Avatar producer Jon Landau reveals the surprising way Madonna inspired the movie. Written and directed by James Cameron, the 2009 blockbuster starred Sam Worthington as a disabled former Marine, Jake Sully, who travels to the lush planet of Pandora and falls in love with Neytiri, a Na'vi woman played by Zoe Saldaña. Avatar, well-renowned for its incredible visual effects and innovative motion capture filming techniques, became the highest-grossing film of all time. Soon enough, four sequels were on the way.
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The first sequel, the long-awaited Avatar: The Way of Water, is due out later this year. Much like the first film, Avatar 2 was subject to numerous delays as new performance capture technology needed to be developed before production. Released this past May, the Avatar 2 trailer revealed it might have all been worth it, showcasing a breathtaking look at Pandora's ocean views and the Sully family dynamic at the heart of the story. To help audiences prepare for Way of Water's release this December, Disney announced it would re-release Avatar in theaters with remastered picture and sound on September 23.
Now, during a recent interview with The New York Times ahead of Avatar's theatrical re-release, producer Jon Landau revealed the surprising way Madonna inspired the film's cinematography. Landau, who shares producing credit with Cameron, says they were inspired specifically by the pop star's microphone placement during her concerts which gave them the idea to keep the camera close to actors while filming action scenes. Read what Landau revealed about Avatar's bizarre inspiration below:
If Madonna can be bouncing around with a microphone in her face and give a great performance, we thought, ‘Let’s replace that microphone with a video camera. That video camera stays with the actor while we’re capturing the performance, and while we don’t use that image itself, we give it to the visual-effects company, and they render it in a frame-by-frame, almost pore-by-pore level. Motion capture to us has always been lacking one very key letter in front of it: E. E-motion Capture.
Avatar taking inspiration from Madonna is not as bizarre as it sounds. On her Blond Ambition Tour in 1990, the pop star popularized using a wireless headset instead of a handheld microphone. Behind the scenes of Avatar, they used similar-looking black headsets. Still, instead of a microphone positioned in front of the actors' mouths, they used a small square camera to capture their facial expressions and make the CGI look realistic as possible. In actuality, this is just an example of one pioneer in their field taking inspiration from another.
For the production of Avatar 2, Cameron and his team have pioneered new filming technology yet again. The biggest headline was the innovation of underwater performance capture, which required Kate Winslet to hold her breath for seven minutes, both feats never accomplished before in film. As Avatar's re-release nears followed the sequel's premiere this December 16, it will be interesting to potentially discover more of Cameron's unlikely sources of inspiration for these technological innovations.