Avatar Gets a Talented Tongue

BILL STOUFFER — 23 Nov 2009 13:45:12 CDT

James Cameron is prepared to boldly go where only Klingons have gone before.

As part of the effort to make Avatar a completely realized world, down to to the blades of grass, he has commissioned a whole new language for his blue-skinned aliens. The LA Times has posted a interview with Professor Paul Frommer, who has spent the past four years gleefully working out the sound, syntax, and vocabulary of this Na'vi native tongue, constrained only by the limits the human voice, itself.

Perhaps not quite constrained enough, though, suggests Zoe Saldana who plays the alien Neytiri in Avatar. Despite her role as the linguistics expert Uhura in Star Trek — and what Kirk (Chris Pine) salaciously describes as "a talented tongue" — Saldana confesses that she found the experience a real challenge:

Oh, it was so hard and I was really concerned about it. I didn't think I could get through it. I'm not good with languages. All the actors, we worked together. It was the only way.

Nonetheless, the language is far more gentle and more melodious than Klingon, the professor insists, and he has high hopes that it will catch on and develop a life of its own. It's lonely, he says, being the only person really speaking the language. No word yet on any plans to teach it to a baby as a first language, as it was recently reported someone did with Klingon.

Karl "Bones" Urban on Star Trek 2

BRENTJS SPRECHER — 20 Nov 2009 19:40:09 CDT

After a notable role as Eomer in the second and third chapters in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Karl Urban went on to star in the ill-fated Pathfinder, Marcus Nispel's Vikings-versus-Native Americans action film.

Urban followed up his little-seen Pathfinders starring role with the supporting role of Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in J.J. Abrams' revamped Star Trek, a role that promised to put him back in the spotlight. However, Abrams' film focused primarily on the relationship between James T. Kirk (played by Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto), rather than on the the Kirk-Spock-Bones trinity that served as the basis for the original series. In a recent interview with IGN, Urban said that he hopes that his role gets beefed up for Star Trek 2, if only to pay homage to the original.

The structure [of the new film] wasn't really the traditional triumvirate that you've seen on the television show. It was really more a movie about establishing everybody. I certainly hope that [screenwriters] Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and J.J. continue to strengthen and evolve those characters into those directions.
I would love to play scenes being essentially Kirk's moral compass or point of conscience. The way McCoy was written, he really sort of verbalized the war going on in Kirk's conscience, and I certainly would love to see more arguments of passion versus logic with Spock because they're always fun.

Urban also offered his opinion on the direction the second Star Trek film should take.

I think the challenge is to come up with the most important mission, the mission that literally tears these people apart. The mission that is the definitive Trek mission. We have to come up with something akin to a Dark Knight or The Empire Strikes Back. Something like that.

Urban recently shot And Soon the Darkness, which is in post-production, and is currently filming Priest.

ReelzChannel | Chris Pine

Avatar Gets a Talented Tongue

Karl "Bones" Urban on Star Trek 2