San Diego was considered the likely venue for the premier IMAX surfing film titled “Ultimate Wave Tahiti,” which has opened its summer run at the Reuben H. Fleet’s Science Center. “And why not? This is a great surfing community,” said executive producer Jeff Cutler before the press preview in the big-domed theater. Cutler speaks with some authority because he lived in Cardiff by the Sea as a youth, and is able to recall also surfing off the shores of La Jolla, Mission Beach and Ocean Beach. “San Diego is so much more surf-driven than Los Angeles, for example,” he said. “You don’t have the big swells here but you don’t need big waves like Tahiti and Hawaii for good surfing. There are a variety of breakers.” The film is a production of Steven Low, who is described by Cutler as an ocean fanatic with a passion for the Polynesian waters of the South Pacific. Low has worked with noted director-producer James Cameron on “Titanic” and “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea.” “When the idea came up, we knew it would be about an area he knew,” said Cutler, who now lives in Atlanta, “And, Tahiti had such a wide variety of good surf.” The IMAX Tahiti film is expected to be shown in 150 locations including Munich and Paris. “Low did a large portion of the filming,” Cutler said. “He’s a hands-on director and understands IMAX’s large format cameras better than anyone in the world.” The film is a blend of surfing and ocean science, starring nine-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater and Tahitian Raimana Van Bastolaer in Tahiti’s famed surf site, Teahupo’o. Viewers will see the power and speed of surfing on nature’s most intense ocean waves in a series of multiple angles and views. Cutler is founder of the National Surf League, an organization that was started in Encinitas, a team-based competition he ran for four or five years. From this stemmed the nation’s only team-based high school surfing format which just completed a tournament in San Clemente. “Surfing was probably considered a fad in the 1950s,” Cutler said. “It went from the sub culture ‘70s to a new full-blown influential facet of pop culture with a lifestyle for apparel, an influence on music and other trends.”