We started off with Jim telling me that he was in Kauai en route to the airport to head back to California. He had just shot 3 days of live action work in Hawaii in the tropical rainforests. Apparently he was shooting with Sam Worthington, Lola Herrera and I believe he said Sigourney Weaver was there, but I might have heard that wrong.
Once he returns to California - he begins a stage called Pre-Capture where he'll mainly be shooting with Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana. The reason is that their characters have been fully entered into the CG system. He told me that this way, with the realtime rendering, he can actually compose and find his shots - and then work with the actors to get the performances he wants within those shots.
I asked how different this was from the way Robert Zemeckis was operating on BEOWULF. This was when he told me that his 1st AD (Josh McLaglen) worked on both BEOWULF and POLAR EXPRESS and that what he's doing is a fair bit different. "Where Bob can have an actor like Angeline Jolie in and out in 5 days - and get a bunch of big stars in and out." Zemeckis was working on just getting the raw performance and then spend months finding the layouts and 'angles' that would make up the film.
What Cameron is doing is with his real-time rendering - he can work with the actors in the performance capture system to get the performances within the angles he wants in the system. He called it more, "Director-centric."
Around this time I asked about his choice for DP. He told me that he's making that decision very soon, but that the DP will be brought in on for the physical shot elements of this film - and will be consulted for the CG-DP aesthetic, but will not be there throughout that process, most likely. I asked how the real-time lighting set up works in the construction of shots in the CG-sphere of shooting. Jim said that they're using something called MOTION BUILDER for the real time cinematography and the lighting elements of that are "not terribly sophisticated." And that there would be an extensive phase that would be just lighting each scene afterwards.
Around this point, Jim asked how I was doing - this is where I told him that JOHN CARTER was over at Disney - and how there was a part of me that was glad about that, since his and mine's last chat - where I felt the direction he was taking AVATAR in was a very John Carter-esque route. It was here that Jim kinda gasped with a "I hadn't thought about that, but..." then he began drawing the comparisons betweent he characters and the situations and I said - see - there is a very real similarity on a structural level - Had Paramount held on to JOHN CARTER - we'd be coming out the same year with a similar attack at Sci-fi Fantasy... and now Disney, possibly with Zemeckis and the Motion Capture film department he's setting up - starting from ground zero means - they'll definitely be coming out on the otherside of AVATAR - if and when that project moves forward - it will have to deal with James Cameron's AVATAR. At this - Jim kinda laughed, in the past - going up against similar material - Jim's film had come out second. But with the superior film.
Around this time - he said he was getting close to the airport and wanted to give me the new casting before having to go. So as you could see in the notes - we got:
WES STUDI, SIGOURNEY WEAVER (confirmed as Grace), Peter Mensah, Joel David Moore (fantastic in both HATCHET and SPIRAL) - I imagine him as being Hippy-esque (think ABYSS), C.C.H. Pounder (love her) and then last but not least... I believe it was Laz Alonso - looking at his filmography - that's the name that most fits with what I heard.
Jim said that each person was "perfectly cast for the part they're playing." He said there was more casting to be done, but that a great deal of it had fallen into place.
