‘Xenogenesis’: The short film that inspired James Cameron to make ‘Avatar’
Nobody could have predicted that a director who made their debut on a shoestring horror sequel about killer fish would go on to redefine blockbuster cinema several times over and shatter every existing box office benchmark, except for maybe James Cameron himself.
As hard as he tried to distance himself from Piranha II: The Spawning, history will always remember it as the feature-length debut of the filmmaker who made a career out of changing the game. It wasn’t his first tilt at filmmaking, though, with 1978’s short film Xenogenesis highlighting the imagination and ambition that would soon become Cameron’s hallmarks.
Shot on a thrifty $20,000 budget and funded by the world of dentistry, the story finds a machine-raised woman and an engineered man being blasted off in a sentient spacecraft to try and find a hospitable planet to begin a new cycle of life. It only runs for 12 minutes and was designed to try and capitalise on the success of Star Wars, but it was clear Cameron had plenty of big ideas up his sleeve.
There were tentative plans to expand Xenogenesis into a full-length feature in its own right, but when that didn’t come to fruition, Cameron refused to abandon the meat on his short film’s bones. Instead, he patiently bided his time until he was a world-renowned, Academy Award-winning, and record-setting filmmaker, before repurposing several of his ideas into the all-conquering Avatar.
Reflecting on the connections between Xenogenesis and the highest-grossing release in cinema history to Letterboxd, Cameron acknowledged that it was a three-decade evolution. “I’d had a dream about a bioluminescent rainforest, and I did a drawing of that, and the moss reacts to you, and the trees react to you,” he said of the throughline between the two.
“A lot of the DNA of Avatar, it starts – really ultimately – with a fascination for the real world and its kind of extraordinary possibilities.” His epic sci-fi faced plenty of lawsuits after a litany of writers and filmmakers claimed he’d actively ripped them off, but Cameron had Xenogenesis in his back pocket to back up the claims that led to all of the legal action against him being dismissed.
“I think you can see that some of the artwork that I did for Xenogenesis of the bioluminescent world actually saved us tens of millions of dollars on Avatar, because we got sued by everybody and their dog,” he offered. “I could point back to stuff I did in 1977 before some of these people that were suing me were born and say, ‘No, we’ve got prior art, dude, you just gotta go hell’. And they did, basically.”
Xenogenesis may have never become a movie in its own right, but it did go on to inspire the biggest of all time, and further proved its worth by coming in very handy during the constant accusations of plagiarism Avatar was forced to endure.