The Abyss full Q&A with James Cameron - Beyond Fest 09/27/2023

wow I think they like it yeah just think what would have been like if it had actually made some money I'm just curious who here saw that for the first time tonight pretty great rightow well it is you know what I love about this movie is you give us so many movies for the price of one in this it's like there a love story there's a cold war Thriller there's a philosophical sci-fi movie and I'm wondering where you even begin writing something like this what's the starting point for you in the writing process well I think I think anybody that was that was a movie fan at that time we're talking 34 years ago at this point could see the DNA in other movies you know from Close Encounters to you know the the Cold War sub movies and that sort of thing so I was being pulled in different directions and obviously the the one that sort of stands above the others Is The Day the Earth Stood Still right which was a a philosophical uh you know sci-fi film you know from the late 50s that um you know asked the question are are we worthy if we were to be judged by a by a higher intelligence you know and it was at that that time when when people where UFOs were sort of taking the place of of angels and demons in a kind of a new science fiction Pantheon you know and uh so that that film had a big impact on me when I was you know a kid and I kind of wanted to to do my own version of that but set it underwater because I was fascinated by the underwater world and by the robotics you know the rovs all that sort of thing and um it just all made sense to me at the time that's all I could say I suppose that's you know what any filmmaker can say you know well it made sense to me at the time well the whole setting it underwater thing is obviously what sets this movie apart and it's one thing to write that on the page but as far as I know there was no real precedent for doing what you did here in terms of shooting this much stuff wet for wet yeah I went to the guy who uh Al Giddings who had been the underwater DP on the Deep which was considered kind of the biggest underwater film that had been done before that and it was minuscule compared to what we T about this and his eyes were were pinwheeling half the time thinking about what we were going to try to do but he and I found the big tank in in gaffy South Carolina that was a an uncompleted nuclear power station and we climbed up on this giant Crane in a rainstorm and looked down at this thing and and it just all made sense to us okay we could do the dive do over there we can have the viewing window over there so we can see all the tank operations and we kind of put the whole thing together so it was based on you know what he had done in the past um just sort of a you know a 10 times you know larger scale well you know so often with your movies whether it's this one or T2 or obviously the Avatar movies you know you're often writing these stories that require technology or modes of film making that haven't been invented yet and I'm curious do you ever censor yourself or are you afraid when you're writing this stuff or do you just take it on faith that you and your team are going to be able to figure out how to execute it I think I write myself into a corner so I have to figure out something cool you know I think it's a deep insecurity that that you know I have to pull some rabbit out of a hat every time you know to to show an audience something new probably comes from an insecurity as a writer as an actor's director or whatever that that you know I can't just do that I have to I have to do some big hat trick you know and uh so you know there's some pretty ambitious images in this film I think some of them were successful some of them we could do a whole lot better now with with CG and the ability to simulate water and to get scale you know the whole thing of the mothership coming up at the end our our our you know our imagination definitely exceeded our ability to execute on that because water doesn't scale and everything was done with scale Miniatures at that time except for the pseudopod scene and the actual kind of giant wave itself um but you know every film is is a a still uh cross-section of its time what was possible at that time where we pushed into new ground with the pseudopod scene which I think is the most kind of dreamlike and surreal moment in the in the film and I think it's it's the it's the moment that certainly caught people's attention at that point I mean the film was not a g uh ginormous uh success um in the marketplace although obviously a lot of people have discovered it um as we go along but that scene made an impact and it impressed a lot of people and showed them what was possible in a in a new way and I I think it sort of kicked in the door to the start of the the CG um you know explosion it was like the CG Cambrian explosion that took place in the next film out of the gate was Terminator 2 which took that uh obviously it was Liquid Metal but it took that idea of a liquid character that could shape change and morph and had a face and could speak and all those things took that much further and then the next step after that was Jurassic Park where they took a lot of the same principles of of fluidity and and fluid morphing and then applied it to actual muscle systems and skinning and all that for the for