A lot has been said about the length of James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. The three-hour runtime has hardly stopped the film from topping box-office charts around the world. Now, Cameron has revealed the film would have run 10 minutes longer had he not cut out scenes with gun violence. He said that he is no longer interested in fetishising guns in his action scenes, given the rampant gun violence in the US.

“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” the filmmaker said. He added, “I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”