When the actors arrived on the set of The
Abyss, director James Cameron greeted them with a “welcome to my nightmare.” Whether
an exasperated joke or a foreboding warning, he wasn’t kidding. Much like the film
itself, production of The Abyss was a tense, claustrophobic thriller: full of
inescapable water, near drownings, and frequent disasters. At the center
of it all was a meticulous auteur, who believed that his art was worth the
suffering, regardless of it being a Sh*t Show. If there is one thing to know about
writer-director James Cameron, it’s that he loves the ocean. He practically made a career
out of it, from his films, to his documentaries, to his insane ocean floor excursions. This all
started back when he was in high school and saw a lecture about deep sea diving, presented by the
first man to breathe oxygen-rich fluid through his lungs. Instantly infatuated, Cameron went home
and wrote a short story about scientists at the bottom of the sea. Decades later, while directing
Aliens, he saw a National Geographic documentary about deep sea submersibles and recalled his
short story. He began writing the screenplay to The Abyss, named after the Friedrich Nietzsche
quote: “And if you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Since Aliens, and his previous film The Terminator, were such big financial
hits for 20th Century Fox (with Aliens receiving seven Oscar nominations), Cameron
had enough clout to pick his next project. He chose to stay with Fox and make The Abyss, with
his wife and producing partner Gale Anne Hurd. His finished script was about a group of underwater
oil riggers (instead of scientists), inadvertently dealing with Cold War tensions when they are
tasked with a rescue mission of a crashed nuclear submarine. And things take an unexpected turn
when they run into non-terrestrial intelligence (or NTIs). When Cameron turned in the script,
the studio assumed he planned to use visual effects and models to do most of the underwater
sequences, but Cameron wanted it to be real. "If I couldn't do what 2001 A Space Odyssey did
for a science fiction films taking place in space, if I didn't feel that I could
do that in the underwater arena, then I didn't want to make the movie." They went back and forth on the budget until
Fox greenlit the project for $33 million. The search began for a suitable
place to film an underwater epic. No fresh water tank would be big enough for
Cameron’s vision, and they certainly didn’t want to film in the uncontrollable environment
of the actual ocean (a lesson Steven Spielberg learned the hard way on Jaws). In the most
unlikely of places to film an underwater movie, the filmmakers chose the Cherokee Nuclear Power
Plant in South Carolina, which was abandoned mid-construction. The first option was a turbine
pit that could easily hold two and a half million gallons of water. Referred to as B Tank, they
used the pit to film multiple smaller sets and sequences (such as the crashed sub). For the
second set, they determined they could convert a partially constructed reactor containment vessel
into the largest filtered fresh water tank in the world. A Tank is where they’d construct an entire
rock face and the fictional drilling platform, Deepcore. For the 11 million gallons of
water necessary for both tanks, they tapped a nearby river; the water was then processed,
filtered for clarity and heated to 84 degrees. To make a film of this scale, with 40% of it
being shot underwater, clever workarounds and equipment were invented, from an air refilling
station to the housing units for the cameras. The diving suits were made expressly for the film,
as they not only had to light the actors’ faces, but include a communications system and
independently record dialogue (which had never been done before). To achieve
the look of 2,000 feet under the sea, the filmmakers had to block out any sunlight.
They covered A Tank with a gigantic black tarp, then over the water, they poured
an obscene amount of black beads. "Beeds?!" This allowed the crew to safely
surface without any obstruction. Then they had to figure out how to light the set. "One engineer told us 'you're all gonna die.
You're all going to get electrocuted.' The other engineer said 'oh I know what to do. We'll
use - we'll use HMI bulbs and we'll use double inline ground fault interrupters to make sure
that there's no short circuiting that injures anybody.' And that's what we did. So we went with
engineer B, clearly. A guy named Pete Romano." The main cast trained for two
weeks to become certified divers, and when they got to the set in early
August 1988, they had to train for another two weeks in the new hard hat diving
suits. Though they ran endless safety drills, their unstructured pool time would be the only
moments they enjoyed themselves on The Abyss. "I don't think there will ever be
a film (certainly before the end of this century) as much of a challenge as
The Abyss was, not only technologically, but also physically and emotionally
on all of us involved with it." The construction of the A Tank set was such
a colossal undertaking, it took longer than expected and delayed filming by six weeks. Since
it would take five days to fill the 55 foot deep structure with seven and a half million gallons
of water, they chose to start filling it anyway. Construction had to keep up with the rising
water. Already behind schedule, a frustrated Cameron started filming in B Tank, even though
they weren’t supposed to shoot there for another few weeks. The crew had to work day and night
to complete the sunken submarine set. Once done, the cast finally got to show off their new skills.