the dinosaurs and then we were we were off to the races at that point well it's so crazy to me when you say that you have an insecurity in terms of writing and directing actors because I think you know the best shot in this entire movie is Ed Harris with the underneath him basically ordering Mary Elizabeth mon Antonio to come back to life he Wills her back to life and there's some you know kind of Politically Incorrect stuff in there you probably wouldn't even try to do today you know but uh I mean his performance is amazing you know an unfortunate thing happened right before we shot his close-ups which is on her Revival I got basically one and a half takes on that she did it once fine and she was right at the point of starting to come back to life on the second take and we had just rolled into it back to back and I hadn't given everybody a chance to reload and one of the cameras flapped out and I heard the the we had this thing then called film you might I heard the the tail end of the of the uh the roll flapping in the magazine and but I still had another camera going and so I didn't cut right and the the Director of Photography who I think did a acular job on the film except for this one moment cut cut in the middle of her her performance and she got up and she stormed out and she kind of you know had a big meltdown and so um Ed had to perform it without her there and he's basically just performing straight to the lens and slapping a sandbag you know but you know he was a trooper and he did it and he he brought his aame which he did throughout the film yeah they both did you know they're both spectacular well he was such a great choice and at this point in time you know he wasn't necessarily thought of as any kind of leading man or anything I mean was that any sort of battle for you with the studio I would assume they would have wanted somebody who was sort of a more conventional movie star type yeah I mean he wasn't thought of as a lady man you can see he had the the male pattern baldness at a very young age very fit and athletic and and you know incredibly handsome I just thought he was an unusual choice and off Choice he didn't sort of fit the mole the typical Hollywood you know leading man an action character and uh you know the studio said oh you got to give him a wig you know and it's like it's like I'm not wearing a rug forget it I'm like forget it he's not wearing a rug well I'm curious what the casting process for this movie was like because you not only have to get great actors you have to get great actors who are capable of meeting the physical challenges of this you know they've got to be able to dive all this kind of stuff and so I'm curious how you cast it and also did you get anybody who came in who lied to you and said oh yeah I can do that when you're casting a western everybody says they can ride a horse you find out on the first day of shooting whether they can or not um so everybody went through training they had to go through basic scuba training which we did down in Grant Cayman uh on a liveboard dive booat for a week we got them all scuba certified I took them in in deep submersibles there because they used to operate they used to operate a sub there they all went down to almost 1,000 ft got a feel for what that was and uh you know it turned out there was and Ed turned out to be an exemplary diver he actually was on another movie he couldn't do that trip so that's where Mary and Michael bean and everybody else learned to dive Ed had to get scuba uh scuba certified I think in a quy in Minnesota or something like that you know uh but he he came in he was a very very good diver he didn't love diving and I don't think he ever went diving again but he happened to be very very good at it maybe I permanently traumatized him I think I had a a year where I didn't even go in the ocean after making this film um but there was one actor uh JC Quinn bless his heart that said oh yeah sure I'm great in the water you deeply claustrophobic and and just was absolutely dreading he had one day that he had to shoot underwater and he was dreading it and dreading it and dreading and finally I said JC you're just going to have to suck it up we got to go do this you're going to be fine and this was after I had run out of air and my helmet and almost died you know and stuff like that so I don't know how convincing I was J see but anyway he was he was over the moon when he came out of the water he he felt like he had climbed Mount Everest you know and it's a it's a nothing scene it's just he's outside welding on the well head and they're just you know bitching and moaning about the work you know that was his big scene I kept him out of all the stuff where they go inside the sub the stuff that was actually legitimately scary and you had to have your your shipwire pretty tight to be able to do that as actors in helmets going in to an overhead scenario of course we always had what we call the Angels who were the the safety divers who were right there and each one was assigned to one or two actors and just kept them in sight the whole time so you know we never had any any uh safety incidents fortunately okay but I want to go back to what you said which is that you you ran out of air and almost died at one point so yeah that well the safety divers were watching the actors I we watching uh but yeah no it was it was a