tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

The first thing I did after watching the trailer for James Cameron's Avatar was to look for more background info to fully grasp what it's all about. I'm already impressed with what I saw and what contains below impressed me even more:

In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for Avatar. Cameron said his inspiration was "every single science fiction book I read as a kid", and that he was particularly striving to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter series. Cameron saw his story as being about how advanced civilizations supplant indigenous cultures, in either actively genocidal or more unpremeditated ways, and was influenced by the story of Pocahontas. In Avatar, humanity extends that practice to entire planets. The premise of a paralyzed man whose mind is remotely controlling an alien body is very similar to Paul Anderson's 1957 short story "Call me Joe." In August 1996, Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of "synthetic", or computer-generated, actors. The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world" [ from the wiki ]

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The Titanic director added that he wanted

...to make "something that has this spoonful of sugar of all the action and the adventure and all that, which thrills me anyway as a fan, but also wanting to do something that has a conscience, that maybe in the enjoying of it makes you think a little bit about the way you interact with nature and your fellow man...

15 years in the making seems such a short time - given how ambitious James Cameron's vision of Avatar is.
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So in December 2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The director planned to create photo-realistic computer-generated characters by using motion capture animation technology, on which he had been doing work for the past 14 months. Unlike previous performance capture systems, where the digital environment is added after the actors' motions have been captured, Cameron's new virtual camera allows him to observe directly on a monitor how the actors' virtual counterparts interact with the movie's digital world in real time and adjust and direct the scenes just as if shooting live action; "It's like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can."

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What the movie is all about: Tom McShea @gamespot explains:

Avatar takes place on a far away moon called Pandora some time in the 22nd century. The planet resembles Earth’s rain forests, covered in lush plant life and towering trees that stretch more than 4,000 feet above the ground. The larger-than-life atmosphere caries over to the creatures that inhabit this world. The dominant creatures on Pandora are the Navids, which look terrifyingly fierce but are actually quite docile. They are 10 feet tall, have blue skin, and resemble felines. Though they are peaceful, they will fight when provoked. However, humans cannot live on Pandora, so they create Navid/human hybrids that are known as avatars. These are real human beings that live, breathe, and otherwise interact with the world, but they are controlled by a human driver. And when the two species meet, conflict arises.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a former Marine who was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down in combat on Earth. Jake is selected to participate in the Avatar program, which will enable him to walk. Jake travels to Pandora, a lush jungle-covered extraterrestrial moon filled with incredible life forms, some beautiful, many terrifying. Pandora is also home to the Na'vi, a sentient humanoid race that humans consider primitive, yet are more physically capable than humans. Standing three meters tall (approximately 10ft), with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Na'vi live in harmony with their unspoiled world. As humans encroach deeper into Pandora's forests in search of valuable minerals, the Na'vi unleash their formidable warrior abilities to defend their threatened existence.

Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na'vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies that are controlled by a human "driver" through a technology that links the driver's mind to their Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Sent deep into Pandora's jungles as a scout for the soldiers that will follow, Jake encounters many of Pandora's beauties and dangers. There he meets a young Na'vi female, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched only by her ferocity in battle.

Over time, Jake integrates himself into Neytiri's clan, and begins to fall in love with her. As a result, Jake finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth, and the Na'vi, forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of an entire world.

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The Lead Actors: John Horn at the LA Times observes:

When Cameron made "Titanic," he cast at its center two actors without much name recognition at the time: - Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Both, of course, went on to be huge stars. For "Avatar," Cameron has cast two more under-the-radar performers: 30-year-old Aussie actor Sam Worthington ("The Great Raid," "Hart's War") will play the film's hero, Jake, and 28-year-old Zoe Saldana ("Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," "Drumline") his love interest.

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Says Cameron in choosing Sam Worthington:

I had found Sam Worthington fairly early in the process. He really hung in there and trooped with us for a long time. He came in for a couple screen tests, and kinda hung on, hoping. So I have to give him credit for that. It was a very exhaustive process. We looked at a lot of people. There were people who were championed by the studio and I even screen-tested them. Ultimately, when I showed them Sam against their champions, they was no comparison. [ read more ]

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Here's more about Worthington: Sam Worthington's international film career began with a series of small roles in Hollywood productions such as Hart's War (2002) and The Great Raid (2005), which was filmed in Australia. He was one of several actors who was under consideration to take over the role of James Bond from Pierce Brosnan for the 2006 film Casino Royale.