James Cameron once said that when he was a student he made bathyscafen fromjam jars. In it he let mice descend to the bottom of a lake. What did thosemice think? We know this from his actors: Cameron doesn’t make any friendswhen filming his underwater spectacles. Or that at _Avatar: The Way of Water_otherwise, we won’t know until much later. Now the actors are stillcontractually obliged to play nice weather.
As bad as bee The Abyss Camerons Close Encounters of the Wet Child from1989, it probably wasn’t. Now film studios like Lites near Brussels have high-tech water tanks ten meters deep that they keep at a temperature of 28degrees, not the ice water they use at The Abyss in circles. In that sci-fiaction film, divers from the oil industry are recruited by the Pentagon torecover a sunken nuclear submarine amid tensions with the Soviet Union. Anunfortunate encounter with underwater aliens turns out to be the cause, acrazy Navy Seal wants to blow them up with a nuclear bomb. When hero BudBrigman (Ed Harris) descends miles into the Cayman Trench in a suicide attemptto defuse that bomb, that sacrifice moves the aliens so deeply that theyrecall the mega-tsunamis with which they intend to wipe out hostile humanity.
An exciting film with groundbreaking digital effects; the tsunamis wereunfortunately cut out in the editing. But the shooting was hell for cast andcrew. Cameron thought it was too risky to shoot the film in the Bahamas, ahuge seawater tank near Malta turned out to be too murky. So he had thecooling tower and a turbine house of a never-completed nuclear power plantnear Gaffney, South Carolina pumped up with filtered water from a lake: tanksA and B together contain about 38 million liters of water.
Everything went wrong. The plumbing was Hollywood style, pipes and pipesexploded, dam specialists had to plug leaks in the concrete, the power wentout, lightning struck. When the film fell behind schedule, Cameron decided towork day and night: The Abuses became the new working title. In the longhours in the cold water – oxygen bottles were refilled underwater – actorsbecame attached to ‘diver’s delight’: urinating in the diving suit fortemporary warmth.
Lead actor Ed Harris refused for years after crying fits about near-deathmoments The Abyss to talk; actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio told moviemagazine Empire that “the recordings were so terrible that everything hasbeen better than expected since”. The Abyss was, according to her, 140 daysof boredom punctuated by agony. Nagging, Cameron thought: “For every hour theywondered which magazine to read, I spent an hour at the bottom of the tanksolving problems.”
The Abyss did mediocre for Cameron’s doing, but presumably it’s his mostpersonal film. After that the sea kept pulling; in 1997 he again torturedmovie stars in water tanks Titanic , then he explored famous wrecks – theBismarck, the Titantic – and in 2012 he descended eleven kilometers solo intothe Mariana Trench. Like a mouse in a jam jar, or Bud Brigman sacrificinghimself for us at the bottom of the ocean. Where it’s cold, dark and lonely.