Early on, Cameron ruled out shooting The Abyss on the ocean. Even before Jaws tripled its $4 million budget, Hollywood had dismissed filming on open water as foolhardy. Storms and tides destroy sets, underwater wildlife can both endanger and be endangered during filming, salt water corrodes everything, and visibility is a day-to-day concern. Cameron needed a tank, a controllable environment in which to build Deepcore and his other underwater sets. But despite surveying available tanks everywhere from Europe to the Caribbean, he couldn’t find one big enough to create the grand-scale realism he wanted. At least until he got an invitation from Earl Owensby, the so-called drive-in king of the South and producer of such regionally successful B movies as Rottweiler: Dogs of Hell and Chain Gang. Owensby had recently bought the never-completed Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant (outside Gaffney, South Carolina), which he intended to turn into an independent movie studio. The producer thought the plant’s large, rectangular turbine pits might be just the place for Cameron to construct his underwater sets, so the director and Giddings flew to South Carolina to assess the site.
Gaffney is ninety minutes from Charlotte. It has one main drag with a few fast-food restaurants, one movie theater, and the local landmark—a water tower in the shape of a giant peach. The day Cameron and Giddings arrived was cold, windy, and spitting rain. Owensby toured his guests around the power plant, which was composed of several warehouses and offices connected by weed-strewn concrete paths and littered with hunks of never-installed equipment. Cameron, by now a veritable connoisseur of forgotten industrial sites, was impressed enough by the turbine pits Owensby was proposing for his film. But in the distance he could see something really intriguing—a giant concrete bowl. From afar it looked something like the Roman Coliseum. Would Owensby take them over there? The massive cylinder half a mile away was to have been the nuclear reactor’s containment vessel. Only half finished and still studded with rebar, it was 240 feet in diameter with eighty-foot-tall walls and no entrance. Parked beside the enormous tub was the construction crane that had been used to build it. Cameron and Giddings, who had his Nikon camera slung around his neck, exchanged a look and started climbing up the 110-foot crane. In the rain and wind, the two men clambered out onto the jib and took in the view of what would eventually become known as A Tank, their home for ten harrowing weeks. The longer they stared, the more certain they were that this massive basin could work. They discussed building the Deepcore set, where they could put the cliff face, constructing a dive platform, and how they could create a viewing and a control room. Before they climbed down off the crane, they had their plan all mapped out. It would involve pouring thousands of yards of structural concrete and installing enormous filtration systems and pumps and a row of twenty-thousand-Btu heaters to warm the 7.5 million gallons the tank would hold to a comfortable temperature. What they were planning wasn’t just the largest underwater set ever built; it was a feat of industrial engineering. When Cameron returned to L.A., he showed Hurd his photos from the trip. “Isn’t this great?” he enthused. “Great for what?” Hurd asked, bewildered by a picture of a bowl filled with red, muddy water. “To make the film,” Cameron said. By now, Hurd knew Cameron well enough to think, This is crazy, and he can probably do it. But neither of them had any idea how hard it would be.
Bud and Lindsey
At the heart of The Abyss is a relationship rare to find in any studio movie, an absolute curio in the action genre, and, in the late 1980s, the last thing anybody expected from a sci-fi technician like Cameron: a realistically troubled marriage. This guy was supposed to be dreaming up the next intergalactic war, not penning a fable about the complexity of human connection. And yet, somewhere between meeting aliens and preventing World War III, The Abyss’s estranged spouses, Bud and Lindsey Brigman, take one last look at each other and rediscover the goodness they had forgotten after years of laboring side by side on Deepcore.
It’s a testament to the brilliant performances of the actors who play the Brigmans, Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, that the most electrifying moment in this movie involves not extraterrestrials or careening subs, but Bud trying to revive his drowned wife. The lone special effects are Harris’s pleading blue eyes and Mastrantonio’s unflinching brown ones. A long list of actors were floated for the role of Bud—Mel Gibson, Dennis Quaid, William Hurt, Harrison Ford, Kurt Russell, Patrick Swayze. Though Harris had proved his heroic mettle as John Glenn in The Right Stuff in 1983, he had no real marquee value and Twentieth Century Fox didn’t see him as a leading man. The studio was concerned about the actor’s receding hairline, a trait Cameron thought added to his everyman appeal. “I don’t much care what an actor’s past roles have been or what his star power might be,” Cameron says. Wearing a motorcycle helmet doubling as a dive helmet, Harris delivered a screen test that sealed the deal. “He was Bud, from the second he started to read. He had the relatability the strength of character, the physicality to play a diver.” And of course there were those piercing blue eyes, which lent Bud intelligence and depth beyond his aw-shucks first impression.
