The Cast * Synopsis * Interesting Facts * Behind the Scenes
To me, The Abyss is a perfect
mixture of adventure, emotions, and spirituality. It might not be
as action-packed as Star Wars, emotional
as Terms of Endearment, thought-provoking
as Out on a Limb or Betrayed…
But it has a bit of it all and does contribute, in my opinion, to the open-minded
viewer’s personal growth. I love The Abyss for being so daring,
yet highly entertaining. A beautiful ride!
Directed by… James Cameron
Written by… James Cameron
Music by… Alan Silvestri
Filming Dates: August 18, 1988 to January 1989
Filming Locations: Earl Owensby Studios (Gaffney, SC) and Harbor
Star Stage (San Pedro, CA)
Released on: August 9, 1989
Running Time: 146 minutes (171 minutes for the special edition)
Budget: $50 million
Box-Office: $54.2 million in the U.S., $46 million abroad
Rentals: $28.8 million in the U.S.
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Virgil "Bud" Brigman… Ed Harris
Lindsey Brigman… Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
Lieutenant Hiram Coffey… Michael Biehn
Catfish De Vries… Leo Burmester
Lisa "One Night" Standing… Kimberly Scott
Alan "Hippy" Carnes… Todd Graff
Jammer Willis… John Bedford Lloyd
"Sonny" Dawson… J.C. Quinn
When the crew of an underwater oil rig are enlisted to assist in the
rescue of an American nuclear submarine at the height of the Cold War,
they discover a strange and mysterious force living in the deep and their
rescue mission becomes an adventure into the wondrous and the unknown.
The
tank was filled to a depth of 40 feet, but there was still too much light
from the surface, so a giant tarpaulin and billions of tiny black plastic
beads were floated on the surface to block the light. During a violent
storm the tarpaulin was destroyed, thus shifting production to night time.Based on articles from Starlog Magazine (September 1989, January 1990), American Film Magazine (June 1989), and an interview by Michael Dare.
Once they've established themselves in Hollywood, many filmmakers finally produce tbat project which realizes a childhood dream. James Cameroon proved no exception. The director, who scored with Terminator and Aliens, planted the seeds for The Abyss at age 17, when he penned a high school short story which bore the same name as his recent film.
The idea for The Abyss came from a science experiment that James Cameron saw performed in high school, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, which he eventually turned into a short story. "There was a guy named Frank Felacek, a human guinea pig who actually breathed a liquid in both lungs," Cameron explained from his posh hotel suite in Beverly Hills. "They started with one lung and then the other. He thought he was going to die, and everyone got real nervous, so they pumped the stuff out of his lungs. It didn't work very well because a saline solution couldn't hold enough oxygen. But later they started experimenting with flourocarbon, and they've done it very successfully with dogs and monkeys. The FDA won't let them use it in human experimentation, so the research has sort of hit a wall, but the proposition is that if there was ever a strong enough military application for it, it would proceed again. In the film, when the rat breathes it, it's the real stuff, it's really happening, the rat is breathing flourocarbons."
"What I originally wrote was a very, very crude and simple story dealing with the idea of being in the very deep ocean and doing fluid breathing and making a descent to the bottom from a staging submersible laboratory that was on the edge," Cameron remembers.
"Being on the brink of the bottomless pit, and the title, and the psychological ramifications of returning to the womb, breathing a liquid and falling to your death while simultaneously going back to your birth, much of that symbology is inherent in that first story. That was taken and layered upon and expanded.”
"I originally conceived it as a story about a group of scientists in a laboratory at the bottom of the ocean, which is the sort of sci-fi idea that appeals to kids, I suppose. But once I had arrived in Hollywood, I quickly realized that a bunch of scientists aren't that commercial, so I changed it to a group of blue collar workers and made the whole thing more accessible to the average man on the street."
However, the film version of The Abyss almost never happened, though not due to its grand scope or equally inflated budgetary requirements. At the time, The Abyss may have been the most expensive motion picture ever made. The fate of an entire major studio (20th Century Fox) relied upon the success of this movie.
This movie was also unique in the sense that the story of a crumbling
relationship, as played by Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, seemed
to mirror that of James Cameron and his wife of four years, The Abyss
producer Gale Anne Hurd: "The second [draft did]. The script preceded any
personal problems. The situation almost prevented me from making the film
because of the scrutiny of my private life, which I protect. Then, I decided
I could deal with it, as I am now. It wasn't a big enough disincentive
to making the movie, which I wanted to do."
