James Cameron says he removed 10 minutes of ‘Avatar 2’ gun violence
While many critics have drawn attention to the fact that James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is a rather unnecessary three hours long, the legendary director has now revealed that it could have easily been longer had he not decided to make a crucial cut.
The Terminator and Aliens filmmaker recently admitted that he decided to cut out ten minutes of his new film that featured gun violence. He claimed that he no longer has any interest in creating a fetish over guns, especially so, given the recent gun violence in the United States.
“I actually cut about ten minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” Cameron told Esquire. “I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course. 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.”
“I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now,” he added. “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.”
It’s unsurprising to hear Cameron also discuss his Terminator franchise in this light, too, seeing as it goes in heavy on gun violence. Cameron added elsewhere, “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.”
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