When most filmgoers last left James Cameron, he was
proclaiming himself king of the world, having seen his Titanic sweep up 11 Oscars to go alongside its record-setting box
office haul. Apart from the 2005 deep-sea documentary Aliens of the Deep and some other non-fiction work, Cameron
has been conspicuously absent from the feature film world, instead producing a few works and chiefly indulging
his own penchant for intellectual exploration.

All that’s about to change, of course, as Cameron has flung
himself into a pair of ambitious projects that — though they won’t hit screens
until 2009 — are naturally already drawing plenty of attention. The first of
these, Avatar, with Sam Worthington
and Zoe Saldana, is being described as a luxurious, futuristic love story on a verdant
foreign planet, set against a backdrop of cultural alienation.

Cameron’s Aliens
leading lady, Sigourney Weaver, has a key supporting role, and took some time
recently during an interview session for Jake Kasdan’s The TV Set to discuss Avatar
as well. “I have a very juicy part,” she says. “It’s not the lead but it’s the
second lead. I’m not one of the two young people in love, but I’m the older
person in love.” Just because the movie re-teams her with Cameron, though, don’t
necessarily start drawing comparisons to the character that launched her to superstardom.
“It’s a very different role, I’m not playing anyone remotely like Ripley,” she
says.

Offering up teasing insinuations that only “sometimes” will her
character, a botanist named Grace, look like her, Weaver is high on Avatar’s visual style. “They’re
transforming the way this kind of movie is being made, I’ll tell you that,” she
says. “Jim has invented different cameras to capture this world.”

Responding to Michael Biehn’s assertion at the recent Grindhouse
premiere that Avatar was essentially “Lawrence of Arabia in space,” meanwhile,
Weaver laughs. “Well, I think scope-wise it probably is, but I think Lawrence of Arabia might be slightly nobler
than our (film). Ours is big entertainment — it’s a big, lush, old-fashioned
romantic adventure the likes of which no one has ever seen. I’m reading this
thing just going, ‘How are you going to do that?’ I mean, if anyone can do it,
Jim can. But it’s incredibly ambitious. And at the same time, it’s all these
wonderful characters that you care about, and it’s a very topical script in the
sense that it is about the environment and, you know, the forces of sort of good
and evil.”