Kate Winslet and Zoe Saldana on ‘Avatar,’ ‘Emilia Perez,’ ‘Lee’

Zoe Saldaña and Kate Winslet connect easily, as colleagues who haven’t seen each other in a while often do: They worked together on James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which was released in 2022, and will also appear in next year’s third film, “Fire and Ash.” Saldaña had created the role of Neytiri in the first “Avatar” in 2009, and Winslet — a Cameron veteran, of course, from “Titanic” — joined the ensemble as the character Ronal, a shaman and warrior.

Winslet recalls the warm environment Cameron established during the films’ rehearsal period, and “that sense of collaboration and willingness to share and listen and to invite ideas.” Saldaña agrees, and says, “It’s crazy what you can do when you’re given an unlimited amount of resources to put a character together. It’s the most rewarding process.”

Speaking about Cameron and the Na’vi, who in the “Avatar” movies are the embattled native people of Pandora, she adds: “It’s so beautiful how he totally gave us free agency to build the Na’vi people from scratch with him.” Not that there wasn’t competition on set — addressing Winslet, Saldaña says with a laugh: “You have to be in the room every time he talks about you. He’s like, ‘Well, Kate can hold her breath for seven minutes.’ And he goes, ‘Sigourney came in second with almost six minutes. Zoe allegedly says that she did it for five.’ And I’m like, ‘I did it for five!’”

Their two films this year, Winslet’s “Lee” and Saldaña’s “Emilia Pérez,” are quite different from Cameron’s otherworldly blockbusters. In “Lee,” Winslet plays war photographer Lee Miller, who determinedly broke down gender barriers to shoot harrowing images during World War II. In “Emilia Pérez,” Saldaña stars as Rita, an attorney in Mexico who becomes enmeshed with Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), first to help with her gender transition and then to guide her…