50 Fun Facts About Avatar (2009 Film)

Who wrote and directed the 2009 film Avatar?

James Cameron drafted Avatar in the mid-1990s, then shelved it for years until visual-effects technology could put what he imagined on screen.

Who plays Jake Sully in Avatar?

Sam Worthington, then little known, grew so fed up with months of secretive auditions that he lost his temper on camera, and that anger is what caught the director's eye.

Which actress plays Neytiri in Avatar?

Zoe Saldaña was cast first, so the actors up for the male lead had to play scenes opposite her before the director chose her eventual co-star.

In Avatar, what valuable mineral are the humans mining on Pandora?

Unobtanium borrows an old engineers' joke: since the 1950s, 'unobtainium' has meant any material that would solve a design problem perfectly, if only it existed.

In Avatar, Pandora is a moon in which real star system?

Alpha Centauri is the Sun's nearest neighbouring star system, and when the film came out a Harvard astronomer said a real moon like Pandora there could be detected within a decade.

Whose avatar does Jake Sully take over?

His twin's avatar: Tommy, a scientist, was killed by a mugger before he could ship out, and since each costly avatar is genetically matched to one operator, only an identical twin could take it over.

Who plays Colonel Miles Quaritch in Avatar?

Stephen Lang had tried out for the director's Aliens some twenty years earlier and lost the part, but the director never forgot him and cast him as the colonel.

Which character does Sigourney Weaver play in the 2009 film Avatar?

Grace Augustine runs the Avatar Program, and to play her Weaver sat down with a university botanist to learn how a field scientist would sample an alien forest.

In Avatar, Jake Sully is initiated into which Na'vi clan?

The Omaticaya come to accept Jake as one of the People, then bind him as a traitor when he admits he was sent among them as a spy.

In Avatar, who is Neytiri's mother and her clan's spiritual leader?

Mo'at orders her daughter to teach Jake the clan's ways, and when the clan later binds him as a traitor it is she who cuts him loose, pleading with him to help them.

In Avatar, Wes Studi plays which clan chief, Neytiri's father?

Eytukan is killed in the mining company's assault on his people, and the warrior Tsu'tey, his chosen heir, takes over as chief.

In Avatar, Jake regains the clan's trust by bonding with which feared flying creature?

Toruk means 'last shadow', and Jake masters it by dropping onto its back from above, betting that the sky's top predator never bothers to look up.

In Avatar, what is the name of the Na'vi's mother goddess?

Eywa seems to answer Jake's prayer in the final battle, when Pandora's wild animals swarm the human forces and turn a losing fight around.

In Avatar, the mining company's gunships bring down which giant tree in a storm of missiles?

Hometree falls in flames and ash, and the director said afterwards that he was surprised by how much the scene ended up looking like September 11.

Which film beat Avatar to Best Picture?

The Hurt Locker cost about $15 million against Avatar's official $237 million, roughly a sixteenth, yet it won six Oscars to Avatar's three.

In Avatar, what do the Na'vi call the humans who have come to Pandora?

Sky People, Neytiri tells Jake early on, cannot learn because they do not See, and he spends the rest of the film proving her wrong.

Which awards gave Avatar their top film prize in 2010?

Golden Globes voters gave Avatar both best drama and best director in January 2010, but seven weeks later the Oscars handed both of those prizes to a rival.

Avatar won three Oscars, for visual effects, art direction and which other category?

Best Cinematography went to Mauro Fiore, even though the director had estimated that about 60% of the film would be computer-generated rather than photographed.

Which genre-film awards did Avatar sweep with ten wins from ten nominations?

Saturn Awards voters gave Avatar's cast four acting prizes, one of them for a character made entirely of computer graphics, though the Oscars had not nominated a single one of its actors.

Who composed the score for Avatar?

James Horner had already scored the director's Aliens, yet he called Avatar the most difficult job he had ever done.

Who sang Avatar's theme song, "I See You"?

Leona Lewis sings it over the closing credits, though it came from the film's own composer and the producer of Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On.

The linguist who invented Avatar's Na'vi language vowed to outdo which famous alien tongue?

Klingon was the bar: USC linguist Paul Frommer told the director they would 'out-Klingon Klingon' with a more detailed and better thought-out language.

In Avatar, what does Colonel Quaritch promise Jake in return for intelligence on the Na'vi?

Surgery to restore his legs is the colonel's price for a spy among the Na'vi, and Jake goes along with it until his loyalty shifts to the people he was sent to watch.

Which visual-effects studio led the work on Avatar?

Weta Digital had so much left to finish that a second effects house, Industrial Light & Magic, was called in late to help complete the aircraft and final-battle shots.

Avatar's director says seeing which digital character on screen helped persuade him his film was finally possible?

Gollum, and after him King Kong and Davy Jones, showed that a computer-generated character could hold the screen, so the script shelved in the 1990s was dusted off.

Before he reaches Pandora in Avatar, Jake Sully served in which branch of the US military?