But the set was deliberately rotated 45 degrees, with debris littered about, making things awkward
as hell. The actors were disoriented and could barely complete a shot. They stumbled around
like newborns, crashing into objects and each other. Very little was being accomplished. And
in rushing to get B Tank ready, the crew didn't know what to expect so the PH levels hadn’t been
properly balanced yet. It quickly became murky and unsuitable for shooting. They began pouring extra
chlorine into the mix. It helped with visibility, but it soon showed its effects on the crew.
Those not in full scuba suits and diving helmets, found their hair bleached blonde… then their
body hair fell out… and then came the chemical burns. They concluded they needed to cover
themselves in Vaseline before each dive. This was their first week of filming. "And that's how we started...
and then it got worse." Each day underwater was a logistical horror show.
Because of the limited technology at the time, communication with every submerged individual
was nearly one-way. Cameron essentially used a PA system to speak to everyone, but only the
actors could speak directly back to him. Everyone else had to use hand signals and lip reading. To
make this work, Cameron and his crew spent hours beforehand planning every single shot. With 20
to sometimes 45 people underwater, every scenario imaginable was required to be meticulously
thought out; how to move the lighting without electrocuting everyone, making sure the actors
knew where the cameras were, when the submersibles needed to hit their mark, when the safety divers
had to provide air, and what steps had to be taken if something went wrong. The list goes on. It
would take days to complete a single scene. Only a couple of weeks in, the filtration system
began to break regularly. And on days off, wild goats would wander onto set, chew up cables,
trample the piping, and pee on everything. The crew were engineering fixes on a daily basis.
Between repairing the pumps, and the time it took to set up shots, the actors had a lot of
downtime. It was common for them to suit up, jump in the tanks, then wait for hours on end.
And they couldn't leave the set in the unlikely scenario they could actually film something.
Michael Biehn summed up his experience saying he was in South Carolina for five months
and only acted for three or four weeks. "Being able to stand there underwater, about 30-40
feet down and just - just stand there. I mean, you pretend like you're waiting
for a bus... for four hours." The actors never went to a depth that required
decompression. But for most of the crew, they would spend up to 2 hours at the end of
a long day decompressing to avoid the bends (a fun condition where gasses bubble up in
your bloodstream that can cause paralysis or even death). Then hang out in their hotel rooms
wearing oxygen masks. And with no bathroom breaks, everyone just peed in their wetsuits; an
experience referred to as “diver’s delight.” "It all went down your leg
and came up on your body, and it just felt really warm.
And it was a nice feeling." For some, the filming The Abyss was a fun one.
But for most, the insanity led to breaking points. It was almost immediately for J.C. Quinn,. He
had a near mental breakdown asking to be fired. "I just want to get out of this." From the possibility of dying
to the consistently annoying respirator sound (that was later edited out), "How you guys doing?"
"Dealing." everything had the cast and crew on edge. "The biggest problem that we encountered
early on was that sense of panic, was that sense of being on the brink of panic.
Relying on equipment, which as an actor you normally don't have to do except as a prop. And
these were not props, these were life support." To ease the pressure, they’d often break
anything in sight or kick in windows. "I grew to compare everything else to
doing The Abyss. Believe me. I mean, you walk around you hear actors
bitching and moaning and people bitching and moaning about this -
I say 'f**k you, I did The Abyss.'" Though she made it through a lifeless
swim scene without a stunt double, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s worst moment was
not in the water. During her resuscitation scene, she laid on cold steel, wet and
exposed in front of dozens of people, while Ed Harris pounded on her chest
and slapped her in the face. Cameron wanted take after take, until the camera
ran out of film in the middle of a shot. "And she heard that, and she just
like freaked. She just said 'hey man, we are not animals. I don't know what
you're doing here, but we are not animals.'" The rest was shot without her,
with the camera pointed up from the floor. To this day, Mastrantonio
will not discuss her time on The Abyss. For Harris, he enjoyed the challenge and is
super proud of what he accomplished in the movie. But after a near death experience in the
fluid breathing suit, even he couldn’t keep it together. Breathing liquid exists, and was used
for real with Benny the rat. In five takes, five different rats went through the same thing, all
coming out fine (according to Cameron). But Harris had to fake it. Each shot was determined by how
long he was able to withstand the chlorine burning his eyes and pretending he was breathing while his
helmet was filled with water, while underwater. "It'll feel a little strange."
