Titanic 3D Footage Q&A with James Cameron

"There's a whole generation of people who haven't seen it in theaters at all. I love 3D. I think it looks spectacular. If I would have had 3D cameras at the time, and if there were 3D theaters at the time, I certainly would have shot it in 3D. It's also just a way of reinventing the concept of a re-release, and getting people to come back to theaters and commit that three hours and 15 minutes to relive the experience again. I think the outcome, when you come out of the theater, is going to be a bit more powerful than you remembered from having watched it on home video."

"We selected the scenes based on how I could trigger your memories of having watched the film before. There's a little bit that's representative of the whole arc of the film, in 18 minutes."

"I'm very much against conversion, for films that have a choice, but I do believe that there are some titles, think of your 10 or 20 favorite movies of all time, that I think should be converted to 3D, but it has to be done right. By the time we're finished, we'll have spent 60 weeks and about $18 million, working with 300 artists between two companies. It's an extremely labor-intensive process. I've got a team of three technical people within our company, who look at every image, several times over, and give notes based on what they know. They know their way around 3D very well, so they process it and bring it up to me in two or three or four-hour sessions, where I'm going through, frame by frame, multiple times, until the depth is worked out. Even then, it's not perfect. It's 2.99D, it's not really 3D. The point I'm trying to make is most conversions which are done in a hurry-up way in post-production, are 2.4D."

"We're not changing the film. The film that's coming out is the same. That's what people respond to, on an emotional level, and it's there."

"I don't feel that I need to rework the film. When we pushed the deadline, and released it at Christmas, which was a joint decision with ourselves, Fox, and Paramount at the time, it was the wisest thing we could have done. It gave us a chance to finish the film properly. We really had time in the cutting room to get it right and fine tune it. What we're doing now, with the conversion process, is trying not to reinvent the film, artistically, but just show, frame by frame, what the movie would have looked like if we would have shot it in 3D. Some would argue that's an artistic change, in and of itself, but from my perspective, as a filmmaker, every time I do a shot, I try to put depth in a shot. I try to enhance the depth beyond the characters, using lighting tools, all of that enhancing a sense of depth, in a 2D film. I was trying to make a 3D movie, even when I was making a 2D movie."

"The first thing we did in the process was create a digital master of the film, a 4k master. When we come out in April, it won't be exclusive to 3D screens. That will be a majority of the screens, but it will also be out in 2D. The 2D is going to be a better print than anything we could have done at the time."

"We're promising the audience a premium experience and we, collectively, in the movie industry and the exhibition community, have to protect the value of that premium experience, if they're going to charge more money. One of the ways they have to do that, is the light levels of the projectors. The technology is very straight-forward. These light levels are very easily achieved, but there's a cost to it. What the exhibitors do is they turn the brightness on the lamps down, to preserve the lamp, because they're so expensive. They can't do that. They have to keep it up at what it's rated for. You can't be taking away with one hand while giving with the other. You shouldn't have to decide if you want to see a brighter movie or a 3D movie. It's not a technological issue, it's a business issue, and it's a problem."