January 27, 2005 - For the past several years James Cameron has taken what some would consider to be a rather drastic detour from the special effects-laden cinematic fare he is most commonly associated with. While other directors of his caliber probably would have continued to crank out large scale blockbusters, in the wake of Titanic Cameron chose instead to focus his energies on undersea exploration, feeding his seemingly unquenchable thirst for new discoveries, both biological and technological.

First there was Ghosts of the Abyss, his excursion to the Titanic, which utilized cutting edge technology to access areas of the sunken legend hitherto unreachable. Now comes Aliens of the Deep, in which Cameron explores the thermal pockets and seismic volcanoes of the ocean floor. What both of these projects have in common, other than Cameron and a carefully selected group of scientists, is that they are both rendered in high-definition 3-D. So even though these films are more closely related to the documentary, they still take full advantage of Cameron's love of technology and next-generation effects.

Yet even though the 3-D employed by Cameron is top-of-the-line, the process, or rather the effect is still largely stigmatized by the general public, a populace who collectively remember the clumsy red and blue glasses and hokey floating imagery of the '50s sci-fi schlockers. In short, 3-D is by and large regarded as a gimmick. "Was it a gimmick in Aliens of the Deep?" the director asks somewhat rhetorically. "We improved the technology a little bit [from Ghosts of the Abyss], mostly in terms of image clarity. I'm not a hundred percent satisfied with the stereo – or the 3-D – in this film versus what we'll do for [Battle Angel], but that has more to do with the fact that this was a documentary where we were 2 miles down shooting and squid would come flying by with no warning. It wasn't like 'Okay, cue the squid.' You get what you get. But in a feature format we'll be able to really control the stereo, make it very easy on the eyes and so on.

-Buena Vista Pictures Distribution "Cue the squid."

"I think it's an aesthetic," Cameron continues. "You choose your aesthetic when you work in 3-D, just like you make all your various aesthetic decisions as a filmmaker; color, filtration, diffusion, desaturation, black and white versus color, all these types of choices. 3-D has its own choices that you make. You can constantly be generating stuff that pokes the audience in the eye or you can use it to create a sense of a window into a reality that they get to share. That's what cinema does in a general sense, but I think with 3-D there's a heightened sense of physical presence for the audience in the moment. But if it's not comfortable, if it's dark, then you're not enjoying the experience. There's been a lot of bad 3-D exhibition."