"Yeah, no sh*t." Harris was in constant danger. "It was extraordinary. I mean, there was no -
the line between movie and reality didn't exist." To pull off his descent into an abyssal trench,
they towed Harris sideways along the rock face in A Tank, then tilted the camera to simulate the
fall. On the third take, Harris’ safety diver got tangled in wires. So when Harris needed air,
a crewmember took it upon themselves to help, but they mistakenly gave him the regulator
upside down. Harris inhaled half air, half water. He purged the regulator and
tried again, same effect. He began to panic, before the cameraman swam over, pushed the
other guy out of the way and gave Harris his air correctly. That night, on his drive to the
hotel, Harris pulled over and broke down crying, surprisingly, mad at himself for
not being able to complete the shot. "There was a part of me that was really
disappointed in myself in not being able to do this thing. And I really thought I
was going to die for a second, and it also pissed me off that I was - that I was afraid of
that. That I got scared of that for a second." As filming dragged into Fall, the weather
got worse. Thunderstorms ravaged the tarp over A Tank and it eventually gave out.
Cameron was forced to move production to night shoots. Just when it was getting cold.
Gale Ann Hurd fought with the studio to get hot tubs for the set. They thought it was an
expensive luxury, but the filmmakers needed them to keep from freezing between dives.
Ultimately it got so cold, that all shot briefings were held in them. Fox would often send
executives to the set to discuss budget overruns. "Beads aren't cheap... are beads cheap?" They questioned everything, but rarely
understood what the filmmakers were going through. They didn’t understand that
chemicals were eating their wetsuits, so they needed to keep buying more. Nor did
they get that a lot of these expensive props were also life support. The chaos wasn’t apparent
to Fox until the studio head happened to visit, when the water in B tank became cloudy.
They discovered (later) that the glue used in one section of the submarine set was water
soluble. But as they floated around in confusion, the generators failed suddenly,
plunging everyone into darkness. "And you know, the heart starts pumping and
you say to yourself 'oh, I can't see anybody. I guess that means nobody can see me. Gee I
wonder how much oxygen I had in my tank. I don't really remember. Gee I wonder where the
tank is. Gee I wonder where anybody else is." In Cameron’s own words, he was the architect of
this misery. He wanted to prove to himself that he could make such a technically difficult film.
He pushed people beyond what they were capable of, just to get the perfect shot. Blunt
and candid, he ruled like an autocrat, with short patience and a complete lack of
bedside manner. He knew the actors grew to hate him but he didn’t care for their
pampered lifestyle sob stories, saying: "For every hour they spent trying to figure
out what magazine to read, we spent an hour at the bottom of the tank breathing compressed
air." He never crossed a line with the crew, and none of them could accuse him of exploiting
his position of power or phoning it in. He was unwavering in his commitment to making the film.
Even though he and Hurd were going through a divorce during production (again, the parallels
to the film itself are uncanny), he never let that interfere. He was putting in 15 hour days,
planning every detail, solving every problem. "So when you got that kind of leadership,
you either come up to it or you get the hell out of there. One or the other, and
not one of us was willing to back down." He was so nonstop, he’d watch dailies underwater, while decompressing. But even Cameron
wasn’t spared from the mishaps. He got a taste of his own misery when his
assistant failed to tell him the state of his air supply. Caught off guard, he ditched his
gear and swam upward. He met a safety diver, 15 feet below the surface. They gave Cameron
a broken regulator and he inhaled water. The diver didn’t know what was wrong and hugged
Cameron tighter to keep him from panicking. Cameron resulted to punching the diver
just to get away. A few hours later, a Fox executive showed up to talk about budget
cuts, again. Cameron snapped. He put his helmet on the guy, sealed it and made him choke for a few
seconds. Then ripped the helmet off and yelled: Cameron then fired the safety
diver and his assistant. "It was pretty much your basic day on The Abyss." When The Abyss finished its grueling
140 day principal photography, it was five weeks behind schedule
and $4 million over budget. Like most of Cameron’s films, he wanted to
push the boundaries of what was possible and in 1989 that was asking a lot. The film’s
greatest advancement was the water tentacle, pseudopod. Cameron suggested projecting
water ripples on stop motion clay, but ILM’s Dennis Muren convinced Cameron they
could do it with Computer-Generated Imagery. "I was very, very leery about
CG. It was not an area I knew anything about. Felt like it would be so
opaque that I wouldn't be, as a director, really able to control it
or even know what to ask." Muren demoed a crude 2 second test, and Cameron chose to trust that ILM would
eventually be able to figure it out. "But Dennis said 'it's going to take
this many months. We're gonna need x amount of time to develop a new tool set.' And so I thought one. total leap of faith.
