Avatar 2 Screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver Talk All Things 'Way of Water,' 'Avatar 3,' 'Planet of the Apes,' 'Jurassic World' and More

After Avatar became the biggest global box office sensation in history, two things were immediately true: one, a sequel was an inevitability, and two, James Cameron would need some extra hands on deck in the writers’ room if he were to go even bigger with Pandora. Of course, in the intervening 13 years, “a sequel” turned into four, and Cameron brought in Josh Friedman, Shane Salerno, and screenwriting power couple Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver to help him grow the world of Avatar into something that could sustain itself for five films.

”I think the original script which became 2 & 3 had an emotional wallop at the midway point with Netayam’s death,” said Jaffa, when we sat down to talk with him and Silver about The Way of Water. “There was a natural break there anyway. At one point we thought we had way too much material and we asked, ‘should we start cutting down?’ Jim said ‘no, let’s go for it,’ and then later said we’d split it into two films instead.”

Even split in two, the parts of the mega-sequel’s script that became The Way of Water amounted to a three-hour film, yet one which loses absolutely none of its momentum and splendor. Silver elaborated on this, praising Cameron’s instincts as a writer in the process. “When you’re writing a script that has as much action and plot as this, you have a lot of plates spinning,” said Silver. “Luckily for us, Jim really focuses and leads with the emotion. Let’s say you have a big action sequence, you know what’s going to happen to the characters emotionally. Jim gets a lot of credit for the muscularity of his filmmaking, but his ability to tap into emotion is unique.”

Jaffa added to this, emphasizing the vitality of the emotional core of a story and how it’s always something that has informed his writing, something rooted in his earliest experiences with cinema and the theatrical experience. "We’re sponges for story," said Jaffa. "At a young age, you’re not necessarily aware of first act, second act, character arcs…but I think you do soak that up on a very deep level and feel the emotion.” Jaffa grew up with the James Bond films, citing them as "a big reason why we're sitting here today," and Silver added that “[The Bond films] made such an impression" on Jaffa that he "uses them as reference points all the time." Jaffa specifically cited Thunderball specifically as something he and Cameron watched to prepare for The Way of Water and the latter's revolutionary underwater scenes. Jaffa's early experiences with film were mirrored by Silver, who recalled fond memories of growing up in New York and being taken to the cinema by her father, watching classic films, including the works of Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Kubrick, and falling in love with the art form because of those experiences.

Jaffa and Silver, who are married and have two children, related their own experiences with parenthood to how they developed the relationships between Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), with their children and adopted children alike. “[Jake and Neytiri as parents] are kinda based on us," said Silver. Jaffa added that, "one of the things Jim was terrific about was that we all understand that the movie has to work, and while we believe in the Quaritch (Stephen Lang) of it all, how the RDA works and how they come back, Jim said it has to work on an emotional level. Once we started talking about characters and sharing our own experiences and insights, the room became a very safe space to talk about and relate."

Silver related her experiences with motherhood to Neytiri, and to the song chord that bookends the film, and why that moment has resonated so deeply with audiences. ”The song chord is very much a part of the culture of the Omaticaya,” said Silver. “The way Jim uses it allows Neytiri to begin processing Netayam’s death. It’s really Zoe’s voice singing that, and brings the audience into processing it and moving on. It’s as if Neytiri is opening her arms and welcoming the audience into the circle.”

On his own approach, Jaffa added, ”you’ve got two fearless warriors in the first movie [Jake and Neytiri]. In this movie, there’s a whole new set of challenges to that fearlessness. They’re terrified because they have kids, they need to protect their children and keep their family together. We have kids, we have an adopted daughter like Kiri, so you draw from your own experiences. I had an older brother and a lot of Neteyam and Lo’ak, as we worked on it, talking about that relationship, was similar." Jaffa was able to find the story easily through the characters' family dynamics, adding" "with Quaritch, with Lo’ak and Neteyam, Lo’ak and Payakan, Jake and Neytiri, we were on solid ground thematically. This idea of fathers and children, and what a beautiful mess it is. Quaritch’s struggle with his feelings about Spider and of course Spider’s struggle with his feelings about his father, there’s a lot of fun stuff to play around with there.”

“I love how [Rick] described it as a beautiful mess," Silver added. "The other thing about Quaritch, is that at the beginning of the film, when he wakes up and checks himself out, he’s got that incisor, he’s got that tooth, he’s got this new body. It’s such wish fulfillment for us as humans, this idea that you can just plug in and bond with a creature and ride that creature, and the fact that Quaritch gets to do it and how he gets to do it, there was a lot of fun for him and the Recoms as they discover themselves as Na’vi and how wondrous that is on Pandora. We get to experience that again through Quaritch.”

