Peter Jackson's THE LORD OF THE RINGS Films Inspired James Cameron To Build Out The World of AVATAR
James Cameron is all in on his Avatar franchise. He’s created an epic world and he’s building on that world with every sequel that he makes, and his inspiration for that came from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films.
Cameron couldn’t believe that Jackson actually pulled off the pitch for those movies, and what he ended up doing with them. It was pretty incredible. In an interview with Deadline, Cameron said:
“Peter and I are pals, [and] I always tell him that was the biggest, craziest bet in movie history. I think ['Avatar'] is a big bet, a very big bet monetarily, but I think that one was nuts."
It was nuts! Every time I revisit those films, my mind is blown away all over again. The level of detail that was incorporated into those movies was amazing, and it’s that level of detail that inspired Cameron to build up the world of Pandora. He explained:
"They proved the model, and I was fascinated by that and I thought, 'Wow, how cool would it be to go into that level of fractal detail in the worldbuilding around the characters that Tolkien did and that Peter did from Tolkien's books?' It would be great to do that."
Cameron also went as far as to create his very own Silmarillion for the world of Avatar. J.R.R. Tolkien's 1977 book The Silmarillion was a collection of lore and background information that was not included in The Lord of the Rings novels and The Hobbit. It’s pretty awesome and filled with some incredible information. Cameron went on to talk about his Avatar version of The Silmarillion, telling Variety:
"If you look at something like 'The Rings of Power,' with those multiple storylines and interesting characters, that's what I was aspiring to. But they had a guide; I didn't. I had to write my own 'Silmarillion' or 'Lord of the Rings' in the form of notes. But I also didn't want to do it all alone. I knew that I was going to do multiple movies, so I created a little writers' room like you would for a TV show."
Cameron previously said that The Lord of the Rings is one of the benchmarks that he was aiming for with Avatar, and he described the world of Pandora as an "epic landscape with epic storytelling" and added, "I was trying to emulate a Star Wars universe or Lord of the Rings. Something that's a persistent world that people can come back to and enjoy over time."
I love to learn about the lengths that Cameron went to in building out the details of the world of Avatar, and after watching Avatar: The Way of Water, you can clearly see that what he is doing is paying off! I can’t wait to watch the sequels that he has planned out.