close one because we were working 30 ft down and for me to be able to to move the camera around and everything on the bottom I wore heavy weights around my feet no fins heavy weight belt around my waist and when the the regulator like if anybody anybody hear a diver put up your hand if you're a scuba diver okay so we got we got quite a few here so you know when you get down on the and the tank gets low you you get a few hard draws you got a little bit of a warning at your body about to run in air well this thing had a piston Servo regulator in it and it was one breath and then nothing like nothing and I'm in a helmet heavily weighted standing on the bottom at 33 ft right in the dark and everybody's setting lights and doing stuff Mary Elizabeth is watching me and I'm like I'm trying to get Al Giddings attention on the PA but Al Gidding had been involved in a diving accident on the Andrea dor where he was rescuing a guy and this is like of an alting story he was rescuing a guy and the bell was moving up and down in a storm and uh he blew out both eard drums the guy was de as a post so I'm I'm using the my last breath of air on underwater PA system going ow ow ow I'm out I'm out he's work he's working away with his back to me you know I'm like oh so I had to I had to bail out all my gear and get all my gear off and I'm wearing heavy weights I can't swim up I can't get the weights off because you can't see anything once you take the helmet off so I'm kicking you know to the surface and the safety diver gets to me about 10 ft from the surface sticks a regulator in my mouth that he didn't check and it had been banging around on the bottom of the tank for three weeks and had a big rip rip through the center of the diaphragm so I purged carefully took a deep breath of water and then I P it again and I took another deep breath of water and at that point it was almost checkout time and and the safety divers are trained to hold you down so you don't embolize and let your lungs overexpanded how to what they call blow and go free Ascend I knew what I was doing and he wouldn't let me go and I could had no way to tell him that his regulator wasn't working so I punched him in the face as her and therefore survive so when you're you know you mentioned this PA system you're under I I mean I I'm fascinated the whole time I was watching this movie tonight I was thinking how on Earth are you communicating with the actors and your crew when you're all underwater well I got to talk to them and nobody got to talk back no there was only one PA system and and there was everybody was hardwired so the actors were hardwired so we could record their dialogue if they wanted to talk to each other they had a way when when the camera wasn't rolling of touching their helmets together so that they're and they could yell through their face plates and talk to each other when they they're just killing time you know while we were removing lights or or whatever but yeah I had a big PA system kind of voice of God in the dark the tank was bigger than this this uh this room so you can imagine and we didn't have a lot of really Advanced lighting at the time you know we managed to to get it lit up but it was always pretty dark and so it was kind of spooky you know but it was fun I mean you know I thrive on that stuff and all the all the people who were really hardcore divers had never seen anything like it and were were loving it a good really good friend of mine got became a friend afterward Charlie arnison did all of Ed Harris's uh doubling when he was diving down the wall and falling down the wall in that water suit of course there was no air so Charlie was doing essentially a 60ft free dive in a FL Ed helmet with a with a nose clip and if he missed an equalization there was no way he could stop he was just going like a rock and he hit the bottom like Wy coyote in a cloud of dust it was hysterical every died just boom know and uh so you know there's kind some serious stunt work I I did I didn't watch the whole film tonight but I did come in kind of toward the end where he has his confrontation with the NTI I was kind of surprised at at kind of you know how relevant it still is is in the terms of the of the the nuclear threat and stuff stuff like that you know I'm going to do like the ultimate name drop I was literally talking you know for for a documentary film project to Bill Gates today we're talking about AI right and he said yeah you know but we got to do something about the whole War thing you know like yeah we really got to do something about the whole yeah no it's amazingly press the movies aged so well um you know mentioning that thing with that Aris character going out of bom I mean that's another thing watching tonight I was trying to figure out how on Earth you did it the stuff with Ed Harris having the oxygenated liquid and I want to know how you did it with the rat okay so the rat you know that was a remarkable piece of acting no actually the rat had no the rat had no choice he was going to breath liquid and I went to the guy who was the leading researcher in the world that was doing this uh liquid ventilation stuff and they were trying to perfect a technique so that they could help prey babies survive and there were other things and they were looking at it possibly for for deep diving um and he actually showed me how to do it with a with a