WHAT WENT WRONG - The Abyss

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

Life’s abyss and then you dive. This week, Chris & Lizzie go deep on the merits of shooting in a decommissioned nuclear power plant, the resilience of the cast and crew in the face of abyss-olute death, and the saga of Beansie the liquid-breathing rat.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I don't know much about science, but... But I know about oil rigs. And this bitch can take it. I'm James Cameron. And I want to take you into a world of cold, darkness, and unrelenting pressure. The movie business. Okay. So, yeah, so I'm going to go into that.

It sounds like he's... lecturing you from the bottom of a well, it is because he is underwater. And like the brilliant, crazy person that he is, he does much of his interviews for the documentary that we've pulled these clips from underwater. And just so you know, most of the clips we're going to be using today, actually all the clips we're going to be using today are from a documentary called Under Pressure, making the Abyss from 1993. That noise that you just pointed out is in all of the underwater footage because this was the first movie to ever use live underwater audio recording. And what that is, it's the respirator.

And it's so annoying that they had to edit it out completely from the final film because it's awful. It's just like they played a clip from the actual movie with the respirators in it in this documentary. And it's Ed Harris being like, yeah, we have to go to horrible. Sounds great. Was the documentary made to be like positive about the movie? the movie or... You'll see. I mean, yes. I do think... It was a promo kind of thing.

It's a bit of a... I mean, not really, because it comes out after. So the Abyss is released in 1989. This documentary is from 1993. And it is certainly made with the blessing of James Cameron because he is obviously heavily participating in it. One thing to keep in mind when you're hearing some of these interview clips from the documentary is that both the actors and James Cameron seem to be tempering their recollection of their experience just a little bit. from what they have said in other interviews. So yes, I would say it's a bit promo-y. But it is very good.

Well worth watching. The whole thing is actually available on YouTube. One of the other main sources among many that we'll be pulling from today is a biography of James Cameron by Rebecca Keegan called The Futurist, the Life and Films of James Cameron, and an excellent LA Times article from 1989 by Martin Kassendorf. So to get into this, if you haven't seen The Abyss, Basically, all you need to know about the plot of this is a civilian diving team on a deep sea oil rig is commissioned by the U.S. government to find a lost nuclear submarine. And they end up discovering a new underwater species or NTI's non-terrestrial intelligences, as they'll be describing them in this.

Like Avatar, the military is kind of bad here and the underwater alien things are kind of good. That's pretty much it. When I watched it, I was shocked at how much this felt like Armageddon. underwater. Yeah. It is just Armageddon underwater. Well, I guess Armageddon was, yeah, was the abyss, but space. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. They're just your simple oil rig guys. Yeah. Yes. Like, I don't know much about science. But. But I know about oil rigs.

And this bitch can take it. It was a lot of, they say bitch a lot in the movie. They do say bitch a lot. Yeah. She's a real bitch. My favorite quote is, then maybe you shouldn't have married her. and then like slow pushing on Ed Harris.

It will get to that as well. So speaking of Ed Harris, he is cast in the lead as Bud Brighman, the captain of Deep Corps, which is the oil rig, and Mary Elizabeth Master Antonio as Lindsay Brighman, Bud's estranged workaholic wife who only truly loves the oil rig that she engineered, doesn't give a rat's patootie about Ed Harris. As a side note here, Lindsay's character is quote-unquote coincidentally, awfully very similar to Cameron's relationship with Gail Ann Hurd,

who is his second wife. except Lindsay and Bud fall back in love at the end of their disaster movie, whereas Cameron and Hurd separated during pre-production of the abyss and go on to divorce immediately after. So that should give you an idea of how this is going to go. And she produced The Terminator, right? Yes, she did. Yeah, she's huge.

She also went on to do The Walking Dead. Oh, yeah. She's an incredible producer. She's amazing. Yeah. Totally a badass. Cameron favorite Michael Bean also stars as the evil U.S. military antagonist Lieutenant Coffee who loves nuclear weapons and just wants them.

as close to his body as possible at all times. Okay, so first impressions after having watched this movie last night, Chris, what do you got? The first 45 minutes are great. They're amazing. Amazing. It's like the first 10 minutes. You're watching a U.S. sub crash dealing with an unexplained object that they think might be like a Russian submarine.

And it's like better than hunt for the Red October and all the other submarine movies that came out then. Then you've got above ocean action. They're filming on real. it looks like aircraft carriers, et cetera, up there. And they have this incredible, I'm assuming, miniature oil rig set bound below. Maybe it's full size. You are actually incorrect about the miniature part, which we will get to.

God. And then they have this, it's an amazing 45-minute sequence that ends with the whole crew trapped at the bottom of the ocean. And then the movie looks amazing. The acting's great. Everything's great. But then the movie starts to feel really jumbled to me. It felt jumbled to me, where it was like, we were trapped somewhere.

between E.T. and Broken Arrow, the movie about the missing nuclear missile, it was just a little jumbled, I guess, after the midpoint. There is a reason for that, which we will get to. And I do not believe it's James Cameron's fault. But overall, best underwater stuff I've ever seen. And like some of the most, it made me physically uncomfortable to watch parts of this movie, because even more so than his later waterlogged movie Titanic, this is extremely claustrophobic. He does such a good job of shooting these sequences in such a way. And frankly, the reason it looks so claustrophobic is because it is claustrophobic.

They are shooting on these real sets. They're shooting on actual replicas. They're not shooting in open sets or anything. Which unlike a lot of other, I'm sure, submarine movies where you, it's just interior shots matched to like CGI shots of submarines. Right. You have the actors interacting with the water here and there are windows everywhere. Yep.

You know, so, uh, kudos to them for pulling that off. Yeah. I mean, this movie is an absolutely unbelievable accomplishment. Yes. Not without its struggles. Okay. So I think we need to get a little bit of background on James Cameron before we get into this. He's born in 1954 in Capu-Casing, Ontario.