On the topic of Quaritch's resurrection, that was firmly an idea that originated in the mind of Cameron. “Jim came into the room with the idea of bringing Quaritch back, and how we were going to do it," said Jaffa. "I’d have to imagine there was a long pause. We were just starting to get to know each other as a group when he first brought it up. But this is the great thing about Jim, you just commit to an idea, and we all just believed in it, believed that the audience would go with it, and so that was that. I think the fun part for Quaritch is he’s just as surprised as we are. He’s surprised when the feeling to protect Spider overtakes him as Spider’s being tortured by General Ardmore (Edie Falco). That’s fun to play with and it deepens Quaritch. It’s a moment of self discovery that perhaps he’s uncomfortable with. You’re kind of messing with the audience a little bit. You’re playing around with rooting interests just a little bit.”

“And if you’re not rooting for Quaritch, you’re relating to him, and that’s a little bit uncomfortable," added Silver. "You don’t want to root for Quaritch, and yet you are here a tiny bit and so that’s fun to explore as writers and it’s part of the journey the audience is going on in Avatar 2.” On Cameron's openness to bringing new writers in and hearing their ideas out, Silver praised the director. “It was really valuable. You spend all day talking about a moment, and Jim is so great about fearlessly carving out time, he doesn’t care how long it takes, we’re going to figure it out. We’re not going to bandaid over it or rush through it.” Jaffa added, “if someone had a specific thought about Jake and Neytiri’s relationship, Jim would just say, ‘Okay, well let’s go down that road.’ We’d talk about it, talk about it, and talk about it, and sometimes it would be discarded after three days of discussing it.” Silver added, "or sometimes you’d talk about it, and then on the third day you’d come up with that nugget. And it’s not just Jake and Neytiri. If you think about Neytiri, she has very specific relationships with everybody, for example Neytiri and Spider. That’s an interesting relationship over the course of all the movies as it develops. She’s a fully fleshed out character in the minds of all of the writers. She has incredible strengths, credible flaws, and this desire for her to be three dimensional is powerful. That complexity is one of the big goals.”

In addition to their work on The Way of Water and all three of the upcoming additional “Avatar” sequels, Jaffa and Silver also inaugurated the Jurassic World series of follow-ups to Jurassic Park with their script for the first entry in that trilogy. ”We were asked if we were interested in rebooting Jurassic Park. We wanted to meet with Steven Spielberg. He pitched a handful of ideas, and we weren’t really sure what was the key to opening this up. Then he said, ‘what if the park’s up and running and they’ve figured everything out?’ That was Steven’s. Our thing was, if we could get the audience to emotionally invest in the velociraptors.” Silver summed up their process as ”how to make velociraptors good guys, and what’s their relationship to the trainer?”

Silver and Jaffa have a deep-rooted history with humanizing non-human characters in their screenplays, including their work on all three films in the rebooted Planet of the Apes trilogy. “Science-fiction gives this rare opportunity to allow an audience to feel safely, and closer, because it’s not so raw, it’s an ape, it’s not a human,” said Silver. “You can talk about things that would be harder in another genre. It uses the genre in a way that is great catharsis for an audience.” Jaffa added, ”in our careers, we’ve always been on this quest searching for the emotional truth in a story. Humans, chimpanzees, cold-blooded velociraptors, Tulkun…it doesn’t matter; they’re real characters to us.” The much-anticipated follow-up to the “Apes” trilogy, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is on the horizon, and the screenwriter couple came back to the writers’ room to work on it. ”We’re about to close production on 'Kingdom,' and we are really excited about it,” said Silver, who could not say much more despite her enthusiasm. “After Caesar’s death there was a period of mourning for us, but we always had ideas for continuing.” Jaffa added, ”there’s a lot of story left to tell. Caesar created something and left a legacy, so the question is, what comes of that?”

As for the remaining Avatar sequels, Jaffa could not reveal too much, but he did share that the order of plot points in The Way of Water may have turned out differently because of it and the third film being split in two. ”There was some fancy footwork about certain bits of plot,” said Jaffa. “Some things were moved forward, left, some things were moved right, but that emotional wallop [Neteyam’s death] was always in the middle.” Silver was equally reticent but did leave us one little crumb: that there would be “much more to come” for Quaritch and Spider (Jack Champion). While the screenwriters did not share specific details when asked about the final battle in The Way of Water, and how its resolution remains more ambiguous regarding the whaling corporation and Metcayina Clan in favor of Jake and his family, their collective "we can't talk about this" response also seems to imply that we will also see the resolution of that threat in Avatar 3.

Avatar: The Way of Water is now playing in theaters.