Mark Fellman
Artistic vision doesn't come cheap. Director James Cameron has presided over the first film to cost $100 million, Terminator 2, the first film to cost over $200 million, Titanic, and now, Avatar, a $230 million sci-fi adventure that's taken four years to produce. According to a profile in The New Yorker, Cameron himself developed the camera system used to shoot this film, which is due out December 18th and will be "the first big-budget action blockbuster in 3-D." “All directors have a God complex,” Dana Goodyear writes. “Cameron takes his unusually seriously. For Avatar, he worked with a linguist to develop the Na’vi language, inspired by fragments of Maori he picked up in New Zealand years ago…He hired a team of artists to execute his ideas, but reserved one creature for himself: the thanator, a six-legged black pantherlike beast, twenty-four feet long, covered in plate scales, with a reptilian double set of jaws and a threat display resembling that of a fan lizard.” The profile paints Cameron as a perfectionist who will do anything to realize his vision. As actor Bill Paxton put it, "The words 'No' and 'That's impossible' and phrases like 'That can't be done'— that's the stuff that gives him an erection."