The Science Behind James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water | National Geographic

I've had this romance with the ocean my entire life. When I was a kid, I aspired to become a diver so I could go and see this wonder and this beauty myself. Then I spent decades, you know, exploring and enjoying that world.

The Way of Water was an opportunity to put two things that I love together. I loved the world-building opportunity that I'm blessed with when I make an Avatar film, and I love the ocean.

There's a very big parallel between Pandora and our planet. The most obvious connection is the coral reefs and the tropical atoll formations, especially in the Central and Western Pacific. All of our species of coral and large soft invertebrate animals and so on that we'd have here on Earth, we put equivalence to those in our Reef ecosystem in The Way of Water.

The Way of Water connects all things. To take indigenous culture here on our planet and put it through the lens of Pandora, we did a lot of research about real indigenous cultures that are very tightly associated with the ocean. They have this deep respect for the harmony and balance of nature. Their tattooing, their body and facial tattooing, we did our own kind of Pandora version of that.

There are the sea people in Indonesia that live on stilted homes and live on rafts and so on. We looked at things like that, and we see a couple of different villages in The Way of Water that use an architecture that uses the local trees.

All Navi culture doesn't want to cut down a tree, saw it up into lumber, and build things. They want to integrate in a very natural and graceful and symbiotic way into their environment. So we had to come up with their architecture. They have a symbiotic culture with an intelligent species we would probably take a glance at and say, "Oh, that's a whale." But of course, it's not a whale; it's a Pandoran version.

To have the underwater experience and the magic and mystery of that, maybe it will reconnect people with what we are presently losing here on this planet. It's an adventure; it's a drama; it has huge emotional stakes. But our hope is that the film works to celebrate and fall in love with again the world of Pandora.