He helped create Gollum and King Kong and the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” winning four Academy Awards along the way. But nothing Joe Letteri had done quite prepared him for the scale and scope of “Avatar,” in which the Weta Workshop partner led a team that created the alien landscape of Pandora and then filled it with strange flora, fauna and a race of 10-foot blue people called the Na’vi.
Director James Cameron’s blockbuster hit is a groundbreaker visually and technologically, with Letteri and Weta exploring new techniques during three years of painstaking work. Along the way, Letteri also found time to check in with a couple of other Weta projects, including the summer hit “District 9” and Weta founder Peter Jackson’s new “The Lovely Bones.”
Letteri sat down with theWrap the week he was in town for the “Avatar” premiere. It marked the first time he’d actually seen the film all the way through. (Letteri photo by Marty Melville/Getty Images Entertainment)
So what was it like to finally see the finished movie?
It was great. The thing I thought was most successful was the editing. I thought it really moved along and kept you engaged the whole time. I saw a rough cut about four months ago, and that was a good 45 minutes longer. And we hadn’t really even started working on the third-act battle scene.
That’s an awfully big piece of the film to leave until the last minute.
Oh, it’s typical for these movies. No matter how you try to plan, it all happens at the end. “Lord of the Rings” was the same way. “Kong” was the same way.
Was it a no-brainer when Cameron asked you to do “Avatar”?
In terms of wanting to do it, yes. Jim had this idea that was almost like “The Wizard of Oz” – what if we just go to this whole other magical place, where the people are not the people but we still recognize things about them? But when it came to sitting down and figuring out if we could actually do everything we had to do to make this movie, that took a little more brain power.
The line I keep hearing is that Cameron had to wait until technology advanced to the point where it was even possible to do what he envisioned.
That’s fairly true. It took, probably, another year beyond the point when we started making the movie to where we actually could make the movie. We’ve been laughing about that for the last few weeks: “Okay, now we know how to make this movie … but we’re almost done!”
What were the problems that you hadn’t solved when you started?
Everything. We started completely from scratch. We just ripped the whole engine apart, basically, and said, “Okay, everything we’ve been doing for the past 20 years, just assume its wrong and find where the flaws are.” Because we’ve got to be able to do more of it, it’s got to be better and faster and more flexible than we could ever do before.