Uh, many apologies. dear Canadians, if I've mispronounced that, which I probably have, to an electrical engineer and an artist slash nurse, which when I found out that those are his parents, everything made a lot of sense. When he's 17, his family moves to Brayette, California. He attends community college for a little bit, drops out after one year to become a truck driver, and then James Cameron sees Star Wars, and it changes his life, or so the fairy tale goes. That was 78?

77. I think he sees Star Wars. He's tired of farting in a semi-truck, and he's like, that's it. I'm going to go into the movie business. So he's 23 at that point? Yeah. Yeah. He's super young. So he quits his job and decides he wants to be a filmmaker, so he borrows money from a bunch of dentists. I'm sure there's more of a story there. I don't know what it is. And he makes us for a short film. Goes on to work a bunch of odd jobs in the film industry. I would just love to know what that choice about. Yeah. Also, like, why were the dentists so on board? He's learning as he goes. You know, it's basically he didn't go to film school. He just started working. Eventually, he lands as a miniature model maker as the Roger Corman studio. For those of you that don't know, Roger Corman is like B-movie sci-fi king. He's made, he did what, Little Shop of Horrors? He's been involved in just like hundreds of movies. This guy is still alive. This guy has never stopped working. Cameron is also involved in the special effects for movies like John Carpenter's Escape from New York. Excellent film.

And then by pure luck, he winds up taking over the director gig on Piranha II, The Spawning, when the first director, a guy named to Miller Drake, leaves due to creative differences. Miller Drake, by the way. I would love to know how creative those differences were on Piranha II, the Spawning. Apparently, the producer was not fun to deal with. But by all accounts, Miller and Cameron got along well because Miller Drake actually ends up being a visual effects editor on True Lies Terminator 2 and The Abyss. So they continue working together. So now we're here at 1984.

His brand new second wife, Gail Ann Hurd, who we did just talk about. Producer, badass. She actually also co-wrote the Terminator, I believe. She ends up convincing the president of Hemdale Film Corporation to make the Terminator with Cameron. directing. On a budget of 6.4 million, they gross over $78 million, which is huge. Pretty good. Yeah. He then follows up Terminator with 1986 as aliens, which rakes in $131 million. And it's the best one in the franchise. I know. I still haven't watched it. I will watch it. And the budget for that one was $18.5 million. And it looks great for that amount of money.

Yeah, that's actually, when I saw that that was $18.5 million, that really surprised me. And Michael Bean is in that. Again. As a military man. Yeah. So they work together frequently. He's one of the relatively few people who continue to work with James Cameron over and over again. There are people who love him.

There are people who do. And a lot of his crew actually is veterans. Okay. So now we're here in 1988. James Cameron is 34 years old. That's crazy to me. He's 34. He's made The Terminator.

He has made aliens. He has his fourth film ready to go. 20th century Fox is on board for this. Now, they were not involved in the Terminator. But they did aliens. They did aliens. Yes. So they have worked with him before.

And boy, do they want those Cameron dollars. They know how he does. They're very excited. And now we're ready to start looking into what that movie is, which is the abyss. So most people in the film industry know the story of Jaws. Chris, what do you know about? the production of Jaws. Everything went wrong.

Yes. The shark just didn't work. Yes. The shark didn't work. They doubled their budget. They ran way over. The shark looked stupid. The shark looked real dumb.

The moral of that story is it made everyone very afraid of shooting a movie on open water. And for good reason, because almost all of the problems in production on Jaws were related to the fact that they were really shooting on open water. So. And then they did it for Waterworld. and everything went wrong later. Yeah, we'll get to that one at some point for sure. So the studios are very nervous because James Cameron has this script. He's very excited about The Abyss. But he is saying right from the get-go, he wants to shoot 40% of this thing for real zees underwater. So Cameron decides to solve this problem and sort of, you know, squash the concerns of the studio

by saying, no, no, no, don't worry about it. We're not going to shoot this on the open ocean. What going to do is we are going to build a freshwater tank so big that it will look like the ocean. And then we won't have to deal with the elements. It'll be great. And also because this is so enormous, like to do what he actually wants to do, which is he wants to build a real sized underwater oil rig inside of a tank. This tank does not exist. There's nobody that has tried to do this before. So they go hunting. They go on some location scouts. They're looking for just at this point, it's like, is this even feasible to get a space big enough for this? They end up touring an abandoned nuclear power plant in Gaffney, South Carolina.

That's fun. Yeah, which, side note. Did they just get to use the nukes from there in the movie? Yeah, it worked great. They saved some money. No, this actually never housed any nuclear materials. I think it was abandoned partway through construction. But it is most of the way built, and it is built to be a nuclear power plant.

So they're walking through this abandoned nuclear power plant. And first they find an unfinished turbine pit that's 210 feet long and 20 feet deep. This ends up being the smaller of the two tanks used in the abyss. This is going to be known as B-tank. As they're wrapping up their tour of the nuclear power plant, James Cameron finally sees something big enough for his magic tank. Chris, can you guess what it is? It's got to be the reactor room. It is the main nuclear reactor containment vessel.

This thing has eight foot thick walls and it can hold 7.5 million gallons of water. This thing is like the size of a football field. It is nuts. When you watch the movie, it just looks... It looks like the ocean. The ocean. Yeah, exactly. I think that's how big the ocean is.

It's the size of this nuclear reactor. So this becomes a tank where most of the abyss will end up being filmed. Deepcore, which is the underwater oil rig that they're building in a tank, becomes the largest underwater set ever built at the time. Is that a real thing that underwater like spaceship oil rig that they have? The thing that like Ed Harrison. Are there such things as that when I was watching I couldn't figure out if that was like, you know how you just, you know, and make stuff up with the technology.

