The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  Shoot days on The Abyss averaged fifteen to eighteen hours. When filming underwater, the crew was typically at about thirty feet deep, or two atmospheres. An underwater filling station was built to enable Cameron and the cast—with their unusual and cumbersome dive helmets—to fuel up on oxygen underwater, saving time and hassle and enabling them to stay down for up to five hours at a time. It took a while to get the pH levels in the tanks right—initially, there was too much chlorine, and crew members’ hair started falling out and changing colors and their skin was burning. During breaks, the cast and crew emerged from the tanks shaky and unstable, like moon men readjusting to Earth’s gravity. Immediately, they climbed into plastic hot tubs that were set up topside to warm them back up. After that many hours in the water, even in wet suits, they were chilled and clammy. Twentieth Century Fox considered the hot tubs an indulgence and gave Hurd a hard time about purchasing them, but as production moved into fall and winter, the hot tubs became the only place at the desolate industrial site that was warm enough for the crew to eat lunch or hold meetings. People grew exhausted and irritable and started coming down with ear and sinus infections. Someone erased the words “The Abyss” from a blackboard on set and instead wrote “The Abuse.”

  Decompression was a concern, especially for the principals like Cameron and Giddings, who were spending the most time under water. Their long daily immersions at relatively shallow depths were unusual and not something covered by standard navy dive tables. Dr. Peter Bennett, an expert on the physiology of diving, visited the set to advise the filmmakers on how much their bodies could take. At the end of the day, Cameron and Giddings often had to hang ten feet under the surface for an hour to adjust to the pressure difference. Never one to waste time, Cameron asked the crew to install a monitor in the control room so he could watch his dailies through the acrylic window while suspended on a line. When his neck was sore from his helmet, he hung upside down and had the crew invert the monitor. He asked Orloff to patch phone calls from the studio through to his helmet so he could to talk to Fox executives while he decompressed. After a draining eighteen-hour day, the few lingering cast and crew members heading home would stop and take one last look in the viewing room window at their director, clinging to the line like a bat on a branch and still at work. “I was stunned by Jim’s allegiance to the project and the extent of his physical abilities,” says Giddings, who had worked in the water all his life and was about sixty pounds heavier than Cameron. “I’m a big guy, strong and capable, and this was my world. Jim was there for every minute of it. It was beyond belief his commitment to what we were doing.” Bennett recommended that the crew who were spending the longest hours underwater breathe pure oxygen through a mask for half an hour every night when they got home. So Cameron would sprawl on the bed at the house he had rented in Gaffney eating his dinner and breathing pure O2. Often he’d wake up the next morning fully dressed, in exactly the same position, with his dinner plate on his chest and the mask on his face.

  “A Classic Clusterfuck”

  The space-age helmets the actors wore were unwieldy—they weighed up to forty pounds and required a dive-tech assistant to remove them at the surface. When underwater, each actor had a dedicated safety diver watching his or her every move. The safety divers, or “angels” as they were known on the set, wore long fins and could swim in from off camera in a second or two to provide air if something went wrong. There was only one diver working in a helmet with no angel—Cameron. The director was also weighted with an extra forty pounds at his waist and ankles so that he could walk around the bottom of the tank with the camera. Cameron could go for about an hour and fifteen minutes on a single fill of oxygen. Because he tended to get absorbed in his work, he asked his assistant director to warn him when it had been an hour since his last fill. A few weeks into the production, Cameron was talking Mastrantonio through a shot; the actress was about twenty feet away. Giddings, about thirty feet away, was lining up the shot with his back to Cameron. All the other divers were at the surface or rigging lights off in the distance. As Cameron spoke to Mastrantonio, he took a breath and got no air. Perplexed, he looked down at his pressure gauge, which read zero. The AD had forgotten to give Cameron the requested one-hour warning. The director’s helmet was attached to his buoyancy vest. He knew if he removed it, it would lose its bubble of air and become a forty-pound anchor—between the helmet and the waist and ankle weights he was wearing, Cameron would be eighty pounds negative. With the extra weight and no fins, there was no way he could swim to the surface. Hmm. This didn’t look good. But he still had the microphone in his helmet linked to the underwater PA system. And Giddings was down there with him. So Cameron called to him, “Al … Al … I’m in trouble.” The running joke on the set had been that all the other divers had to cover their ears all day long while Cameron yelled, “Al! Al! Pan left!” because the DP had ruptured both eardrums in a diving-bell accident twenty years earlier and was all but deaf from the scar tissue. Funny, but not this time. Unable to rouse Giddings, Cameron looked around for the support divers. “Guys, I’m in trouble,” he said, using up the rest of the air in his lungs. He made the sign for being out of air, a cutthroat motion across the neck and a fist to the chest. Nothing. At the bottom of a 7.5-million-gallon tank, in the dark, thirty-five feet from the surface, Cameron really was in trouble. He knew he had to ditch his rig or die.