Lindsey would be another one of Cameron’s spiky heroines, whose arrival on the rig is heralded by a Deepcore crew member as the coming of the “queen bitch of the universe.” The actress who played her would have to be believable as someone smart enough to have designed an oil rig and open-minded enough to receive the alien communiqué everyone else is too blocked to see. She would need to be photographed wet and disheveled with very little makeup. And she would have to be willing to spend six months paddling around in tanks. Casting suggestions included Kathleen Quinlan, Jessica Lange, Debra Winger, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Barbara Hershey But Mastrantonio had turned in two recent performances that suggested she possessed the strength the role required—as Al Pacino’s fiery sister in Scarface in 1983 and as Tom Cruise’s tough-talking pool-hall gal in 1986’s The Color of Money. As Lindsey, Mastrantonio had to play a huge spectrum of emotions—courage, terror, awe, loss. Both she and Harris would have to learn to dive and would film many of their own underwater stunts. Both actors were deeply impressed by Cameron when they were cast and excited to get to work. By the end of the movie, they would have wanted to kill him at least a dozen times.
The authenticity of the Brigmans’ marriage also owes quite a bit to Cameron’s writing. This is a love story from someone who knows how working next to your partner day after day can somehow simultaneously breed both respect and contempt. As he prepared to film The Abyss, Cameron’s own marriage to Hurd was falling apart. While he researched underwater cameras and gear and rewrote drafts of his script, she produced Alien Nation, and husband and wife retreated into their own separate projects. By the time he was fully into preproduction on The Abyss in December 1987, Cameron and Hurd had separated. Their personal relationship had suffered irreparably. But Cameron could think of no one he would rather have produce his demanding underwater action film than his soon-to-be-ex-wife. “So we wound up working together under pressure,” Cameron says. “But I didn’t meet any aliens and we didn’t get back together.”
The rest of the Deepcore oil-rig crew were mainly character actors cast out of New York City. A month before the start of production, they underwent diving training on the same boat Cameron and Hurd had chartered on their honeymoon, the Cayman Aggressor. The goal was to get the actors working as a team before they had to play one on camera. One cast member, it soon became clear, had lied at his audition and didn’t actually know how to swim. But most were like giddy young soldiers about to march off to war—anxious to get their hands on the gear and learn how to use it. Harris, who had been cast last and was still filming another movie, couldn’t attend the training in the Caribbean and so got scuba-certified in a lake near his other film location. By the end of the shoot, Harris would be the most accomplished of the cast underwater, strong enough, Giddings says, to hold his own with professional divers, and all without having spent one minute in the actual ocean.
For his villain, Lieutenant Coffey, the l
eader of the Navy SEALs, Cameron cast old friend Michael Biehn, who had played heroic characters for him in The Terminator and Aliens. Biehn read an early draft of the screenplay and sought an explanation for Coffey’s increasingly reckless behavior. He convinced Cameron to add that Coffey was falling victim to high-pressure nervous syndrome—a disorder from breathing high-pressure gases that results in tremors, nausea, and decreased mental functioning. Biehn grew a mustache to look more menacing than the baby-faced good guys he had played before. Along with the three other actors cast as the SEALs, he underwent a different training, to learn discipline and a military mind-set. Cameron had now assembled his two families—the Deepcore crew and the SEALs—and he wanted each bonded as a unit.
Endless Night
Much of the equipment Cameron would need to realize his vision for The Abyss didn’t yet exist. The director wanted his actors’ faces clearly visible in the underwater sequences, but conventional diving gear covers the whole face, revealing just the eyes. Ron Cobb, who had helped Cameron design many of the memorable vehicles in Aliens, drew a concept dive helmet with a clear faceplate, so the actors’ every subtle facial movement would show. A Santa Barbara company called Western Space and Marine (WSM) manufactured Cobb’s design. One of the things Cameron wanted to achieve on The Abyss was the first recorded underwater dialogue in a motion picture. For a number of reasons, this was going to be a knotty problem. A typical regulator—the piece of dive gear that supplies the air—fits into the diver’s mouth and wouldn’t allow the actors to speak their dialogue. For The Abyss, WSM built the regulator into the side of the helmet Ron Cobb had designed, cycling fresh air as needed without a mouthpiece, freeing the actors to talk. To record the dialogue, microphones normally used in fighter aircraft helmets were incorporated into the WSM helmets. The special helmets were made for all the principal actors and for Cameron. To distinguish the director’s helmet from the others, the company painted it with multiple colors and a big star on each side. Wearing it, Cameron resembled Captain America’s skinny, scuba-diving sidekick. An underwater PA system was created so that Cameron—and only Cameron—could be heard by the cast and crew. “Jim enjoyed that,” says Giddings. “It was a total dictator system.” The cast and crew heard not just Cameron’s orders but his every Darth Vader–like breath on his regulator. At a twentieth-anniversary screening of The Abyss, the production’s sound mixer, Lee Orloff, recalled that for months after filming finished, “I would wake up in a cold sweat, hearing Jim’s breathing.” When the crew needed to communicate with Cameron underwater, they did so through hand signals. Since the clapping of the film slate—the traditional way moviemakers synchronize the picture and sound in a scene—couldn’t be heard in the tank, a crew member would instead crack the slate on an actor’s helmet. It was one of the milder indignities the cast would endure on this unusual shoot.
