15 CHRIS PINE AUDITIONED AND IT DIDN'T GO WELL...

Chris Pine spoke with Chicago Tribune about his audition for Avatar and let's just say it didn't go well. However, this story's better in his own words: "I have a feeling that story will haunt me for the rest of my life. It’s one of these things--sometimes you can leave your car in Burbank, Los Angeles and walk into a conference room and your back is sweating and you’re thinking about the laundry you have to do and somehow seamlessly you can then pretend to be a man in a loincloth standing in front of blue people saying lines like, 'Come follow me, I’ll save you!' And sometimes you just can’t buy it. I walked into that room absolutely not believing myself. How dare I put that poor casting director through the experience of watching me. Halfway through I just kind of stopped; she was maybe smiling or laughing at me.I didn’t take offense to it because I realized I was probably pretty bad, and we just called it a day and I shook hands with her and out I walked."

It's too bad that he didn't believe in himself, maybe he'll get another chance to audition again. There are three more Avatar movies to be made.

14 THE FILM BARELY MADE IT OUT OF THE ANIMATED FEATURE CATEGORY

One of the many pioneering aspects of Avatar was its use of sophisticated motion capture technology that allowed Cameron to create the incredibly realistic animated look of the Na’vi. It required actors to wear a body suit with sensors attached to it to capture body movements and a face camera to pick up on facial movements and expressions, thus creating faithful recreations of the actor's movements on-screen.

While Avatar didn't win Best Picture, it did win Best Visual Effect, Best Cinematography, and Best Art Direction at the Oscars.

What's interesting here is that Avatar was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, instead of Best Animated Picture. According to the Academy, a film must be 75% animated and feature a significant number of animated characters. Despite the number of animated characters and CGI backgrounds in Avatar, it didn’t make the cut for the Animated Feature category – not that Cameron was sweating it.

13 IT MADE A LOT OF MONEY (AND COST A LOT OF MONEY)

At the end of its box office run, Avatar surpassed Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Titanic. The movie grossed over $2.7 million worldwide, with most of the film's profits coming from foreign markets ($2 billion of its profits to be exact). Avatar became the second highest grossing film (when adjusted for inflation) behind the groundbreaking 1939 film, Gone With The Wind.

It was also the most expensive movie ever produced at the time of release at $237 million. However, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which was released two years after Avatar, took the top spot with a budget 0f $410 million.

12 THERE ARE SUBTLE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NA'VI AND AVATARS

If you’re confused about how to identify the Avatars from the Na’vi, there's a pretty simple distinction. The Na’vi are the race of people that inhabit Pandora, a moon that orbits a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system. Avatars are human/Na’vi hybrids used by human scientists to explore Pandora to locate unobtanium, an energy source badly needed on Earth.

Because the Avatars are human hybrids, they sport slightly different features than the Na’vi. They have many of the same abilities but they have features that are important to humans, like extra digits or eyebrows. Avatars are remotely controlled by their human operators, who’ve been connected to the Avatars by a mental link.

11 CAMERON TOOK THE CAST JUNGLE CAMPING FOR RESEARCH

In an effort to coax the most realistic performances from his stellar cast, James Cameron packed them all up and ferried them to a Hawaiian jungle so they could build a sense of what it would be like living in a rainforest-like environment on Pandora.

Cast members slept in hotels at night, but lived in the jungle during the day where they learned how to fish, build fires, and live tribally.

Saldana found the experience incredibly helpful. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, she described a revelatory few days: "That experience helped us so much. Sigourney, Sam and I were shooting the movie on a regular cement floor on a sound stage, but we needed to know what it was like to walk in a jungle world, what that felt like."