  Up in the control room, Orloff had noticed the director wasn’t sounding like himself. Suddenly the sound mixer heard Cameron’s helmet being popped off and all the expensive electronics inside it flooding. Back in the tank, with his heavy helmet now off and fastened to his buoyancy vest by a braided steel hose, Cameron couldn’t see anything but a blur. By feel, he located the release of his buoyancy vest and shrugged out of it, dropping the helmet to the floor of A Tank. Then he began what divers call a “blow and go,” a free ascent. If a diver fails to breathe out during a free ascent, the compressed air in his lungs will expand as the pressure in the water around him decreases, and eventually his lungs will explode, a very painful way to die. Cameron was blowing out a stream of bubbles as he ascended and kicking like crazy because of his ankle weights. Finally, a safety diver named George raced to the director’s aid. And that’s when things got bad.

  Safety divers are trained to stop panicking divers from ascending so they don’t blow their lungs. So George stopped Cameron about fifteen feet from the surface, as he was schooled to do, and shoved his backup regulator into Cameron’s mouth. And Cameron did what he was supposed to do, which is purge, then inhale. But the backup regulator was broken, a useless piece of junk disguised as lifesaving equipment. So Cameron inhaled water. Thinking he had purged incorrectly, Cameron repeated the procedure, as George held him down, and got another blast of water in his lungs. Now he was choking, about to black out, and he had a guy preventing him from ascending. With no way of explaining that he wasn’t getting air, Cameron tried to pull away. Thinking the director was panicking, George held him even tighter and tried to make him breathe on the regulator. “A classic clusterfuck,” recalls Cameron. It was then that Cameron’s rough scuba training in the Buffalo Y pool really came in handy—either that or having brothers. He punched George as hard as he could, right in the face. George let Cameron go, and the director made it to the surface without blacking out. He swam weakly to the dive platform and dragged himself from the tank. By the end of the day, he had fired George and his AD. And he ordered the divers at the surface to fish out his helmet and fix the microphone so he could get back down in A Tank.

  Wussies

  The Abyss is the movie on which Cameron first earned a reputation for running a brutal set. Only half joking, he would yell, in the midst of yet another endless day in wet suits, “I’m letting you breathe. What more do you want?” Loyalists like Biehn knew Cameron could be harsh one minute, jolly the next, and they shook off the bad days. On The Abyss, though, there were mostly bad days. For newcomers, the director’s relentless pace and
harsh criticism of anyone who couldn’t keep up were jarring. “Wussies,” he called them. “He’s so possessed and maniacal,” Giddings says. “He’s always a handful, always stressful, a mad hatter, moody, but I say it softly because of the load he’s carrying. Tough to work with? The toughest.” At the time, Cameron wanted to be the kind of leader he had written for Ed Harris to play Bud Brig-man commands the respect of his team and doesn’t abuse his authority. He delegates to people based on their strengths. He’s sensitive to morale. Cameron’s leadership style has evolved over his career, particularly on the expeditions he took after Titanic, but on The Abyss, he still had a lot to learn. “Bud expressed the qualities I believe are critical to leadership, in any environment, business or hazardous,” Cameron says. “Even though I knew these things during the making of The Abyss, I found it personally hard to lead that way.”

