James Cameron Once Explained Why He Decided to Direct ‘Avatar’ Over ‘Alita: Battle Angel’
Before James Cameron directed Avatar, the filmmaker had his sights set on another movie called Alita: Battle Angel. Although it was a close call, Cameron chose to do Avatar over the manga-inspired feature.
James Cameron was originally supposed to direct ‘Alita: Battle Angel’
Alita: Battle Angel was once supposed to be Cameron’s comeback feature before the Avatar films took precedent. The film was going to be based off the cyberpunk manga Battle Angel Alita created by mangaka Yukito Kishiro. The sci-fi piece was close to Cameron’s heart, and he looked forward to translating Kishiro’s work to the big screen.
“We’re in pre-production right now on a project called Battle Angel which is something I’ve been working on for several years and we’re just, we’re finishing up the shooting draft right now. We’ve been designing, it’s a big science fiction film and a couple things that will be interesting about this project,” Cameron once said according to Superhero Hype in 2004.
Somewhat similarly to Avatar, his vision of the film combined live action with cutting edge 3-D technology of the time.
“The main character, even though it’s a live action film, the main character will be done with CG animation and the second thing that’s interesting is we’re going to be shooting it in 3D using the stereo imagining system that we’ve been developing for the documentaries,” he added.
James Cameron had to choose between ‘Battle Angel’ and ‘Avatar’
As passionate as he was about Battle Angel, the Avatar films were also fighting for Cameron’s attention. Due to how time-consuming each film could potentially be, eventually the Titanic filmmaker had to choose between the two.
“Well, Battle Angel and Avatar were being developed at the same time. The thinking was that we’d be using similar technology to create either one or both of those films. It was little bit of a horse race there for a while to see which one was going to be done first,” Cameron once told Entertainment Weekly.
But Cameron had too many ideas at the ready for Battle Angel. And since he couldn’t solve the script issues with Angel, Cameron decided to focus on Avatar.
Technology also played a factor in Cameron’s choice.
“We did a test of the performance-capture techniques we wanted and needed to use to make this film — a live action, real-time, director-centric performance-capture process,” he said. “In other words, as the actors perform, I’m able to see in the monitor not only what they might look like as their CG character, but in the CG environment we’ve created, and direct them accordingly. When we did the test, we chose Avatar, just because it seemed like the easiest one to get going for a test, for a lot of reasons.”
James Cameron felt ‘Avatar’ would do more good for the world than ‘Battle Angel’
After doing Avatar, Cameron felt the series had a lot more potential than Battle Angel. The Terminator filmmaker believed that Avatar could potentially impact the globe in a more profound way than the manga adaptation.
“I see the good the Avatar franchise can do in terms of keeping a world audience cognizant of our relationship with nature, but doing it in an entertainment context,” he said in a 2012 interview with MTV News. “Ultimately I think there’s more good to be done there than with Battle Angel. Battle Angel is just a great, kick ass story.”
