TIME Magazine writer Rebecca Keegan recently chatted with about her upcoming book The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. During the discussion, she revealed more about James Cameron's plans for an upcoming sequel to Avatar. About being on the set, she said, "It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. I was shocked to go to this dingy little warehouse and see these guys making a movie entirely on computers. There were no sets, or anything. It was like a weird, post-modern play." Why did it take Cameron so long to make the film? "After Titanic, he was going to take a few years off. He was going to make some documentaries. That period lasted longer than he thought it would. He had some movies that he was working on, that didn't work out. There was a movie based on a comic book called Bright Angel Falling that he ended up not making. He had a Mars movie that he invested a huge amount of money into. Then two other Mars movies came out. They didn't do very well. So it went to the back burner. He was also working on Battle Angle, which everyone thought was going to be his next movie. It took him a while to figure out what the right project would be for the technologies he was developing. He wanted a movie that would be big enough to justify the expense of doing it." Which brings us to the sequels, "One of the fun things I got to do was sit in on these meetings with scientists and James Cameron, and they would talk about the whole world of Pandora. They were hammering out all these scientific details. They were compiling what would essentially be a whole Wikipedia that would be used for sequels. It is definitely on the minds of the people behind this project. They have gone to great lengths. One of the things I sat in on was them talking about some theoretical plots for sequels. Cameron hopes that this is a movie that does well enough that it is able to become a franchise."
