James Cameron Once Shared How Doing Dark Angel Helped Him Write the Avatar Sequels
Movie maker James Cameron was decades away from creating the Avatar franchise while he was developing the TV show Dark Angel. But working on the television series had an unforeseen influence on Avatar down the line.
How ‘Dark Angel’ was already influencing ‘Avatar’ twenty years before the movie franchise
Cameron decided to explore the small screen in the year 2000 with the Fox sci-fi series Dark Angel. The show offered Jessica Alba her big break, and featured other familiar faces like NCIS’ Michael Weatherly and Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles. Dark Angel saw Alba playing a genetically enhanced superhuman in a futuristic scene with a somewhat similar tone to Terminator. One of the reasons he took the story to TV instead of film was because producing television offered more creative energy.
“When you make a film there’s a long period of time where you’re writing and planning. It’s basically office work and it’s boring, quite frankly,” Cameron once said according to Conversations With Filmmakers. “When you’re making television, you’re in production all the time. You are constantly out there every single day making film. And even though I’m not on the set every day actually doing the shots, there’s an energy to it, it keeps the creative wheels turning. It’s also that television is an art of compromise.”
Cameron further shared that doing television was more accommodating to his sensibilities as a storyteller.
“You have an image in your head and you’re not going to be able to achieve it, so for a perfectionist like me it takes away the need for perfection and allows me to concentrate on the craft of writing, making good scenes on the page, casting good actors, and the things that are ultimately the strongest aspects of the show,” he added.
Despite television being the more satisfying medium, he would invest his full attention on filmmaking after Dark Angel’s cancellation. He’d further build up his filmography with films like True Lies and Avatar, the latter being the crown jewel of his career box-office wise.
When making the Avatar sequels, however, Cameron shared that he discovered a surprising link between them and Dark Angel.
“We tried an experiment. We set ourselves a challenge of writing three films at the same time. And I could certainly write any one of them but to write three in some reasonable amount of time – we wanted to shoot them together so we couldn’t start one until all three scripts were done and approved,” Cameron once told the Los Angeles Times (via Slash Film). “So I knew I was going to have to ‘parallel process’ which meant I would have to work with other writers. And the best experience I had working with other writers was in television when I did Dark Angel. The television room is a highly collaborative, fun experience. So we put together three teams, one for each script.”
James Cameron felt the ‘Avatar’ sequels were more like television shows
It may have been a while since Cameron had to helm his own television show. But the Avatar sequels might’ve helped hit the spot that Dark Angel did in more ways than one. Speaking with The Wrap, Cameron went over his process for writing the Avatar films again. He confided the remaining three Avatar movies are pretty much already completed in his head. Now, it was all a matter of making sure they hit theaters.
“We know what these movies are gonna be,” Cameron said. “We just have to go through the process of getting them done. So ideally two years from now, [Avatar 3] comes out, ideally maybe three years after that [Avatar 4] comes out, and then ideally maybe a couple years after that [Avatar 5] comes out. So we won’t be away from the marketplace, so we’ll have that sense of a persistent world, an ongoing story that I think people want. If they’re gonna invest in these characters, if they’re gonna invest in this world, we want to give it to them at a regular cadence. That was the game plan. And that’s why one of the reasons we were gone so long.”
Like most streaming shows nowadays, Cameron asserted that each film was a chapter to a bigger narrative.
“It’s really one big story, but it’s like episodic television. Each one has its own proximal resolution. The character problems continue across the cut,” he said.
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