Avatar director James Cameron, a climate change activist, said he can “relate to” Marvel villain Thanos’ plan to kill billions upon billions of people as well as other creatures in the universe for the sake of population control.
In the Avengers finale, Thanos famously wanted to destroy half of the universe’s population to preserve its finite resources — a possible allegory for climate change extremists. According to Cameron, Thanos had a plan that he can relate to.
“I can relate to Thanos,” Cameron told Time. “I thought he had a pretty viable answer. The problem is nobody is going to put up their hand to volunteer to be the half that has to go.”
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Time did not specify if Cameron meant his alleged support for Thanos as a joke.
Cameron statement comes after his Avatar: The Way of Water grossed over $2 billion, further adding to his (much-deserved) reputation as the most bankable director in Hollywood history. Over the years, the director has not been shy to share his beliefs about climate change, which his beloved franchise seeks to explore. In December of last year, Cameron also decried what he called a growing surge in gun violence, adding that he edited 10 minutes out of the Avatar sequel to limit the display of guns.
“I’m happy to be living in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago,” he told Esquire.
“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” he said. “I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”
Cameron even said he could not make some of his past films now.
“I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now,” he said. “I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30-plus years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”