Gale Hurd and Cameron were divorced a couple of months after the completion of the film's principal photography. "Gale's levelheaded in a crisis and scrupulous to a fault," says Cameron. "She will hold you to the exact letter of a contract – and herself as well. I centered the screenplay on a marital relationship instead of scientific researchers, and I wasn't sure it was even producable. But Gale was emphatic: 'We muse make this.' " Although they'd been separated for some time, Gale Hurd stayed on to produce The Abyss. "Jim Cameron is as strong a director as exists, and he's got to have an equally strong producer," notes Stan Winston, makeup-special effects artist on The Terminator and Aliens. "She can stand up to him, and he knows he needs her."
"Techno-nerds need love too, and relationship people also live in a
technical world. I don't think there's a hard distinction between those
two groups. There's a big intersecting set of people in the middle who
both acknowledge that we live in a technological world and feel all those
normal human emotions that everybody feels. They have to address that in
their lives as well. I see it as a film for anybody living in the latter
half of the twentieth century who happens to be human, male or female.
I hope that's not too narrow a band."
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Cameron frequently spent 12-hour stints beneath the water in the tank of an unfinished nuclear reactor, where the better portion of his $50 million dream film was shot. "Twelve hours?” deadpans Cameron. "That's a big exaggeration. Eleven hours submerged. Imagine having a waste basket over your head for 11 hours. That's what it was like. A 28-pound waste basket."
"We had originally planned to try filming on location in the Bahamas where the story is set, but we soon realized that we had to have a totally controlled environment because of the stunts and special FX involved. So, I started looking around for alternatives, and when I heard about this place, I came out and immediately decided it would be possible to shoot The Abyss here instead."
It would seem only a maniac would go to such extremes to make an underwater epic of love and aliens. "Yeah, I think so. It's not a disease I've recently succumbed to just for this project. It has always been that way," Cameron claims. "Terminator and Aliens required that kind of energy, too. We had more resources at our disposal on this film and we had a greater challenge, so the net charge was zero. They always seem to balance out. You always seem to get exactly as much as you need and not any more."
For The Abyss, Cameron called upon more outside help than he ever had before. Still, he was the boss. The vision was his, too, but he left the logistics and designing to others. Turning over such important responsibilities didn't come easy. "It was a challenge, and it's one that I worked up to over the years. My first job in professional filmmaking was in special FX," remembers Cameron. "I was an FX cameraman. I have a little of the technical background and I speak a bit of the lingo. I also worked in production design. On Aliens, I did a lot of the design renderings, about a third of the film. On The Abyss, I delegated much more responsibility to other designers I knew and trusted. I worked through them.
"It was more of a verbal collaboration rather than my drawing what I wanted and their just refining the work. I waited for inspiration from them. I told them what I wanted and painted a word picture. Then, I let the drawings come back and I selected from among them the different elements I thought worked. They went to a second or third generation which finally had the look we wanted. The next stage of the challenge was to create that physical world. A whole different set of people come into play at that point. You try to find the best people you can. It was a long, grueling process, as it always is.
On
the set itself, when production commenced, the pressures continued to mount.
Concepts had to become realities. Each mistake cost time and money. If
an actor dove incorrectly into the water and splashed the camera, the take
had to be done again. If a submerged light blew, hours passed before shooting
resumed. These and countless other major and minor dilemmas - including
weather conditions, timing miscalculations, etc. - forced Cameron to be
"on" every moment. The price exacted for his clarity of vision was a reputation
as a tough, strict director.
For years, Ed Harris has publicly chastised director James Cameron for putting his life at risk during the filming of The Abyss.
"Ed and Mary Elizabeth had to dive again and again into cold water. Sometimes we'd sit in a submersible for eight hours before the cameras rolled. You can't comprehend how hard it is to work on a Jim Cameron movie,” says Michael Biehn, who also appeared in Aliens and The Terminator. "Jim was impassioned, almost in a trance sometimes. I don't think Gale and Jim quite realize how frustrating it is to get into makeup and costume, then spend the whole day waiting around."
Michael Biehn didn't know about most of the technical problems that caused at least some of the misery. Obviously, Hurd and Cameron elected to insulate the performers, which inevitably put them under an even greater strain.
"On the first day of shooting, the main water tank sprang a leak," Hurd relates. "One-hundred-and-fifty-thousand gallons a minute rushed out – it sounded like Niagara Falls. We called in dam-repair experts, who used a special epoxy to seal it without our having to drain the tank." Water hassles of a staggering variety continued throughout the shoot.
