Featured Image Credit: UNILAD / Mariano Garcia / Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: James Cameron, Film and TV, Virtual Reality, Technology
Daisy Phillipson
Topics: James Cameron, Film and TV, Virtual Reality, Technology
James Cameron has opened up about what he predicts could be the next big change coming to cinema in the near future.
The renowned filmmaker is behind some of the biggest blockbuster hits in history, including Avatar and Titanic, the highest and the third-highest grossing movies of all time, respectively.
And he's well on the way to another box office success with the recent release of the long-awaited sequel Avatar: The Way of Water.
According to Forbes, the film has drawn in $180 million internationally since dropping on Friday, December 16, with estimates suggesting this figure could reach $400-450 million by the end of the weekend.
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While Cameron has big plans for the franchise moving forward, with three more Avatar films in the pipeline, he's certainly open to experimenting with another potential development in cinema.
UNILAD caught up with the director ahead of The Water of Water's release where we asked him what he sees happening in the near future, and talks soon turned to the potential of virtual reality (VR).
In fact, Cameron's no stranger to working with this technology.
"So in order to author an Avatar movie, I work in VR all day long," he explained.
"It's like, I take the goggles off, and I put it in my hands just so I can run around the set without tripping and falling on my a**."
Working with a virtual camera is nothing new to the filmmaker, who said he’s been doing so for the last 20 years.
But when it comes to authoring narrative fiction this way, Cameron went into the finer details of how this can be achieved.
While he says it’s certainly possible, he went on to ask: "Are we talking about a VR immersive camera process? Or are we talking about actual real-time render of VR worlds?
"We’re not at a point yet where we can do the kind of quality of image that we can do on a movie where we've got millions of hours of rendering time going into it."
While it’s not possible right now to create a film like Avatar - which already represents a humongous leap forward in terms of CGI and visual effects - in real time, that’s not to say VR filmmaking is out of the question down the line.
Cameron continued: "Can we imagine VR narrative? Yes, and I'd even like to experiment with that at some point.
"But I would do a different subject than this so it's not so computationally intensive and we can do it in real time.
"I think yeah, let's explore that – any new tools are interesting to me."
Well, if there's any filmmaker in the business today who could take VR filmmaking into the mainstream, it would be James Cameron.
Until then, don't miss out on the opportunity to see Avatar: The Way of Water on the big screen – we'd highly recommend catching it in epic 3D.