rat and to do it safely we did it with five rats and they were all fine uh and Ed watched the rat and said I got to do that now he knew he wasn't literally going to be taking you know oxygenated fluorocarbon into his lungs but he had to simulate it so he had to be pretend end in to breathe while holding his breath so he's he's holding his breath way in the back of his throat back here but pretending but moving his diaphragm and opening his mouth and pretending to be moving that liquid in and out which takes quite a lot of effort you could see the rat was really having to work hard to get the Liquid in and uh so Ed had to he he used the rat as a guide for for his performance you know and I thought he sold it he sold pretty well and he was in a helmet filled with liquid the entire time the difference is when he was above water and they're doing the scene where it fills up and he kind of you know thrashes for a bit and he calms down and realizes that it works that was an actual helmet that had to hold water right so we were really spooked by that it turned out the way we built it was those two big hoses that came up on either side we were able to pull those and dump all the water in the helmet through these large openings in like 4 seconds so if he got into trouble we could we could get him to air in 4 seconds so he considered that to be safe enough when he was underwater I didn't want to be messing around with any of that so we created a helmet where the entire face plate would open like a motorcycle helmet so he'd be breathing away on a scuba regulator and looking at his lines and he had special soft scleral contact lenses that allowed his eyes to focus in water which was really cool I've tried them I've used them for freedom diving it's amazing you could see perfectly so he's sitting there going over his lines in a laminated plastic laminated script you know and thinking breathing on a on a regulator we'd get ready to shoot and he'd pop the regulator out hold his breath click that face plate closed we made sure that it was really easy to open for him and so it looked like he was in that same sealed helmet that you saw before but he but he wasn't so we could get him a regulator very very quickly but you know there's a mental discipline involved in in you know doing all this sort of thing U that you know you really got to respect what what uh what he managed to accomplish yeah absolutely and you know curious as you describe all of these you know problems that you guys solved I'm wondering what were the sort of unforeseen things for you like what was more difficult about this than you expected well it was always some thing I mean we were dealing with 7 million gallons of water and it had a tendency to sometimes just go cloudy for no apparent reason we had all these filters and heaters and stuff outside it was quite a major it was almost like building a major aquarium facility from scratch you know and uh I mean we didn't build the tank structure but that's the only thing we didn't bring we had to bring in all these big heaters and filters and you know hundreds of miles of piping and all kinds of stuff and sometimes it would just get murky you'd come in in the morning it's like all right what's the weather in the tank sometimes you could see all the way across 210 ft to the other side sometimes you could see like 10 ft now what do you do well we do a scene where you only need to see 10 ft we go inside the sub or we do something like that you know you just got to be got to roll with it and then the other thing that was fun was we had this big construction crane that stuck up over the top of the tank which would occasionally get hit by lightning and we were all the one right so whenever anybody would see lightning on the horizon you know 10 miles away we all had to get out of the tank and wait till it it went through you know uh well you know it's it's amazing when you talk about all this because the cinematography in the movie is really consistent and beautiful actually and that's another thing I was watching watching you know that some of these camera movements are very elegant but obviously you can't have a dolly I wouldn't think in this situation so what what kinds of rigs were you creating to sort of execute that stuff we were able to use a crane underwater just a normal camera crane not not one with a remote head like you'd have today because the electronics wouldn't hold up but we could use a camera Crane and we could swing it around and you know uh the camera operator could just sit up on the crane and just and just operate so we were able to do very controlled Rises and swings uh my brother Mike is a very good engineer he built a twin rotor uh dpv diver propulsion vehicle that we call the sea wasp and we could use that to fly the camera around so you know and sometimes you just swim the camera you're completely free in three-dimensional space which is which is wonderful above water we use the normal tools Crane and steady cam you know typical things for that for that time you know the when I look at the the visual effects I think uh they did some amazing stuff so you know yatman was in charge of one group uh one group of people and they were doing a lot of stuff just in smoke that was dry for wet of the submersibles we had another team Walt KY and and Ty Boyce who built radio controlled big quarter scale