I got a kick out of reading in Geoff Boucher’s Hero Complex blog today (one of the best sources of Avatar news, BTW) about the Leona Lewis song that will play over Avatar’s closing credits. When I asked Cameron in June of ‘09 if there would be a song in Avatar, he gave me an emphatic no. He doesn’t like songs in his films. “They never seem to fit tonally,” Cameron told me at the time.

But then, the director said the same thing while making Titanic. “There was gonna be no song, dammit, in my movie,” Titanic composer James Horner recalled to me in July, when I was interviewing him about Avatar. “That was a closed issue.” But as he grew close to finishing the Titanic score in 1996, Horner was stumped about how to end the movie musically. He ended up sneaking into a studio with Celine Dion and secretly recording My Heart Will Go On, the ballad he had written with lyricist Will Jennings. Horner waited weeks to play the song for Cameron, holding out for a rare good mood day. The result is, of course, soundtrack history. When I asked Horner in July if he had a similar plan up his sleeve for Avatar, he didn’t answer, just got a twinkle in his eye and offered to show me some footage.