Before The Abyss, underwater motion-picture lighting was purely a practical consideration—was there enough illumination to get a good exposure? A cinematographer, who was primarily expected to rely on ambient light, could rarely consider aesthetic sensibilities about shadow, balance, or mood. But this movie was to take place in the black depths of the ocean, where no light penetrates. Ambient lighting would ruin that illusion and reveal the confines of the tank that housed the sets. Therefore, all lighting in The Abyss had to appear to come from practical sources on Deepcore, the subs, or the divers themselves. For help determining how to light the deep ocean realistically, Cameron dispatched his friend John Bruno, a visual-effects artist who had helped create the apparitions in Poltergeist and Ghostbusters, to the Cayman Islands with some still cameras and a couple of subs. Bruno dived down seven hundred feet and acquired images of the blue-black undersea world. These would serve as inspirational documents for Cameron and his crew, which now included Mikael Salomon as the director of photography on land and the underwater lighting supervisor. Now they just had to get their hands on hundreds of lights bright enough to illuminate the massive sets and safe and reliable enough to stick in a giant bowl of water with thirty people swimming around in it. Most of the existing lights designed for underwater use didn’t have enough candlepower for the job. Richard Mula and Pete Romano, two engineers at an El Segundo, California, company called HydroImage, created for Cameron a powerful 1,200-watt metal halide lamp called the SeaPar. After The Abyss, the SeaPar went on to be used in countless other movies, from Michael Bay’s Armageddon to National Geographic nature films. It became the only underwater lighting NASA allows in the indoor pool in Houston where it trains its astronauts in weightlessness. And it earned Mula and Romano a special Oscar for technical achievement. Of course, back on The Abyss set no one had much time to think about making movie history. It was on to the next technical problem, of which there were plenty.
A still body of water reflects everything. Once A Tank was filled, the entire set would be mirrored on the underside of the surface, ruining the illusion of being thousands of feet underwater. The filmmakers needed some kind of cover to help maintain the appearance of endless night. Several different ideas were considered—a canvas tarp of some kind, it was assumed, would be the best approach. But the winning plan was an unusual one that passed a test on a sunny afternoon in Giddings’s swimming pool in Berkeley, California. Giddings got his hands on a giant barrel of black propylene beads about the size of BBs, which are normally used as filler in molding fiberglass products. He built a small, floating grid to contain the beads on the surface of his pool. From above, they looked like fresh blacktop road cover. From below, the beads blocked out all the light and blue sky. This cover allowed a diver to burst through in case of an emergency; if a lighting cable or a steel I beam penetrated the surface, the beads would immediately collect around the form, blocking any light. The production ordered forty thousand dollars’ worth of the little black beads. It was a novel and ingenious solution. The only problem Giddings’s swimming pool test failed to predict was that the crew would be pulling beads out of their ears, their noses, and every conceivable fold of their bodies for the next three months.
Early on, clearing the film’s countless engineering hurdles was fun for Cameron. Making The Abyss was when he rediscovered just how much he enjoyed hands-on science. Although he had abandoned the subject as a vocation in college, the director was now returning to the family trade with the help of his brother Mike, who had spent the past fourteen years as a mechanical engineer. Mike’s biggest contribution to The Abyss was something called the SeaWasp. Cameron needed a way to move the camera underwater smoothly and quickly, to achieve the kind of dramatic tracking shots for which filmmakers normally rely on dolly track or cranes. He tried mounting his camera on various diver propulsion vehicles but found them limited—he wanted to be able to aim the camera separately from the path of the scooter. As a solution, Mike Cameron built a vehicle powerful enough to tow two divers at nearly three knots and nimble enough to rise or descend while allowing the camera operator to stay on the subject. The SeaWasp DPV would earn the Cameron brothers their first of five patents on technical filmmaking equipment. Not much had changed since the Cameron boys’ raucous, competitive youth. On The Abyss, the director cast Mike as a drowned corpse. At twenty-five feet below the surface, Mike had to lie with his eyes open and a live crab in his mouth. When his brother called action, Mike was to let the crab out. The shot took five takes. “Two times, I had to crush the crab because Jim was taking too long setting the lights,” Mike says. “I’m sure it was a sheer delight for him.”2
“Welcome to My Nightmare”
The art department moved to Gaffney in April 1988 to start building Deepcore. The turbine pits, which Cameron had originally come to Gaffney to scout, would be used to shoot miniatures and subs and would be referred to as B Tank. Production was supposed to begin in A Tank on August 8, but thanks to engineering delays in preparing the tank, Deepcore was nowhere near done. While he waited, Cameron started shooting what he could in B Tank and on dry sets. “Hello, boys,” he
greeted the crew on the first day of production. “Welcome to my nightmare.” By early September, Deepcore—the main set and the site of the most complex underwater action sequences—still wasn’t finished. Since it would take five days just to fill A Tank with water from a nearby lake and additional time to heat and filter it, Cameron decided to start pouring water into A Tank with the workers still inside it. As the water rose beneath them, painters stood on skiffs, working day and night to finish the set before it became submerged. When construction finally finished, the crew faced maddening new delays—thunderstorms, pipe ruptures, water clarity problems. A Tank was so big that it actually had its own weather. Some mornings the crew would arrive to find it too murky to shoot. Some local Gaffney goats even showed up, wandering into B Tank, chewing equipment, tumbling off the walls, and relieving themselves—fate was literally pissing all over this production.
The Futurist Page 10