James Cameron’s commitment to the Avatar franchise is something that has never been in doubt. As Avatar: The Way of Water draws closer, it has become clear that the director had spent more than two decades of his life creating the world of Pandora. According to Cameron’s long-time producing partner Jon Landau, that included writing over 1000 pages of notes that would eventually become the Avatar sequels.

Avatar was originally released in 2009, and it has taken James Cameron over a decade to develop and shoot the first of its sequels. In advance of Avatar: The Way of Water, Landau spoke to SFX Magazine and revealed exactly how long Cameron has been working on the movie, and how much work went into pulling out the stories from the director’s extensive notes. He said:

“You know, we wanted to do it again before the first Avatar ever came out. We identified that there was more that we wanted to tell, but we needed a decompression period after the release of the movie. Also Jim had other ambitions, including going to the Mariana Trench, so it was after the 3D premiere of Titanic [in 2012] that Jim really sat down to put pen to paper on the ideas that he had for where he wanted to go. [Early on] Jim had identified that he wanted to make three movies, and felt that he had a plethora of directions to go in those. Then, when he started working with teams of writers to take his 1,000-plus pages of notes and coalesce them into stories, we realized we couldn’t get it down to three movies, that there were really four unique stories to tell.”

Related: James Cameron Talks Na'vi Character Design and Why They Look Humanlike

How Did James Cameron Create The World of Avatar?

AvatarWayofWater
20th Century Studios

Despite having written a bible of notes in the last decade, James Cameron previously revealed that his original ideas of Pandora came to him in a teenage dream. Cameron said that he sketched out a number of images based on those dreams at the time, but it would take many years for their purpose to come to fruition. He said:

"I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fibre-optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it. And these kinds of lizards that didn't look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something."

Avatar: The Way of Water is only the fourth movie that Cameron has directed since the early 1990s, and while he will be almost certainly helming at least one more of his Avatar sequels, he has suggested that someone else could take over later movies in the franchise so he can finally move onto other projects. Whether he can trust anyone to keep the Avatar ship afloat though, is something that is yet to be seen.