I think that's real. God, that's crazy. I mean, that's, should I look it up right now? No, we can just, we'll throw it out to the audience. Do you work on an oil rigs? Do you work on an underwater oil rig? Yeah. I mean, I would assume that it is because we know they're doing deep sea oil drilling. And I don't think they're just drilling from the top. There are people down there that are operating the actual. Yeah. When I thought I was just shocked. It also looks like the spaceship from the first alien movie. It looks amazing. Any of these outside shots where the actors are like clearly in the windows. You know what I mean? Looking at you. It's nuts. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're, they built this thing for real. And James Cameron was in his little cement shoes on the bottom of the ocean floor filming them. We will get to that. So while the crew is building an entire underwater oil rig and giant deep sea trench inside of a nuclear reactor, the cast is busy getting advanced scuba certification.

However, when they arrive to set, they realize they're going to be doing something called hard hat diving, which is not what they were trained in because almost no one has to do it. Hard hat diving, as you can probably figure out, is the fact that they're not wearing traditional scuba masks. They are in super heavy helmets that are essentially like drilled onto their suits. One cast member described it as being like living inside a bowling ball. Great. Right. So normal hard hat diving is already incredibly heavy. These things, because James Cameron was insistent that they do live underwater audio recording,

which does pay off because they're not doing ADR, the performances are great. However, it means these things are outfitted with thousands of dollars worth of microphones that make it significantly heavier. And you're dealing with the fact that if you take off your helmet, you ruin all of the technology inside of it. So now there's extra money on the line in your bowling ball suit. They're also extremely claustrophobic.

You can't really turn your field of vision the same way that you can in a regular scuba suit. Because if you think about it, you've got a bowling ball that is bolted on to your suit. It has a window in the front and that's it. So not ideal, I think is how we'll describe this.

Monday, August 8th, 1988 is supposed to be the first day of shooting, but pretty much nothing is ready. The set of deep core in a tank is nowhere near built. So they decide to start shooting in a submerged submarine set first, which is located in B tank. And this is when Michael Bean and I think Ed Harris is in this group, when they go down to look at the sunken submarine. That's the first thing they shot. They're all bopping around and hitting things. You're going through these narrow corridors, wearing tanks on their backs. So that's all real. That's all, like all the nerves that you see there, those are them getting used

to the suits. Mm-hmm. And I will let Ed Harris explain how it felt. Total chaos. I mean, and everybody was kind of a little freaked. I remember getting up out of there and going, man, we're going to be here a long time. Because this is not going to be on schedule. I guarantee you that.

He sounds drunk in this interview. I think he's just tired. Yeah, exactly. This documentary made me love Ed. Harris so much, to be perfectly honest, because he just seems like, it seems like to push Ed Harris over the edge, you have to push him really far. But don't worry, James Cameron does. So as they're starting to shoot, the water in B-Tank gets really cloudy with algae. So they up the chlorine. This ends up causing crew members hair to turn bright white and fall out. Lovely. They're getting chlorine burns.

Now, the cast is protected by their helmets. So the one good thing that the hard hat diving is doing is that they're not having their hair singed off by the chlorine in the tanks. The wig budget just like goes through the roof. Seriously. I will let James Cameron explain what it was like for everybody else being in these tanks. We wound up having to grease up with Vaseline from head to foot like a bunch of channel swimmers and keep working too, of course, because we were making a movie and we did have to get the shots done.

But it was just hell. And that's how we started. And then it got working. I like how he says channel swimmers as if, Anyone else has any idea what he's talking about. What does he mean, by the way? Does he mean like people that swim in the English channel or like, what is he talking about? It's not a job.

I don't know what he's talking about. So this is what they're dealing with from essentially day one. Sounds like a blast. And also, to be clear, it is not just the actors that are underwater. It's not just the camera guys. James Cameron is underwater more than anyone else for this entire shoot. So any crap that you can give him kind of falls away. He was willing to do it to himself.

He did it to himself and he did it more than anybody else. He was one thing that James Cameron did for this movie, which is both interesting and horrifying, is that he built an underwater oxygen refilling tank so that they would not have to resurface for up to five hours at a time on these shoots. So these people are just sitting on the bottom of this fake ocean floor because it takes forever to set up these shots.

Like you said, imagine how long it takes to set up a shot on land and then what, quadruple that because you're underwater. Sure. Yeah. So they're just sitting there at the bottom of the ocean, fake ocean, nuclear reactor ocean, for hours, hours and hours. And they would resurface for just long enough, I guess, to decompress and then they would go back down. Sounds like a blast. It's actually my nightmare. James Cameron would sometimes do 12 hours underwater in a day.

It's crazy. It's nuts. It's crazy. On August 20th, a tank still is not completely ready to go, but they go ahead and start filling the thing with water anyway. It takes five days. Wow. So five days of just continuously pumping water into this thing.

That's crazy. Yeah, 7 million gallons of water. And they're actually not even, they're not done building the set. So these guys are going in and they are finishing the build as the water level is rising. Great. And there's footage of this in the documentary. They're like, yeah,

just really trying to finish as the water level is going up. Like gluing things onto the side of the oil rig as they're going, which ends up causing some problems. So for most underwater shoots, at least prior to this, you would light from the surface of the water because you don't want to bring your lights underwater. Not James Cameron.

He wants to light everything underwater and not have, any natural light filtering in because it's supposed to be. Right, right. Exactly. So it does make sense. So he brings in a football field size tarp to cover the entirety of a tank. He brings in a tarp large enough to cover a main nuclear reactor. And so this is also like you don't want to go swimming in a pool that's been tarped because

you could drown under it. Well, so it's not right on the surface. Okay, got it. So there's like a little airhole. It's more like, because of, part of the deep core rig is sort of above the water, they actually haven't filled this completely up to the top. So the tarp is covering the top of it, like a lovely little sort of patio thing. An awning.

