Over at the Los Angeles Times‘ The Envelope section, Glenn Whipp has a chat with James Cameron in which the writer-director talks frankly about pissing off conservative pundits with Avatar (some of whom, like The Weekly Standard, have lambasted the movie as a “deep expression of anti-Americanism”), and 20th Century Fox’s desire to suppress some of the movie’s environmental themes. Their reaction, from the piece and according to the filmmaker, was: “We really like the story. It’s great. But, well, is there a way to not have so much of this tree-hugging, Ferngully stuff in it? I said, ‘Not with me making it.’ Because that was my purpose in making the film. I wanted to make an environmentally conscious mainstream movie. And to be fair to 20th Century Fox, any of the other studios would have said the same thing. Fox ended up being enormously supportive and wrote this huge check. But they would have been much more comfortable if I had eliminated what they called the ‘tree-hugging’ elements.”

Also, in unrelated linkage, Todd Gilchrist has up a nice wrap/overview of the eighth annual Oxford Film Festival, over at Cinematical.