. And that's, that's the story, you know.
03:55Yeah, but you're mistaken. Taruk Makto was never on your ship.
03:59I view the gondola as almost like a, like a flying souk. A covered marketplace where
04:04light is filtering down through the colored tarps. There's a play of light.
04:07As he moves, you can see the light moving on his face. There's, you know, motion in the background
04:11that could conceivably be distracting to the shot. But by allowing him to dance in the light
04:16in that mid-ground and staging him, he becomes the most important element.
04:19If you could pause right there. Let's back it up a frame. Right there.
04:23We're actually using light, dark, light to describe the relationship. Both characters
04:28in the foreground are dark. We have Nateri stacked center feeding into why she is the most important
04:33thing in the frame. Clear, concise visual language. Talma Chambers, my visual language teacher,
04:38would be very proud of me. But if he was ever aboard, then him and his woman would be happy to fly as
04:44outriders and protect your caravan. One of the things I did with the wind traders in general was to
04:51give them more clothing. You know, a loincloth after a while gets kind of like how many ways can
04:56you make one? One of the things that Jim said, they travel at a very high altitude and that high
05:02altitude is quite cold. Even in the tropics, the second you go over mountains, that sort of thing,
05:07they might experience some quite cold winds. So they wear capes. The other thing is you notice
05:13in their hairstyle is that they're very tight to their head. The neural whip or the kuru, they'll wear
05:18that sometimes wrapped around their neck. They wouldn't want to get their kuru caught in amongst
05:23the lines and maybe going through a fair lead and injuring them. Perhaps so. The mankwan raiders
05:29grow more aggressive. Very well. I meet you on this. I still am amazed how much spirit transcends
05:42from these performances. It's my job in big part to shepherd the performances of the actor and vet
05:50whether the performance is in fact as intended. We are constantly referring back to our actor to
05:57try to understand the breakdown between text, subtext, inner monologue. It's probably more important for us,
06:03actually it is more important for us, to understand what the actor is thinking rather than
06:07the articulation of any given portion of the lips. It's a little like sort of black box theater.
06:13There is no camera to act to. It forces in some ways our actors to be honest in every moment.
06:19It is what actors are always trying to obtain. Where everything that's in front of you disappears
06:24and what you are putting together in your mind becomes so real it's almost tangible.
06:28So we don't explain much about the wind trader culture. We just let the audience take it in at
06:38face value. We looked at many different nomadic cultures from the Bedouin to the Romani to the
06:43Turkana of Kenya to the Agoria of India. But one thing that we notice about most nomadic cultures is how
06:48they embrace color. Suddenly we were in like the bazaar. It's like going to the big city. It's always a good
06:53day when the wind traders come to town. They're fun. They bring goods. They bring news. They bring
06:58gossip. They want to arrive kind of like the circus coming to town. So they have these pennants,
07:04these beautiful long colored streamers. We were reserving for the wind traders more rich burgundies
07:11and burnt oranges and earth tones. Paloc's cloak here, I wanted it to be like the sunset or sunrise.
07:17These wispy clouds all over his body. It's almost like a visual representation of their world. They see
07:23these incredible skies every morning, every night. And then of course with our other new
07:28clan that we're introducing, we have the ash people. And they're, you know, very stark. They
07:32don't have a lot of ornamentation other than the paint on their body. They have a scarification
07:38pattern. They have the paint pattern. They have the paint colors, but it's very narrow. It's red,
07:43black and ash. It's important for us to give a distinct motion vocabulary to each of the clans. Ash
07:49just have a fundamentally different movement. There's a ferocity to them, much more feral behavior. It's
07:54informed by their leader and in some ways informed a little by fear. Your goddess has no dominion here.
08:04You have only the time it takes to make a movie. So you have to embed these ideas
08:09in these really, really scopey shots that describe a full village. Come on. These scenes running across
08:17the deck were very, very important and exciting because it showed the life that was on these.
08:24And that's Sigourney Weaver, 69, 70 years old, playing a radiant young 15 year old girl.
