No matter how much art and technology we threw at this thing, if it wasn’t in the eyes of the characters – if you didn’t see a soul there – it would just be a big clanking machine. . . It’s called the uncanny valley. We’ve seen movies never quite get out of the uncanny valley. - August 2009
[On the future of 3D] "3D is going to be a lot like color was. It was initially introduced on the biggest movies, and it gradually spread ultimately over a 25- to 30-year period to the point where you couldn't make a black-and-white movie without the permission of the studio." - July 2009
"Watching Avatar is like dreaming with your eyes wide open." - March 2009
“There’s nothing in the palette of entertainment that can’t be done in 3-D. All the hard work has been done. Still, Avatar and all future 3-D films will live or die based on (their) own merits. Market forces drive this thing based on content." - December 2008
On using cutting edge techniques: "It's this form of pure creation where ... if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements and the production design," - September 2008
"It is the most challenging film [Avatar] I've ever made." - August 2008
"One more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed. All the syn-thespians are photo-realistic. Now that we've achieved it, we discovered CG characters in 3D look more real than in 2D. Your brain is cued it's a real thing not a picture and discounting part of image that makes it look fake." - July 2008
"I don’t look in 3-D while I’m composing my shots. I compose it just on a flat monitor. And I don’t edit in 3-D. So for me the discipline is imagining what the shot will look like in 3-D, but be satisfied with the shot aesthetically in 2-D. That way I’m always making a good 2-D movie as I go along. And that seems to work for me." - May 2008
"I don't know if this will be a good film, great film, awful film, but I can say with absolute certainty that you will see stuff you've never imagined, and that the process of making this film will generate a lot of interest within the technical side of the biz." - February 2008
"Each one of my actors is turning in incandescent work --- Sigourney, Sam Worthington, Stephen Lange, Giovanni Ribisi, Michelle Rodriguez, Joel David Moore ---- they're each so right on that it's impossible to think of anyone else playing their characters." - December 2007
"We're going to blow you to the back wall of the theater in a way you haven't seen for a long time. My goal is to rekindle those amazing mystical moments my generation felt when we first saw '2001: A Space Odyssey,' or the next generation's 'Star Wars.' It took me 10 years to find something hard enough to be interesting." - January 2007
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