Hello, Jim Cameron here. I'm the director of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” This is Varang, played by Oona Chaplin. And she's sharing with Quaritch, now that he's in this altered state of consciousness, her backstory about how the volcano erupted. She does not use the term “volcano.” She says the fire came from the mountain. We can make up for that ourselves, we destroyed their homeland, he says, “we burned our forests.” And he talks about the difficult situation of his people. So this is Oona imagining a flame. There is no flame. And we even went back and picked up this line: “But Eywa didn't come.” – because I wanted something strong that I could really zoom in on his face because we really fell in love with his character, the look of his character. People should remember that they don't really take pictures here. There is one hundred percent performance capture. So when we see this POV, of how Quaritch is perceiving her, what is her altered state due to the hallucinogenic truth powder that she shot into his nose with her blowgun. This is me with my virtual camera just playing around, having fun. I just see what a 9 millimeter lens would look like, I just see what would happen if I shake the zoom so it shakes and fluctuates a little bit. And then we created shaders that would make the surface boil with these fractal patterns. And we create delays and all that. So I did some research on this ahead of time in college. [Laughs] No more is said about that. This is Oona and Stephen Lang. And they didn't do much preparation. We didn't rehearse the scene much. We just immersed ourselves in it. But here you see two really accomplished actors working and just bouncing off each other, feeding off each other's energy. Then Stephen came over saying he was taking some kind of hallucinatory drug, but in reality, he was playing and thought she was something amazing and almost a goddess. And that's why here we play with the scale and the size of her with the wide angle lens, and that he really thinks that some of the things she says are surprising and even funny sometimes. In the meantime, we're supposed to think he's in a lot of danger here. He has lost his supervisor: Wainfleet, his sniper. It is hidden from him. He is alone with her. She has a knife. She is picking up her kuru. We have already seen her cut the kurus of many other people. Yes, we're past the point of greatest danger here, where we trick the audience into telling her that she's going to cut off his kuru, which we're also told is worse than death for them. Oona's performance is extremely detailed here. I have great respect for what he did. I don't remember us doing many takes. But at this point the power begins to shift. He said, “I can give you the only thing you've never had, which is an equal,” and that stops her in her tracks. And then he starts to paint this picture of what he can do for her with human technology: weapons and various advanced technologies. And since he is under a truth serum, she must believe everything he says. And that's the wonderful thing about this scene, because it can't lie. It will happen as he describes. And then he looks toward a future where he will have the kind of power he has always dreamed of. And that's when she says, “I see you,” meaning, I see what you're saying. “You need me.” “I see you.” And closes with “very good, you do it.” I mean, his plan has always been to go in there and do that. So all that time you thought he was in danger. In reality, he was just cheating on her. Now it begins to develop. Cinematographically I love this scene. I like slow motion, I like the wind. I like the fact that there is no real sound here other than the music, that incredibly pulsating and forceful thing. It's almost like the music of a destination playing. And when his technology meets his lust for power, his joy becomes almost sexual here. In fact, in the script it is written that she is like a girl with her first pony. You know what I mean? She is very happy with what he brought her. But it's actually a pretty dark moment because you see that the cylinders in the lock of destiny are turning and closing. And I had a lot of dialogue here where he says, “So, we're partners?” And she says, “This is not the way we became partners,” but it turned out to be unnecessary. And so it became a very stylized cinematic approach. [GUNSHOTS]
