James Cameron reveals early conflict with Disney for Avatar: The Way of Water’s 3-hour runtime: “There was a lot of tension”

Director James Cameron recently admitted that he had to fight to keep the three-hour run time for his visual spectacle Avatar: The Way of Water and went on to share how the sequel’s long runtime caused tension between him and Disney.

“I think there was a lot of tension around length,” Cameron told Entertainment Weekly. “And because it’s a complicated linear narrative, which is the worst scenario for trying to shorten, you’ve got a complex story servicing a lot of characters, and it’s like dominos falling: This has to happen for that to happen. You're not following a bunch of parallel plot lines in a way that you could take a lot out.”

Solving that puzzle “was our bête noire for about a year,” Cameron said of the balancing act between “keeping engagement” and “preserving beauty” before adding, “The hardest thing when you're trying to shorten a film is to hold onto the things that don’t advance the plot that are beautiful or scary or suspenseful for their own sake. Things came out, and then if I felt the pacing was off, we put things back in.”

Avatar: The Way of Water is now playing in theaters and has caused quite a stir in critics who are giving it some rave reviews for grandiose visuals. In the much-awaited sequel, Cameron dedicates a fair amount of screen time of the three-hours-ten-minutes-long film to “preserving beauty” over plot events.

In an interview with Total Film, Cameron explained how the expanding story, with multiple character domains, needed to be told in such a long runtime and required extended narratives. “The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis. I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion,” Cameron said.

“We didn’t spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it’s a longer film because there’s more characters to service. There’s more story to service.”

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