James Cameron has directed some of the most expensive films ever and made box office history time and time again.
While he surely had final say over the runtime of his latest, Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron shortened it – so as to not “fetishise” gun violence.
“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” Cameron told Esquire Middle East. “I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course.”
He continued: “Violence and action are the same thing, depending how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”
The 68-year-old Oscar winner reflected on the gun-laden action movies he’s made in the past and told the magazine he doesn’t know “if I would want to fetishise the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30+ years ago, in our current world.”
Cameron, who moved to New Zealand in order to make his Avatar sequels at the Weta Workshop effects studio, said he was “happy” that the country banned assault rifles within weeks “after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago”.
The Christchurch mass shootings in 2019 saw a 28-year-old gunman – who had posted Islamophobic content and a white nationalist manifesto online – enter two mosques during Friday prayer, killing 51 people and injuring dozens, according to The New York Times.
“If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try to launch that franchise again ― which is in discussion, but nothing is decided ― I would make it much more about the AI side of it than bad robots gone crazy,” Cameron recently said on the Smartless podcast.
As for The Way of Water, the ambitious sequel has already become the third highest-grossing film of the year with a domestic $300 million (around £249 million) take. It has reportedly also crossed the $1 billion (£831 million) mark worldwide — proving those excised minutes clearly weren’t needed.