James Cameron‘s Avatar was released in 2009 and became a massive hit, and the director is planning four sequels to the film. The second movie is currently filming and reunites Cameron with actress Kate Winslet, who he directed in 1997’s Titanic.
“She’s very excited about it,” Cameron told Vanity Fair of Winslet’s role in the film, which is scheduled for a 2020 release. “She blazed through for a couple of days of rehearsals and saw the world that we had created, and how we do the work, and she’s very excited. She plays a character who’s part of the Sea People, the reef people.”
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Winslet’s casting was announced in October, with Cameron sharing that her character will be named Ronal, Entertainment Weekly reports.
“The one thing she did do is demand that she do all her own water work,” Cameron added of the actress. “I said, ‘All right, that’s fine, we’ll have to teach you how to free dive.’ The other actors are up to three- and four-minute breath holds. We’ve already been doing underwater capture. We did a scene last week with six teenagers, well, actually five teenagers and one 7-year-old underwater holding their breath for a couple minutes and acting, actually doing a dialogue scene under water because they speak kind of a sign language.”
Avatar 2 will focus on the offspring of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), with the actors set to reprise their roles from the first film alongside a group of new young actors who will play their children.
“It will be a natural extension of all the themes, and the characters, and the spiritual undercurrents,” Cameron said of the sequels. “Basically, if you loved the first movie, you’re gonna love these movies, and if you hated it, you’re probably gonna hate these. If you loved it at the time, and you said later you hated it, you’re probably gonna love these.”
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