Geoff Shearer
February 27, 2010 12:00am

HIS 3D extravaganza Avatar dominates the box office, but director James Cameron is adamant it won’t dominate next month’s Academy Awards.

On the Gold Coast yesterday promoting the still-in-production Sanctum which he is executive producing with Australian director Alister Grierson, Cameron instead points to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.

“This is not our season with Avatar,” he said in relation to the March 8 awards ceremony. The Hurt Locker has already triumphed over Avatar with BAFTAs for best film and best direction, and a Director’s Guild of America gong for direction.

“There is a very small part of me emotionally that is a little bit disappointed on behalf of my crew – who worked so hard,” Cameron said.

“Personally, individually? No I’m very, very happy for Kathryn. I think we are all going to be cheering for her this year.”

While Sanctum is not in the same budget league as Avatar – it comes in around $30 million, compared with the latter’s more than $230 million – the 3D film about an underwater cave diving expedition gone wrong is one of Australian filmmaking’s largest undertakings. By comparison, Grierson’s first feature film, Kokoda, had a $3 million budget.

Sanctum – being filmed on the Gold Coast and at the Warner Roadshow Studios at Oxenford – stars Richard Roxburgh (Moulin Rouge ), Rhys Wakefield (Home And Away) and Ioan Gruffudd (Fantastic Four) and utilises the same Cameron/Pace Fusion 3D camera system used on Avatar.

“It’s great that we’re being a bit more ambitious about filmmaking and tackling these kind of things,” Grierson said yesterday.

“Sanctum is very fortunate, for a lot of reasons – (producer) Andrew Wight’s relationship with Jim (Cameron), giving us access to American finance sources; very fortunate the Australian Government’s rebate system was around at the same time; we almost got whacked by the global financial crisis as the Aussie dollar kind of went north – but we somehow struggled through that and survived.”

Cameron, for his part, left his Aussie director well alone on the project. Yesterday was only Cameron’s second day on the Gold Coast – principal photography started last November.

“I’m like the fairy godmother producer – I just add the money and stand back because I’m not going to produce a director that isn’t grown up and can’t make a film.”

Source:  The Courier Mail

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Sanctum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.