It’s the Avatar: Fire and Ash scene critics and fans keep talking about: A sensual, druggy, S&M-tinged meeting between the film’s two big villains: Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and Ash People witch-queen Varang (Oona Chaplin).
The sequence is not only eyebrow-raising by the family-friendly Avatar franchise standards, but also arguably the film’s most interesting and unpredictable exchange — and might even be director James Cameron‘s favorite.
In the scene, Quaritch meets with Varang in her tent to try and convince the volatile Ash People leader to enter into an alliance. But Varang turns the tables on Quaritch, making him consume a hallucinogen and seductively cutting his chest with a knife.
Cameron broke down the scene’s appeal during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “You have no idea what’s going to happen next, and they’re both fascinating characters and she’s mesmerizing in that scene. ‘Mesmerizing’ is the word that always comes to mind for me.”
Continued Cameron: “I didn’t quite realize exactly what I’d written for that scene until I [saw the actors perform it]. Then I realized it’s a double seduction. He’s there to get her to do what he wants her to do, then it seems like she’s got him under her thumb, and yet the whole time he’s had a plan and it actually works. So from a writing standpoint, I’m happy with the psychological dynamics of the scene.”
In fact, Cameron was so pleased, he firmly pushed back on an effort by his editing team to trim the scene in half when the movie was being cut down to its current runtime of 3 hours and 15 minutes. “I said: ‘Guys, you’re about to become unemployed — put it back, every line,’” Cameron recalls.
The scene was also the one that landed Chaplin the role during her audition. As previously reported, the Game of Thrones actress beat out three well-known movie stars for the part. “There’s a sexuality, there’s a dominating psychology, and there’s a lot of fury,” Cameron said of Chaplin’s audition. “There are a lot of layers to what she’s doing there and the forces that are driving her, and Oona was able to move fluidly back and forth between those in a way that I wasn’t seeing with the others. I’m sure, in retrospect, I could have cast any of them. But my instinct is to always go with the actor that understands the character the best.”
Chaplin recalls that after shooting the scene for the film, she worried for months that her performance wasn’t good enough and she was working up the courage to ask Cameron if she could reshoot it.
“I was like, ‘I got to call Jim, ask him to reshoot it,’” she says. “It’s such an important scene, her whole origin story is in there. I really wanted to honor her trauma and the resilience of this character in a way that did that story justice. And then I was like, ‘Okay, I’m just gonna ask him’ and he was like, ‘I have something to show you.’ He took me to his cinema, and he showed me that scene. He was like, ‘It’s my favorite.’”
For more from James Cameron’s wide-ranging and deep-dive interview with THR, read this week’s cover story: James Cameron Is Ready to Move Beyond Avatar: “I’ve Got Other Stories to Tell.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash is currently in theaters.
