In September, Fox launched a rather underwhelming viral Web site for "Avatar" containing nothing much beyond some concept art, a laughably low-budget video game and a grainy video from the film's scar-faced baddie Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) about the dangers of the alien planet Pandora.
As we would learn a few months later, Quaritch's dialogue — "Out beyond the fence, every living thing that crawls, flies or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for Jujubees" — was pulled directly from the finished film. But in an interview with MTV News Lang revealed that he actually shot a string of videos that have not yet been seen by the public.
"Back in early '08, I was doing some recruitment stuff for Pandora," he explained. "Jon Landau, our very creative producer, had said, 'How about doing a couple recruitment things for Pandora?' And I said, 'OK.' "
As director James Cameron and his team began to build the world of "Avatar," creating new species, plant life, native peoples and their history, they constructed a sort of bible about their universe: the definitive word on all things Pandora. At the start of 2008, the book was not yet complete, but Lang got his hands on it.
"As an aid to that, [Landau] said, 'I'm going to send you something. It's the beginning of our book. This is the book on Pandora. Don't share it. Nobody else has it,' " the actor explained. "So I have this thing, so I knew quite a bit about Pandora."
Within the "Avatar" world, the videos were intended as recruitment tools for humans to take the six-year journey to Pandora to work with the natural-resource plundering Resources Development Administration. Quaritch is the company's security chief. While it seems these videos were meant to be used for Fox's viral marketing campaign in the real world, it's not entirely clear from Lang's description if Cameron and Landau in fact intended to use them in the film itself. In either case, "Avatar" fans can hold out hope that the unseen footage will pop up on the forthcoming DVD. Elements of the bible, meanwhile, can be had now as part of a so-called "Activist Survival Guide."
"[The bible] actually was very helpful to me too, because it freed me in some of the stuff I was talking about in these videos that supposedly get broadcast back to Earth," Lang said.
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