Zoe Saldaña Teases James Cameron’s Upcoming Avatar Documentary May Drop Before Fire and Ash

An Avatar documentary has been a long time coming. While the quality of its storytelling is a very divisive point, the tremendous ambition and painstaking effort fueling James Cameron’s epic sci-fi franchise are indisputable. Creating the idyllic moon of Pandora and populating it with a multicultural cast of distinctive, blue, humanoid “Na’vi” has required the most dedicated and laborious artisanship from everyone involved. Before they see the third film, this December’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” fans can treat themselves to an as-yet-unseen behind-the-scenes look at everything that has made this franchise possible.

A Chronicle of a Blockbuster Labor of Love

We have Zoe Saldaña to thank for bringing the news of a forthcoming Avatar documentary. Saldaña, who portrays Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) fearsome, strong-hearted Na’vi mate Neytiri, first expressed her desire for such a documentary in a mid-October interview with The Beyond Noise, where she mentioned that Cameron was “considering” it.

No more than two weeks later, it’s clear that an Avatar documentary is well past the consideration stage: on October 21, Saldaña informed The Hollywood Reporter that this feature was in the late stages of development. It was, she said, “still being sort of finished and fine-tuned,” but she believed that it would be released before the December 19 premiere of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”

A Paean to an Underappreciated Art Form

Certainly, this Avatar documentary will chronicle the assiduous work of all the designers and special-effects artists responsible for creating Pandora with all its distinctive Na’vi, flora, and fauna (which would themselves make rich fodder for a fictional documentary in the mold of “The Future Is Wild” and other works of speculative evolution).

However, Saldaña is particularly looking forward to how the Avatar documentary will showcase the prodigious labor that she and her fellow actors (those playing Na’vi or avatars, at least) have put into the enterprise of motion capture, which she called in her Beyond Noise interview “the most empowering form of acting.”

Motion capture, which has been integral to such other big-budget franchises as “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and the “Planet of the Apes” reboot series, is fundamentally distinct from other forms of CGI and animation – notably because of the workload it places on actors. A motion-capture CGI character is played by an actor who wears a full-body unitard speckled with motion-capture sensors; this actor effectively acts out her character’s scenes so that her movements and facial expressions can be translated digitally to said character.

This means that every actor who has played a CGI character in the “Avatar” films has had to master the art of acting out the physical actions of her character. Saldaña listed “the archery, the martial arts, the free diving, the scuba diving – so that you can hold your breath under water for longer than five minutes… the language conceived out of thin air… physically training with former gymnasts, circus performers, and acrobats so you can learn how to walk like an extraterrestrial human species” among the many tasks that she and many other actors had to learn for the movies.

Long, Hard Efforts Finally Showcased

Now, with the forthcoming Avatar documentary, James Cameron is at long last ready to reward the almost unimaginable work that his entire filmmaking team has put into the franchise that has become his gargantuan passion project. They really have been waiting quite some time for this: “Avatar: Fire and Ash” was filmed between 2019 and 2020, with pick-ups and especially post-production VFX being formidable enough to occupy Cameron and his crew well into 2024.

Moreover, Saldaña speculated in her Hollywood Reporter interview that Cameron has been delaying the Avatar documentary to preserve the escapist mystique of the franchise’s lavishly created alien world. “Jim has been a little hard on himself lately,” she explained, “thinking that maybe he did us… a disservice. But I do believe that Jim was doing it for the sake of fans and this desire that he just didn’t want to rob them of being transported into this beautiful planet. When you see the wiring of how things happen backstage, it kind of keeps you from really going on that voyage.”

However, such forays behind the scenes are the kind of thing that Saldaña herself has long craved when it comes to her favorite films. In Beyond Noise, she recalled that Cameron’s early work – “The Terminator,” “Aliens,” and “The Abyss” – meant a lot to her decision to go into acting, and that as a child she watched behind-the-scenes features on repeat. “I liked the sacrifice that goes into putting something together,” she said, “It’s art, right?”

The Avatar documentary will be released on Disney+ on November 7.