Movies
Speaking to Popular Mechanics, the filmmaker said that he convinced studio 20th Century Fox to spend $10 million so that he could film the scene where protagonist Jake Sully first meets Na'vi alien Neytiri.
"We shot a five-minute scene," Cameron said of the early prep work. "I hired two actors, turns out one of them is now quite well-known - Yunjin Kim who is in Lost. There was Yunjin and a guy named Daniel Best. I took these two young actors and just did the scene. From that we took 40 seconds, because that's all we could afford, and had [visual effects studio] ILM take it through to a finished product."
Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington went on to fill Kim and Best's roles when the sci-fi blockbuster eventually went into production.
> Video: Four clips from Avatar
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Box Office Charts
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