It’s taken Avatar’s makers 13 years to return with its sequel, Avatar: The Way Of Water. That’s partly because director James Cameron was waiting for the right underwater tech and also because they had to create the setting – a part of Pandora inhabited by the ocean-dwelling Na’avi clan, the Metkayina – from scratch. In the sequel, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana reprise their roles as Jake Sully and Ney’tiri, now parents to five children, who have to learn to survive in the water world. Like the protagonists, the cast was put through the ringer during filming. Kate Winslet, who plays the matriarch of the water tribe, even ended up breaking Tom Cruise’s record by holding her breath underwater for a whopping 7. 12 minutes!

Ultimately, for the film’s producer Jon Landau it all boiled down to “getting it right”. And though there’s no denying that the world’s changed dramatically since the original Avatar came out, he tells us why he feels the timing of its sequel couldn’t be more perfect. Excerpts:

It’s not that people don’t want to go to the cinemas. I, in fact, think they want to go more than ever. But we as an industry have to give them content that is worth getting out of the house for. We can’t give them the same thing they can get on their phone or their TV at home. We have to give them something new and different. And that was our goal from Day 1 – to create “a must-see on the big screen” experience. Not just in the visual, but also an emotional sense. And I think that when movies work, they work emotionally. And I think one of the things that the Indian audiences respond to is the emotion of a movie – whether it’s the laughter, whether it’s the heart. And that’s what we have tried to put into the film – heart.

We took our time because we wanted to do it right. And this is the amount of time it took. If you look back, it took us the same amount of time between Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009). Am I happy with how it turned out? 100%! We make the movie for audiences, and that’s one of the reasons why in India we’re going to be in so many different languages. We know the diversity of the country, and Avatar – at its root – is about celebrating diversity.

I think we are making a lot of sequels (Avatar 3, 4 and 5 are already in the pipeline), but not for the sake of making a sequel. We are making a continuation of a saga. I look at each one of our movies as standalone movies. Each movie is going to come to its own story conclusion, its own emotional resolution and we always go, ‘is that a movie worth making?’ ‘Does this movie warrant a cinema experience?’