Subs they weighed about 6 or 700 lb for the whole sub Chase and uh most people tell you well radio frequencies don't propagate through the water but they use some kind of low frequency they ran along gantries over the top of the tank to keep proximity to the subs and they were able to drive the the subs around every once in a while the subs would go completely out of control just drive through ladders and knocked people over and me operating the camera I got you know knocked over a few times by the subs but it all it all worked pretty well uh well I read something that I wanted you to confirm because I was kind of shocked by this I read that the Abyss was the first movie to use multiple effects houses that before that everybody would just say oh we're going to ilm or we're going to right well that was a panic move because we got the bid from a big effect house it wasn't ilm ilm did work on the film we got a we got a bid from a very big effect effect house and it was like double or triple our budget and I said all right let's just break this up you know we'll we'll break it down into smaller bite-sized pieces cuz I I thought it was more like a Fear Factor than a real number and I think I was right on that because we did manage to do the the the effects more or less on budget for about half of what that bid was by parting it around to different hous it's very common now to break up the show and then bring the coordination of the of the whole effects uh in house which is what I did with John Bruno and that's the first time I worked with John he and I are are close friends um got to be friends over that over that film he took on some of the big outdoor water work where we we see the ship he went out and they were out offshore off Seattle I think someplace like that shooting in stormy conditions and uh we had fantasy D to a company doing some of the model work at the scotch Brothers um who I had worked with at Roger Corman and then that I had worked with them again on uh on uh aliens and they came in to do the whole crane crash sequence so we just broke it up around and it was my first Entre to working with Dennis Miran at ilm and he was such a such a Superstar you know wizard I mean he just really he always saw what was possible next you know and it was Dennis that assured me that they could do the pseudopod sequence because that had never been done you know I had actually written it initially that the water flowed over the ground you know kind of like a snake and I thought nah let's let's bring it up and let's let's have it reach in you know I thought that'd be cooler let me just see if somebody can do it you know and uh we were right on that that just that early cusp of being able to do CG for film it was really the the first uh soft surface CG character ever in a movie and it was actually conventionally optically composited we we weren't even doing digital composits at that point we did the first digital composite on on Terminator 2 a couple years later and then the the the effects company that I founded digital domain with with Stan Winston um then subsequently really uh broke down the problem of of digital composite and we moved fully into the digital world at that point but that was a few years later so we were right on the you know right on the Leading Edge of a lot of these techniques that we completely take for granted these days yeah completely and in terms of the editorial process I'm wondering how challenging that was because obviously the version we watched tonight was not the theatrical release and honestly I like the theatrical release a lot but I love this version so much I'm kind of curious why this isn't the one you released at the time well I wasn't this was my first really big cut of Mega budget movie and uh you know we all it wasn't kind of a slam dunk in the way aliens was like we just knew aliens worked right this one we didn't know exactly how it was going to work and we went out and tested it and I was unfamiliar with the testing process I had never done it before we didn't test the Terminator and we didn't test aliens I never had to read cards and and get feedback from a test audience and uh in those days you just go out in the boonies someplace and you you you do a test audience and it it never kind of leaked out there was no Avenue for it to leak out the first major leaks came on Titanic with AED cool news you know Harry noes and that's the first time they started you know leaking information from test screenings you know was a big thing but this was still in the where you you thought you could sort of go out someplace and and have like a little laboratory uh and get some um some market research and I didn't know how to read the cards I didn't know how to interpret the data um the studio wasn't terribly helpful I have to say what we we went out and we actually screened it twice once with the wave sequence in and once with it out because the wave but the wave sequence wasn't done it was just a bunch of storyboards and you can't ask a uh a nonprofessional cinema audience to to watch a movie where all of a sudden it just comes to drawings you know they just they don't know how to process it so you know so of course the cards were bad for the wave sequence and the cards were bad for the non-wave sequence so we kind of went well at least it's shorter without the W at least it won't cost as much