James Cameron cut 10 minutes of gun violence from Avatar 2

The film has a running time of three hours and 12 minutes

James Cameron has revealed that he cut 10 minutes of gun violence out of Avatar: The Way of Water.

The film runs at three hours and 12 minutes, and is the long-awaited sequel to the original Avatar movie, which came out in 2009.

After explaining that he is no longer interested in fetishising guns in his action scenes, given the rates of gun violence in the US, Cameron told Esquire Middle East: “I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action. 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.”

Earlier in the interview, he had said: “I don’t know if I would want to fetishise the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30-plus years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”

He added: “I’m happy to be living in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago.”

James Cameron photographed at the world premiere of ‘Avatar: The Way of Water' (Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

Recently, Cameron confirmed that a long-standing story about his pitch meeting for the movie Aliens is, in fact, completely true. The Avatar filmmaker directed the 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi-horror classic Alien. Read more here.

Avatar: The Way of Water is out now in cinemas. Read The Independent’s three-star review here.