10 Things You Didn't Know About Avatar
4. It Was First Written In 1995
The first Avatar film arrived on our screens way back in December 2009, but pre-production on the epic started seven years earlier in 2002. Cameron assembled a team to carry out experiments with the camera technology and cutting edge CGI which would be needed to make the film possible. Not until 2005 had the team made enough developments to create a viable production method to realise Camerons vision the movie. It was not until then that the project got the green light from 20th Century Fox.
The ideas and story for Avatar, however go back even further, with Cameron having written a treatment for the film back as early as 1995, even before he began filming on Titanic. At the time, no studio would take on the project as the ideas and visual concepts were so vast and fantastical, that any idea of production was abandoned until visual effects technology had caught up, which in Avatar’s case would take fourteens years to be realised.
With the gap between Avatar and its sequels being twelve years, this is another example of the long gestating nature of all of James Cameron projects.