A Hollywood Titan on Diversity in Film: Alec Frazier of Autistic Reality Quizzes Jon Landau of Lightstorm Entertainment

Alec Frazier and Jon Landau

In 2014, I was privileged enough to visit Lightstorm Entertainment with AvatarMeet. One of our activities was a question-and-answer session with a number of the filmmakers and other people involved in the making of the Avatar franchise. What follows is my exchange with producer Jon Landau, one of the smartest, most successful people in Hollywood, after I asked him about involving disability and other forms of diversity in film.

Me: I’m interested in that uh, you have this great environmental message but another message that I’ve liked a whole lot about Avatar is the message of tolerance and so I’m wondering about uh, I have a general part of this question and then specifically… I’m wondering how you’re willing to in general enforce tolerance, will not enforce but address tolerance in the movies and specifically things like sexual orientation, religion, race, and disability, things like that. So I’m wondering if any of the future movies will deal with that, or will feature that in any way, and uh, and my general question is if they will go further to promote tolerance.

Jon Landau: Well look, I think that, a general answer? Yes. When you say feature something, it always makes me nervous.

Me: No I don’t…

Jon Landau: No, no, no. I’m just saying, cause we work on stuff creatively. When you push something to the forefront, I think it has much less of an impact than one you play it in the…

Me: I agree.

Jon Landau: …background. So, featuring things I don’t think, you know will continue to exist. But, that sense, I mean I really see the future movies again, not about Na’vi versus human, but is about the choices we make. It’s about good versus evil. It’s about are you a good Na’vi, are you a bad Na’vi. Are you a good human, are you a bad human. How do you become accepting of other people and their differences. So I think those things, those thematic themes are going to play out and it’s important for us, because those are universal themes. They are not American jingoistic themes. And as we make movies in today’s world, we have to do it for a global audience and we have to, you know, attract people in and let them discover the types of things we’re talking about, and not be beating them over the head Of discovery for them, and we’re really looking at this, and while each movie will complete itself as a story arc, and I say that Jim [Cameron] twice has done sequels, I argue that both times they have at least lived up to if not been better than the first movies, but they were complete movies, so we have to do that and some of our themes that remain in the end are themes that are really gonna take the full story arc to play out, but I think that’s okay um, andwith them, let it be a journey, a journey…   

Me: That’s what I believe, too.

Jon Landau: …at the end, as we talked about we want to make movies that, that affect people, and have an impact on their lives, and how they see the world, as they move forward.

Me: Just in the interest of full disclosure, I don’t like being labeled. People exist, that’s what I think that they…

Jon Landau: Look, I’m going to use the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”. I went through it, I enjoyed it, but their preaching to the people they already converted. What you have to do is you have to, like the first Avatar does, people have heard me say this before, it begins and ends with Jake opening his eyes. So what we need to do is get people to come in, and they may think that their eyes are open, but they’re really not. Because if through our films we can get people to open their eyes and see things differently, then we’ve been successful.