If you build it, they will come — or is it vica-versa?

"He deliberately focused his story on characters that fit in a narrow design band, the Na'vi, a species of 10-foot-tall blue aliens with catlike ears and tails but human-like features. 'If they were more human, they could be done with make-up, which was boring, would not advance the the cause and had been done for 30 years in Star Trek,' Cameron says. 'If they were less human, they could not have been performed by humans effectively.'" — The Futurist, Rebecca Keegan

An interesting slip. Elsewhere, Cameron has kept himself firmly on-message. "He wrote Avatar years ago, but had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision," concluded 60 Minutes. "He just had to wait for the technology to catch up to his ideas," confirmed Variety. But the quote above, from a new biography, says something wholly different: Cameron didn't design the Na'vi and wait for technology to catch up. He designed them around the technology. Not human enough and the motion capture would be pointless; too human and they could do it with make-up, "which would not advance the cause." The cause being?

My review of Keegan's book to come in the New York Times.