If you faced a long hungry period with nothing between you and starvation but a bit of barley and a pig, you'd be better off turning the barley into beer and letting the pig starve.

What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?

I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.

Avatar is the most high tech film in terms of its execution, dealing with essentially a very low tech subject; which is our relationship with nature...and in fact the irony is that the film is about our relationship with nature and how our technological civilization has taken us several removes away from a truly natural existence and the consequences of that to us.

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.

I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.

In writing the new films, I’ve come to realize that AVATAR’s world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.