Plus, the James Cameron request that surprised her, and how she honored Janis Joplin in one section of the original song.

Miley Cyrus reveals how losing her Malibu home in wildfire inspired lyrics for Avatar: Fire and Ash song ‘Dream as One’

Plus, the James Cameron request that surprised her, and how she honored Janis Joplin in one section of the original song.

By Gerrad Hall

Gerrad Hall is an editorial director at **, overseeing movie, awards, and music coverage. He is also host of *The Awardist* podcast, and has cohosted EW's live Oscars, Emmys, SAG, and Grammys red carpet shows. He has appeared on *Good Morning America*, *The Talk*, *Access Hollywood*, *Extra!*, and other talk shows, delivering the latest news on pop culture and entertainment.

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December 25, 2025 3:11 p.m. ET

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When Miley Cyrus and James Cameron were both being inducted as Disney Legends at the 2024 D23 Awards alongside Jamie Lee Curtis and Harrison Ford, she didn't waste the opportunity to tell the Oscar-winning director she was available if he ever needed her.

He remembered that and took her up on the offer (so did Curtis, who called her up to write a song for 2024's *The Last Showgirl*) when he needed someone to write and perform an end-credits song for the third movie in his *Avatar* franchise, *Fire and Ash*, in theaters now.

With nine studio albums and dozens of songwriting credits, Cyrus has her own process for crafting a song for herself. But for someone else?

"I kind of approached *Avatar* in two ways. My first approach was showing up and just being the voice and relaying the message that James wanted," she tells **. "He's done this film for now over 20 years. No one knows it better than him. So I kind of was torn between: Am I just lending my voice to perform a song that's going to be really almost scripted the way that a film would be, or is this something that's going to sound like me, like my story?"

It helped that Cameron told her he wanted her to write the song the same way she would any of her own music, "which is a journal entry, something that's personal, something that's intimate and emotional. And I was actually surprised by his kind of request because I thought maybe it was going to be something overly large-scale and epic, and what he wanted was something truly vulnerable," she recalls. "And that's what I felt I could bring to something that's got this level of intensity for multiple hours, that then you leave on a note that's really just kind of tender."

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Below, Cyrus explains how her country music roots helped lay the groundwork for the song — which she co-wrote with Andrew Wyatt, Mark Ronson, and the film's composer Simon Franglen — how losing her own home in a wildfire inspired some of the lyrics, why she wanted to honor Janis Joplin in one section of the song, and more. And you can watch the video above for the full, unedited interview.**

Miley Cyrus at the 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Ross House in Los Angeles on Dec. 4, 2025.

Rodin Eckenroth/Getty

**: When people are asked to write songs for films, sometimes they get to see the whole film, sometimes it's just clips, sometimes it's just the script. What was the case for you?**

**MILEY CYRUS:** I saw the film, and I saw it in multiple ways. I saw it in all [different parts] of its process, which made me feel a part of it because they've been working on this film now for over 16 years and I'm coming in kind of in the back end and I wanted to really feel like I was a part of the family, because that's so on theme, I felt like that was really important.**

**The lyrics are one thing — you do that from your journal entry perspective — but obviously the music is another. I love how, within the melody, there are these half steps that you take either up or down, in your vocals.**

That was Andrew Wyatt. That's a really good Andrew Wyatt melody nudge that I think makes it feel classic Disney. There's something theatrical about it that you maybe wouldn't do in a pop song, and it is something that I would've never written because I write kind of more simple... what I brought to the table was really the lyrics. I feel that what I bring the most is authentic storytelling. That's kind of who I am. So Andrew came up with that amazing, very classic Disney song.

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**Were those things there from the beginning or were you guys discovering those while you're recording and just playing around?**

It's a little bit of a mushy process in that he kind of had a little bit of an idea, then I also come into studio sessions and wreck everything that everyone put together because I see things from a female perspective, which is why in the first lyric is, "We're diamonds in the dark," because that was very me. And Mark Ronson goes, "What do you mean 'diamonds in the dark'?" And I was like, "Well, I lost my house in the fire, and when I went back, we had nothing, but I started scraping around in the ashes and I found one of my diamond rings." He was going, "That's kind of a lyric that would never happen, 'a diamond in the dark.'" I was like, "That happened to me. I literally found a diamond in the dark.'" So I bring a much more, I think, feminine approach because so much of the action of *Avatar *can lean more masculine feeling, and I just wanted to bring something really vulnerable.

EW's Gerrad Hall and Miley Cyrus at an 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Q&A in Los Angeles on Dec. 4, 2025.

Rodin Eckenroth/Getty

**So this song is personal to you.**

Definitely — the theme of fire and ash, obviously for the kind of literal reasons of losing my house, rebuilding, growing from the ground up, and this Phoenix resilience and courage to keep going. But also not doing it alone, to kind of reach out and ask for help from the people around you that care.

**You were talking about wrecking the song, the lyrics. Are there ad-libs in this, things that you didn't know if they were gonna make it in the final cut?**

Yeah. I was really nervous about one. On the bridge, in the section when it's saying "Dream, dream..." and there's these big outbursts of vocals, that's an ad-lib. I cut it in the room that Janis Joplin worked in a lot at Sunset Sound. So I just said, "I would love to throw in some Joplin in here to honor this space that we're recording in." And I thought, there's no way I'm gonna get away with James Cameron keeping Janis Joplin screaming lyrics in the back. And he kept them in because I think the spirit of that room captured a lot of magic and a lot of her magic.

**When it came time for James Cameron to hear the song, did you guys just email it off and wait for feedback, or do you get in the room with him and play it?**

So, he was editing nervously close to the release of this film — like, he was still putting together the trailers and the video and so much of that. So, he was in New Zealand, and we would talk on the phone. Sometimes I would want to call him for two minutes to ask him a quick question because there's no reason to keep writing if he wasn't gonna love it, and then I realized we've talked on the phone for two hours about everything — about life and loss and what this kind of personally means to him. So I worked on the song in stages and we got it to a place that we felt confident in sharing it and then taking his feedback, which was very little. He was very happy with the song kind of right off the bat, which made me feel really good.

Miley Cyrus with fiancé Maxx Morando at the 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Los Angeles premiere on Dec. 1, 2025.

Kevin Winter/WireImage

**Please correct me if I'm wrong: This is the second original [song] you've written for a movie?**

Actually, I think the third.

**Got it, the third. But the second in two years, after "Beautiful That Way" from *The Last Showgirl*. Is this a new era for you — your Soundtrack Diva Queen years? **

Well, I'm obsessed with that. We've been coming up with book titles — that's another good one, too, Soundtrack Diva Queen, because I love doing soundtracks because everyone else works on a movie for two years and then I come in at the end, I do two vocal sessions and then I'm like, "Here I am!" I could even tell [at the *Avatar: Fire and Ash* premiere], Zoe [Saldaña]'s looking at me like, *girl, please*. They've been working on it for 16 years and I'm in my gown, like, *This has just been such an effort from all of us*. *It's so nice to finally see these blood, sweat, and tears up on the screen* — and I did two days, shot a video, now I'm here, and that's it. Five days.

**But hey, it needs the song. **

Hello, you need that song. There couldn't be an *Avatar: Fire and Ash* without it if you asked me.

**But to that point of soundtracks, have you ever considered à la Whitney Houston and *The Bodyguard*, you starring in a movie, a soundtrack full of original Miley songs...**

Yeah, every day. I'm waiting for the right one, but I always keep everything open for the absolute perfect thing for me because I won't settle. So when the right thing drops in and there it is, I'll definitely know and it'll be a full body yes.**

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.*

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