to finish you know but so I didn't really know how to interpret the data and I think we overreacted and I've learned I mean I learned as a result of that how to interpret those cards of what they really mean and when to take it seriously and when to just assume it's the movie's not done yet they're not getting the full picture so a couple of years later I think it was in '92 we decided to just go ahead and finish the The Unfinished visual effects and put it all together and see what it looked like and I think you know I agree with you I think it's a better movie it's it's the film I intended to make if nothing else but I actually think that you see how a lot of the the themes do come together and how it truly is a a kind of a a proper you know air apparent to the day the years Stood Still which was what my my intention was and I I came in I was at the back of the house just for that last section and when it gets to that there's that little clip that they run which is like all the bad things humans ever did in in whatever it is 45 seconds we called it atrocity greatest hits at the time it was cut by uh by a young guy named ed Marsh who was just he was literally just working in the sound and AV Department you know I think he was running the monitor screens on set but you know he had a flare as an editor he cut that sequence together and I mean it St s today is a remarkable piece of editing I think you know and it gives me chills every time um I think we got time for a few audience questions if anybody has any um yeah back there yep I'll repeat the question so everybody can hear it um the question was uh what lessons he learned on the abyss he was able to apply to Titanic and Avatar well a wiser man than me would have learned never to mess with water again but I think what I learned was in a way it was something I already new but to have it graphically demonstrated to myself and the crew every single day which is you have to respect the force of water and the difficulty of working with it I mean the water sometimes would come pouring into the set and blow the set apart you know when Ed Harris is being rammed down the corridor by that big uh flood coming in behind him the Seton blew apart just blew apart collaps just blew the walls right out of it you know they had underestimated the the force and the power and the weight uh of water so we were prepared when we got to Titanic we built the set out of steel like really no we built the built the set out of steel because we knew that that was the only thing that was going to work and uh I think it allowed us to keep people safe on Titanic which was obviously you know yet that much more complex and ambitious we had a lot more people in the water we had hundreds of people in water on Titanic and we had to keep them all safe and when water starts moving you can't stop it you can't swim against it you can't resist it um so you know respect for water respect for the difficulty of the process um you know learned a lot about underwater lighting and putting cameras in water and how do you coordinate uh water teams with divers in the water and people working above the water that sort of thing yeah it was a good primer to cut my teeth on before I got to Titanic and then of course you learned from that and then Titanic was a good primer for doing the way of water where we were still working underwater we weren't doing photography we were doing performance capture uh but before we went into that tank with the actors and the stunt people for the way of water we went out to the Bahamas with working mockups of our creatures to figure out how to ride creatures at high speed underwater above water diving into water we actually held we had a um a vehicle that was meant to be a skim wi I know I'm I'm digressing but this these are the things you learn we actually had a a thing you could ride that was like the skim wi in in the way of water that could go 15 knots underwater come out of the water fly over the surface at about about 15 or 20 knots and then dive back in and it took two days to figure out how to hold on to that son of a [Music] you know you're not in that picture the question was about his use of high frame rate in Avatar 2 and how he plans to use it in the future well I prefer to talk about the abyss but very seriously I mean that's why we're all here you know i' answered that question many times but you know I think High frame High frame rate is a way of making 3D better and obviously at the time I was making the I wasn't working on 3D I wasn't even thinking about 3D yet at that point but it's a way to make uh a lot of people have issues with the strobing in 3D which is made worse we've all lived with strobing for 120 years of of cinema at 24 frames second but at 48 and 60 frames a second the strobing is radically diminished and it makes the 3D experience better but if you if you just use it as a format like IMAX is a format 70 mm a format High frame rate shouldn't be a format it should be used as an authoring tool where it adds value and not used where it doesn't add value so that's the quick answer yeah ahead d so so the question was about you know that he's got these great ensembles in the abyss and aliens and what the casting and rehearsal processes like and how you develop that camaraderie among the actors rehearsing for film is is potentially dangerous because you