"No one had ever worked in that amount of water before," Hurd continues. "We had problems with chlorine, and tremendous ones with clarity. The water was pumped from an algae-filled lake and went through a filtration process before reaching the tanks. Nonetheless, within a couple of hours it could become so murky we couldn't shoot. On the ocher hand, sometimes the water was so crystalline it was invisible, whereupon artificial bubbles and waves had to be created."
If that wasn't enough, "we had enormous pipes, with elbow fittings that had been improperly installed. There was so much pressure going through them that the elbows would blow of. Under those conditions, water becomes a lethal projectile. We were afraid we wouldn't be able to turn (it) off."
Because of unpredictable water visibility, the actors were kept poised
to shoot any time – dry or wet, day or night. If water became cloudy, they
went topside, dried of and kept going. The cast could barely leave their
hotel rooms and sometimes were kept on the set all day without working.
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"There was a direct conflict between my desire to do the best possible scene and my terror that someone might get hurt," says Cameron. "Most underwater photography uses ambient light, but ours was completely artificial. When the electricity would go – which happened three or four times – it was pitch black, and the communications system died with the power." Biehn describes what it was like, lace one night, when the lights went out: "It was [absolutely dark], and in the water you have no sense of direction whatsoever. I knew my air was good for 10 or 15 minutes. But everyone had a different level of air and who knew how long we'd be down there?..."
Blackouts were especially traumatic for the actors because they only wore weighted boots to help them move around on the bottom of the tank. If they had run out of air, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to hold their breath long enough to shed their gear and get to the surface.
As insurance, each actor was accompanied at all times by a "bodyguard" (safety diver), and every other extant safety device was available. Additionally, after the first blackout, battery-powered underwater lamps were taken into the water and a procedural drill instituted. In fact, there was not a single accident.
Another detail that triggered the rage of Ed Harris was the fact that there was no hidden breathing apparatus in the suit when the actor seems to be breathing liquid rather than air in a diving outfit that's full of water.
"He just had to hold his breath for a long time," said James Cameron. "Any hidden breathing apparatus would have leaked, so there would have been bubbles coming up all the time. Ed didn't like it. It was very uncomfortable, but I don't think it was ever really dangerous. In the film, you see the helmet seal down into a neck ring that looks like one integral unit. In actuality, the whole faceplate popped open on a hinge and he would just breath through a standard regulator. When we were ready for the take, the regulator would be removed, the bubbles would be cleared away, and the faceplate would be closed. It had a very delicate latch that could be easily over-ridden if necessary. It took a lot of nerve, but Ed did almost all his own stunts. The wider shots where he's tumbling down the wall are the only places where we doubled him."
"I'm
very specific. That's my way of saying it. I have a very high number of
actors who want to work with me again. I think when they see the end result,
their view is usually a little different than it may have been," suggests
Cameron. "I'm pretty high energy on the set. I'm usually fighting a schedule
that, given the difficulty of what we're doing, is tight. I'm not saying
140 days [for The Abyss] is a tight schedule, but given some of
the things we were trying to do, where it would take an entire day to light
a set-up because you're working with 45 HMIs [lights] and 30 divers, it
is tight.
"There was no time to experiment. Basically, I put my faith in the script and in the actors' ability to interpret the material creatively. I'm certainly not inflexible, but the contract I make with the actors is this: The rehearsal period will be out creative period, where we will make our major changes. If you have a proposal, make it then. If you want to alter your character, do it then. If you want to change the course of a scene, do it then. We will incorporate it, and I will be able to make my plan for shooting based on the rehearsal.
"Some actors embrace that. Others don't," Cameron notes. "Others wait for the inspiration of the moment, and if it is good and if it is possible to incorporate what they come up with, I will do it, I will break the plan. But to make a schedule and plan very complex scenes like we were doing, where there are many special FX, you have to stick to the plan."
Directing, then, can be an especially lonely task, even if hundreds of people mill around day in and day out. "It is a very strange situation. Any director who claims he made a movie himself is an idiot. You rely very, very heavily on the very best people that you can get and you rely on them to shoulder the responsibility of their immediate area,” he says. "If it is the image, it is the director of photography. I put a great, great deal of faith in my DP on The Abyss, Mikael Salomon, who, I think, is one of the world's great DPs. Other people like Al Giddings, our underwater cameraman, I relied heavily on, on his strength, his knowledge, his support, his experience.
"On the other hand, there's a kind of catalytic center to all these people working together. [Director] Walter Hill told me a story about how he once got sick and had to leave his set. He left his crew with one set-up to do. It was a simple close-up on a 50 millimeter lens. He told them the lens and what he wanted, and he left. It took them three hours to do something that should have taken a half-hour.
