James Cameron got 'pushback' on this surprising 'Avatar' romance

• The third 'Avatar' movie, 'Fire and Ash,' hits theaters on Friday, Dec. 19.
• James Cameron puts a new emphasis on relationships in the movie, emphasizing love and family over action and battles.
• There's a dazzling new villain named Varang (played by Oona Chaplin), who runs away with the visually striking movie.

It’s been three years since we last traveled to Pandora in “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

In the sequel “Avatar: Fire and Ash” (in theaters Dec. 19), the blue alien race known as the Na’vi are once again under attack by human military forces, as well as a new warrior clan called the Mangkwans, or “Ash People.”

Three-time Oscar winner James Cameron (“Titanic”) filmed both movies at the same time, although after the $2.3 billion success of “Way of Water,” he decided to go back and shoot additional scenes that put the characters’ relationships front and center.

“I wanted to emphasize the love, hope, empathy and family bonds that emerged, and pushed some of the action and battles into the background,” Cameron says. “The film did evolve in a good way.”

Cameron, 71, walks us through the biggest developments in “Fire and Ash”:

Spider (Jack Champion) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) have a blossoming romance

“Way of Water” introduced audiences to Kiri, the gifted adopted daughter of Na’vi leader Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). We also met the teenage human Spider, who longs to be part of the Na’vi.

Although the aliens are skeptical of Spider, whose late parents colonized their planet, “Kiri sees into him from the beginning,” Cameron says. “She sees how courageous and good-hearted he is. He's a deceptively important character.”

Kiri and Spider are best friends with a sibling-like bond, but in “Fire and Ash,” their flirtatious dynamic blooms into something more.

“That's absolutely something that I wanted to explore,” Cameron says. “There was a little pushback around it from some of the other creative voices on the film: ‘They're more like brother and sister. They're more like family.’ Well, they're not. They're both orphans and Spider hasn't been adopted by the Sullys. He's not even technically part of the family. There's absolutely no reason why they couldn't have a romantic relationship.

“They've been really good friends since the earliest days of both of their childhoods, and is it evolving into something else? From my perspective, the answer is yes.”

Jake and Neytiri painfully confront grief in ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’

In both 2009’s “Avatar” and 2022’s “Way of Water,” Neytiri loses many members of her family in conflicts with the humans, including eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), who died at the end of the second movie. Because of this, Neytiri resents Spider and urges Jake to kill him, fearing that Spider will turn against the Na’vi as other humans have. The conflict has echoes of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible.

“She goes on a dark journey in this film,” Cameron teases. “Spider is the human in the mix, so to Neytiri, he represents the enemy and everything bad. It's really an alien invasion story flipped on its head, where the good guys are the aliens and the invaders are us humans. We all know that we're destroying the natural world, and with it, we're also destroying Indigenous human habitats and culture. These are all themes that are mixed up in the film.”

Varang (Oona Chaplin) is an alluring fire queen who steals the whole movie

The most exciting addition of “Fire and Ash” is Varang, a witchy Mangkwan chieftess who essentially rages against Pandora’s god, the nature deity known as Eywa. As a child, Varang lost her home and loved ones to a devastating volcanic explosion, and she now wants the other Na’vi to suffer as she did. (Miley Cyrus cowrote and sang the end-credits song "Dream As One," which was inspired in part by her own experience losing her house to a fire in 2018.) 

“She rules through fear,” Cameron says of Varang. “She sees herself as the hero of her own people, but she's also the dominant alpha. If you’ll notice, nobody ever stands taller than her in a scene. There are some tall men in the tribe, but they'll always hunch a bit and never stand above her.”

Cameron was inspired by coyotes when it came to the distinctive battle cries of the Mangkwan clan, and wanted them to incorporate both fire and ash into their rituals.

“I’m fascinated by this psychology of, ‘I’m going to take the thing that hurt me so deeply and I’m going to put it all over my body,’ ” Cameron says. “She’s going to wear ash and create a sense of empowerment for her people around inflicting pain on themselves, which is why they have ritual scarification and piercings.

"They seem to want to outdo each other in how much pain they can stand. It’s that idea of: You take the hurt and it makes you powerful.”