James Cameron did not use generative AI to create characters for “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” and the prospect of doing so is “horrifying to me,” he told CBS News Sunday.
The upcoming release required the movie’s team to “build an ocean – the movie’s stars filmed in a 250,000 gallon tank, and digital artists took those shots to create the characters on screen.
“So, performance capture, we use a whole bunch of cameras to capture the body performance of the actor,” he explained. “And we use a single camera (or now we use actually two) to video their face. They’re in a close-up 100% of the time. But there’s a beautiful thing about being in a close-up 100% of the time. It’s very much like theater rehearsal.”
He used practical effects for “The Terminator,” and puppeteers brought the creatures of “Alien” to life. But his first foray into CGI was “The Abyss,” and then Cameron wrote “Titanic” — largely because he wanted to explore the shipwreck.
“It was a little bit of a means to an end, you know?” he said. “I thought, ‘I can just go do this. All right, I need a story. Okay, ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ You know, young, doomed love on the Titanic.’ Boom! Like, instantaneous.”
Cameron said he wrote the first “Avatar” script before “Titanic,” but the technology wasn’t there yet. As he put it, “For years, there was this sense that, ‘Oh, they’re doing something strange with computers and they’re replacing actors,’ when in fact, once you really drill down and you see what we’re doing, it’s a celebration of the actor-director moment.”
“Now, go to the other end of the spectrum, and you’ve got generative AI, where they can make up a character,” he explained. “They can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It’s like, no. That’s horrifying to me. That’s the opposite. That’s exactly what we’re not doing.”
Read the interview with James Cameron at CBS News.
