By far the high point of the Con for me was EW editor Jeff Giles' interview with Peter Jackson and James Cameron. The two men respect each other enormously. Weta's achievement with The Lord of the Rings' Gollum convinced Cameron that he might be able to forge ahead with Avatar, which had been collecting dust for more than a decade.

Cameron signed up Weta to do the elaborate visual effects on Avatar; Jackson wanted to visit the set but took off to shoot The Lovely Bones just as Cameron was arriving. He came back for the last week of principal photography.

Jackson was making his first visit to the Con. He always sent lovely personal video greetings from Wellywood, full of cool stuff for the fans to see. He clearly understands what goes on at SDCC, and the role the fans play. So it was odd to see him looking so thin, tired and low-key. Jackson made the schlep from Wellywood partly to support his protege Neill Blomkamp whose horror thriller District 9 was the hit of the festival. He candidly expressed his anger over how he and Blomkamp lost Halo, and then made District 9.

Cameron, for his part, seemed energized and mellow, while acknowledging that he and producer Jon Landau have their work cut out for them. (Avatar went over well, but it was not the best-received footage in San Diego. Cameron sets a high bar. And the film plays very sci-fi.) They cooked up the 15-minute free 3D footage stunt set for August 31, knowing that marketing will be key to turning Avatar into the event it needs to be on December 18.

I could listen to these guys all day. I love it that they respect their audience. They make smart movies to please themselves and everyone else at the same time. Which is really hard.

[Thank you, Kris Tapley.]

Here's my Comic-Con interview with James Cameron about how his undersea expeditions informed his return to moviemaking, Avatar. He digs into how he perfected the art of performance capture to allow the warmth of his actors to come through. He wants to do some consciousness-raising with SAG on what performance capture really involves. During Friday's panel with Cameron and Peter Jackson, the two men discussed how resistant actors have been to such acting as Andy Serkis as Gollum.

Twentieth Century Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman came down to San Diego to intro James Cameron, who in turn presented 24 minutes of footage from Avatar. The studio has backed Cameron's R & D for the dozen years since Titanic. After earning credibility with the deep sea documentary world with a series of 3D docs, Cameron finally opted to chase the promise of advanced 3-D motion-capture with an original story that had been sitting in his drawer for 14 years. But no matter how fabulous this movie looks--and it wowed Hall H, the perfect target audience for a sci-fi adventure--Fox has to market this movie without major stars, branding and the kind of wide release a blockbuster usually commands. That's why they're showing 15 minutes of footage, free, on Avatar Day on August 21 on 35 IMAX theaters around the world.

The footage shows us a space station, where we meet a tight-necked colonel (Stephen Lang) warning new recruits about the dangers of Planet Pandora, home to an indigenous alien race, the Nav'i. Sam Worthington arrives in a wheelchair. He's a paraplegic whose twin brother has died; he's going to inherit his 10-foot blue, long-tailed avatar, a half-human, half-alien creature that humans can link to and send to explore the inhospitable planet. Cameron vet Sigourney Weaver (Aliens) plays a scientist on a mission to save the planet from degradation and exploitation.

The story is immediately exotic and compelling. But the magic comes from the 3D immersion into the exotic fauna and flora of the Pandora jungle where our hero is saved from certain death by a lovely native girl (Zoe Saldana). She tells him he's like a stupid child stumbling and destroying things. But when he attracts white wood sprites that look like deep sea creatures, she wonders if he might have some spiritual potential and takes him to her people. As night falls the rich jungle becomes as luminescent and brightly colored as a coral reef.

In another stunning sequence, the native warriors challenge Nav'i's new boyfriend to tame a flying pterodactyl-like banshee. He wrestles the creature into submission and flies him into a huge canyon.

The audience roared with support for Avatar, as Cameron, Weaver, Lang and Saldana talked to the crowd, and later, the backstage media. (Worthington appeared via video from the European set of Clash of the Titans.) But the movie is clearly ahead of the curve, which could make it a must-see event. But it's also likely to play best for fans of sci-fi adventure, which could limit it to a degree. Wisely, Cameron says he has no interest in competing with his own boxoffice. He's a filmmaker who wants to pursue the edge of technology and reach millions of people around the world. Avatar will be a must-see when it opens on December 18.

Comic-Con 2009 is front-loaded. Most of the key movie stuff happens on the first day, Thursday July 23, and Friday, with Iron Man 2 the main play on Saturday. (Here's the EW Iron Man 2 cover-preview.) The trick is to balance the crowded Hall H panels, trawling the exhibition floor, backstage interviews, screenings and parties with actual blogging. Yikes.

