Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver shared their experience with writing the script for Avatar.
James Cameron proposed the script idea to Silver and Jaffa which was much more than a for-hire gig. Cameron’s initial idea was to make more than three movies and expand the world of Avatar. He arranged a team of scriptwriters including Jaffa and Silver, Josh Friedman, and Shane Salerno.
Sharing the experience with Variety, Silver says, “We met for six months. It was so big and so exciting. But it was going to take the room to wrangle all this amazing material into three movies that would each be individual yet follow the saga of all these different characters in these expanding worlds.”
Jaffa while sharing his experience said that Cameron handed about finders of roughly 800 pages. He says, “We went through it with him, very slowly and carefully. We were invited into his mind, his left brain, and his right brain, and to just kind of dive in and immerse ourselves in the world that he’d created in the first movie.”
The authors, according to Jaffa and Silver, were conscious of that risk as they developed the Pandora worlds. Jaffa says, “We did a lot of research and a lot of talking about it. You have to write, really, to the character. We just kept falling back into character and emotion. As long as we had studied and really been sensitive to it, we felt like we were on solid ground.”
The writers shared their thoughts and said that there were a lot of hurdles they faced because at times there was too much material and at some point there was nothing. The only thing that kept them going was Cameron’s commitment.
