See James Cameron’s Original Avatar Vision From 1976
While director James Cameron gets together his Avatar franchise, it’s a good time to take a look back at the origins of the world of Pandora, and the inspiration for its native people, the Na’vi.
Considering that the highest-grossing movie of all time is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the mythology of Pandora, Cameron better has a vivid imagination to mine four movies from a single idea.
Cameron first developed this idea in 1976 while working as a poster painter for a low-budget movie studio.
According to Movies.com, Cameron worked various industry jobs while learning his trade. While he was creating the artwork for an unknown, freaky-looking science fiction film, the sexy blue woman on the poster led him to create the world of Avatar.
During his episode of Oprah Winfrey Network show Visionaries—Inside James Cameron’s Creative Mind, the 59-year-old director showed the painting and recalled his initial idea.
James Cameron explained, “This [painting] is going back to 1976 I think, and this was for a film project that never went anywhere. The thing that’s interesting about it is that I’ve already got a tall, hot blue girl in that movie. Her name wasn’t Neytiri and it was in a completely different context, but I was already thinking about it then.”
While the mysterious painting looks nothing like Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) or any of the Na’vi, it’s interesting to see where it all started, 33 years before Avatar finally hit movie screens.
Cameron also recalled dreams he had as a young man, vivid with images of a glowing forest, which is where he found the inspiration for the landscape of Pandora.
James Cameron continued, “One of them [the dreams] was a glowing forest with a river of light running through it and trees that sort of looked like fiber optics…Well, guess what. Cut to 30 years later and I’m making a movie where we’re spending millions of dollars to create that imagery, but that image came to me in a dream when I was 18 years old.”
We know that James Cameron seems to have put his entire professional life, in one way or another, into the Avatar franchise. And you can see that he started it a long, long time ago.
