It’s been mentioned more than once on this blog that James Cameron is kind of an asshole. An industrial strength, weapons grade, uncut Afghan black tar asshole. And, much like his film career, Cameron doesn’t rest on his past achievements. In the wake of Avatar, now that everyone feels that three is the minimum number of dimensions for a big-budget film, Cameron is saying that’s a bad idea:

…[I]t’s typical of Hollywood getting it wrong, right? We do a film that’s natively authored in 3D, shot in 3D, so they assume from the success of that, that they can just turn movies into 3D in 8 weeks… and that’s going to work somehow.

Cameron goes on at some length about what a lousy idea it is to make a film retroactively 3-D, and in all fairness the man has a point. But there are films it would have been nice to see made in 3-D from the get-go, as this quote from Quentin Tarantino makes clear:

I’ll tell you what would have been a game-changer for me with Avatar. If I had seen it before I did Kill Bill. When I did Kill Bill, I had these ideas of what it would be like watching the movie. It would be like a ride, like taking a wild ride. I didn’t manage to do that. It was good, but it wasn’t the ride I envisioned. When I saw Avatar, I thought, “That’s the ride I saw in my head when I set out to make Kill Bill.‘”

I still have my doubts about Avatar, but I’ll forgive Cameron a great deal if it leads indirectly to Kill Bill, Vol. 3-D. That’s the kind of inspirational greatness that can excuse all kinds of assholishness.