What do you remember from the night Titanic won the Oscars?

I remember almost getting in a fight with Harvey Weinstein and hitting him with my Oscar.

In retrospect there are probably a lot of people . . .

That would’ve preferred I had played through on that one. . . . It was happening on the main floor at the [theater] . . . And the music had started to play to get back in our seats. The people around us were saying, “Not here! Not here!” Like it was O.K. to fight in the parking lot, you know, but it was not O.K. there when the music was playing, and they were about to go live.

What were you and Harvey discussing that led to this altercation?

It’s kind of a long story, but it has to do with Guillermo del Toro and how badly he was dealt with by Miramax on Mimic. Harvey came up glad-handing me, talking about how great they were for the artist, and I just read him chapter and verse about how great I thought he was for the artist based on my friend’s experience, and that led to an altercation.

You made Titanic for 20th Century Fox, which has been your longtime studio home. And you’re making the Avatar sequels for them, but there are reports now that the Murdochs are interested in selling the movie studio. What would that mean for you and your films?

Probably not that much. I’ve always had a good relationship with Fox. If they sold to Disney that wouldn’t be bad because Disney actually at this point in time has a bigger investment in Avatar than Fox does in terms of spent money.

Because of the Pandora—The World of Avatar themed land at Disney World?

Yeah, exactly. So I get along great with Fox; I’m sure I’d get along great with Disney.

With all of the work going into the Avatar sequels there have been some delays in getting started.

I wouldn’t call them delays. It was highly optimistic that we could start quickly until scripts are written. If there’s no scripts, there’s nothing, right? The scripts took four years. You can call that a delay, but it’s not really a delay because from the time we pushed the button to really go make the movies [until now,] we’re clicking along perfectly. We’re doing very well because of all the time that we had to develop the system and the pipeline and all that. We weren’t wasting time, we were putting it into tech development and design. So when all the scripts were approved, everything was designed. Every character, every creature, every setting. In a funny way it was to the benefit of the film because the design team had more time to work. . . . Most of the actors, the key principals, have all read all four scripts, so they know exactly what their character arcs are, they know where they’re going, they know how to modulate their arc now across the first two films. We all know where we’re supposed to be dramatically in the saga, and that’s great. Let’s face it, if Avatar 2 and 3 don’t make enough money, there’s not going to be a 4 and 5. They’re fully encapsulated stories in and of themselves. It builds across the five films to a greater kind of meta narrative, but they’re fully formed films in their own right, unlike, say, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where you really just had to sort of go, “Oh, shit, all right, well I guess I better come back next year.” Even though that all worked and everybody did.