‘I could go blue!’ Miley Cyrus’ bold pitch to James Cameron that got her a songwriting gig on ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’
Marcus James Dixon
Miley Cyrus wanted to to go "full Céline Dion" for her original song "Dream as One," which plays during the credits of Avatar: Fire and Ash. "I was like, screw Miley Cyrus!" she laughed. "But [director James Cameron] wanted it to sound like me. I can do that better than anybody, so I did it."
Cyrus spoke about the origins of "Dream as One" following a Thursday screening of the third Avatar movie at the DGA Theatre in Hollywood.
And it all came about due to a bit of Disney magic.
Cyrus happened to run into the filmmaker while both were being honored as Disney Legends during an August 2024 ceremony, and she decided to shoot her shot. "I was patiently waiting my turn, and I was standing behind Harrison Ford, Jamie Lee Curtis, and James Cameron," she recalled. "I've always been one to find opportunities. And so, I told all of them that I was available to do music — and everyone called me except Harrison Ford."
Curtis reached out, and that's how Cyrus "got involved" in writing the song "Beautiful That Way" for Pamela Anderson's film The Last Showgirl, which earned Cyrus a Golden Globe nomination. "That was just pure me, kind of being sleazy at the Disney Legends and trying to get a gig," Cyrus confessed. "It ended up working pretty well.
"For James Cameron, I asked a question that I knew the answer to, which was, 'What are you up to?' I knew that he was up to Avatar for 20 years. Then I just said, 'If you ever need anything, let me know. I could go blue! Or I could write some music.'"
That interaction led to Cameron asking her to contribute a song for the third installment of Avatar. "The connection between us came really easily," the three-time Grammy winner admitted. "Obviously, he's a master, but now to have him as a mentor and friend is really meaningful and helpful."
"Dream as One," which Cyrus cowrote with Andrew Wyatt and Mark Ronson, is a Best Song contender for the 2026 Oscars and other upcoming awards shows. While Cyrus has never been nominated at the Oscars, she is a two-time Best Song nominee at the Golden Globes for Bolt's "I Thought I Lost You" and the aforementioned "Beautiful That Way" from The Last Showgirl.
Cyrus and Cameron found a connection in that they both "like to do big things." She continued, "I like to be a part of big moments, and I like to impact culture. But really what I like to do is impact people. I like to make people feel things, question things. I like to relate to humanity. Even in these large scale forms, I think there's a way that we can still create intimacy and vulnerability and feel the individuality. And so, I think that's what really connected us."
Their first conversation was only supposed to be a few minutes long, but they ended up "being on the phone for two hours talking about everything except Avatar, just because that's the way you get to know somebody." They discussed concepts of "life, love, death, grief, devastation, and trauma," she explained. "Obviously, that's all embedded into Avatar, but it also comes from experiences in our lives. I realized, after we spoke, that I knew what to do. Even though we didn't really talk about what the song was going to be, I knew how it was going to make people feel."
The title of the new film is something that connected directly with Cyrus' personal life. "Everything that I went through with losing my house in the Woolsey Fire, I really related to Fire and Ash in a very personal way. I do think that I'm this symbol for rebuilding now. When that happened in 2018, it was such a moment. I feel like I'm so proud to kind of represent this rebuilding, this phoenix rising. I'm so grateful that I got to build my life from the ground up. Now, everything that I have in my life is things that I chose. They're meaningful, they're important — and they're not as many, but they're more."
Cyrus only has "one problem" with Cameron, she told the crowd. "He's worked on this movie for 20 years, yet he forgot that there was a song needed for the end credits until two months before this film was going to come out. He had 20 years to perfect his craft, and I had about two weeks!" To prepare, she watched three different versions of the film, including an unfinished form that showed "the creation of how the actors actually interact with each other." Even though she had a "very small amount of time to put this song together," that ended up working out for her in the end. "Perfect isn't really ever my goal. It's about, how do I make it have the most truth that it can?"
She then joked, "20 years would be nice, too! I was available 20 years ago, he could have hit me up. I was around, doing the same old thing I'm doing now."
When the first Avatar came out in December 2009, Cyrus remembers exactly where she was: "I was filming my first movie that I had ever made outside of Hannah Montana. I was doing The Last Song in Georgia, and I wanted to go see Avatar." Her favorite part of the franchise? "I've always loved that chosen family is a theme. No matter what you've gone through, you have each other's back."
Cyrus attended last week's premiere of Avatar: Fire and Ash in Hollywood, and declared that if her song had been in the opening sequence, she would have "been home at 9 o'clock." But since she was in the end credits, she had to stay the entire time. "I was corseted at midnight in the middle of Hollywood, all because he put me in the credits. That's not the first time I've been corseted in downtown Hollywood, but it might be the last, because I've never done three-and-a-half hours — that was a new record. Toes were numb." She went on-stage with the cast members, which is when she realized, "I'm doing everything the cast is doing with, like, not even a quarter of the effort. It's so good on my part."
As for the lyrics of the song, Cyrus wanted them to be "very femme," particularly since the movie's plot has so much action and is so loud. "A lot of the most powerful characters in Avatar are the female characters, and so I really wanted to take a feminine approach that would show that there's strength in your softness," she said. "I was the one that was like, 'We have to sing about diamonds.' That's why the first lyric is diamonds in the dark." Diamonds are "something that we all find so beautiful and so valuable because they can withstand this type of pressure, and can we do the same thing? So for me, diamond is not really as much physical as it is metaphorical about each of us."
Cyrus recorded "Dream as One" in the same studios where Frank Sinatra and Janis Joplin used to record their music. She could "only imagine" what the workers were thinking, as images of Pandora were playing all around them for inspiration, including "crazy whales and birds." It probably "looked insane" from the outside, she noted. As it turns out, Cyrus has worked in that same studio before. "I wrote 'Flowers' in that studio," she revealed. "It's a lucky room."
When Avatar comes back for a fourth or fifth film, she wants to appear on-camera as a Na'Vi. "Paint me blue and put me in, coach," Cyrus told Cameron. "I will make myself available. If it's Avatar, I'll be there. I love everybody. I love the cast. I love everyone that James has around. Everyone's been incredibly amazing and kind, and they're also fully immersed."
Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters Dec. 19 from 20th Century Studios.
