The day after the world premiere of “Avatar: Fire and Ash” in Los Angeles, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver — who wrote the third film in the multibillion-dollar movie series with director James Cameron — are huddled in a hotel restaurant, nursing large cups of chicken broth.
“I’m not a late-night person, and …” Silver says before turning to her husband. “What time did we get home last night? At 1?”
“It was close to one o’clock, yeah,” Jaffa says. “And by the way, we’re usually sleeping at 10.”
Silver playfully bats at Jaffa’s arm. “Don’t make us seem like oldies!”
The night before, Jaffa and Silver also sat side by side in the Dolby Theatre, nudging each other to look around and gauge the reactions of their fellow moviegoers as they returned to the far-flung moon of Pandora. They’d seen a cut of the film a few weeks prior, so they steeled themselves for the waves of emotion to come.
“If I had not, I’d still be sitting in the Dolby weeping,” Jaffa says.
In 2022’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the family of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) suffered a tragic loss: Their eldest son, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), was killed in battle. “Fire and Ash” follows the Sully clan as they try to pick up the pieces.
“Grief is a great teacher. It teaches us how fragile life and connections are. The movie does a good job of dramatizing that,” Silver says. “The Na’vi are fantastical creatures, but they really do experience human emotions, and all humans struggle with mortality.”
The emotional plot sees Jake and Neytiri figuring out how to cope while their younger son, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), who narrates the story, grapples with survivor’s guilt. For all the wrenching moments, Jaffa and Silver insist that the arc is more hopeful than sorrowful.
“The great takeaway — and we’re living proof of it — is, as Lo’ak says in the voice-over, ‘The light always returns,’” Jaffa says.
It’s been a decade since Silver and Jaffa wrote that line, but they understand it more deeply today, as their son, Joe Jaffa, died last summer. He was 33.
“Joe was a bright light in the world. In his short time on the earth, he really affected a lot of people,” Silver says. “No matter what he went through — and he had health issues his whole life — he brought joy into the world.”
Jaffa chimes in: “He wanted to tell people that he didn’t lose his battle to cancer, that he fought it to a draw and took it down with him.”
Then, in January, the couple and their daughter, Franki, lost their home when wildfire engulfed their Pacific Palisades neighborhood. “To be very candid, the holiday season has been difficult, not just without our son but without the comforts of our home,” Jaffa says.
It’s another element echoed in “Fire and Ash,” which introduces a Na’vi clan whose home was destroyed in a volcanic eruption, and something the screenwriters couldn’t have fathomed when they landed the “Avatar” gig more than a decade ago.
Married since 1989 and writing partners since 1992, Jaffa and Silver have been blockbuster cinema mainstays since their scripts for 2011’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and 2015’s “Jurassic World” relaunched each franchise. But their work on “Fire and Ash” and “The Way of Water” was unlike anything they (or any screenwriters, for that matter) had done before. In 2013, Cameron hired them, as well as Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, to help him expand the story of 2009’s “Avatar” into a proper sci-fi saga. They spent six months in a writers’ room hashing out what was planned to be three new films about the Sully family.
Jaffa and Silver speak of that period with a kind of wide-eyed awe. “Jim created a safe space for us to throw out stupid ideas, to try things out,” Silver says. “He invites us — the actors, the art department, everybody — to dream as big as they can and let him choose what he likes and figure out how to make it.”
But as Jaffa and Silver set about writing “Avatar 2” based on the extensive outline they’d all crafted together, their script began to expand well beyond the length of even a Cameron-sized movie. So they sent what they’d written to Cameron and asked him, “Should we start editing?”
“He just wrote back, ‘Take the hill,’” Jaffa recalls. “Which basically meant, keep going.”
Adds Silver: “And he knew what material was ahead of us. It’s not like we were making that material as we went.”
By the time they finished the full script in 2015, they estimate it approached 350 pages. “Insanely long,” Silver says with a knowing smile. “We never would write that long, but we had a mandate.” Ultimately, Cameron decided he wanted to include as much material as possible, so he split their mega-script into two movies, “The Way of Water” and “Fire and Ash.”
That led to some substantial creative changes: What Silver says “we used to call ‘the skirmish’” halfway through the story became the climactic battle at the end of “The Way of Water,” and Cameron gave that film the ending that Jaffa and Silver had written for “Fire and Ash.” But it also meant that Jaffa and Silver had the space to explore all the nuances of the emotional arc in service of the audience.
“People go to the movies for catharsis. And sci-fi and fantasy provide a huge opportunity to hold a mirror up to the human condition, and you can experience these difficult emotions at a safe distance,” Silver says. “The lights come up at the end of the movie. You throw away your popcorn and your soda; you’ve had a good cry. People need that.”
But she insists that “Fire and Ash” isn’t a melancholy experience.
“It’s about joy and triumph and connection,” Silver says. “That’s the Sully way. And that’s also the Jaffa way.”
