'Avatar' Director James Cameron Gave Writers A Massive Challenge Before Sequel

“Avatar: The Way of Water” director James Cameron revealed just how much “homework” he gave his writers before setting them to work on the sequel to his 2009 film epic.

Cameron told ScreenRant in an interview published Friday that he made “a bunch of notes for six months,” which he eventually shared with his writers room as he set out to develop “The Way of Water” ― the follow-up to the highest-grossing film of all time.

Cameron’s comments come the same week he told Collider that he had the screenplays for three “Avatar” sequels written before production began on “The Way of Water,” which opens Friday.

Cameron said he had to have a starting point in order to do multiple scripts with his team of writers, so he did a lot of brainstorming to develop the fictional world of Pandora.

“Literally, just every day sitting at my desk, talking about the world, the characters, trying to fill in what happened the day after Jake woke up in a Na’vi body, and just was carrying the story forward. I knew I had certain goals in mind,” Cameron told ScreenRant.

“I walked in on the first day with the whole writers room, and I plopped down 800 pages of notes, single spaced. I said, ‘Do your homework, and then we’ll talk.’”

Cameron added that he also asked writers to figure out how the first “Avatar” movie functioned and to determine what people were “keying into” during the film.

“It had to hit the heart, had to hit the mind, had to hit the imagination, and it had to hit something even deeper, which we had a hard time quantifying,” Cameron said.

“Something you could call spiritual, or you could call subconscious. Some kind of connection that you can’t even really describe in words. And I said, ‘If we can’t do that again, then we are going to fail.’”