An awning, yes. As they're starting to light, they also realize that the surface of the water is so still that it's reflecting them back to themselves like a mirror and all the lights is already being reflected back to them. So Cameron brings in seven billion, polypropylene beads to cover the surface of the water. Great. It's absolutely disgusting. A little sand poop. Yes. And the actors are talking about this. They're like, it got in every crevice. It's like in their armpits. It's in their nose. It's like... In their butts. Yeah. It's definitely in their butts. The actors aren't really going below 40 feet. But James Cameron and the crew want to shoot from

Exactly. They're shooting from underneath them. So they are 50 feet underwater for sometimes five hours at a time. There's no acting required in this movie as far as I can tell. Everyone is just scared all the time. They're so scared. And that's all they have to do is just be really, really scared. And it works. On September 10th, this is where we're going to start getting into some of the problems here. Because thus far, it's just like a difficult shoot. Like everything has been typical thus far, right? You fall behind, you make it up. Right.

It's fine. It's fine. They're going to stay on budget, right? It's fine. Yeah, they're not going to stay on budget. The initial budget for this was $33 million. And it ends up costing somewhere between $50 and $70 million. It's a bit of a scrupency there.

Probably 70. I would bet 70. Fox probably said 50, but it's probably 70. Fox does say 50. Everywhere else says closer to 70. So that's a 40 million dollar difference. It's over double. Yeah.

The budget over doubles. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, they pull a jaws. But here's what's really crazy is this movie actually didn't cost that much more than the island of Dr. Moro. That's true. I will say every dollar went a lot further on this movie. That is true.

All of this starts to go awry on September 10th. So they're a month into shooting. They're a month into shooting. The pipes in A-tank start to completely fail. this is because it turns out they had installed non-pressurized pipes in a pressurized tank. So everything is leaking. Mostly the filtration and heating, which are now down 50%. But to be fair, in the movie, they are running out of oxygen and it's getting really cold.

So I would say, if I were James Cameron, I'd be like, guys, let's go method on this one. This only adds to the fun. Yeah. Also, the result of James Cameron insisting that people be underwater for five hours at a time is obviously they're all peeing in their wetsuits. Oh, of course. 100%. Yeah. Academy Award nominee, four-time Academy Award nominee Ed Harris is just pissing it as a wetsuit.

What's funny is it is really fun to pee in the ocean, but peeing in a cold wetsuit is not nearly as fun as people think it is. Actually, they would disagree with you. Maybe because the water was so cold and pleasant. Oh, so cold that it warmed them up. Yeah. They referred to it as diver's delight and enjoyed peeing in their wetsuit and would try to figure out what pee it was if it was like their coffee pee or... I thought you were saying like which person.

No. So everyone's peeing in their wetsuits all day, every day. And James Cameron would actually stay down so long. James Cameron and Al Giddings. So we should talk about Al Giddings for a second. He's the special underwater DP. So this guy is amazing. He literally specializes in underwater shooting.

He does continue to work with James Cameron. a little bit. He actually is a producer on Titanic. Oh, cool. So Al Gettings will continue to show up. He is extremely useful on this shoot. You will see why shortly, mainly because he's one of the only people who, like, actually knows what's going on underwater. And for all, for any movies that shoot in extreme conditions, there will always be, like, if you're doing aerial photography, there's usually like a special aerial DP that's involved or underwater photography. You know, you bring in specialists that understand. So Cameron would stay down so long that he would he would have to decompress longer than anybody else.

Cameron and Giddings. Giddings was down there within the entire time. They would have to hang 10 feet below the surface of the water at the end of the day for hours to decompress. Yeah, the one atmospheric pressure. And apparently when it got, when the helmets got too heavy and uncomfortable, James Cameron would request that he was hung upside down, like an evil fruit bat in the tank. And he had them build him an underwater monitor so he could watch dailies from the previous day while dangling. It's crazy. Yeah. He's, he is an impressive nutter butter. That's crazy. He doesn't stop. No, it's insane. Yeah. And that's what everybody will say in this documentary and, and everybody who

has worked with him is just like, he does not quit. Yeah. So remember the tarp that they brought in to cover A-Tank? Sure. The tarp that was brought in to create total darkness. Uh, it rips in half. Yeah. Do do wind and thunderstorms because they are now pushing. So the top of this was exposed. Yeah. Oh, I assumed it was contained. No. Oh, okay. It's an unfinished nuclear reactor, so the top of it's completely open.

Got it. Yes. So the tarp was the roof, basically. Got it. So that rips. That rips. James Cameron, the response to that is, I guess we're on nights now, guys. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Because they're already behind schedule, and the budget is steadily increasing due to things like replacing wet suits that the chlorine is eating through. They cannot afford another tarp the size of Kentucky. So. And night shoots are insane. Yeah. By the time you hit like five, you know, four a.m. five am rolls around on a night. Like people, you're losing your mind. And then to think about doing that underwater. Yeah. It's a real nightmare. Yeah. So at this point, which is like not even halfway through the shoot, they shift everything to night shoots. So this brings us to the first near death experience on the abyss. Now, as we mentioned, James Cameron would stay underwater for so long and get so engrossed in shooting that he would lose track of time. So. So, He could go for about an hour and 15 minutes before he would need to refill his oxygen. So he told his second AD to warn him when he needed to re-up his tank. Otherwise, he would completely forget because he's just barreling through.

One day he's directing Mary Elizabeth Master Antonio, who's about 20 feet away from him. He goes to take a breath and there's no oxygen. Great. He looks down at his gauge and realizes that he's at completely zero. He tries to get the attention of Al Giddings, the DP, who is actually partially deaf from a prior diving accident. so that didn't work. Cameron is saying, Al, I'm in trouble.

He's doing the symbol for I'm out of oxygen, which is cutting his hand across his throat. And for some reason, I don't know if they think he's like joking around or what, but nobody comes over. I bet you Mary Elizabeth is just like, let him die.

