Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa discussed their experiences in writing the Avatar script.
The writing proposal that James Cameron pitched to Silver and Jaffa was much more than a paid job. The original plan for Cameron was to create more than three films and develop the Avatar universe. He put together a group of screenwriters, including Josh Friedman, Shane Salerno, and Jaffa and Silver.
Silver talks about the experience with Variety and says, “We met for six months. It was so big and so exciting. But it was going to take the room to wrangle all this amazing material into three movies that would each be individual yet follow the saga of all these different characters in these expanding worlds.”
Jaffa and Silver claim that the creators were aware of this issue as they created the Pandora planets. Jaffa claims: “We did a lot of researh and a lot of talking about it. You have to write, really, to the character. We just kept falling back into character and emotion. As long as we had studied and really been sensitive to it, we felt like we were on solid ground.”
Jaffa stated that Cameron handed him finders that included about 800 pages before movie while relaying his experience. He claims, “We went through it with him, very slowly and carefully. We were invited into his mind, his left brain, and his right brain, and to just kind of dive in and immerse ourselves in the world that he’d created in the first movie.”
The authors discussed their experiences and admitted that there were numerous obstacles to overcome because there was occasionally too much information and, at other times, nothing at all. Cameron’s dedication was the only thing that kept them going.
