What makes a mockery of a lot of these 3D conversions, where they're shot in 2D and converted to 3D. Having laid a real 3D movie, you realize that it's right in the production design. You design sets that enhance the 3D and you design interactive elements, like the rain or smoke. If you're shooting 2D, you don't know about that.
Paul W. S. AndersonThe first job I did was Volkswagen, we shot it in Long Beach, and it was like they won multiple awards with it and they were super excited about it and that kind of launched me into the world of commercials. Still most of what I do is car-related stuff.
Paul W. S. AndersonYou really feel like you're on the cutting edge and you know you are because all the camera equipment you take for granted doesn't exist for 3-D. So all the cranes with all the stabilized heads, they don't work on 3-D because they're all built for lightweight camera packages. As soon as you kind of put two cameras together and all the other crap that they need and the cabling to go back to the computers, we've literally, the cranes on these movies, they break after a couple of days.
Paul W. S. AndersonWhen you're writing it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea. It's nice- that again, is another nice thing about being able to do commercials is, you can get out of the house and chase high speed cars around for a few days and then by the time you go back, you're kind of re-infused to write.
Paul W. S. AndersonI love Death Race, it's one of my favorite films. I thought, "You know what? All that two years worth of work is now gong to be wasted because I'm highly unlikely to direct another car movie straight away," and I felt at that point there was no one who was kind of better at shooting cars, so I thought rather than let it go to waste I would explore the idea of doing commercials, and that's what I did.
Paul W. S. AndersonWhen we wrapped Resident Evil, we were a 3D movie, but it was no big deal. And then, Avatar came out and the whole of Hollywood was like, "Look at these grosses! 3D is huge. Let's all be 3D!" We just got on with doing what we were doing, which was making what we think is a really quality, kick-ass 3D movie, and we'll really be the first live-action 3D movie of the year.
Paul W. S. Anderson