‘Avatar: Sense of Water’: Sigourney Weaver had to learn parkour for the sequel

This Christmas we finally return to Pandora with ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’. We, the viewers, return, and surprisingly Sigourney Weaver also returns, despite the fact that her character, Dr. Grace Augustine, met a fatal fate in the first installment. Instead, this time she will play Kiri, the adopted daughter of Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña)..

As we already knew, the cast of ‘Avatar 2’ has had to go through exhaustive training to deal with a fairly intense shoot. To make filming underwater easier, the actors had to learn to hold their breath for several minutes.. Sigourney Weaver was able to spend six minutes underwater before needing to catch her breath.

But underwater breathing was just one of the skills the 72-year-old actress had to learn. She in an interview with Interview Magazine she admits that she had to learn to do parkour: “I know (James Cameron) is going to present me with some really unique challenges, and that he’s not going to back down from getting what he wants. In a lot of cases, my reaction is ‘I can’t do that.’ This is because I know they’re going to pick on me endlessly because of how cowardly I am, but I think everyone enjoys working with Jim because he asks a lot of you. In ‘Avatar: Water Sense’ I was older than a lot of the other actors, and we had to do a lot of parkour. We had to do burpees. We had to free dive. Don’t you love those jobs where you have to learn something weird but you’ll stick with it for the rest of your life? Freediving specifically, I’m grateful to have spent a year doing it.”.

Six and a half minutes without breathing

The actress spoke again about those six and a half minutes that she is able to hold under water and how she reached that spectacular mark: “Our professor, Kirk Krack, who teaches the Marines, taught us some diaphragmatic breathing exercises. We did them with, I think, at least 50% oxygen. What we normally breathe is 30% oxygen, so you have the advantage of having more oxygen in your tissues, and then you are very still, not moving, holding your breath. My husband is from Hawaii and he is a great swimmer and surfer, we did the training together and one day we held our breath for six minutes and medium.” Kirk couldn’t believe it. Neither could we, but it was his training. You learn that you’re not going to die if you don’t catch your breath. You learn to tell the, as he calls it, ‘smiley villain’ who wants you to breathe: ‘yes, yes, I’m doing this, I’ll see you later’. everything is psychological. It’s very, very interesting.”.

‘Avatar: Sense of Water’ opens in theaters on December 16. On September 30, ‘Avatar’ will be re-released in Spanish cinemas to refresh it before the sequel.