Was he working on it the whole time, or did it get put on the backburner and forgotten about for times? If it's the former, I stand corrected.
Um, both?
I looked up key dates, so make of it what you will:
-1973: First has the dream that will lead to Avatar (fun fact: apparently the Terminator premise also came to Cameron in a dream)
-1994: Script is complete by then.
-1997: Titanic is released, Avatar is intended for a 1999 release date. However, technology hasn't caught up to what Cameron wanted. Turns to documentaries for the next few years.
-2005: Proof of concept clip.
-2006: Script is "developed" (re-developed?), enters full production mode, aiming for a 2008 release.
-2009: Film is released.
We can debate what counts as working on something and when it's on the backburner, but there's a clear line of progression from 1994 to 2009. You can state that there's a gap between 97 and 2005, technically, but I doubt that absolutely nothing was done.
Point is, you don't spend the amount of time here, and draw from personal sources (childhood novels, teenage dreams, deep ecology, etc.), and do a cash grab. Or, maybe you can, but that would have to be one of the longest drawn-out crash grabs in history.
Though, if he was making Avatar for the art...that's embarrassing.
We'll have to agree to disagree there.
I know James Cameron has artistic integrity and all that, but at the end of the day, money is money. He wasn't the only one invested in that project.
Which is true of every movie ever made.
Agreed. Like I said before, the dude has been sniffing his own farts ever since Titanic.
How?
Thanks for the AHCKCHOOLLY here but yes, I was aware. The mockery of that term isn't that the movie invented it, it's that it's actually using it as the name of the thing. It would be like calling an object that characters are fighting over in a movie The McGuffin.
Except those are two different things. A mcGuffin describes a plot device, unobtanium is a real-world scientific term that describes certain materials. One's literary, one's scientific.
You could argue that unobtanium meets the definition of a mcGuffin, but that would be the same if it was given a made-up name as well.
You wouldn’t need an exhaustive in depth explanation even with an invented element, just a couple lines of dialogue.
“Tritanium? The key to keeping our society running?”
“Yeah, there’s a shit-load of it on Pandora. We’re going to mine the fuck out of it.”
New element name and explanation if why tvey need it.
I don't see how making up a compound name (or element, but it's almost certainly a compound) is somehow less silly than using a real-world term.
It's a minor point either way, but if people want to make it into a major point, sure. I just don't get why unobtanium is so out of place in a setting that's strived for scientific accuracy since the outset.