James Cameron is no stranger to working with water. In The Abyss, the actors walked off set after an all-too-realistic drowning sequence and Titanic famously featured a 5 million gallon tank the set could be lowered into to simulate the sinking ship. ‘Avatar 2’ is going to continue that habit, with the story taking us to the underwater biomes of Pandora.
As with the first movie, Cameron is using advanced motion capture but insisted that the actors actually submerge themselves in order to accurately show underwater movement. So, as with ‘Titanic’, much of the film has been shot in a 900,000-gallon tank that can simulate ocean currents and waves.
Now, in a new interview with EW, Cameron has heaped praise on his cast for developing their breath-holding skills. The 72-year-old Sigourney Weaver is capable of holding her breath for six and a half minutes, but Kate Winslet “blew everybody away when she did a seven-and-a-half-minute breath-hold”.
More precisely, Winslet held her breath for 7.14 seconds, making her the record-holder for the longest on-film breath-hold. That quite handily beats Tom Cruise’s previous record of six minutes for ‘Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’ (the all-time record for humans is 24.37).
In addition, apparently, they could not use SCUBA gear as the air bubbles would have interfered with the motion capture. Let us hope that ‘Avatar 2’ was worth all this hardship. We do not have an official title yet, but it hits theaters on December 16, 2022.
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