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Academy Award-winning director James Cameron is no stranger to ideas of colonisation and exploitation in the name of of ‘progress’. His work on the Avatar film series heavily draws on these themes, exploring the impact of human resource extraction on an alien world.

When discussing the latest film in the series, Avatar: Fire and Ash, he said the themes are both relevant and visible in today‘s world, in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. Cameron was speaking to Brandon Davis on an episode of the podcast Director Debrief when he spoke about how some fights are “righteous”.

Davis asked the director about his portrayal of all-out war in the film and how Cameron makes a point to highlight the suffering and pain of “the good guys”. The director tells him it’s important to draw a “fine line” when it comes to the responsible portrayal of violence.

Discussing the culture of a pacifist race in the film’s universe, the Tulkun, Cameron said they believe “killing only leads to more killing in an endless, expanding spiral, right? And that’s the world we live in right now, that‘s what we’ve seen”. “We‘ve seen it in Gaza, we’ve seen in Sudan, we’ve seen it Ukraine,” he said.

The director contends that, being an action movie, Avatar had to show have fighting, but said it had to be “for a just cause”. He said the Tulkun, owing to their nature as a people, had to be convinced that “there are some fights that are righteous and total annihilation is a reason to fight. It’s existential”.

Cameron said this was in contrast to fighting “war for war’s sake”. This, he explained, was clear with the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

In another interview with Ireland’s RTÉ, the director said these themes keep repeating, “going back throughout human history”. Talking about how fiction takes its inspiration from fact, he said, “It’s always amazing to me that people will escape their lives into an otherworldly story that takes place in this phantasmagorical universe, and yet what they confront there is a mirror of ourselves.”

Interestingly, Cameron told The National he changed the ending to this latest film after filming had wrapped up — he is known as a demanding filmmaker who keeps actors on call for when inspiration strikes. The original ending involved the series’ protagonist, Jake Sully, arming the tribes of Pandora with human weapons, leading to a “gun-heavy final showdown”.

“At a certain point it just hit me – this maps to colonial history,” he said, “Arming the tribes and pitting them against each other is actually the wrong thing. That was part of the North American genocide of indigenous people. I can’t have Jake doing the same thing.”