“I’m not going to tell you anything!” jokes the actor Stephen Lang at the start of our interview. The third part of Avatar, title Fire and ashes, rivals the level of secrecy within Disney with the MCU, so we were not deceived to the point of asking him what will happen in this new chapter.
The mischievous smile of the actor who plays Colonel Quaritch in the Millionaire franchise James Cameron – Jim to his friends – it’s because he just admitted that he read the scripts Avatars 2, 3, 4 And 5 follow up, to which we couldn’t help but respond with “So you know a lot!”
Sam Worthington who plays the protagonist, Jake Sully, also jokes that he can’t know when, later and after only a minute of the interview, the Zoom decides to stop working. When we reconnect, the first thing it tells us is that “If you ask too many questions about Avatar, Jim will drop you from the call. “He has eyes everywhere!” »
We have 20 minutes with each and we haven’t seen the movie yet and they can barely explain anything about it. But Lang is nice and decides to offer us a candy: “Well, yes, I will tell you,” he adds. ““Things are going to get worse before they get better.”
“War and Peace”, Pandora version
The actor says reading the script was like “read an incredible novel, and not just any novel, an epic saga, something like War and peace. And it doesn’t seem like he chose this title at random. The story of the Sullys has nothing to do with the Napoleonic Wars themselves, but rather with the disappearance of one’s own world, of love, of loss and above all of family.
For his partner, the detail with which the story is written is “incredible”, which has made him grow a certain respect for the challenge of a third plot so “charged with emotion”. And as indicated Oona Chaplin, new to the cast as leader of the late Na’vi people (and with whom we were also able to chat), Cameron is simply a genius.
“But a real genius! He knows so much, he has so much love, so much affection, so much care and so much integrity in everything he does…”, he praises. “I don’t know if you know this, but He built a submarine and went to the bottom of the sea, deeper than anyone else, least one person who, I think, beat him”, he says in reference to the second part of the saga, The meaning of water. “He is like a magnificent genius and it is a privilege to be in his presence.”
The actress, whose name should be familiar to you and rightly so, well She is the granddaughter of Charles Chaplin, He would have even been a tree if Cameron had asked him to. Instead, it was his turn lead the Mangkwan clan, whose appearance in the world of Pandora serves to show us the other side of this idyllic blue paradise.
The protagonist of Avatar he calls her “Google Pandora” and the first time we explored it was in 2009, when He himself revealed it to us through the eyes of Jake Sully, a human sent to this distant moon where its inhabitants, the Na’vi, lived in connection with nature and its goddess, Eywa. They accompanied him Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace, Lang as Superior and Zoe Saldana like Neytiri, the daughter of the Na’vi chief whom Sully ended up falling in love with in the middle of the war between humans and aliens.
After the victory of the natives of Pandora, we had to wait 13 years to come back with a second part in which we discovered that this was only the first battle: the protagonists were now parents of five children, the actress of Stranger had become a Na’vi teenager, Kate Winslet He joined the party as the spiritual guide of a new clan and Quaritch was still alive, ready to hunt down Jake and with a son raised in nature by the Sullys.
Forced to change homes and blend into this other brother city to the rhythm of the waters,The depths of the ocean and its creatures have become Pandora’s new landscape. A landscape that now appears before us enveloped in flames and covered in ashes.
Snakes in Paradise
Fans of the animated series that shares a title with this hit Cameron joke –Avatar: The Last Airbender This production is called Nickelodeon– with what The plots of the two projects are too similar. The first tells that the inhabitants of air, earth, fire and water lived in harmony until the attack of the Fire Nation. After the premiere of The meaning of water, It is not surprising that the announcement of a third chapter of Sully’s story centered on this dangerous element has raised laughter and comparisons.
But if there’s one thing that this trio of actors never tires of repeating, it’s that It would be a mistake to consider the Na’vi fire clan as the villains of the film. “He is a magnificent beast, of unprecedented power and command,” Chaplin says of his character, Varang. “Their people suffered a great natural disaster and their connection with Eywa was severed, so they feel very abandoned and are suffering a lot. »
A resentment that gave way to a new type of power in Pandora: the one that arises when the Na’vi renounce their goddess. “There is a line in the third film that says: “This world is deeper than you imagine” Worthington recites in reference to this new plot.
“And not just in terms of the moon, but also in terms of who they are and their journey. Everything is deeper, from their emotions to their darkness,” he says. “For those who consider Pandora to be Eden, I would say that “Eden would not exist without its snakes” » adds Lang of his own accord. “For all this beauty and goodness to exist, it is absolutely necessary that it be offset by ugliness and pain.”
But at no time do any of them speak of evil, but of despair. In this sense, for Chaplin, This new clan is the one that most resembles humans. “Their disconnection from nature is the source of all their conflicts, and I look around and I see the same thing: you go out and there’s a cement sidewalk, you go to the store to buy food and it’s wrapped in plastic,” he says.
“There is an absolute disconnection with natural cycles, with the forces of nature and with the birds that sing in every season; a disconnection that we almost take for granted and forget the pain it causes. But deep in our hearts, we know that the right thing to do is to connect.
The destroyed fortress
“That the memory of these underwater images and the seven minutes and fifteen seconds of Winslet holding her breath underwater “For Cameron, don’t turn away from the tragedy the Na’vi are facing,” the actors seem to warn us. The meaning of water ends with the death of the Sullys’ eldest son, and the family’s pain over his loss was only a prelude to what was to come.
NOW, It’s his brother Lo’ak’s turn to take the reins of History Already Great Britain Dalton, the actor who plays him, tells fire and ashes through the eyes of his character. “It’s not about passing the baton” specifies the one who plays his father. “Jake couldn’t tell this story because he’s suffered so much, he feels so much rage and anger and pain, that there would be too much swearing in this story.”
SO, Just as it was he who told us Neytiri’s story, it will now be Lo’ak who guides us through this pain. of a family who saw how what they considered indestructible -“This family is our strength,” Jake said several times- It was destroyed by the death of a firstborn.
“It’s the story of a family, of a father and mother, of sons and daughters trying to stay together.” AND While some struggle to survive, others begin to discover what it means to feel this fatherly love. “Look, you and I know that there are many types of parents in the world, right? And guess what? A lot of them are not very good parents,” Lang analyzes of this more sentimental side that we begin to discover in Quaritch.
This does not mean that it will be a point of union between the protagonist and him. “They’re not going to sit down and sing a duet together,” he laughs. “But things will happen. You know what they say: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
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