Last year I took the Fox City of Ember train down to San Diego, which worked great, actually. I loved not having to worry about a car, but I was staying at the Omni, right across from the Convention Center, so I was spoiled. This year I'm farther away, so I'll drive down at the crack of dawn Thursday to get my pass in time (!) to start off the day with the 11 AM Disney 3-D panel. Tim Burton (Alice in Wonderland) returns to the Con for the first time since college, while Bob Zemeckis (A Christmas Carol ) is coming for the first time. Burton will stay to do some press, Zemeckis will not.

The combo of Disney's 3-D animation panel and James Cameron's Avatar pushed the Comic-Con folks to install 3-D in the 65,000-square-foot Hall H. The Titanic director will attend the Con for the first time to show the first U.S. 3-D footage of Avatar, along with stars Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang. (Exhibs in L.A. screen the 20 minutes already shown in Amsterdam at Cinema Expo on Thursday July 16.) Sam Worthington, who debuted at The Con last year with Terminator: Salvation, is stuck in Wales playing Perseus in Louis Leterrier's Clash of the Titans. (Check out the photo: Gerard Butler, watch your back.) Fox will also promote off-site Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama's horror comedy Jennifer’s Body , starring Megan Fox.

Cameron is participating in another Thursday panel on The Future of Filmmaking with Avatar's VFX czar, Weta chief Peter Jackson, who is also coming for the first time--he usually beams video to Hall H from Wellywood. Attendees are expecting to see Adventures of Tin-Tin footage. Jackson is also pushing his production of the sci-fi thriller District 9 on Friday. He's not involved in LOTR fan site Onering.net's side panel on pre-production of Guillermo del Toro's The Hobbit, which Jackson is also supervising in Wellywood. UPDATE: Word from Jackson's people: it's way too early for a Bilbo announcement.

Another Comic-Con virgin is Disney/Pixar animation czar John Lasseter, who will host an animation panel Friday with Japanese master Hayeo Miyazaki (must-see Ponyo screens Wednesday night), Disney's John Musker and Ron Clements (2-D The Princess and the Frog), and Kirk Wise (Toy Story 3). This is my idea of Heaven.

Thursday's crazy madness will be the Twilight: New Moon panel. Heartthrob Rob Pattinson will appear (reminder: must pack earplugs) with co-stars Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner and director Chris Weitz, but lovelorn vampire Edward Cullen isn't the main character in the movie, so Pattinson won't participate in any backstage interviews. Summit is screening Twilight for the fans with cast members on hand. Summit is scheduled to film the third installment of the Twilight Saga, Eclipse, from August 17 through October 31 in Vancouver with David Slade (30 Days of Night) directing Melissa Rosenberg's screenplay.

To promote Park Chan-wook's vampire movie Thirst (which played well in May's Cannes competition), Focus Features mailed the press a pouch of blood in advance of the Thursday panel, and will screen the intense horror film Friday night.

Some films won't be rating panels at this year's Con, although they may have some viral or off-site happenings or displays on the exhibition floor. Universal, for one, is skipping Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. Disney is ignoring the live action Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Surrogates. Cash-strapped The Weinstein Co. passed on promoting Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Rob Zombie's Halloween II, The Road (starring Viggo Mortensen), Youth in Revolt (starring Con-friendly Michael Cera), and Piranha 3-D.

Warner Bros. probably isn't bringing Joel Silver's long-delayed screen adaptation of the graphic novel Whiteout because it was promoed last year. Also missing are Ninja Assassin and Zack Snyder’s animated 3D Guardians of Ga’Hoole. It's early days yet for MGM to promote the Joss Whedon/Drew Goddard horror comedy The Cabin in the Wood, but Whedon fans can catch the first three webisodes of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Thursday night.

Brian Lowry vets Comic-Con on the TV side.

I was going to leave Saturday, but David Tennant is showing up for a Dr. Who panel on Sunday morning. I may have to stay on.

Last year, I remember a few diehard fanboys mocking me when I flagged Twilight as a big deal at Comic-Con. The power of Twilight fans became clear as thousands of girls screamed their lungs out for emerging star Rob Pattinson. Helping to avert certain traffic gridlock, Comic-Con organizers pushed apart back-to-back Thursday panels for Twilight: New Moon and James Cameron's Avatar, by far the most anticipated two panels of the Con. Many were concerned that the threatened tsunami of fans surging toward Hall H Thursday morning (many of them female, in this very male-dominated universe) would make it tough to also cover Disney's 11 AM 3-D panel (Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol, Burton's Alice in Wonderland) and James Cameron's Avatar on the same day. Now New Moon is at 1:45 pm and Avatar is at 3:00 pm. Covering media may have a tough time getting into New Moon without some kind of press pass.

