Avatar: Fire And Ash almost didn't exist at all. James Cameron's original plan was to follow up his 2009 mega-smash Avatar with three sequels, but when he and his writer's room got into developing the story, there proved just too much juicy material. 

Hence, as Cameron says - in his latest Path To Pandora dispatch, some of the story planned for Avatar: The Way Of Water got developed as a whole other film.

"In a nutshell, we had too many great ideas packed into act one of movie 2," Cameron says, unpacking the process of the Avatar writers' room. "The [film] was moving like a bullet train, and we weren't drilling down enough on character. So I said, 'Guys, we've got to split it." While The Way Of Water was epic in its own right, "movie 3 will actually be a little bit longer than movie 2," he teases.

For both The Way Of Water and Fire And Ash, Cameron was joined by screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, in a writers' room that also included Josh Friedman (assigned Avatar 4), and Shane Salerno (Avatar 5). "It was spectacular. You're talking about a character deeply for days and days, and all of a sudden there they are," Silver says of seeing concept art for the scenes they were discussing. 

And the benefit of having The Way Of Water and Fire And Ash as distinct films meant allowing enough time to bring all those nuances to the screen. "The characters needed to breathe," she says. "These movies are a lot more than just propulsive plot and gorgeous spectacle. I mean, these are real characters."

Much of that depth was drawn from personal experience. "These characters are amalgams of us, our childhoods, our role as parents, the mistakes we made, and probably to some extent continue to make as parents," says Cameron. 

"I mean, Jake is a hard-ass motherfucker. He's very hard on his kids. Well, that's me." As for Jaffa, he poured much of himself into Jake's middle child, Lo'ak - seen in all-new Fire And Ash concept art above, riding an ilu. 

"A good friend of mine who saw Way Of Water - a woman I grew up with - wrote to me after she'd seen it," he recalls, "and said that the relationship between Lo'ak and Neteyam reminded her of the relationship I had with my older brother." It's just like Jake Sully says: 'This family is our fortress.'