Zoe Saldaña reveals her favourite and “overwhelming” James Cameron movie
James Cameron has made many great and successful movies, but the one that is currently most intertwined with his name is Avatar. This CGI-heavy tale of anti-colonialism and plug-in hair set all kinds of records when it dropped in 2009.
Avatar quickly became the highest-grossing movie of all time, unseating Titanic (another Cameron production) from the top of the pile. It has since been followed up with an equally profitable sequel, The Way of Water, with several more on the way over the next few years.
Plenty of big names came together to flesh out the first Avatar movie, which was inspired by a short film Cameron had made as a young man. Sam Worthington stars as Jake Sully, a disabled soldier who finds new life on Pandora. Sigourney Weaver reunited with Cameron over two decades after Aliens to play Dr Grace Augustine, the scientist behind the Avatar programme. And then there’s Zoe Saldaña.
In her role as Neytiri, daughter of the leaders of the Na’vi tribe, Saldaña plays a key part in the story. If she hadn’t met and fallen in love with Sully, then none of the events of the movie would have happened. In The Way of Water, the story is focused on Neytiri and Sully’s family unit, placing her at the centre of the action once again.
The Oscar winner seems to be something of a good luck charm when it comes to movies, as she has starred in four of the seven highest-grossing movies of all time. And while Cameron owes a lot to her, the converse is also true.
Speaking to Rotten Tomatoes, Saldaña didn’t miss an opportunity to lavish praise on her once-and-future boss. When giving a list of her favourite movies, she revealed that she has a major soft spot for Cameron’s groundbreaking 1984 sci-fi-cum-horror, The Terminator.
“Maybe it’s the fact that I was five when I saw this movie, so I was very overwhelmed by it,” she said. “I felt the passion between these two individuals. I saw the strength of a woman. From the music, the robots, the technology… that movie was big because I saw it through the eyes of a five-year-old. I’m not gonna judge Terminator now that I’m 32, because obviously I’m gonna have a different take”.
She added: “I’ve evolved, I’ve seen different things, and life and technology, and the way we see films has evolved, so it wouldn’t be fair to what Terminator represented when I was five. But that essence will never die. Terminator was very impacting for me. It really helped me a lot to understand the kind of actor I wanted to be, and also the kind of movies and genres that I gravitate towards and absolutely love.”
As well as making a global star out of Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Terminator is the first film that made people sit up and take notice of Cameron. He would love people to think it was his debut movie, but alas, we all remember the existence of Piranha II: The Spawning. Much as we all wish we didn’t.
In a beautiful full-circle moment, Saldaña was inspired to follow her acting dreams by Cameron, only to one day star in his biggest venture. Now all she has to do is play Sarah Connor in some sort of reboot, and the loop will be complete.
