James Cameron

But I'll have it come from the future, which I don't have to see.

And I'll just see present day.

We could just use available light, street lighting, and that sort of thing, which is interesting.

Kind of how we did it.

Yeah, that's really good.

I mean, you know, the resources will come eventually and that brings its own curse because now you can do anything.

And when you have infinite choice, you could get paralyzed, right?

And an Avatar movie is an exercise in limiting choice because when you work with performance capture, I get a great performance.

But then I can put the camera anywhere I want.

I can cut it anywhere I want.

I'm not constrained by just the footage that we were able to grab that day before the sun set.

It becomes a kind of a problem of infinite choice.

I think it makes you a better filmmaker because now why is the camera going right here?

Not because that's the farthest back I can move before my ass hits the wall and that's the widest shot I can do.

Why is it here and not back there or not over there?

And so it forces you to become quite rigorous about your aesthetic.

That's a separate problem from getting great performance, by the way.

And the weird thing about an Avatar movie – it's a little weird –

is we separate performance from cinematography.

We do all the cinematography later.