She did not have a fun time on the shoot, so maybe. So he is 35 feet underwater right now in a 7 million gallon tank. And so he can't come up for air because you would have the bent. right so he can't he can't get anybody's attention um and also every single person underwater on this shoot has a safety diver they have a diver assigned to them as like a guardian angel as somebody

that is supposed to be paying attention uh and come over and help them but for some reason nobody's showing up when the director has run out of oxygen so he decides all right fuck it he pulls his helmet off flooding it, ruining all of the microphones and wiring inside of it. He's just like, I don't care, obviously. Now they're all paying attention because... It's a smart move, though. It is a smart move. I don't know if I could think of that. I just would have died. It's the only thing to do because all of a sudden everybody is like, oh, oh, no, something's really, really wrong. And also keep in mind, again, James Cameron is weighted down by ankle weights so he could walk around the bottom of the tank. So he has, he is helmetless, oxygenless,

with cement booties on the bottom of this tank. He's kicking like crazy trying to get up to the surface, so a safety diver finally shows up, comes up and puts what's called a regulator or respirator, as they call it in this documentary, on his face. It's the mouthpiece that delivers air to divers generally. Cameron breathes in, but this regulator is busted, and he just gets straight up water.

So the safety diver does not realize that's what's happening. But James Cameron is like, oh my God, it's just water. So he starts flailing and struggling. The safety diver assumes that he's panicking. So this diver actually tries to hold him down. So this is a literal version of the Ed Harris scene later where he's inhaling water. And they're like holding him down saying like this is normal. Yes.

Got it. This is what's happening to James Cameron except he cannot breathe in this water. So he's freaking out and this diver is just like, shh, calm down. Like I'm just holding him. Easy baby boy. Easy. He can be fine. So James Cameron does the only thing he can think to do.

just punches this guy straight in the face. Can you punch someone hard underwater? James Cameron can. And this guy lets go of him. James Cameron is able to kick. It says kick to safety. I assume because he's 35 feet underwater, he did not kick to the surface. I think he kicked to someone else who had another regulator.

So he's okay. That ends up being the first, but not the last near death experience on the set of the abyss. James Cameron immediately was like, get me another helmet. I'm going back down. He really is like unfazed doesn't care. Someone who is not unfazed is Ed Harris. So poor Ed Harris came potentially closer than James Cameron to dying on this shoot, very close to kicking the bucket.

There is a plot point in the movie where Ed's character gets put in a helmet full of this special goo called oxygenated fluorocarbon liquid. This is liquid that you can, in theory, breathe in. And it's real. I don't believe it has been tested a ton with humans for obvious reasons. It has, however, been tested with rats, and they actually show that in this movie. There's a scene where one of the evil military men grabs the rat off of... It's the good one. It's the good evil military man.

Sure. Except that he plunges a nice man's rat into a pile of goo. Beansy, right? Well, Beanie is the rat. But so he grabs the rat. He plunges it into this cage, and then, sticks the cage under water. And what you see is the rat starting to breathe seemingly underwater. It's real. The only reason they cut away from it, and this is sad, it's because the rat is literally

shitting itself. It's so scared that they had to cut away because it's, it's shitting its rat pants in the water. And they didn't want to show that. Side note. Peter did not endorse the movie. No, they very much did not. And actually in England, they said that the Royal Vet made them edit out that scene because it was too upsetting, which I almost agree with it is upsetting to watch. Yeah.

Because it's clearly really happening. Like, there's no faking it. Yeah. So, Ed Harris almost dies. So, okay, so here's how this is working. Ed Harris gets put in, what they do is they like, they put them in a helmet full of this goo. And in the movie, he's breathing in the goo. So, and I think the idea is that it's because he's going down to disarm a nuclear weapon very, very far down into this.

underwater trench. The liquid doesn't pressurize in the way that gases do. The liquid doesn't pressurize and in theory it lasts longer than the oxygen. So he would be able to do it. And to be clear, he goes down like 15,000 feet at the end of this movie. It is insane. They're like 4,000 feet. You're the deepest any human has been.

Five minutes later, 16,000 feet doing good, but it makes no sense. Since Ed Harris, however, is not a rat. He is not breathing in this liquid. what they had to do is they had to just have him hold his breath because they can't have an oxygen tank on him. It's not going to look right. And let me tell you, it looks like he is holding his breath. Like he looks like he is in pain. He is in pain. He is just holding his breath in a helmet full of pink goo. And they made it so that the face plate on the helmet, he could push forward and release the goo for it to be able to have a safety diver swim over with a regulator so he could

breathe whenever he needed it. Now, what you're talking about, where he's supposed to be dropping thousands of feet. They can't do that. Right. Because, A, they aren't in a tank that big. And also, he would have to be, I guess, kind of decompressing as he goes. Right. So he would be holding his nose. He would be making funny faces. And James Cameron's like, nope, that won't work. I can't have my lead actor doing that. So what they decide to do is they decide to drag him horizontally across a rock face and turn the camera sideways. Now, a stunt double does this scene a few times, holding his breath the way that Ed Harris will be doing and it goes fine. So they bring

in Ed Harris to try it out. They're dragging him across this rock face and he realizes about halfway through that he's not going to be able to make it. So he detaches himself from the line and goes to cling to the rock wall. He's making the international I'm out of oxygen signal

and nobody shows up. Nobody learned it on this shoot apparently. Well, evidently, his safety diver was actually tangled up in a piece of the set. So physically was trying to get to Ed Harris and could not release himself from whatever he was tangled in. So Ed Harris is stuck there. He's talking about this in the documentary and he's like, this is the moment where he really thought he was going to die. And so a different, and it would appear less trained, diver swoops in

with a backup regulator to give Ed oxygen. So Ed Harris gets this on his mouth. He goes to breathe in and he gets a little bit of air, but mostly water. Ed Harris, being the sweet, lovely man that he is, assumes that he did something wrong, so he takes another breath in, and it's just straight water. What happened is that the guy put the regulator on his mouth upside down. And I had to look this up, but it turns out if you don't put this on with the correct side up,

