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Hollywood has been waiting 10 years for hot shot director James Cameron to make another film, since his last Oscar-winning, box-office smash Titanic. Well, the director has finally started work on a new film, but Hollywood has lost him to the film-making expertise of New Zealand and the team at Peter Jackson's special effects house, Weta.
The new film Avatar, a ground-breaking 3-D sci-fi epic, will shoot for 31 days in New Zealand beginning late August, but the film will take 2 1/2 years to complete. Special effects will be handled by the team at Weta. It's expected to be released worldwide in mid-2009.
"It's taken me 11 years to get the script right, and it took this long for the technology to catch up to my vision," said Cameron, who was special guest at Investment New Zealand's annual pre-Oscar bash in Beverly Hills last weekend.
Cameron never does the Hollywood party scene and made a special effort for the New Zealand bash, accompanied by wife and their 8-week-old baby Rose.
"I don't care if I never work in Hollywood again," the veteran director said. Avatar, an original script conceived by Cameron and is set on a planet where humans can only survive by projecting their consciousness into genetically engineered bodies, called avatars.
Cameron said it will be a film like no other. Australian actor Sam Worthington has been cast in the lead, and Sigourney Weaver (who starred in Cameron's Alien) will also feature. But don't expect to see their faces.
"The special effects will mean that they won't actually be seen as themselves. It's a bit tough for an actor to come to terms with that, but I think they are coming around," Cameron laughed.
The film is expected to cost US$195 million and according to Economic Development Minister Trevor Mallard, Cameron's project is quite a coup for the New Zealand film industry.
"This is the biggest contract ever for a film. Bigger than Lord of the Rings, in terms of special effects and groundbreaking technology," he said. "This is a massive exercise in digital experimentation and will take the boundaries well beyond where it's gone so far."
Cameron said he has been keen to come back to New Zealand since he visited the country in 1994, and Peter Jackson's work on LOTR and King Kong convinced him to make Avatar there.
"Peter and I have become good friends over the past couple of years. He's a 3-D fanatic, like I am, and he loves the effects, and he loves fantasy film-making. I'm going to be relying on all the infrastructure he's built down there, from the live action soundstages to the Weta workshop, which will make the props and sets.
"It's going to be, 'Thanks for building all this, Peter. Now can you move out for a year and let me use it?' "
