James Cameron Confirms The Rumored AVATAR Titles Are Real and Kate Winslet Can Hold Her Breath Longer Than Tom Cruise
If James Cameron had it his way, he would probably make Avatar sequels until the day he dies. As of right now, there are four sequels that he’s hoping to make and two of them have already completed shooting.
We have some additional details on the films to share with you. The first of which comes from ET, in which Cameron confirms that the strange titles that previously leaked for the film are in fact real and they are being considered to be the titles of the films.
If you don’t remember, those title are: Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: The Seed Bearer, Avatar: The Tulkun Rider, and Avatar: The Quest for Eywa. While the titles may not make sense to us now, I’m sure they will as the movies are released and we learn more about the story.
When asked about the titles, Cameron said “I can neither confirm nor deny.” Then he added, “All right, here’s what I’ll tell you. Those titles are among titles that are in consideration. And no final decisions have been made yet.”
In a separate interview with Collider, producer Jon Landau talked about shooting certain scenes underwater and in the process revealed that Kate Winslet can hold her breath longer than Tom Cruise. Cruise held his breath underwater for six minutes to shoot a scene in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Winslet managed to hold her breath for seven minutes underwater for Avatar!
“We built a water tank that was 500,000 gallons of water, and we are doing performance-capture under the water, on the surface of the water, and above the water. We trained our cast to free-breath-hold…So we had a gentleman named Kirk Krack come in and train everybody that needed to be underwater… Kate Winslet had to train in this and she got up to a static breath hold of just about seven minutes. It’s amazing, it’s mind over matter. You see Kate going underwater and she just felt so comfortable. There was one day, we have a tank where she was just rehearsing and testing and we have some windows into it, and I go in there and she’s just walking on the bottom [of the tank] left and right, left and right, left and right, then she sees me in the window and she just waves.”
That’s pretty freakin’ incredible! Seven minutes! Now Winslet just needs to star doing her own crazy stunts! When previously talking about the film Landau opened up about the setting for the sequels, saying:
“As we’ve moved on with the sequels to Avatar we made a very conscious decision to stage the whole four sequels on Pandora. We don’t need to go to another world if we want water, we’re going to go to the oceans of Pandora.
”It’s a continuation of the same characters, but what happen when warriors that are willing to go on suicide charges, and leap off cliffs on to the back of big orange toruks, what happens when they grow up and have their own kids? It becomes a very different story. Now the kids are the risk-takers and the change-makers. So, it’s interesting, but it makes sense to me. Everybody’s either a parent, or they had parents at the very least, and if you look at the big successful franchises now, they’re pretty much uninterested in that.”
It was also explained that there will be different clans of Na’vi all over Pandora:
“We’re going to go to totally different environments, we’re going to meet different cultures. Just like our planet is as diverse culturally as we are environmentally. We want to introduce people to different cultures. In the first movie, we only met the Omaticaya clan, and they are the clan here allowing us to come to the Valley of Mo’ara. But as we venture out we’re going to different environments and different clans.”
It’ll be interesting to see how the story for the next four Avatar films play out. I hope Cameron delivers something special because he’s got a lot riding on these films. Will he succeed? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Avatar 2 opens December 18th, 2020; Avatar 3 on December 17th, 2021; Avatar 4 on December 20th, 2024; and Avatar 5 on December 19th, 2025.