08:31It's really interesting Sig stays in that zone. You can talk to her Sigourney, but she's got the
08:36mannerisms of Curie. You channel that energy. It's, it's awesome to be around. I don't quite know what I
08:41did. All I know is I think I let me leak out of my foot and it filled up with something else. I was
08:48kind of amazed that I couldn't step out of it. You skip around a lot. Did I?
08:55Also showed up the design as you're running past all the rigging and rope details and
08:59fair leads and how this thing works. And we're passing over a tow bridle connected to the harness
09:05that's on the wind ray that's out in front. So the wind ray is almost like a tugboat. So there's like a
09:09saddle, there's a harness that harnesses the wind ray to the gondola. We've got a lot of backstory
09:15worked out here. It's obviously inspired a little bit by sort of cuttlefish, a little bit by manta
09:20ray. How often do they have to release them from the towing bridle so that they can go feed? There
09:24would be additional wind rays that are not in harness that are just traveling as a little community.
09:29When another one gets sick or needs a time out or is just getting tired. So let's keep going,
09:34let's keep going. We're looking down at the Metcaina clan who are singing them away. They're singing
09:39a traveling song. Here we see Kiri's cloak, which we did have in film two. You can see little things
09:45growing on it or attached to it because Kiri's really a collector. It's almost like a charm bracelet
09:51of hers. I also love that like in the two minutes Spider gets there, he takes one of their like
09:56their cultural like ponchos and starts wearing it. Just assimilates him so. Yeah, just assimilates
10:00immediately. So here we have Saraya.
10:05Asymmetry is really important to the Metcaina especially. It's difficult designing the costumes
10:14for the women to get a rating. We have to cover up certain things and make it look pretty without
10:20making it look too intentional. You know, even people yelling, even though we look over the side,
10:24we would still have people there yelling at us and waving goodbye. So we have something to actually
10:28react off. There wasn't the big jellyfish, but anything that we interact with, we interact with.
10:33Or whatever it is, a jellybird.
10:35Answer it!
10:36Ready about! Ready about! On all lines!
10:41It's a sailing movie really, isn't it? It's a master and commander. Trying to really describe
10:45the ship as just a ship is a misnomer. They're a transient clan that travel port to port and
10:51this is their home. It became uber clear that the ship was part of the story.
10:57This guy jumping onto a, you know, a two-inch rope and trusting that there's going to be enough tension
11:03on the other side to just ride it down would be second nature. But to make it feel so natural
11:08is the challenge. That one is a particularly satisfying one for me.
11:11On all lines!
11:13Time to stop it!
11:17There's what's called a navigator that sits atop the wind ray and queues into it with their crew room.
11:23It's not just a singular element of the gondola. It's a whole connected system.
11:27And these people really know what they're doing. So when we were designing the gondola,
11:31we had to figure out how do you sail one of these things.
11:34Jim wanted it to make sense and rightfully so. And we had figured out kind of how the rigging works.
11:38So we went so far as to make a manual that shows, okay, we want to tack left. Okay,
11:44you have to let out in this fairly, pull in on this line.
11:47Windward!
11:47Vades out!
11:48Fall!
11:48Pull out and race! Fall to windward!
11:51This part's great, especially where you see the line going through the fair lead there,
11:54is what I was talking about. We have to use fair leads and not pulleys,
11:57so that we do not break AWO's laws. One of AWO's laws is that you cannot use the turning wheel,
12:02and a pulley is essentially a wheel. So we have the fair lead, which is just a redirect.
12:06It is internally consistent and the thing, in theory, does work.
12:13In this particular shot we're looking at, you can see there's a physical rope with resistance.
12:17Team! Team!
12:20They are actually holding ropes and pulling a large weight. There's no version of pantomime.
12:25For us, pantomime's the enemy.
12:27When they bring a prop to us, Brad the prop master has to have tested it, built it,
12:32so that it really works. It can do really what it's supposed to do.
