Avatar Secrets That Won’t Make You Blue

The director of Titanic, The Terminator and Aliens had a dream that made him feel blue, in a good way.

"I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fiber-optic lamps," James Cameron told GQ in 2022, "and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it. And these kinds of lizards that didn’t look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something. It was all in the dream."

Then he set to putting his vision on paper (a talented artist, that's Cameron's hand sketching Kate Winslet's Rose in Titanic), drawings that "saved us from about 10 lawsuits," he added. "Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head."

Cameron wrote the screenplay for the first Avatar film—as well as came up with the seeds of the Na'vi language—and then turned over his 800 pages of world-expanding notes to married writing partners Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who wrote the next two movies.

Josh Friedman is the credited writer, along with Cameron, on the presently titled Avatar 4, while Shane Salerno worked on Avatar 5.