Another dispatch for Vanity Fair, this one on how to tally Avatar’s budget…
In Hollywood, the saying goes, the really creative folks are the accountants. Certainly the number-crunchers at 20th Century Fox, the studio distributing James Cameron’s costly and complex epic Avatar, will be kept busy over the coming months as box office grosses pour in and profit participators line up for their share. As ticket sales are tallied, and investors are repaid, the question will be, Was Avatar worth it?
Determining the final cost of this film is a trick in itself. Wildly different reports have been published, ranging from $230 million (The New Yorker) to nearly $500 million (The New York Times). Avatar’s official budget lies somewhere in between, probably closest to the figure the Los Angeles Times’s John Horn and Claudia Eller cited earlier this month—$280 million for the production, plus marketing costs. “It is the most expensive film we’ve made, but now, having the luxury of hindsight, it is money well spent, so I’m not concerned about it,” James Gianopulos, co-chairman and C.E.O. of Fox Filmed Entertainment, told CNN in early December.
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My conversation with The News Hour’s Arts Correspondent, Jeffrey Brown, for his ArtBeat blog, covers the spare Avatar set, the technique of performance cap, and what Cameron was up to all those years after Titanic…
My Vanity Fair piece on Cameron’s badass heroines, from Sarah Connor to Neytiri….
This is how “meet cute” happens in James Cameron’s Avatar: At night in a jungle on the alien moon Pandora, Jake Sully, a cocky Marine played by Sam Worthington, stumbles into a pack of snapping, six-legged predators called viperwolves. This jarhead is about to become a viperpuppy chew toy when a lithe huntress named Neytiri (Star Trek’s Zoe Salanda) intervenes. Luckily for Jake, Neytiri is handy with a bow and arrow. She’s also smart, bilingual, spiritual, great with animals, and—for a 10-foot-tall cyan-colored woman with a tail—a babe.
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Campea and I talk Avatar sequel, Cameron’s BFF Guillermo del Toro and more on this interview, my maiden Skype:
My interview with Kim Masters of KCRW’s “The Business” is up. We talk about the Avatar set’s minimalist vibe, whether the movie is really a game changer for the industry and how Cameron convinces studio execs to sign on for his wildly ambitious projects.
