As most of you hardcore horror fans know, Hollywood kingpin James Cameron worked on Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, the 1981 sequel to Joe Dante’s Jaws “spoof” about a slew of flesh-hungry killer piranha. With Avatar getting re-released in theaters, Vanity Fair caught up with the director to talk about everything from the Navi to the direction 3-D is going. Inside you can read what he had to say about Piranha 3D, and how it “cheapens” the new medium….
Vanity Fair: Was there any sense of nostalgia when the Piranha movie came out last weekend?

“Zero. 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,” he explained. “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. It is a renaissance–right now the biggest and the best films are being made in 3-D. Martin Scorsese is making a film in 3-D. Disney’s biggest film of the year–Tron: Legacy–is coming out in 3-D. So it’s a whole new ballgame.”

Dimension Films is already hard at work on a sequel to Piranha 3D.