James Cameron “Mourns” All The Movies He Didn’t Make While Focused On The “Avatar” Sequels

Avatar: The Way Of Water has already made $1 billion at the worldwide box office, and apparently, this successful action movie was all done with James Cameron specifically editing out over 10 minutes of footage because he doesn’t want to contribute to glorifying gun violence. Wow… it’s actually inconceivable there is any more footage that can exist of this 3-hour and 12 minutes-long movie. Just how fucking long was this thing going to be before it got edited down? James also put on his mourning veil over the loss of all the movies he wasn’t able to make because his brain was deep in everything Na’vi.

It seems that James is very staunchly and specifically anti-guns and will no longer be featuring them in his movies in any glamorizing way. So much so that he looks back on some of his older movies, like Terminator, and isn’t really happy with what he sees. In an interview with Esquire Middle East, James spoke about how he actually removed a bunch of footage from the newest Avatar film because he didn’t want to promote the message that guns can be cool. via Variety:

In a new interview with Esquire Middle East, Cameron revealed the film would’ve run 10 minutes longer had he not cut out scenes with gun violence. The filmmaker said he is no longer interested in fetishizing guns in his action scenes given the rampant gun violence in the U.S.

“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” Cameron said. “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.”

Cameron said earlier in the interview, “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,” Cameron added as an aside.

And in the January issue of Empire, there’s an interview with James and other filmmakers, including RRR director S.S. Rajamouli. In James’ response to a question from S.S. about the stories he hasn’t got to tell while working on Avatar for the past 25 years, he says he does “mourn” some of the projects he doesn’t get to work on.

S.S. Two thoughts in answer to your question: the first is that the world of Avatar is so sprawling that I can tell most of the stories I want to tell within it and try many of the stylistic techniques that I hope to explore. And secondly, yes… our time as artists is finite. I will always mourn some of the stories that I don’t get to make. But I feel a great satisfaction when other directors want to explore some of my ideas, like Kathryn Bigelow did with Strange Days, and Robert Rodriguez did when I passed him the baton on Alita: Battle Angel. I look forward to more collaborations in the future with directors I admire.

I’m sure that James has a graveyard on his property with headstones for all of the movies he never got to make while focused on Avatar. It’s probably right next to a mausoleum dedicated to Jack from Titanic, which reads: “Here lies Jack, who absolutely could NOT have also gotten on that floating door.”

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