James Cameron vs. Piranha 3D and Werner Herzog weighs in on Cameron’s 3D future

Lately it seems like James Cameron has been full of advice, tidbits, and general comments on whatever.

It’s interesting to hear some of his insight, whether you agree or not. One of the biggest topics/trends right now brought on by Cameron’s monster AVATAR is 3D. Cameron once said that the 3D Renaissance was upon us.

Right now, it seems like every movie has decided to jump on the 3D bandwagon. Is this the “cool” thing to do right now? Or has this technology had a profound effect on the film viewing world? It’s too soon to tell where 3D will go, if it goes anywhere. However, Cameron doesn’t think that 3D is the greatest idea for every project. The director spoke with Vanity Fair on when the technology works and when it doesn’t, “After Avatar, people tried to cash in. Or, in some cases, like Alice in Wonderland and How to Train Your Dragon— especially the latter, which I think is excellent in 3-D—they were films that were in the pipeline for some time.”

One genre he thinks doesn’t benefit from 3D is horror. Cameron was asked about PIRANHA 3D and also commented on his brief time on the sequel to Roger Corman’s PIRANHA, “You’ve got to remember: I worked on Piranha 2 for a few days and got fired off of it; I don’t put it on my official filmography. So there’s no sort of fond connection for me whatsoever. In fact, I would go even farther and say that… I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip. And that’s not what’s happening now with 3-D.”

Then on the other end of the spectrum we have Werner Herzog. The Playlist spoke with him about the technology, “I’ve always been skeptical of 3D, for some cases it’s fine like ‘Avatar’, you see the spectacle [of the picture] like fireworks on the 4th of July, that’s perfectly ok. But in principal, human beings do not like to see 3D on the screen. Our eyes, our brain is not really for it, because in real life we see with one dominant eye and the other one peripherally sees the third dimension.”

Herzog has been working on a 3D documentary titled CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS and feels like his film is an instance where it can be used, “Like our cave documentary, you will see what a wonderful choice that was, but I hope you will never see something like a romantic comedy in 3D. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”

But what did Herzog have to say about Cameron’s prediction on the future of 3D? “He is certainly wrong, he’s definitely wrong. Our eyes do not want to see 3D all the time. We are very selective how we see and even how we hear. It’s the same thing with 3D. It works in a few isolated cases — as I said, like the fireworks of July — otherwise, I think 3D will not invade what we normally want to see in a theater.” Herzog is currently working on a big, epic film that he says will not use 3D.