Episode 58: Avatar: The Way of Water with Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa

Buckle up, listeners – we’re heading to Pandora. Avatar: The Way of Water is the long-awaited sequel to one of the biggest movies of all time, and our guests today are two of its talented co-writers. You might know Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver as the screenwriters behind the brilliant Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy and 2015’s Jurassic World. If you’re familiar with those movies, you’ll know exactly why legendary director James Cameron would have chosen the pair as collaborators for this sequel to his 2009 sci-fi fantasia – both of those franchises combined clever commentary on man’s exploitation of the natural world with exciting set-pieces and epic blockbuster spectacle.

The Way of Water is a much more complex movie than the first Avatar, with a lot more moving parts, some of which are seeds for movies to come (this is the first in a number of sequels that Amanda and Rick have also worked on, in production now). The film picks up with our heroes from the first movie, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), fighting another battle fourteen years after the historic Battle of the Hallelujah Mountains – parenthood. The pair have had a family and now have an even more pronounced reason to protect their land from the colonisers from Earth, seeking to make Pandora man’s new home, having wrecked their own.

Rick and Amanda – who have been married since 1989 – told us all about how the Way of Water’s screenplay came together. In this spoiler special, we get into exactly how they, Cameron and fellow co-writer Josh Friedman brought back the certain characters from the dead, the Mowgli-esque origins of new character Spider, and the environmental truths about our own climate change-stricken planet that the film takes aim at. There’s also a thorough breakdown of that death in the film’s final act, and Al at various points attempts to speak Na’vi. Badly.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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