"There basically must be, and I think this is true in human dynamics, someone to say, 'Do it that way.' It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. The trick in directing," according to Cameron, "is probably the trick in any operation where you have that responsibility. You make a decision, right or wrong, and you follow it through without equivocation, or else you lose the crew's faith. That will ultimately take its toll. It's one of those things where even if you have doubts, you have to play the hand. People call me a perfectionist, but I'm not. I'm a rightist. I do something until it's right, and then I move on to the next thing."
During The Abyss' shoot, James Cameron often found himself hanging upside down underwater watching dailies while decompressing after 11 hours below the surface. The moment he wrapped one shot and felt he had something useable in the can, he moved on to the next set-up. "Yet, while you are shooting that first shot, you are thinking of what the next set-up will be, where you will move the camera to, what the shot after that will be, how long the actors have been in the water, how long the camera people have been in the water, how close is lunch, how much air do I have left," Cameron says.
"In other words, you really don't have time to get a perspective on
the whole thing. Infrequently, there would be a point where, say, we were
waiting for some element that had failed. Maybe they had to take the ROV
[remotely operated vehicle] out of the water and repair it, so it was easier
for me to just wait on the bottom for 15 or 20 minutes, and I would look
around at what I thought of as a big train set and then I may have had
a chance to reflect on it all and say, 'This is insane.' "
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While The Abyss came together, Sean Cunningham's Deep Star Six opened and sank quickly at the box office. Another challenger in the underwater sweepstakes, George Pan Cosmatos' Leviathan, cost millions more than the low-budget Deep Star Six, but met a similar fate.
"Even if there was a tangible effect on the box office success of The Abyss, it is totally irrelevant to me as a filmmaker what these other films were doing. I'm not living in a cave," says Cameron. "I hired Ron Cobb as a designer for some of this picture's hardware. He worked with me on Aliens, so it was a natural for me to go back to him. In the meantime, l knew he had worked on Leviathan. I said, 'Ron, don't tell me anything about that movie. I don't want to know, don't want to know negatively or positively. But if I ask you to design something in a certain way and it's similar to something in Leviathan, say so and we'll do something different. Don't tell me what you did, just tell me if I get inadvertently close to an area.' I let him be the judge. I haven't seen Leviathan, so I don't really know the results of our experiment. I didn't look at the rest of the movies. I didn't think of them as competition.”
But they were.
"I'm sure they were. They were competition in that there are X numbers of dollars to be spent and people will decide how they want to spend them. But you can't think competitively as an artist or as a writer. You certainly cannot create a good story by thinking about what the other stories are. The characters tell me the story."
The director appears totally unfazed by the suggestion that the marketplace might already be saturated by underwater epics. "I simply don't worry about things like that," says Cameron. "It's always like that in Hollywood, there are a bunch of people trying to make a similar film. Last year, it was the 'body-switch' theme, and look what happened to Big even though it was the fourth or fifth one. And the year before, it was 'science project' films. You just have to ignore everyone else and concentrate on what you are doing and make it the most original, most exciting film you can."
An actor Cameron relies on often to breathe life into his characters is Michael Beihn, who battled Arnold Schwartzenegger in Terminator, assisted Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, and plays the antagonist of The Abyss. Cameron laughs at the suggestion that Biehn is always playing his alter-ego.
"He is much better looking than I am. In a way, every character you write is an alter-ago in one way or another," Cameron suggests. "Whether it is Michael's characters or Linda Hamilton's character in Terminator or Sigourney Weaver's character in Aliens or Mary's character here or the blue collar guys on the oil rig or even the greatest heroes, you fantasize yourself into all these different people as a writer.”
Even Schwarzenegger?
"Listen, when I originally got the idea for Terminator, I was sick, I was broke, I was in Rome, I had no way to get home and I could not speak the language. I was surrounded by many people I could not get help from,” says Cameron of his days after shooting his first movie, Piranha II, in Italy. "I felt very alienated and it was very easy for me to imagine myself as a machine with a gun. At the point of the greatest alienation in my life, it was easy to create the character. About the only characters I could not relate to would be the monsters in Aliens, although I tried to humanize the alien queen a little bit. She was just trying to protect her babies.”
Many
directors shoot just enough footage to tell their story, but James Cameron
tends to film more than he can cram into a release print. The Abyss
runs nearly two hours and 20 minutes in its final form. Cameron screened
a two-hour-and-50-minute version for 20th Century Fox executives, who then
recommended he trim a half-hour. Mary-Elizabeth Mastrantonio publicly expressed
regret that some of the footage deleted contained important emotional moments
which further established the Harris/Mastrantonio relationship. "There
were some beautiful scenes that were taken out," Mary Elizabeth says. "I
just wish we hadn't shot so much that isn't in the film." Ed Harris has
said he too misses the footage Cameron cut, arguing that if the film's
core is the love story between his oil rig team leader and Mastrantonio's
tough rig designer, then more time should have been devoted to it.
