Did the Cast of 'Avatar: The Way of Water' Really Film Scenes Underwater?

James Cameron's love for, and fascination with, the ocean is well known from his work on films such as Titanic and The Abyss, and he is now applying it to his newest movie, Avatar: The Way of Water.

The sequel to Cameron's 2009 film Avatar sees the director return to Pandora, and the characters that fans grew to love such as Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). In the new movie, they will be chased from their home to seek help from an underwater clan.

Viewers may be wondering how much of the film's underwater sequences were filmed for real, and how they were created. Luckily, the director has shared details of the filming process.

Did the Cast of 'Avatar: The Way of Water' Really Film Scenes Underwater?

In short, yes, the cast of Avatar: The Way of Water did film their underwater scenes for real as Cameron was keen to ensure these moments looked as realistic as possible with the motion-capture technology.

"The key to it was to actually shoot underwater and at the surface of the water so people were swimming properly, getting out of the water properly, diving in properly," Cameron said ahead of the film's release. "It looks real because the motion was real. And the emotion was real."

To bring the underwater scenes to life, Cameron and the film's cast and crew filmed in a tank that was constructed at Manhattan Beach Studios in California, where the director and producer Jon Landau's production company Lightstorm is based.

The tank was 120 feet long, 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep, and it could hold more than 250,000 gallons of water. It was here that the crew were able to film the actors in their performance-capture suits.

The tank meant that Cameron and the crew were able to control the environment that the actors were working in, and he explained: "We could do waves breaking on the shore and have people trying to get out of the water while they're getting hit by waves.

"We could create wave interaction with the creatures and people surfacing, getting hit by a 10-foot wave and trying to say their lines and trying to breathe at the same time."

The water in the tank had to be clear so that the crew could fully film the performance capture technology, but this also meant that the cast couldn't use scuba gear while filming because there couldn't be too many air bubbles on camera.

Cameron said: "Every one of those air bubbles is a little wiggling mirror, and the system that's trying to read all the marker dots on the actor's body, so it can capture their motion can't tell the difference between a marker dot and a bubble."

The cast and crew had therefore to hold their breath while shooting. "If there was somebody down their holding the light, they were holding their breath. If they were operating a camera, they're holding their breath. The actors, of course, had to be holding their breath," Cameron said.

According to the director, this proved an interesting challenge for the actors, but it was something that they "really enjoyed," particularly Kate Winslet, as she was able to hold her breath for a total of seven minutes.

The Titanic director said: "Kate enjoyed the freedom of being able to express herself underwater. She was able to do a static breath hold for something like seven minutes and 20 seconds. I've been a free diver for 50 years, and I think the longest I've ever held my breath was five-and-a-half minutes."

For her part, Winslet has joked that she had asked if she'd "died," after holding her breath for as long as she did in the Avatar sequel, in which she plays the leader of the underwater Metkayina clan, Ronal.

In an interview with Games Radar, Winslet said: "I have the video of me surfacing saying, 'Am I dead? Have I died?' And then going, 'What was [my time]?'

"Straight away, I wanted to know my time. And I couldn't believe it... The next thing I say is, 'We need to radio set. I wanted Jim [Cameron] to know right away."

Avatar: The Way of Water is released in theaters on Friday, December 16.