  There were plenty of moments on the film when Cameron pushed his team to the brink—and beyond. One dangerous sequence called for Harris and supporting actor Leo Burmester to complete a long, helmetless free swim—more than forty feet underwater without their own sources of oxygen. The safety divers had to stay far enough away to keep out of the shot. When Harris or Burmester made the cutthroat “out of air” sign, it seemed to take forever for their angels to glide in with the life-giving regulators. They finished the free-swim footage without incident, but after multiple takes, the actors were utterly drained. For another nerve-racking scene where Harris descends the wall of the abyss, the actor had to hold his breath inside a helmet full of liquid while he was towed the entire length of the set, some two hundred feet. Harris wore special contact lenses to be able to see underwater, but the chlorine left his eyes stinging and his vision blurred. During one take, the actor’s safety diver got hung up on some cable, so when Harris signaled that he was out of air, his angel was nowhere to be found. Another diver swam in, opened Harris’s faceplate, and shoved a regulator into his mouth—upside down. Instead of air, Harris got a gulp of water, and then another. “For a split second I really thought I was a goner,” he said in a documentary about making The Abyss.3 Finally Giddings rushed in, ripped the regulator out, and inserted his own, right side up, so Harris could breathe. In the car on the way home that night, Harris wept in frustration and fatigue. During the press junket for the film, when a reporter asked how he was treated on The Abyss, the actor said that was “like asking a soldier how he was treated in Vietnam.”4

  The most notorious story from The Abyss is somewhat misunderstood, having been told out of context in Hollywood for years. It’s known as the day that drove Mastrantonio to scream, “We’re not animals here!” and storm off the set. It was November, three months into the grueling shoot, and there had been a bomb threat called in that morning that halted production in A Tank. Just another day on The Abyss, people thought. Maybe it was the goats. The dry-set scene on the schedule was Bud’s revival of Lindsey, the movie’s emotional climax. For this scene, Mastrantonio would have to lie on the floor of Deep-core’s sub-bay, wet, her shirt ripped open and breasts exposed, her eyes unblinking as Harris administered CPR and the rest of the Deepcore crew formed a concerned circle around her. She used eyedrops to dilate her pupils, giving her a lifeless stare but preventing her from seeing very well. The actors delivered a strong first take, but the shot wasn’t well positioned—Harris’s arm was blocking Mastrantonio’s face. The second take was what directors pray for: magic. Crew members describe the hair on the backs of their necks standing up at the power of the performances. Mastrantonio, Harris, and the four other actors played the long, white-knuckle scene brilliantly. But this take was running longer than the one before it. Mastrantonio was just beginning to revive when suddenly the sound of a negative end flapped inside the camera magazine. The camera had run out of film. “Rollout!” the cameraman said, and cut the take—as well as all the hard-won tension in the room. That’s when Mastrantonio jumped up, screamed the animal line, and left the set. “I understand the pressure and how it got to her,” Cameron says. “It was our fault.” It would be hours before the actress returned, after apologies from Cameron and Hurd and understanding words from Harris, to finish the scene. “I can be as hardy as the next person but only for a limited period of time,” Mastrantonio told the New York Times in 1989 of the stress of making The Abyss. “I don’t have the stamina.”5

  While she was gone, Harris filmed his close-ups. The script called for Bud to yell, “You never backed away from anything in your life. Now fight! Fight!” and slap his dying wife across the face. When Harris turned in the take that Cameron used in the final film, there was actually nobody there. He was slapping a sandbag. “I’m still in awe of that,” says Cameron. The scene as it plays from beginning to end is riveting, and preview audiences and critics alike would praise it as their favorite. No one ever seems to notice that in the take Cameron selected, a cameraman quickly wipes his steamed-up lens. The director guessed, correctly, as it turns out, that this was one take that didn’t need reshooting.