it causes the seal on the exhaust valve to break and water to rush into the compartment. So the longer it's on there, the more it's just shooting water into his mouth. Great. And Ed Harris is just like, I'm done. Like I think he had more of your reaction where he was just like, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. Ed Harris was done. He was like, I don't know what to do. You know, fortunately, Al Giddings, who is an extremely accomplished diver, looks over and realizes that the thing is on upside down. He comes over. He rips it out of Ed Harris's mouth, puts it on the right way. And Ed Harris is okay. And James Cameron's like, let's go for two. Well, so there are conflicting takes about what happened next, but there are several sources. that did claim that James Cameron continued to film. Yeah. While this was happening to Ed Harris,

and that when they got above ground, Ed Harris punched him right in the face. I believe it. So there's a part in that sequence where Ed Harris bonks his head on the cliff as he's going down. I'm convinced that is not like what was supposed to happen. It's definitely not. He just bongs his head on his way down.

And they put a huge sound effect in there. It's like bonging as he hits his head. When he was driving home that night, Ed Harris said that he just started sobbing in his car. Let's hear from Ed Harris in the documentary about what it was like working with James Cameron. Keep in mind that this is a documentary James Cameron is also a part of. So it feels a little tempered. Jim is Jim and every, you know, he, the people that work with him, you know, continuously, I think, understand him. Yeah.

Yeah. My light just went dead. George, it's a rehearsal. Shut up. Oh my God. And that is something James Cameron allowed into the documentary. So you wonder what the other things sounded like. I kind of loved that reaction.

George is a rehearsal. Shut up. It's great. Yeah. So Jim is Jim. And that's what we've learned. That's like how you talk about family members that are never going to change. Uncle Bill's Uncle Bill.

And he's always going to be Uncle Bill. And the people that know Uncle Bill kind of know. that Uncle Bill is going to be Uncle Bill. Yeah, 100%. Oh, man. Now, physical trauma is not the only thing the actors suffered on set, as you can probably tell from the little clip that we just heard of James Cameron directing. And I also do want to say, for all the crap that we're giving James Cameron, he is an

incredible director. And I do think he genuinely believed he was not putting anybody in danger. He really, he was doing everything himself. I think he viewed it as, if I can handle it. Yes. Other people can handle it. That's exactly how he viewed it. So there is a scene in the movie that actually you were talking about a little bit

earlier when we were chatting about this, where Mary Elizabeth's character, spoiler alert, she basically allows herself to drown so that Ed Harris, the stronger swimmer, can kind of pull her through a lot of water. It's your classic. It's your classic. Two lovers, one wetsuit. One wet suit. Toboccal.

Somebody has to die for a little bit until their partner slaps them back to life, which is basically what happens in this scene. Which is why didn't they also try that at the end of Titanic? I don't know. But anyway. Well, maybe because this one didn't go great. So Ed Harris yanks her out of the water onto this cold metal grate. She looks dead as hell.

It's a very convincing dead. The makeup team did a great job. I think because she was also dead inside. He's screaming in her face. He's doing CPR on her. He rips open her shirt as soon as she's on the thing nips out. Well, because they, so they pull out the defibrillator. And they're like, you have to do it skin on skin.

Right. They say that. And so they very unceremoniously tear her top open. Yes. So she's cold. She's freezing cold. She's soaking wet. She's on a metal grate. She's got her boobs out. Ed Harris is screaming at her, spitting in her face, you know, defibrillating her, slapping her around, yelling at her. They've been doing this scene for hours. The scene goes on for a long time in the movie. They tell Ed Harris a couple times, let it go and he refuses. It's like nine minutes in the movie. They had been doing take after take after take of this for hours. And finally, Ed Harris looks up. and sees a light on on the camera indicating it had run out of film. And it had been out of film for a long time. And he stops.

Yeah, the standard film canister runs for 12 minutes. Right. So after 12 minutes of rolling, you're just out of film. You have to reload the camera. Yeah. It had been out for a while. So he stops. He tells Mary Elizabeth that they're out.

And she very understandably freaks out. She ran out of the room screaming, we're not animals. and stormed off set. And like, why would you do that? I don't even understand what the advantage was to continuing to do that scene. I don't know what the plan was. He maybe he wanted, I mean, David Finchery does stuff like that where he wants the actor to break down.

He feels like they can't get them by themselves. So he's like, I'll drive you insane. I don't think it's a good way of doing it, but he's a better director than I am, so I can't say. I mean, it does get an amazing performance out of Ed Harris. who literally slaps her back to life though which is a not great choice i will say he slats he resorts to just slapping her in the face yeah which last summer her doesn't restart your heart well and then she starts breathing and she comes back um i will say though i bet you that he was thinking so like she's exposed and it's like you know if an actresses do nudity you should do a closed set but in i bet you in james

Cameron's mind, he's like, nipples are just anatomical things. They're just nipples and we're not using them as sex organs in this moment. Like she's being resuscitated. She needs to, like, you know what I mean? I could see it. Probably. But from, from a woman's perspective, like, this is a nightmare. Oh, this is a nightmare. And to find out that you've been enduring this. And there's a cast of seven people around her too. Oh, yeah. It's the whole cast. Not including the crew that would be around them as well. Exactly. So she had a very bad time. And she has spoken about the abyss. And I think one of the things she said is that the abyss was a lot of things fun is not one of them, or fun to make is not one of them. It's around this time that someone erases the abyss on a chalkboard on set and writes the

abuse. They also started making t-shirts and writing life's abyss and then you dive everywhere, which is pretty good. So the initial release of the film is supposed to be July 5th, 1989, but it is quickly becoming apparent to literally everyone they are not going to make that date. Fox is sending representatives out to just pop by the set, just, oh, I happen to be a gaffy, South Carolina. How's it going? Yeah. That's the nervous executive showing up. For frequent, frequent troubleshooting trips trying to find out why they're buying so many more wetsuits. The answer is the chlorine is eating food.

