There is no pressure on Jon Landau. The producer only has to save the entire cinema industry. That requires him to make a profit on the upcoming sequel to James Cameron’s all-conquering Avatar. No problem. In a recent interview with GQ, the director said that would merely entail Avatar: The Way of Water, which cost north of $350 million, registering as “the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history”. This in a business that is still feeling the hangover from Covid. Easy-peasy.
I am being only partly facetious. Landau, a burly, genial fellow in his early 60s, has been here before and pulled it off. This is the man who produced both Titanic and Avatar for Cameron. We recall that both films became the highest-grossing of all time, but some of us may have forgotten that, before release, the films gathered a lot of negative publicity. Titanic, in particular, was expected to be a disaster. The film came in late and over-budget. During the Canadian shoot, an aggrieved crew member doped Cameron and others with angel dust. Yet things worked out okay.
“Let’s talk about Titanic for a second – and the same thing applies to the first Avatar film,” Landau says. “The people who were writing the negative articles never read the script. They never saw the dailies. They never walked the sets. I get to do that. It all starts with the script. And that’s where Jim is the master. He has themes that are bigger than the genre – to engage audiences with relatable characters set against extraordinary backgrounds. So I don’t let the outside fodder bother me. But Jim and I did have a conversation where we said: when people bet against you, it just motivates you to work harder to prove them wrong.”
We meet in a spanking new hotel on Leicester Square, an hour or two after Landau has presented footage from Way of Water in the adjacent Odeon Luxe West End. The crisp 3-D images float even move convincingly in apparently empty space than did the visuals for Avatar. Landau brings on the new, younger cast members and allows them to gleam promisingly. If there is even a smidgen of doubt he has suppressed it like a master. But he has to worry. How could you not? I wonder if he can remember when the concern faded with Titanic. When did he realise it had gone beyond mere success and become a phenomenon?
“We realised it was a success the first time we screened the finished movie, which was at the Tokyo Film Festival,” he says. “I did the same as I did today. While you were watching the screen, I was off at the side watching the audience. At the Tokyo Film Festival, in a room of 6,000 people, I was watching the audience. That told me we had something that worked. When you release a movie, it’s not just about the opening weekend. That just tells you about your marketing campaign. It’s your third weekend. Do they still want to see it? That’s when I started to realise that Titanic was special. The eighth week of release on Titanic was Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day was our single largest day at the box office. Eight weeks into release! And that’s when we said: ‘It’s a phenomenon.’”
It is so rare now that films hang around in this manner. It happened this year with Top Gun: Maverick, but, in most cases, a film’s financial health really is determined by its opening weekend. Then again, Cameron operates in his own universe. Avatar didn’t just break Titanic’s record. It annihilated it. Few thought anything would beat the science-fiction flick’s eventual haul of $2.7 billion. Avengers: Endgame did manage to pass it out, but the studio just re-released Avatar and it promptly regained the title. Never bet against Jim.
Still, he and Landau have set themselves considerable challenges here. The team shot both The Way of Water – as the title suggests, largely a maritime adventure – and the third episode simultaneously in New Zealand over three long years (the last dogged by Covid). Once again, the release has been repeatedly delayed. Yet they hope to release a total of four sequels. Speaking to me last year, Cameron sounded admirably level-headed about it all. “That will be determined by factors beyond my control,” he said. Is Landau similarly philosophical?
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“I feel confident that we have the goods there to make the movies,” he says. “The scripts are great scripts. In 2019, I would have told you a lot of different, confident things about the state of the world – before Covid, with stability in Europe. So I’ve learned that nothing is inevitable. I think that’s what Jim has learned. I don’t think he’s lost his competence or his drive to make the movies. I think we just realised that there are outside factors that are sometimes beyond our control.”
It is vulgar to talk about money but nobody is more concerned with that side of it than the producer. He has an extraordinary history. To produce two films that have taken the all-time box-office record is something else. There is more. David O. Selznick, the man behind Gone With the Wind, is the only other person to have produced a film that regained the title. These things must matter a bit. If only in a sporting sense.
“What it means to me?” he says. “It’s less personal than it is about the industry. Right? Titanic showed the industry what the potential was. The potential for a relatively original story – that you didn’t need to make the 18th version of X, Y or Z. Yeah? Avatar was an original idea that did the same thing. So when Endgame beat Avatar, that was a good thing. Because it showed people that the industry is not dead. And when Spider-Man: No Way Home broke US box office records, that was in a post-pandemic era. So, people, wake up! We’re still here. Right?”
Let me get back to my list of hurdles. Avatar arrived in 2009 at the high point of the second 3-D boom. Cinema owners invested in digital projectors just to screen the thing and, in the process, helped accelerate the near-total demise of celluloid in projection rooms. The 3-D medium looked to be here to stay. Yet in subsequent years audiences and filmmakers drifted back to the flat images that had sufficed for so long. Earlier this year, writing about the format, I noted that my nearest multiplex was, that day, screening not a single film in the format. It took a bit longer to die out than it did in the late 1950s. But it has happened again. Right? This is 1959. This is 1960. Is 3-D not a goner?
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As ever, Landau does not flinch. He smiles at my audacity. He has an answer ready.
“I don’t want to tell people why 3-D still works,” he says. “I want people to discover it. I want another 19-year-old to say: ‘Hey, I saw this in 3-D and you have to see it in 3-D.’ Look, people chased 3-D after Avatar. And they did it poorly. They thought that 3-D could make a bad movie good. It doesn’t. It exacerbates everything. Yeah, it makes a good movie better. It makes a mediocre movie more mediocre – makes it worse. We have more 3-D theatres than we had when we released Avatar. I know that for sure.”
So what about his relationship with Cameron? I have met the director on a few occasions and he has always seemed the most agreeable of individuals. Yet he has a reputation of being, shall we say, fiery on set. “There were times when I was genuinely frightened of him. Jim has a temper like you wouldn’t believe,” said Kate Winslet of her experiences on Titanic. Yet she joins Edie Falco and Jemaine Clement among the new cast members on Avatar: The Way of Water. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver return from the first film..
“I think your term was ‘fiery,’” Landau says. “My term would be ‘passionate’. Okay. You have to be passionate. You have to push people to go beyond where they think they can or you’re not going to have Titanic. You are not going to have Terminator 2. You’re not going to have Avatar. I think Jim brings with him a passion. And he has a drive for excellence. He doesn’t ask more of anybody else than he expects of himself. Right? His pushing of people, his critiquing of people was never personal. It’s always connected to the greater goal. That’s why we have people who have been with us a long time. I know you’re from Ireland. I am going to give a shout out to Richie Baneham.”
Baneham is the Dubliner – a graduate of Ballyfermot Art College – who shared the special effects Oscar for Avatar. His name is not as familiar as that of Saoirse Ronan or Colin Farrell but, having also worked on The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, he is among the most successful film professionals the nation has ever produced.
“Richie has been with us for 17 years,” Landau says. “He’s phenomenal. He is also under the gun of Jim as directly as anybody. If Jim was just this one side that people think, you would not have someone staying with him for 17 years.”
Landau has won me over. I am now willing to bet Avatar: The Way of Water will eat the universe alive. But there are still nagging doubts. Overall box office is down. People are staying at home. Maybe the entire art form is doomed.
“I was in Barcelona recently and I quoted the New York Times,” he says. “I’m paraphrasing, so it’s not exact quote. They said: entertainment can be had now at a cut-rate at home. The movie business as we know it is going to die”.
He pauses for effect.
“That was written in 1982.”
Ha ha. Take all my money.
Avatar: The Way of Water opens on December 16th.
