Cult filmmaker Joe Dante is the latest director to rail against the practice of converting 2D films into 3D. Dante was in London to promote his upcoming family horror The Hole, which was shot in native 3D, and he revealed exclusively to HCC his thoughts on the subject of converted 3D films...

'There's an art to shooting in 3D... an art that I might add is not being used in the movies that are being converted to 3D after they've been shot. These are basically a way to rip off the public without doing the work. There's a correct way to shoot 3D that makes it easy to watch and a pleasure. None of these films are done that way; they're shot as if they're going to be normal films'.

'Imagine The Bourne Identity in 3D, I mean, you can't have that kind of cutting in 3D, the brain can't process it, it's very annoying. And when you get down to movies that are now so dark and so blurry through this conversion process, they just look like shit. You've got people still paying the extra five-bucks to get in, which is the only reason they do it, and then they come out and they go, "This 3D sucks. I don't want any more 3D". So we're at this weird juncture where we have the best version of the 3D process we've ever had and the easiest to use and the easiest to project, and they're still going to kill it, because they're so greedy. They just want to take every picture they've got sitting in a can, and send it India and have it come back in this fake 3D and charge an extra five-bucks. They're cutting their own throats'.

Melting cameras and girls' breasts
However, the one converted 3D film that was spared Dante's wrath was the recent Piranha 3D, which draws its inspiration from the director's own 1978 cult favourite Piranha...

'I haven't seen it yet. I know about it, because they asked me to be in it, which I couldn't do because I was doing this film. And I read the script, which was... obviously not based on the script that I shot. But there were certain telltale similarities involving girls' breasts. But I was disappointed that they weren't shooting it in real 3D'.

'Now, they explained to me why, and it made sense. They said that they would be out in the middle of Lake Havasu and it would be really hot and the cameras would melt. Which they do, because the RED cameras are very sensitive... digital cameras are very sensitive to heat. And also the water is a very difficult thing to shoot in 3D because the highlights are in different eyes. So, okay, fine, convert it later. But what I didn't expect was that, I didn't expect that their piranhas would look as shitty as they do. Because I was so envious, thinking, "Boy, I didn't have any money for piranhas. I couldn't do big schools of piranhas. I could just quick shots of like six or seven". So, they had all this money, and I was surprised to see how fake the digital piranha looked... Maybe they look better in 3D, because they really didn't look very good in 2D in the clips I've seen'.

Joe Dante's new 3D film The Hole opens at cinemas across the UK from September 22.