Two it will be so f***ing cool." ILM had to develop technology that simply didn’t
exist. They built one of the first scanners to digitize human faces, and wrote the book on how
to make realistic water effects in a computer (from reflections to rippling). After 6 months of
work, ILM created the first digital 3D character in film. Those 75 seconds were revolutionary
for its time, and it still holds up today. "Hey Ace, you done impressing yourself?" The film’s first cut was far too long for Fox,
hitting nearly 3 hours (which, at the time, was considered a death knell for box office
potential). Instead of cutting bits and pieces, Cameron took a machete to the film’s Cold War
subplot. Almost any mention of the tensions between the US and Russia were removed. The
biggest cut came with the ending encounter with the NTIs, where they reveal they were
about to drown the world for humanity’s petty warmongering. Cameron was not happy
with ILM’s practical tidal wave effects, and was ok with removing all of it. Still, Cameron
toiled away with the edit and visual effects, forcing Fox to keep pushing the release
date. Originally set for July 5th, it was moved to July 28th to give Cameron extra
time, but under the condition that he forfeit half of his salary to help finish the VFX. Yet, even
then, Cameron asked if they could delay it more. "What?!" After a year of dealing with Cameron’s
constant nitpicky perfectionism, Fox reached the end of their rope. An executive
barged into the editing room threatening Cameron: “You can either finish the movie some way,
or you can personally go to 1,200 theaters and describe the movie for the audience,
four shows a day.” Cameron gave up. Now $10 million over budget, production
on The Abyss finally came to end. "You alright? Everybody okay?"
"Yeah." "Son of a b*tch..."
"Oh man..." Back when Fox announced the next feature from
their new golden boy, rival studios fast tracked their own underwater thrillers. Horror films
DeepStar Six and Leviathan were both released in early 1989 beating The Abyss to theaters. And
both bombed. Fox grew scared audiences were sick of underwater movies or uninterested in them.
Fox didn’t even know how to succinctly market such a complex film that couldn’t be boiled down
to a single tagline. Adding to the troubles, the media kept incorrectly calling The Abyss a
horror flick, and internal testing found that most Americans couldn’t even pronounce “abyss.”
So when the film finally released on August 9th, the reception was lukewarm. Widely appreciated for
the performances and the craftsmanship on display, most agreed that the final act with the NTIs was
a jarring and abrupt left turn, perhaps souring everything that preceded it. Grossing only $54
million in the US, the film barely broke even. Cameron would bounce back two years later with the
enormously successful Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Easily one of the greatest action films ever made,
it pushed visual effects further than ever before, thanks to advancements pioneered on The Abyss.
Fox was eager to keep Cameron around and signed him for a five year deal, worth $500 million.
It gave Cameron unprecedented control on his future projects. The contract also allowed
extra funding so ILM could complete their work on The Abyss. They returned to the tidal
wave sequence, ditched the practical effect, and rebuilt it entirely with CGI. The special
edition, released on LaserDisc in 1993, restored 28 minutes of cut footage,
including the world ending scenario. "I still think it's a damn
good movie at 2 hours and 20 minutes. I think it's a better
movie at close to three hours." However, the inclusion of that footage
drastically changes the message of the film, furthering the divisive opinions about its
ending. That said, The Abyss has aged very well and is hardly the black sheep of Cameron’s
filmography that some might expect. Cameron stated he’d probably never invest as much
of his soul and energy into a film again. "Where are we next with the four sequels that are planned for Avatar?"
"They're gonna be four films coming out, one after the other, hopefully a
year apart, if we can do that." Well at least he didn’t deal with water again… "We were training for 18 months, a full year
before we ever started shooting in the tank. And I think you can really tell, looking at the movie."
"F**k you, I did The Abyss." In “Under Pressure: Making The Abyss,” a documentary commissioned by Cameron
himself, he begins with this gem: "I'm James Cameron and I want to take you into a
world of cold, darkness, and unrelenting pressure: the movie business." Cameron seems to imply that the
cost of filmmaking is a high one, and it takes the hardest of hearts to survive. As
if Cameron is simply a product of his environment, a symptom of this movie business.
And every unbearable moment that his cast and crew went through, was a
stepping stone to achieve his vision. "Was it necessary to go to all that?"
"Well um... I think so - I think, you know - I mean, obviously I thought so, because that's the
way I did it. So you're asking the wrong person." "Do you ever think you placed them in jeopardy,
you, yourself would not have wanted to be in?" "Well, some people like to challenge themselves.
And I think we all were trying to push ourselves a little bit. You know, jeopardy is relative.
"You know, I may have lost a little perspective on that movie and pushed beyond what it should be.
But you know, that's the nature of filmmaking." This is why James Cameron can be considered
one of the most difficult people to work with in Hollywood. His desire to be the
first and constant need to raise the bar on everything he does is relentless. No
budget is too steep, and to the studios, the tickets sold justify his methods. Whether
or not you agree that his films are worth the suffering, James Cameron is going to do,
what James Cameron does, for James Cameron. "James Cameron does what James Cameron does
because James Cameron is James Cameron." "His name is James Cameron, the bravest pioneer, No budget too steep, no sea too deep,
Who's that? It's him, James Cameron." "Systems are normal. You guys
hearing the song okay up there?" "James Cameron, explorer of the sea."
"Yes, James. We hear the song." "With a dying thirst, to be the first,
Could it be? Yeah it's him. James Cameron."
