“Whatever happened, happened. No second takes, no lighting, nothing. What we said was, if anything ever goes wrong on the expedition – people dying, blood on the deck – I don’t care what it is, you shoot it. It was pretty amazing.

Here we are shooting Imax off the shoulder, which had never been done before. We’d been so rigorous about not imposing ourselves creatively on the expedition that we wound up with 1,300 hours of footage. That was crazy. We had 300 hours just of 3D.

One of my favourite shots is when we’re getting slammed by the storm and we can’t get the sub out of the water. We’re just getting trashed!”

Effect On Avatar: Cameron’s 3D obsession begins in earnest...