Mr. Bungle said:

AVC: George Lucas seems like, famously, someone who wouldn’t work well with your methods: He doesn’t like rehearsal or, reportedly, a lot of spontaneous exploration on the set. How did you work together?

EM: Well, you still have to make the characters real and in the moment, and that’s your job, so that’s always gonna be the case there. The technical aspect of the Star Wars films is difficult, because there’s no environment. A lot of the time, anyway, we were working on bluescreen sets or greenscreen sets where there’s nothing there at all, and oftentimes, no other actor to work with. Somebody’s just reading lines off the side of the set, and you’re looking at a tennis ball on a stick. So that becomes much more of a technical exercise. But at the same time, it’s still going in the movie, and it still has to be believable. But I like working with George. I like very much being part of the legend of Star Wars. It’s nice to be in that.

I defy anybody to watch 'Capturing Avatar' (or the dozens of terrific "Making of" featurettes that the production released for free online leading up to 'Avatar's release) and compare that to the PT. James Cameron's philosophy for creating quality performances for actors in synthetic environments (all green screen for the PT, mostly performance cap for AVTR) was 100% the opposite.

Just watch the opening speeches! Before shooting on one of the PT movies began, Rick McCallum gives a speech that basically goes, "We're on a tight budget so let's get this shit over with in 60 days, people!" Conversely, James Cameron's speech was, "Thank you so much for all you've done. I'm so impressed. We have a long, hard road ahead of us, and there are going to be many late nights and wrong turns. But we're all in this together and let's make a great product."

The end result? AVTR was the biggest hit ever, the PT movies are mostly a punchline. (Though I think this is sad, because I think ROTS was still great.)