James Cameron's sci-fi blockbuster Avatar pitted greed and violence against indigenous life and ritual on a distant moon called Pandora. A similar scenario is playing out just as tragically here on Earth, the director said.
Cameron recently joined Brazilian protesters in opposition to the $11 billion Belo Monte Dam, a hydroelectric project that environmentalists and the regions' indigenous people argue would prove devastating. The Oscar-winning Avatar director sent a letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva begging him to think twice about going forward with the project.
Belo Monte is a "quintessential example of the type of thing we are showing in Avatar," Cameron told The New York Times. "The collision of a technological civilization's vision for progress at the expense of the natural world and the cultures of the indigenous people that live there."
Cameron's cinematic collaborator Sigourney Weaver has also been generating controversy in Brazil, while stumping for Avatar's Earth Day DVD release. But she aimed her protest a bit closer to home.
"Jim didn't have breasts, and I think that was the reason" he lost the Academy Award for Best Director to his ex-wife, The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, Weaver told Brazil's Folha Online. "In the past, Avatar would have won because they loved to hand out awards to big productions, like Ben-Hur. Today it's fashionable to give the Oscar to a small movie that nobody saw."
Image from Avatar courtesy Industrial Light and Magic/20th Century Fox
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