Before you know it the waves will break on Sam Worthington’s second batch of blockbuster starring roles, as 2009’s golden boy gets all of his sequels out there. While Avatar 2 is still many years away, Wrath of the Titans is tromping towards theaters and many of the smaller films he’s been involved with are also on their way. One of these is The Debt (which I feel like I saw trailers for ages ago, though that might be a trick of the memory), and it’s while promoting it that the actor has been questioned about his sequel choices, and how he decides on a role of any size. Worthington’s taken on a very emphatic (almost blustering) tack of late that has him throwing Clash of the Titans under the bus –though that’s something everyone does with their shitty franchise films these days– and emphasizing how hard he works to make sure weight is injected into these blockbuster scripts, especially for sequels. From interviews with Collider and Coming Soon…
“You make “Clash 2” weighty. “Clash 1” is a video game. You make “Clash 2″ weighty. You take everything you’ve learned, and go, I’m not doing this f–ing sh*t! I’m going to do a weighty script in a blockbuster. That’s the bigness of a blockbuster. They’re very hard because they’re done by such a machine, so you try to get that weight that an independent can allow you, that freedom that they have on an independent script, and then you try to fit it into a blockbuster…”
…You do it all of the way through. You sit down with the studio, you sit down with the character, you sit down with everybody and have a whole different look at how we’re going to handle it. But that’s the hard thing about making blockbusters, because they’re just churning them out; they give you five months and the date’s already pre-planned for the next year.
Regarding his method of choosing roles in the first place, apparently it all comes from the desire to tell stories of any size…
“I pick which movie by “would I want to go see something like ‘The Debt’?” Or, “Do I want to see something like ‘Terminator’?” And within that, you kind of by chance end up with a career that balances. You’re not just sitting there going, “I’m going to do one big one for them, and one small one for me.”
Finally, the latest update on Cameron’s Avatar progress came from ole Sam, and what he found out from the director during a call on his birthday.
“…he’s writing the bible, at the moment, which is a precursor to Avatar 1 and the whole world, basically. I think it’s just to get Jim’s mind back into the characters and back into the world. He’s told me where he wants to take Avatar 2 and 3, and it’s monumental. It’s just huge! But, you’d expect nothing less from him. He’s not going to start it until he’s 100%. I know they’re setting up shop down in Manhattan Beach, and when he says jump, I jump.”
I would expect Cameron to take his sweet goddamn time with Avatar 2, as he certainly doesn’t want to live up to the legacy of the biggest film ever released with a sequel that isn’t just as precisely engineered to appeal to the largest amount of people. Who knows if it will even be economically realistic by the time Avatar 2 hits theaters, but there’s no reason that Cameron won’t go for the “#1 Of All Time” hat trick. Frankly, with overseas grosses continuing to increase with more countries gearing up screens, the internationally-appealing franchise might have no trouble at all setting more records.
Until then, expect to see Sam Worthington pushing as much weight and weight and weight into his franchises as he can.
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(via Dark Horizons)