The director's cut would fortunately resurface years later, to the delight of all. James Cameron insists that the first ending to be released in theaters, in which the NTls' underwater city rises to the surface – dredging up Harris' damaged rig, several ships, and Harris and his crew, who suffer no ill effects from not decompressing – delivers the message as he wished.
“What emerges in the winnowing process is only the best stuff. And I think the overall caliber of the film is improved by that,” Cameron maintains. "I only cut two minutes of Terminator. On Aliens, we took out much more. I even reconstituted some of that in a special [TV] release version.
"The sense of something being missing on Aliens was greater for me than on The Abyss, where the film just got consistently better as the film got along. The film must function as a dramatic, organic whole. When I cut the film together, things that read well on paper, on a conceptual level, didn't necessarily translate to the screen as well. I felt I was losing something by breaking my focus. Breaking the story's focus and coming off the main characters was a far greater detriment to the film than what was gained. The film keeps the same message intact at a thematic level, not at a really overt level, by working in a symbolic way.”
As with any action film attempting to develop a relationship angle, there are traps. Certain cliches go hand in hand with the genre. In one sequence, Mastrantonio begs Harris not to free dive to another vessel. The dialogue runs along the lines of: "Somebody has to go." "Why you?" "Somebody has to do it, and I'm that somebody."
Cameron smiles.
"I never thought of [that dialogue] as a necessary evil. Maybe I should have a talk with the writer,” he laughs, “tell him to come up with better stuff. For me, it felt organic to the moment. I tend not to be worried too much about what other films have done. If a moment works, for me, it works."
Yet, in such a massive movie, Cameron still found room for several of the exposition-type scenes Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio lamented losing. In one, Ed Harris snores loudly while lying on his back. Mastrantonio, sitting just in front of her soon-to-be ex-husband, simply and knowingly says, “Virgil, turn on your side,” which he immediately does. “You have to fight for moments like that because the conventional wisdom would say, `Your film is too long. You have a boring moment where nothing is happening, take it out,' ” Cameron says. "But it was such an important moment. It had to be there. You had to show the mileage between these two people.
“I've seen the film with paying audiences, and I was terrified before it started, not really knowing how people were going to respond,” admits Cameron. “When they applauded the scene in which Ed brings Mary back to life, I felt good. That, to me, is the picture's heart. If you buy that scene, you will buy him, you will buy her, and hopefully what happens after that scene will make sense.”
Cameron also found satisfaction in the lack of applause following Biehn's
demise. “That was important. We tried to humanize him and evoke a little
feeling of pathos for a guy under the strain of his overdeveloped sense
of duty,” Cameron says. “That the audience doesn't always cheer in that
rock-'em, sock-'em action movie way actually meant the film works tonally.
The
Abyss does not strike me as an audience participation picture like
Terminator
and Aliens. In a way, that is good, really.”
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"Most people think if you're doing a story about human contact with a bad monster, it's going to be Alien, and if you're doing a story about human contact with an intelligent species from another place that's mysterious and strange, it's going to be Close Encounters. I refuse to accept the idea that there are only two choices left and nobody else can make a film on any subject even remotely similar. E.T. and Close Encounters are amazing and beautiful films. This film uses the concept in a different way.
It's a very positive, hopeful film with a message - that we have to change if we're to survive as a species. It's about contact with a superior force, an ultimate force that has the power to judge us, and it's a love story."
"I think this is a less cynical picture than my others. I've always been very positive about people and negative about trends. This film has the same kind of balance between positiveness and paranoia. There's still the paranoia of nuclear weapons, the potential for war, even though we're in a 'glasnost' period. As long as the president of the United States is the ex-head of the CIA, and the premiere of Russia is the ex-head of the KGB, there's a limit to how much you can really relax. Ultimately, it's a more optimistic picture because it deals with people I see as positive role models."
James Cameron has said was the most difficult film he ever made. " I was running for 18 months on The Abyss. The body has to catch up to the fact that you no longer have this great pressure. There's a great relief, actually, in releasing The Abyss to the public. And the version you saw is the one that satisfies me the most."
"I knew this was going to be a hard shoot, but even I had no idea just
how hard. I don't ever want to go through this again. It has been a long,
tough shoot, but I know it's worth it."