  Another performer who would deliver above and beyond the call of duty was the white rat—or rather, five white rats—cast as Beany, beloved pet of the Deepcore crewman played by Todd Graff. In the years since Cameron first saw the liquid-breathing diver in that Buffalo seminar, scientists had continued to research the plausibility of the technology on various animals, from rats to dogs and chimps. Cameron sought out the main researcher, Johannes Kylstra, who turned out to be at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, not far from Gaffney Kylstra, at first a bit surprised that Hollywood was even interested in his work, briefed Cameron on all his research in the intervening seventeen years. Cameron told him he wanted to show fluid respiration with a rat on camera. “He told me exactly how to do it, like giving me a recipe for a pie,” Cameron says. The director ordered the materials and followed Kylstra’s method. He heated the fluid to rat body temperature, bubbled oxygen through it with an aquarium bubbler for twenty-four hours, and then shot the scene, with five live rats in five takes breathing the fluid. The actors’ reactions are natural, because the experiment was really happening in front of them on set. After each take, Cameron picked up the rat by the tail to drain the fluid from its lungs. The first four times, the experiment went flawlessly A production assistant would dry off the rat and take it to the vet for an antibiotic shot, since the fluid stripped out the protective mucus in the lungs, leaving the rats susceptible to infection. But when Cameron pulled the fifth rat out, it hung limply by its tail, completely inert and not breathing. The cast and crew watched silently. “I thought, ‘Oh, shit, I’m not going to be able to get that little disclaimer at the end which says no animals were harmed in the making of this film, not with all these witnesses,’” Cameron says. So the director performed CPR on the rat, rhythmically pumping the little rodent’s sternum, not unlike Bud reviving Lindsey Within moments, rat number five came back to life in front of the crew. Cameron kept it as a pet until it died more than a year later of old age. “We were good friends,” he says. “I like rats.”

  As the underwater photography portion of the shoot wound down, the crew members found themselves working in comically smaller and smaller tanks. After Christmas 1988, they gladly moved from Gaffney to C Tank, the Harbor Star Stage in Long Beach, California, for insert shots. After that, there was a miniature shoot in the 1932 Olympic swim stadium in Los Angeles, and then a close-up shot of a flare going off in Hurd’s pool in the Hollywood Hills. The last shot of the film—the Brigmans embracing after the aliens rescue Bud—is actually two body doubles standing in a puddle in a parking lot at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

  The Pod Squad

  One of the innovations that came out of The Abyss was actually a process—this was the first film to divide its visual effects among multiple vendors, seven to be exact. The multishop model is now common practice in Hollywood, a way of guarding against a bottleneck in the production schedule, saving money, and allowing different companies the opportunity to do what they do best. The
Abyss called for all kinds of complex shots utilizing miniatures, rear-projection screens, green-screen technology, puppets, opticals. But the sequence that had Cameron stumped was the alien water tentacle, the shifting, shimmering liquid pseudopod that rises out of the ocean and reveals itself to the Deepcore crew. Cameron wrote a detailed letter to effects houses that would be submitting bids for the work, explaining each shot and the method he thought best to complete it. For the pseudopod, he wrote, “Allow for testing to determine a technique. CGI has been suggested but due to the extremely long lag time between start-up and demonstration of positive (or negative) results, I am shying away from this.” At the time, computer graphics was considered a crapshoot. “Digital was kind of corny,” says John Bruno, who was supervising the effects on the film. “Everybody was doing stick figures with shiny heads and cue-ball faces. I hated the look of the stuff. It wasn’t real.” The early movies that employed some kind of CG were 1982’s Tron, which takes place inside a computer, and 1984’s The Last Starfighter, which is about a video game—both stories where the graphic, linear look of CG is an asset. But the pseudopod was supposed to feel organic and lifelike.

  In northern California, Dennis Muren, one of the founders of George Lucas’s special-effects empire, Industrial Light & Magic, was looking for a game-changing project. With Star Wars, ILM had broken new ground in motion control and miniatures, enabling cinema’s most complex, perfectly synchronized spaceship battles. But by the mid-1980s, Muren was convinced the future of his industry lay in computer-generated effects, and he wanted ILM to get moving on the new technology. “I had the feeling that our tool-chest way of doing effects was just repeating itself,” Muren says. Lucas had also started up a little computer division, a company tantalizingly located right across the parking lot from ILM. To Muren, the computer division seemed to be taking forever to get off the ground. It was called Pixar. In 1985, ILM and Pixar collaborated to create the first-ever CG film character, for the Steven Spielberg–produced Young Sherlock Holmes. The six or seven shots of a knight made of stained glass—all hard edges and no facial expression—were a good way to test Pixar’s new software. In 1986, Steve Jobs bought Pixar from Lucas for $5 million. While perhaps not the best financial move for Lucas—twenty years later, Disney bought Pixar from Jobs for $7.4 billion—losing Pixar freed up Muren to press ahead with a CG division at ILM. He knew whom he wanted to work with first—the guy who had directed Aliens, which had deeply impressed him.