Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron trimmed 10 minutes of gun violence in ‘Avatar: Way of Water’
Three-hour runtime has hardly stopped the film from topping box office charts
A lot has been said about the length of James Cameron’s long-awaited ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’.
The three-hour runtime has hardly stopped the film from topping box office charts around the world. Now Cameron has revealed the film would have run 10 minutes longer had he not cut out scenes with gun violence, reports Variety.
The filmmaker told Esquire Middle East that he is no longer interested in fetishising guns in his action scenes given the rampant gun violence in the US.
“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” Cameron said. “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. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”
Cameron said that he looks back on some films that he has made, and he doesn’t know if he would want to make that film now.
“I don’t know if I would want to fetishise the gun, like I did on a couple of ‘Terminator’ movies 30-plus years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”
“I’m happy to be living in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago,” Cameron added as an aside.
Given Cameron’s comments, it’s safe to assume that action scenes in ‘The Terminator’ franchise will look a bit different should it ever return to the screen.