As THR covers how the studio marketers are harnessing the rising power of the online fansites--many of whom will participate in Comic-Con's annual Masters of the Web panel on Thursday at 2 PM--The Wrap examines the countering impact of Twitter on movie openings. As the studios try to use Twitter to disseminate information, word-of-mouth is taking on a whole new meaning in the Twitter universe. The Wrap also posts a handy short-form entertainment sked (the full Comic-Con schedule is packed with cool but not movie-centric graphics and comics panels). Here's Marvel's collection of panels, including Hall H's intro to Iron Man 2.

HitFix is also tracking Comic-Con. Stay tuned. I'm covering. I'm looking forward to seeing Hayao Miyazaki and Pixar's John Lasseter for one of my fave movies of the year so far, Ponyo, and seeing Terry Gilliam again, who is showing some footage but not the entire Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassas, starring Heath Ledger, who made the cover of Vanity Fair this month, a must-read. And for the first time ever, New Zealander Peter Jackson is appearing at the Con in person, to introduce District 9.

James Cameron made an appearance at E3 to promo the videogame for his 3-D performance capture epic Avatar. The game is scheduled to come out concurrent with the movie's release on December 18. IGN interviewed Cameron primarily about the 3-D third-person game, which is crammed with even more creatures, gadgets and weapons than the film--all approved by Cameron himself-- but he reveals a few Avatar nuggets along the way.

Worthington plays paralyzed ex-marine Jake Sully, who travels to faraway planet Pandora, which is inhabited by the Na'vi tribe. He explores the planet via a remote link that controls the body of a powerful 10-foot blue alien/human hybrid Avatar. In the deep Pandora jungle, he encounters many exotic creatures, including a gorgeous Na'vi warrior, voiced by Zoe Saldana.

Here's Cameron's E3 Q & A.

UPDATE: The BBC and HitFix's Drew McWeeny visited the videogame presentation.

I'm excited about Avatar and Worthington, clearly the best thing about Terminator Salvation--which is a summer disappointment, although McG accomplished his goal of establishing his action bonafides. Cameron suggested Worthington to McG, who had offered the role to Christian Bale, who preferred to do the John Connor part, which was a mistake. Worthington landed the juicier role, and if Bale was seeking another franchise (greedy), this one's over. Finally, the movie was too confusing (the time line was a mess), you weren't invested in the characters and the outcome, and this sequel didn't advance and reinvigorate the franchise.

The irony is that while the latest Star Trek invokes the old promise to take you where no man has gone before, the movie itself, while giving you a very good time, takes you back to a familiar and pleasant sci-fi universe, and does so using existing cinematic technology.

The reason James Cameron's Avatar has so many people hot and bothered is that he really is promising to show us something brand new and never before achieved on film. And given the decade-long wait between feature projects--Titanic being the global blockbuster of all time ($1.8 billion)--we can all be forgiven for harboring high expectations. Besides, word inside Hollywood, the buzz from insiders is good. Not that anyone has seen the thing, it's not finished. Josh Quittner of Time Magazine saw 15 minutes and was blown away.

Cameron started virtual photography on the sci-fi epic in April, 2007, with live-action photography commencing in August, for a scheduled summer 2009 release, which was later pushed back to December 18, 2009. It was filmed with a new digital 3-D format for release in 3-D.

The director spent years in R&D on the multiple processes needed to create a $190 million hybrid of live action and animation, which he vowed would never pass the $200 million mark--which of course it has. Neither Cameron nor Fox want to repeat the budget overruns that plagued the $200 million Titanic, Cameron told me at the start of the picture. Here's the announcement story.

"It's going to be interesting," James Cameron says on CBC's The Hour. The director is talking about "Avatar," a movie that has already eaten up two years of his life, and has one more to go. "We finished with the actors," he says. "We're in CG hell. We're trying to create a world from scratch. It's like trench warfare. We're working with computer-generated characters that are photo-realistic. That's tough. We set the bar high. We're just now getting confidence that it's going to work."

By way of comparison, Cameron's "Terminator 2" had 42 shots with CG characters. Avatar has 1700. This film is both "the hardest" and the "most rewarding," of his films, Cameron says. "Filmmaking is a world of complete madness. You have to have a strong personal ethos in the film business. Being a person of your word is very important."

Cameron knows he's pretty tough to work for. "I'm pretty passionate about what I do and try to inspire other people working with me to give 100%," he says. "Deriding them doesn't work." He says that working on deep-sea docs like Ghosts of the Abyss taught him leadership. When he reverts to his "old behavior pattern," he apologizes now. "I'm a good filmmaker but not a natural leader," he admits. "I've had to learn that as I go along."

Here's the full interview:

[Hat Tip: Moviecitynews.]

[Posted by David S. Cohen]
Contrary to reports in the LAT and NYT, it was not an unanticipated shortage of 3-D screens that forced Warner Bros. and the producers of Journey of the Center of the Earth to change the film's title, which was supposed to be Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D.

