- James Cameron told an executive who wanted "Avatar" to be shorter to "get the fuck out of my office."
- "I think this movie is going to make all the fucking money," Cameron said he told the exec.
Filmmaker James Cameron knows a thing or two about box-office hits.
His "Titanic" was the highest-grossing movie ever for 12 years, until his own "Avatar" topped it in 2009. And Cameron was so confident in the latter that he swore at an unnamed executive who begged him to make the movie shorter.
"'I think this movie is going to make all the fucking money,'" Cameron said he told the exec, in a GQ interview published Monday. "And when it does, it's going to be too late for you to love the film. The time for you to love the movie is today."
"Avatar" was 162 minutes. It's earned $2.9 billion worldwide and remains the biggest movie of all time.
"I said, 'You can't come back to me and compliment the film or chum along and say, Look what we did together. You won't be able to do that,'" Cameron said. "At that point, that particular studio executive flipped out and went bug shit on me. And I told him to get the fuck out of my office. And that's where it was left."
Cameron's long-awaited sequel, "Avatar: The Way of Water," hits theaters next month, and will be 190 minutes long — or, three hours and 10 minutes (That's still a few minutes shorter than "Titanic").
Cameron defended the sequel's length in an interview with Empire Magazine earlier this year by comparing it to binge-watching TV.
"I don't want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours," Cameron told Empire.
He added, "I've watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here's the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it's okay to get up and go pee."
"The Way of Water" isn't just long; it's expensive. Cameron also told GQ that the movie has to be "the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history" just to break even.