There’s something kind of major happening at Walt Disney World this weekend—they're opening Pandora: The World of Avatar, based on the James Cameron blockbuster of 2009. (Three sequel films are slated, with Sigourney Weaver, Zoë Saldana, and James Worthington all set to return.) Cameron has been a big player, but at Disney one of the key leaders of the ginormous team of "Imagineers" pulling this off is Lisa Girolami, director and executive producer of Walt Disney Imagineering. She’s responsible for everything guests will see touch, hear, taste, and more. (As she says, “I’m kind of like Mom” to the team.) We caught up with her to find out how she helped pull off the biggest expansion at the park since they blew out the walls at Fantasyland.
Glamour: How do you take something like Avatar and reimagine it in a three-dimensional way that is also true to the story? Fans of the film can be intense.
Lisa Girolami: We start with a concept, and in this case, it was, “Hey, let’s create Pandora and do floating mountains.” Your first thought is, Uh, floating mountains—how do we do that? The great thing about working for Disney is Imagineers are kind of crazy people. We go, “Oh, that’s never been done before; that’s probably impossible.” And then we say, “Let’s go figure it out.” And we do end up figuring it out somehow. For the story of Pandora, we sat down with Lightstorm, James Cameron’s company, and said, "We want to experience this land. We want to ride a Banshee. We also want to see the Na’vi." It’s all about the story. We start with a design and a concept. And throughout the whole process, my job is to make sure we are still on the mark. So if we go, “Oh, the mountains—it’s a little too hard to make them floating; we better put columns in to [hold] them up,” my job is to say, "No, we can’t do that, let’s figure out [another way]." Because we want our guests to walk in and say, “How does this happen? How do these mountains float?”
You mentioned you started by sitting down with James Cameron, and rumor is he can be difficult. Avatar is near and dear to his heart. What was that process like? Were there any moments when you said, “I don’t know if this is possible with the engineering or technology we have”?
It was really cool and really fun because James Cameron isn’t difficult—he’s a visionary. Just like Imagineers, he wants it right…and it’s not a dictatorship. It’s a partnership where we get together and everyone works their genius. It’s all about delivering the story. Whatever the story is saying, we have to do. That is our benchmark. This story, of course, is about the incredible Na’vi people that are really, really tall. They are not proportioned like us. They are huge. So how do you do that? How do you create the Shaman? How do you create the floating mountains? How do you create the flight on Pandora on the banshee, which is a huge animal? We really strive to do things we’ve never done before. That’s what keeps us passionate.
What was the hardest thing to pull off?
The hardest is going to be walking away from it.… I don’t mean to sound all sugary, because I don’t mean that at all. But the harder something is, the more we all dig in. We have tons of brains and creativity on it.… The Na’fi Shaman is our most advanced audio-animatronic. Ever since Walt built the first audio-animatronic, we’ve been on a mission to use all of our tricks to make them more and more real. The Shaman is the next step. She posed a number of good challenges: She is a different proportion than a human—she is very sinewy, and you have to think about how she is going to function, her skeleton, and how she is moving. But we used the same performance-capture technology Cameron does. And then we had to translate it into little motors and little pieces and parts that make up this incredible woman.
How do you keep guests so immersed—not constantly checking their phones?
You create a great experience and you create a land that when you are in, you are completely in the land. There is no visual intrusion—you don’t see a skyscraper, you are just immersed. In Pandora, the conflict takes place long ago, and we are all about joining the Na’vi and having peace and restoring the land.… And Pandora has the same three values as Animal Kingdom—that intrinsic value of nature, the transformation through adventure, and the personal call to action—which is why it’s perfect there.
It seems very well timed with the Inconvenient Sequel (a look at climate change 10 years after An Inconvenient Truth) and some of the other issues in the news.
We need to love our land. And you love it by traveling and having adventures and seeing other cultures and understanding them and saying, "Hey, this place is pretty beautiful."
Last question: After all the experiences and rides you’ve created—Tower of Terror and others—at the Disney Parks, do you have on favorite?
You know, truly, I loved the Little Mermaid when we built her. And now not only the flying of the banshee, but believe it or not, the story in the queue; I heard a lot of the guests saying it’s the best queue in an attraction. We have to entertain you!
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