12:36We learned from the first movie. We did this test with a big Ritter fan and Alicia
12:40sat on the Akron. When she jumped down, she literally, the hair piece, the wig came in front
12:45of her face. The first thing she did was brush it back. We had this kind of aha moment. I looked at
12:50Jim and I knew straight away he twigged the same thing. And so from that moment on, we were ears,
12:55tails, you know, hair, so that there was a proper understanding of interaction. Along the gunnel where
13:00these guys were walking, we actually piled ropes and had loose ends so that people would negotiate
13:06it with footsteps differently. We actually built a fully realized walkway and mesh that has a spring
13:14to it because again, that informs how people move. It's a very cool thing because you're trying to
13:19ground and ground true emotion. So you need true stuff. Otherwise, it's just all BS.
13:29We redesigned these masks from film one to get a little bit more expansive the face because we knew
13:34we were going to have one of our main actors wear a mask suit, the whole thing. And it was a whole big
13:40ordeal. Jack had to wear it underwater and it had to be certified. Oh, that was hard. It's like,
13:45I hope I don't kill him. Okay. Now spider is different than the other characters because we
13:50have a human actor. Well, they're all human actors, obviously, but wherever we see spider,
13:55we have a live action element that we have to create as well. So we had to capture the scene
14:00on the performance capture set with everybody jumping down, including young Jack. But then later
14:05we had to go back and then make up a small piece of the set and do Jack's part of it. So I basically
14:12did two years of performance capture and then another two years in New Zealand.
14:15Were you on a boat? They built like parts of a boat, but then in that moment, it was like real,
14:20looked like real rope. It looked like a part of a pirate ship. And they had like these Navi-sized
14:24puppets that the people put on their shoulders and your guys' face from like the facial cam. So it'd be
14:29like this iPad of your face and their performance that I'd be like reacting to. We use every available
14:33technology from the most primitive to the most advanced wire and twine and bent cane and actual weaving to
14:39the latest in virtual reality sculpting and design. This is really a thing that comes from Jim. It's
14:45his scientific brain, again, wanting to prove the concept that these things work. Almost every single
14:51thing you see on the screen has been made. It's been made physically in real life by great artists
14:58establishing the methodology behind the culture, using those crafts that have been around forever
15:05to help make this incredibly high-tech movie. It's just like the best of both worlds crashing together.
15:11Light and ship, come up easy!
15:17This part here with the scuppers opening, even just how that water opens went through about half a dozen designs.
15:24Windward and fall!
15:25Looking back to the anatomy of the Medusoid, it also needed to feed. That's what the long tentacles are for.
15:31Any place there's open water, it can feed in the water, it can capture fish and so on. The Medusoid itself
15:38is something like five or six hundred. It's a thin membrane like a jellyfish. It has inside it a kind
15:43of bacterial, kind of like we have in our own stomachs. It generates gas and we toot. It just fills itself with gas
15:49that's, you know, biogenic. It's basically a living blimp or living balloon. We don't stop to explain it much
15:56in the movie. We just let you take it in. The spirit here is that sense of setting sail.
16:08Beautiful shot of Kiri just taking in the wonder of how they operate this thing.
16:14That's some of the beauty of Pandora is that even in moments of running away and mourning a loss,
16:20that just one of the many things that Pandora in moments of tragedy can still just be so beautiful.
16:25Yeah, I could talk about this for hours. I think you've got enough. And by the way, it didn't take
16:29an afternoon to do all this. Literally years to figure all this out. And that's the level of detail
16:36that we love. You know, that's what our team gets into. Then it's like we go crazy. We're allowed to take
16:41anything from the real world and transfer it through our imagination into something from Pandora.
16:46Because the whole point of Avatar films, it's not to be as alien as possible. We should see ourselves
16:51in this world. The whole point of Avatar is to connect us back to our own families, our own
16:55cultures, our own planet, and celebrate the nature and diversity and connectivity of it all.
16:59You know, there's an acceptance of this as an art form. It's a collaborative process. The editorial,
17:04director, actor is intact very much in this process. It's a torturous, you know, process, but it's an
17:11enjoyable result.
17:19I wanted to capture that feeling of we're going on an adventure, guys. This is going to be fun.
17:24It's going to be so cool.
17:31I don't think there's anything to say. I think we're done. I think it speaks for itself.
17:34All right. Thank you, everybody. That's how it's done.
17:44That's how it's done.
17:46That's how it's done.
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