As they're shooting a scene where the control room of the submarine starts to flood, white goo starts to rise up from the floor. It turns out they've used water-soluble paste for some of the last portions of the set that they'd built. which they were doing quickly, uh, to glue down the tiles and now they're all coming off. So the whole floor is lifting up. There's just glue everywhere.

Then the generator goes out. Yeah. Plunging all of the actors into complete darkness for several minutes, which Michael Dean is talking about this. It, well, he's sitting there and he's like, oh, it's dark. I'm scared. And then he's like, oh, it's dark. I'm scared.

And no one can see me if I'm doing the I'm out of oxygen thing. Right. Oh, I can't see my oxygen gauge. Yeah. What am I going to do? And he's like, as he's starting. to spiral into complete terror, the power comes back on. But that's just, that's just like a, that's a

day on the set of the movies. Yeah, exactly. Now, the actors wrap up somewhere around Christmas, I believe, and then principal photography continues into March. Please remember they started shooting this in August. So what, so they must be shooting all the like bigger sets, scenes and stuff like that. And they also shot, so there actually is some. So it's four months of, like, with the main actors, then. At least. Yeah, exactly. Four or five months. That's crazy. It's nuts.

So Fox is shitting their pants right now because the only thing they've released so far this summer is weekend at Bernies. Oh, God. We were going to take you underwater, but instead we're taking you to Bernie. Yeah, we're taking you to a dead man we're going to carry around. So they're freaking out because they're losing all of the summer blockbuster dollars. This is all based around the fact that kids are out of school for the summer and the closer they push to the end of that, the more screwed they are. Cameron ends up forfeiting most of his salary to cover special effects. over overages. Now, he initially had Lucasfilm's industrial light and magic on board,

and they do end up building the water tentacle thing that they call like a pseudopod or something in the movie. Sure. And it does look great. The special effects in this, and in particular, that pseudopod thing are incredible and were super groundbreaking. This did actually win an Oscar for special effects, and deservedly so. However, they can't afford Lucasfilm for everything at this point because everything has cost more money. So he ends up bringing in a slightly cheaper effects company DreamQuest images to handle a lot of the rest of the effects. This is the same company that also worked on Escape from New York, which as we know, James Cameron worked on, so he's worked with them before. And they probably work a lot faster if they're doing, you know what I mean? Like the

escape from New York stuff's probably pretty quick. And there is, there is a huge quality difference between the sort of water tentacle thing that industrial light and magic does, which for those that don't know, that is a tentacle of Lucasfilm. And there's a big drop in quality between that and the rest of the underwater aliens. They still look good. They do, but not compared to the tentacle. They don't hold up. No.

The studio is panicking also because the movie is running quite long. They basically were like anything over two hours and ten minutes. And it's 220 is the final. The final is 220. That's what I mean. So I can't even imagine. It must have been three hours long. It was three hours.

So he's like, he's coming close to three hours. They're like, hell no. Cut this thing down. You're already, they're missing time for this being in theaters. And now he wants to make it so long that they're. can't do multiple showings in a day. That's the thing. Well, yeah, so that's a big thing that people don't think about is the longer your movie, the fewer times you can screen it during the day. So not only is it a harder sell to get people to come to a longer movie. You can't sell

as many tickets. If you go three hours, you can only show it, you know, 60% as often. So anyway, they order him to cut it down. James Cameron decides that it's easier to cut an entire subplot than to chip away at one, which I think he's right. So this was my question, because is that the movie feels, the movie's amazing for the first like 45 minutes. And then it starts to feel a little choppy until the ending. It's still really well done. But you can kind of feel that there's like, it's uneven, I guess, is how I would describe it. So I'm really curious what happened.

So for me, I had the same experience watching this because I watched this before. I'd done a lot of the research on it. And I felt the same way. I was like, damn, this is an amazing movie. And then the aliens showed up. And I was like, what? And the aliens were so kind of random. them and they were, they appeared so little in the movie that I was like, you only see them three

times. You see them three times. And that felt really strange. And it felt like a second movie. And that ended up being the response of most critics and audiences as well was that it felt like the last third of the movie is a different movie. Now, there is a reason for that. Everything he cut was alien related.

Oh. So there's a scene in the movie where Ed Harris is in the alien's ship. And he is kind of communicating with them. Yeah. There's a whole section of that where the aliens show what they're doing above ground and what they do because they know what the, what you realize when you see the longer edit is that the aliens are aware of the nukes. So it's basically contact. Yes. So the aliens decide to send the humans a little bit of a memo to maybe not blow up their underwater camp.

and they create a hundreds of foot tall wave that comes to every coast in the world. And you see this news footage of reporters being like, what is it? It looks like a wave. And it comes and it stops. And it looks actually great. It was a threat. Oh, cool. It looks amazing.

It comes right up and you think you're going to watch these aliens just wipe out everybody in Manhattan Beach or whatever they are. And it just stops. And then as the aliens are kind of continuing to show him, all of this sort of like horrifying stuff that humans have done. And as they're reasoning for why they're doing this, they then cut to what is in the movie, which is the sort of text message.

The love. And Harris sends his wife from underwater. And what it's implying there is that the aliens don't actually go through, aliens, the little underwater critters. They're aliens. They're not. They're on our planet. Anyway, the NTIs don't go through with their plan because they see,

the capability of humanity. They see that Ed Harris was willing to sacrifice himself to save his wife and his crew and people that he loved. So I guess because they like Ed Harris, they assume that all humans are Ed Harris. They're wrong, but they decide not to flood the world because of it.

So they then let the wave kind of go back. Oh, that's so interesting. Because I, yeah, I kind of had no idea what we were doing with that seeing the text in that scene. So that's, it's a whole thing. It's like the aliens are, they have a lot more

intention. They are making contact with them for a reason at this point because they're aware of the nukes. They're aware of what we're doing. They're keeping an eye on us. They already have this big old wave they're planning to flood everything with. Oh, got it. Cameron did claim that he had the idea for the script in a high school science class.

