The highest-grossing film of all-time , Avatar’s aliens may be blue but director James Cameron and star Sigourney Weaver are using their movie to spread a message that’s proudly green.
Cameron and Weaver hosted the Eco Warrior Training competition where high school students vied for $12,000 in scholarships delivering speeches on “An Environmental Lesson I Learned From Avatar and How to Apply It In My Community, New York City, America and/or the World,” People magazine online reported.
“As a New Yorker, I’m thrilled to be here to meet you, to talk to you about all of us becoming eco-warriors because our planet needs it. I got involved in Avatar, and I loved the experience. I loved the director, but I also really wanted to play Grace Augustine, who’s this kick-ass woman scientist,” Weaver, 60, told the audience.
“Unfortunately she’s on Pandora partially because there’s nothing left on Earth for her to study and for her to report,” she said. “It’s a dead planet.”
Weaver, whose character immerses in her studying the Na’vi species in the year 2154, said she sees kids as responding to the movie’s ecological message.
“I think children have a connection to nature that’s so deep when they’re born, and they’re closer in a way than we are as adults,” she said.
“It’s the message of the movie: Open your eyes. You’re never too young to open your eyes and go, ‘What is this world? What can I do? What do I like to do? What can I give that will improve the world and make me happy?’ I think that serving and being useful is the most satisfying thing, and there are so many ways to do it.”
Filmmaker James Cameron says he and his wife of nine years, former model Suzy Amis Cameron, are driving that message home with their own children, twin son Quinn and daughter Claire, 9, and daughter Elizabeth Rose, 3.
“We do it from two directions,” the Oscar winner, 55, said.
“We keep the kids off the computer other than just enough to be competent, and we keep them off the commercial channels, except for the Science Channel, Discovery, National Geographic and Animal Planet,” Cameron added.
