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On Feb. 28, the Visual Effects Society will honor James Cameron at the Century Plaza Hotel with its Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the 8th annual VES Awards. So, I invited Cameron the opportunity to put Avatar into a much larger VFX context, reminiscing about The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Titanic as well.

James Cameron: So, we're gonna talk about effects, huh?

Bill Desowitz: Yeah, we're gonna look back at your previous films and talk a little bit more about Avatar.

JC: What hasn't been said? Is there anything that hasn't been said?

BD: I don't know. Did you have the retreat?

JC: Yeah, we did the retreat and it worked out very nicely.

BD: What did you discuss?

JC: Well, what I was looking for were themes that were common to everyone's comments, and really just the fact that we explored a few blind alleys and it took that to come up with the best possible version of the process, and we didn't start firing on all eight cylinders until the last few months of the virtual production process, and I think we now believe we know what that should look like from the inception on another project, so we think we can do it a lot more efficiently.

BD: Any specifics?

JC: No, it's all proprietary stuff at this stage. The stuff we were talking about was generating a competitive advantage over everyone else. I don't exactly want to blather on about it.

BD: What about more generally?

JC: Well, the consensus was that, actually, we had done it right. We made a lot of mistakes, but in refining it we eventually wound up at what we had imagined to be the best possible approach using current technology. As newer, faster render engines become available, we will ultimately convert to something that probably produces a result that looks more like a contemporary game engine with realtime shadows and lots more moving effects like wind, but we're not gonna do that in the next generation.

BD: And you were obviously pleased with the performance capture.

JC: Yeah, I mean, we looked at it from all perspectives, including getting Weta's perspective and Fox's perspective. And the consensus was it took three-and-a-half years to get to a point where we were really running optimally, but we got there. And if it looks like that from day one on a new project, then it's going to run a lot more efficiently and take less time and money.