It is true that digital 3-D deployment has been slower than predicted and there aren't yet enough digital 3-D screens to support a tentpole-sized wide release. However, Journey director Eric Brevig told Variety: "We knew that two years ago. It's not a mystery to look at the number of projectors being installed and the number of 3-D screens."

Brevig continues: "We didn’t want the '3-D' on the title because the movie is going to play on DVD and in airplanes and everywhere in 2-D." Producer Charlotte Huggins, a leading proponent of 3-D, also argued from the start that audiences would be confused and upset if they bought tickets to a movie with "3-D" in the title and wound up sitting through a regular 2-D showing.

The problem was, Twentieth Century Fox had control of the title Journey to the Center of the Earth and was unwilling to give it up to New Line. By appending "3-D" to the end, New Line could avoid that legal hurdle.

So why did Fox change its mind? It's no secret that digital 3-D is in its infancy: the digital 3-D filmmaking community is small and close-knit. They all know that what affects one 3-D release affects all that follow. Fox has its own very expensive live-action 3-D tentpole coming: James Cameron's Avatar. So Fox has an interest in making sure the 3-D brand isn't sullied in the 18 months before that epic unspools.

We hear that as the conversation escalated at Fox, someone proposed that part of the Journey release be in anaglyph 3-D, using film projectors and the old-style red-and-green glasses, but everyone agreed that was bad for the new digital 3-D brand. Eventually everyone agreed it would also be bad for the 3-D brand -- and, by extension, for Avatar -- if thousands of moviegoers came out of Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D wondering why they just saw a 2-D movie. Eventually the discussion escalated to the highest levels of the studio, where Fox toppers relented and let New Line and Warner Bros. use the title they had always wanted.

In the end, said Brevig, Fox toppers had only one caveat for the Journey filmmakers: "Just make sure it’s good-looking 3-D."

Sigourney Weaver is one tough babe. She starred for James Cameron in Aliens, and returned to the director's set on Avatar. And she survived to tell Stephen Schaefer the tale.

Variety tech wonk David S. Cohen conducts an in-depth interview with James Cameron about something he knows a little bit about: 3D. An early believer and innovator in the technology that looks to revolutionize the way many movies are made, Cameron expounds at length. (He reveals some tech details on his next 3D effort, the long-awaited Avatar, due in 2009.) Here's a sampling of their email exchange:

I believe that Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they're not. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow. It's all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving.

This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion. Especially in the types of films which have been my specialty to date, the fantasy experience is served best by a sense of detail and textural reality supporting the narrative moment by moment. The characters, the dialogue, the production design, photography and visual effects must all strive to give the illusion that what you're seeing is really happening, no matter how improbable the situation might be if you stopped to think about it -- a time-traveling cyborg out to change history by killing a waitress, for example.

When you see a scene in 3-D, that sense of reality is supercharged. The visual cortex is being cued, at a subliminal but pervasive level, that what is being seen is real. All the films I've done previously could absolutely have benefited from 3-D. So, creatively, I see 3-D as a natural extension of my cinematic craft.

A 3-D film immerses you in the scene, with a greatly enhanced sense of physical presence and participation. When most people think of 3-D films, they think first of the gimmick shots -- objects or characters flying, floating or poking out into the audience. In fact, in a good stereo movie, these shots should be the exception rather than the rule.

Watching a stereo movie is looking into an alternate reality through a window. It is intuitive to the film industry that this immersive quality is perfect for action, fantasy and animation.

What's less obvious is that the enhanced sense of presence and realism works in all types of scenes, even intimate dramatic moments. Which is not to say that all films should be made in 3-D, because the returns may not warrant the costs in many cases, but certainly there should be no creative reason why any film could not be shot in 3-D and benefit from it.

The new 3-D, this stereo renaissance, not only solves all the old problems of bad projection, eyestrain, etc., but it is being used on first-class movies that are on people's must-see lists. These are fundamental changes from what happened with the flash-in-the-pan 3-D craze of the '50s. 3-D is also a chance to rewrite the rules, to raise ticket prices for a tangible reason, for demonstrable value-added.

James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver give an Avatar update.

James Cameron has added two new cast members to Avatar, which has been in production since April (you can't say "shooting," because technically no cameras or film are involved). Broadway star Stephen Lang will play yet another military role in a buzz cut, while tough girl Michelle Rodriguez (Lost) will also add some muscle to the cast. Mauro Fiore (Training Day, The Island, The Kingdom) has been hired as d.p.

James Cameron has been in pre-production on Avatar for a year or more--designing the picture's environments and characters and costumes and pre-visualizing its sequence of shots. In fact, Cameron is already in production, it's just that he isn't exactly filming, for lack of a better word. It's all in the computer. There will be live action photography in New Zealand later on, with real actors. Here's more from a firstshowing.net.