The critically-acclaimed filmmaker opens up about one of the deleted scenes from ‘Avatar: The Way of Water, explaining it was inappropriate because of today’s rising gun violence.
AceShowbiz –James Cameron deleted 10 minutes of “Avatar: The Way of Water” containing guns. Explaining that he did not wish to “fetishize the gun” amid America’s struggle for gun control, the “Titanic” director has scrapped the gunplay action from the flick.
“I had a bit of a crisis of faith as we were cutting the movie together. It was too violent,” the filmmaker told Esquire Middle East.
“I wanted a balance between the beauty, the epiphany, the kind of spiritual aspect of the film, with the action, and I felt it had gotten a little too grim. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”
Helming violent “Terminator” and “Rambo” movies in the past, Cameron added, “I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now.”
“I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of ‘Terminator’ movies 30-plus years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach. I’m happy to be living in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago.”
Meanwhile, Cameron has confirmed a “Terminator” reboot is “in discussion.” The 68-year-old movie maker addressed the future of his long-running franchise, which started with the original sci-fi classic in 1984 but stuttered with 2019’s “Terminator: Dark Fate“, and his ideas for a seventh movie.
He told the “Smartless” podcast, “If I were to do another ‘Terminator’ film and maybe try to launch that franchise again, which is in discussion, but nothing has been decided, I would make it much more about the AI side of it than bad robots gone crazy.”
“Dark Fate” was helmed by “Deadpool” director Tim Miller from a story by Cameron himself, and was seen as a revival of the franchise with original stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton reuniting as the T-800 Terminator and Sarah Connor, respectively.
While Cameron was “reasonably happy” with the movie, there was a clash between himself and the director when it came to bringing back the original cast members. Whereas Cameron refused to make the film without Arnie, Miller was only keen to have Hamilton return.
He explained, “I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it. I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60-something, he’s 70-something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your ‘Terminator’ movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s ‘Terminator’ movie, it was your granddad’s ‘Terminator’ movie. And we didn’t see that… We loved it, we thought it was cool.”
Cameron directed and co-wrote the original “Terminator” film and its 1991 sequel “Terminator 2: Judgment Day“, but had no involvement at all with follow-ups “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” (2003), “Terminator Salvation” (2009), and “Terminator Genisys” (2015), which got slammed by critics.
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