The Marines are why the security chief, an old Recon man himself, trusts Jake to gather intelligence that the scientists never would.

Which sequel to Avatar finally reached cinemas in 2022, thirteen years after the original?

The Way of Water was first aimed at 2014, but the director wanted to film motion capture underwater, and inventing a way to do it helped push the release back eight years.

In Avatar, why can't humans breathe the air on Pandora?

It is poisonous to them within minutes, which is how the colonel nearly wins the final fight: he smashes open the unit that holds Jake's sleeping human body.

Avatar's director spent years with Vince Pace developing the Fusion Camera System to shoot in which format?

Digital 3D was something the director had first tried out on two deep-sea documentaries, using earlier versions of the same camera rig, before trusting it with a feature.

Which star says he turned down the lead in Avatar, and with it a tenth of the film's profits?

Matt Damon says he passed because he was committed to a Bourne film, though the director has since insisted he never formally offered him the part.

In Avatar's final fight, what kills Colonel Quaritch?

Two arrows to the chest from Neytiri's bow end the fight, loosed just as the colonel's knife reaches the throat of Jake's avatar.

In which city was Avatar's live-action footage shot?

Wellington's soundstages hosted the shoot, yet not one frame was filmed in a real jungle, so the cast were first sent to a Hawaiian rainforest to learn how one feels.

Citing the climate, Avatar's director says he moved the Avatar movie set's catering to what kind of menu?

Plant-based menus came in after his family gave up animal products around 2012, years after the first film was shot, so it was the sequels' crews who ate them.

Avatar's designers measured what kind of real site to model the mining colony's interiors?

An oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, the Clyde Boudreaux, was toured, photographed and measured in June 2007, then rebuilt digitally as the humans' base.

Avatar's director agreed that his film's story is much like which Western?

Dances with Wolves was put to him by an interviewer before release and he answered, 'Yes, exactly'; one critic went further and called Avatar the same movie.

Avatar's director says Pandora's "world mind" echoes a theme of which novel?

Solaris, by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, imagines a planet-wide ocean that seems to think; the director says a script of his own from the late 1970s already had a planet that could sense and react.

The Na'vi go back to a dream about a 12-foot-tall blue woman, described to Avatar's director by whom?

His mother told him about the dream, and he liked the image so much that he wrote a planet of tall blue people into his first screenplay in the 1970s.

In Avatar, how do Na'vi riders control their direhorses and banshees?

By linking their braids to them: tendrils in the braid join the animal's antenna in a neural bond, and a banshee bonded this way flies with one hunter for life.

When Fox wavered over Avatar, its director showed his test footage to which rival studio?

Disney's bosses left the screening saying 'We have to have it', which spurred Fox to commit, and Disney got Avatar anyway when it bought Fox in 2019.

Which typeface, used for Avatar's logo, was mocked in a 2017 Saturday Night Live sketch starring Ryan Gosling?

Papyrus so torments Gosling's character that he cannot sleep, and the font's own designer said that he and his wife could not stop laughing at the sketch.

At the very end of Avatar, what happens to Jake Sully?

He becomes his avatar for good: in a ceremony the Na'vi move his mind out of his human body, and he wakes as one of them.

Which studio developed Avatar: The Game?

Ubisoft Montreal got the job from the director himself in 2007, with a brief to forget it was a movie tie-in and simply make the best game the team could.

Which film did Avatar surpass to become the highest-grossing of all time in January 2010?

Titanic was the director's own previous film, so he lost the record only to himself, and he then kept it until Avengers: Endgame came along in 2019.

A 2021 re-release in which country let Avatar retake the top spot from Avengers: Endgame?

China's reissue needed only a weekend: the two films stood less than $8 million apart, and two days of ticket sales there put Avatar back on top.

Within four days of its 2010 disc release, Avatar took North America's Blu-ray sales record from which film?

The Dark Knight had needed 16 months to sell 2.5 million Blu-rays, a total Avatar passed with 2.7 million in its first four days.

Which actor plays Parker Selfridge, the corporate administrator of the mining operation in Avatar?

Giovanni Ribisi's company man had a model: the director has said he based him directly on the smooth corporate schemer Paul Reiser played in Aliens.

Which company staged a touring arena show set on Avatar's Pandora from 2015 to 2019?

Cirque du Soleil set its story long before the film's humans arrive, and spectators could download a phone app that let them take part in the show's effects.

Pandora – The World of Avatar opened in 2017 at which theme park?

Animal Kingdom's Pandora cost about $500 million and opened two years before the park's owner bought the studio that made Avatar.

Which album-cover artist sued claiming Avatar's floating mountains copied his paintings?

Roger Dean sought $50 million over 14 of his images, but a New York court threw the case out the following year.

Watching Avatar convinced which director he could finally adapt Valérian and Laureline?

Luc Besson says he came home from the screening and threw his finished script in the bin, because Avatar had shown him how much further the film could go.