I mean, yeah, I read that. An excellent review from the Washington Post it said, is there any wonder it's wet but not deep. Great. Which is mean but true. So can we watch that version anywhere? I actually think you can.

I mean, you can certainly see parts of it in the under pressure documentary, but I believe there is an edit of it available. I would love to watch like a director's cut that has all of that crap in it. I'm sure Jimmy has released one. I'm sure he's got it at home. Oh, yeah. So finally it comes time to do press for the movie. Now, Fox does some market research and finds out that the majority of the American public not only doesn't know how to pronounce the word abyss. They also are not entirely sure what it means.

this becomes a very, very difficult film to promote. Now, a natural part of any film's promotion is press junkets, which generally is the actors. That's who people want to hear from. It comes time to do the press junkets. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth refuse. They're like, no, this was the worst thing I've ever worked on. I'm not talking about it. I'm not doing it. They obviously must have gotten some pressure put on them by the studio. Or some money. Or some money. At the last second, they agree to do one or two junkets. Now, Ed Harris famously responds to a reporter who asked about his treatment in the film saying, that's like asking a Vietnam War soldier how he was treated in Vietnam.

I'm sure all the vets around the world really appreciated. Yeah, it's a little different, Ed, but I understand where you're coming from. He's not wrong, but... No. So they famously kind of refused to really talk about any of the specifics. They just, they didn't want to do it. Michael Bean, who, as we've discussed, is a bit of a Cameron apologist, as well as as someone who is, you know, enjoys working with him, said, even he said they were insensitive

to actors of Ed and Mary's class. Windows were kicked in, cars were kicked in, people were howling at the moon. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Now, James Cameron, in retrospect, perhaps, because remember the documentary that we're hearing these clips from is from 1993, he's honest about the difficulty that actors had on set.

So let's hear what James Cameron had to say from 1993. about the treatment of actors on set. Four years later. Four years later. We had a kind of a bond during the production that consisted of me challenging them. And there were times when they, I'm sure, they hated my guts, but they hated the fact that I'd created this situation and seduced them into being there. And I was the architect of this misery.

Sounds like Serena Williams' dad talking about how he raised the two girls. Oh, no. So that's how he feels in 1993. And, you know, to his credit, he does acknowledge that it was a really tough shoot for everybody. Now, here's what he said in 1989 when he first heard the actors were publicly complaining about it. Quote, you know, life's a bitch. I got to tell you, I shed not one single tear for them because all the hours they're waiting. The crew is busting their backs.

So they had to put up with a little Greyhound bus station waiting. Poor babies. Actors are pampered in this country more than any other country in the world, end quote. It kind of sounds like the CEO who really secretly wants to do child labor in a different country. And he's like, yeah, you know, the workers in this country, they want to unionize, whoa, suck by. It's just a little tough. Yeah, he's a little tough. As Ed Harris put it, Jim is Jim.

And he'll just always be Jim. August 9th, 1989, the film ends up releasing to decent reviews and okay ticket sells, but it's nothing like Terminator or aliens. So it costs 70 million. What did it gross? It grossed over 90 million. I mean, listen. That's a flop. It's not.

It made its money back. I don't think that's technically possible. They say that it did. But who says that it did? Well, so Fox does swear up down and sideways that it made its money back. Maybe with home release, video release on top of it. I think it has. I think it broke even and then some.

So it's not like it was a disaster. No, no, no. But it certainly was not what they were expecting. Like, they expected aliens. Or Titanic, like what would later happen? And speaking of Titanic, everyone, actually including James Cameron, is adamant in articles from the time that they do not want to go through something like this shoot again, that it's horrible. And then eight years later, he will take on one of the most ambitious water-based movies of all time,

which is Titanic. And I can't wait to hear about how many people were peeing their pants in that one. I'll spoil it for you all of them. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man, the abyss. That's it. When I first saw this movie, I was 12, and I loved it. I thought it was, like, the best movie I'd ever seen.

It's honestly still a good movie. It's a good movie. But when I rewatched it now, you can really feel how tacked on the alien stuff feels as a result. Like, that's the one. Like, no, hearing the story, it makes a lot of sense because you can feel how tucked on that feels. It also feels to me like this movie really upset James Cameron because he goes on. to make Titanic, which does pull a lot from this. Like a lot of the shots of the submarines flooding and the ship's sinking are very similar

to how he shoots Titanic. I think he wants to go back and get it right. Right. And he does. Yeah. Clearly. And then there's also kind of the like sort of sci-fi disaster movie that's tied together by a love story, which we see again in Titanic.

We also see the sort of evil military versus aliens again in Avatar. It's interesting how he always has the evil. corporation or evil military angle in every one of his movies. And you go through all of them and they all tie in in that way. And like no one does a good military bad guy quite like James Cameron. That's true. And that's, even with Titanic, you're right, because it's the sort of military there is the company that built the ship that wants to push it forward.

It's always like the corporate stews or something like that. So we will get to Titanic in a little bit of James Cameron part two. Yeah. So, Chris, what do you feel like we've learned from this? For better or worse, a movie like that lives and dies on the director's willingness to just push things forward. Yeah. So, like, that movie would have been a lot worse with someone besides James Cameron directing it. Oh, it wouldn't have worked.

That's what I mean. But, and also, it might have been a lot more. pleasant. So I, it's tough to, like, I hate to say the ends justify the means in this instance, but there is a reason why James Cameron is very successful. And he's very good at what he does. And he can do it in a way that, like, I know I could never do. And I don't think a lot of people could. Yeah. Yeah. The, when they say, like, you need someone with a singular vision to push something, this is a good example of that. Yeah. I would say I've also learned, uh, peeing in your wetsuit, probably fine, pooping in your wetsuit, probably not as good.

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