don't want to sort of lock in on performance until you get there on the day but you I use rehearsal as an exploratory process so to start with first principles you know Howard fer cast the film brought brought in some amazing actors uh you know went back and forth between LA and and new York found the people that I wanted uh they weren't necessarily the people that I visualized but but I you know I go on the individual I don't go on trying to fit a stereotype of a character that I've created in my in my mind um and you know I think I managed to find you know everybody that I needed that that were spectacular remember battling with the studio a little bit about about Ed um and uh and Mary because they're they're a little bit off center you know and they saw this as their big action movie for the summer and all that crap but once I fought those battles and uh got them together now we had to to to create a team in the same way that we had a team in Aliens so I hadn't experienced that before aliens Terminator was just really a three character play you know and and they're they're very isolated from everybody around them uh but here I had to create a camaraderie so on Aliens everybody went through boot camp you know they they they became a squad together and they went out and they marched and they ran and they crawled through the mud and all that sort of thing I said all right well I've got to do kind of the the same thing here so it was really the dive training it was living on that dive boat for a week it was getting certified together uh and then it was coming back to the tank and learning the helmet training because that was a separate layer they had another week or I think four or five days of helmet training and and I remember them dancing and doing flips and and doing conal lines and all sorts of things together they really enjoyed the process of learning and learning to be with each other underwater because they're supposed to be professionals by the time you get to them there are no newbies in the whole the whole thing um everybody's supposed to be pretty seasoned so our actors had to be able to sell that so they had to get past survival to actually acting to from from Fear to Performance and so we made sure that we sort of got that out of the way early and we did a lot of the dive work up front so that they could stay in a in a Continuum of that and then all the above water stuff was done second so they went straight from very intensive dive train training which was a bonding experience into the shooting of the underwater stuff uh they actually had to to act to create the animosity because the Seal team and the and the riggers all sort of blonded with each other so they had to remember to act that they didn't like each other you know and they were suspicious and all that um but you know that part of it I mean i' love to say it all went well there were a lot of small problems but we never had an actor freaking out we never had somebody who who came to me and said I just can't do this you know it wasn't like that they they really leaned into to it I think I think they I don't want to say they enjoyed the process of shooting the scenes cuz some of the scenes are quite Grim underwater but I think they enjoyed the Afterglow of having accomplished something that was that was difficult and that they knew was hard and that they knew had never been done before um I mean we recorded the first dialogue that had ever been done in a in a dramatic scene underwater and we did a bunch of it we did it every single day you know uh there's a funny thing where we we could couldn't figure out how slate slated cu the only microphones that were underwater were inside the helmets so the way we slated the shot was to bang on the top of the helmet so you know so you know I can still remember Michael Bean or Leo burmester or whoever in the slave would come in and go you know and action so you know what I'm talk about yeah yeah um well we're getting done getting the signal it's time to wind down Let's do let's do one more we sure you pick who's got a good one this gentleman right here great question we're all wondering when is the 4K of the Abyss coming out I've completed the transfer and all the mastery's done and I think it I think it drops pretty soon like like in a you know in a couple months something like that so it's out of my hands at this point anyway and there's a lot of added material that they're that they're sticking in with uh you know with the what you can own and it'll be available I think simultaneously on streaming all that but I wanted to do it right I didn't I didn't want to just say just go look at the at the old transfer you know at the old HD transfer I wanted to wanted to do it right and uh I kind of had a day job getting Avatar 2 finished a while well I think I speak for everyone here when I say this was really one of the great movie going experien in I really appreciate you coming out talk thank you thank you thank you everybody I what oh he movie finally see the whole thing je are we going to grab some well there you go not even in and out Budd I don't like in and out

Channel: HandLand

Views: 7,010

Keywords: Avatar, James Cameron, The abyss, Movies, Live, Q&A, Box office, Titanic, Beyond fest, Film festival

Id: mwLtVWOy99U

Length: 40min 5sec (2405 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2023