Avatar: This reference to Titanic that James Cameron himself didn’t notice

“You see.” (“You see.”)

This little phrase, uttered many times (and in many circumstances) throughout the Avatar Saga, is a bit like the motto of the Boat People. These three little words, sometimes used as a greeting, to ask for forgiveness or even to declare one’s love, are accompanied by a very special gesture and represent the heart of the language spoken by the inhabitants of Pandora.

“You have to make a gesture, it’s almost more important than words”Explained Joel David Moore’s character Jake Sully in the first episode when he taught him to speak on a boat. “It’s not just ‘I see you,’ with my eyes, in front of me. It’s ‘I see you, I see you, I get you, I understand you.’

But 12 years before Avatar came out, light years away from Pandora, this famous line had already been spoken in another famous James Cameron film. Indeed, when they were just getting to know each other on the deck of the Titanic, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) said the exact same thing to Rose (Kate Winslet).

“You have talent, Jack, talent. You know how to see people,” said the latter. To which the young man replied: “you see”before specifying that he would never jump off a boat.

He asked about it recently Entertainment WeeklyJames Cameron admitted that he didn’t even make the connection between the Titanic replica and Avatar:

“I totally forgot Jack said that in Titanic”He confided before explaining how he came up with the phrase for his sci-fi saga:

“It makes a lot of sense and seems to resonate with people. I was just wondering what a member of one tribe might say to a member of another tribe. ‘I see you’ seemed the most obvious to me. Let’s go back to the most basic semiotics.”

“And from there I started layering all the other meanings , then I went back and found that I had already done it. I always tell my teams that I’ve only had four or five good ideas in my life and that I’ll keep reworking them.”

This little phrase seems to have worked for the filmmaker, as the three feature films in which we can hear it (Titanic, Avatar, and Avatar: The Waterway) are now in the top 5 of the biggest hits. temperature.

(Re)discover our interview with James Cameron on ‘Avatar: Waterway’…