Over the weekend you caught 9 bloody minutes of Alex Aja’s Piranha 3D that either wet your whistle, or completely dried out your mouth. While at the San Diego Comic-Con, Bloody Disgusting had the chance to talk with the French director following the “too hot for Comic-Con” footage screening. Read all about it inside and get ready for the gore on August 20.
Director Alex Aja makes no bones about where his sympathy lies in PIRANHA 3D. With the fishes, of course. “The Spring Breakers are the mass of raw meat,” Aja tells press. “We have them trying to survive that situation. Somehow I have the feeling that, maybe not in the U.S. but in Europe, the movie will be perceived more on the piranha side.”

Jerry O’Connell provides comic relief in the movie as the character you love to hate, a thinly-veiled take on Girls Gone Wild’s Joe Francise. “Jerry in the movie is the human piranha,” says Aja. “He is like that other kind of predator on spring break. In the water you have piranhas and above you have Jerry’s character. His last line is one of the best. He’s spitting blood and he’s saying, ‘Wet t-shirts, wet t-shirts.’”

The footage aired at Comic-Con (and, ahem, possibly on a web site or two) was heavy on the gore and gratuitous nudity. Aja promises he’s got plenty more where that came from. “What you saw is a small part of the movie. There is much more in that location.”

If there is one human in the movie Aja showed some respect for, it was Richard Dreyfuss, who returns almost 25 years later to the character he made famous in JAWS, Matt Hooper. “He survived the shark and this time the piranha won’t let him go,” says an enthusiastic Aja. “Richard really understood the idea, that we didn’t want him to come and play something else, that he was Matt Hooper and he was coming to play Matt Hooper. He was so happy. It’s a great way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Jaws. We were very shy to ask him about Jaws, but he was giving up everything about the experience. He came for two days and it was an amazing two days.”

Despite the 29 year lag between PIRANHA movies, the franchise has an intriguing directorial history with Joe Dante directing the first and none other than king of the world himself, James Cameron, taking the reigns on the sequel. We asked Aja whether he had thoughts for murderous fish movies. “You know, this is PIRANHA,” says Aja. “They can come back and there are many, many possibilities for other stories. I think they will definitely have some other PIRANHA movies, but we are talking about different stories and nothing is set yet. If we think about a great storyline that can do a real movie and stand on its own, then yes, I would definitely be involved.”

PIRANHA 3D opens nationwide August 20th, 2010.