The James Cameron movie that almost killed the cast and crew
Creating the omelette that is becoming one of the most successful filmmakers of all time, more often than not, requires the cracking of at least several professional eggs, something many collaborators have come to discover after working with James Cameron.
The director pushes his cast and crew hard, which is fair enough when he’s constantly pushing himself to reinvent what cinema has the potential to be on a technical level. History is littered with countless tales of actors and crew members experiencing his wrath either first-hand or through the intense way in which he runs his sets, but only once has he come close to causing the movement industry’s equivalent of a mass extinction event.
Admittedly, there have been several close calls along the way – not to mention that time the set of Titanic saw an innocent pot of clam chowder spiked with PCP to the detriment of many – but it was The Abyss that nearly killed a whole lot of people. When a creative mind has the desire to push the boundaries as often as Cameron does both physically and technologically, the chance of something going wrong is always lingering in the background, but it thankfully hasn’t reached quite the same dangerous levels in the years since.
The aquatic sci-fi effectively set the template for what Cameron’s career would become – namely, an exceedingly difficult, complicated, and challenging shoot that would blend cutting-edge and brand-new visual effects techniques with practically-shot sequences that pushed the people performing them to the absolute limit. It’s a unique approach to the medium, for sure, but the results have spoken for themselves.
Shooting large swathes of the movie underwater in a specially-built tank fashioned inside an abandoned nuclear power plant wasn’t even the most dangerous part of the job, even if the divers suffered from skin burns and the whitening of their hair after spending so much time immersed in the chlorinated water.
Ed Harris wisely opted against the concept of liquid breathing in the film, though, which was a theory that had been tested on animals but not humans. Instead, he decided to hold his breath inside of a helmet full of liquid and be dragged up to the surface, an experience he told Entertainment Weekly he enjoyed so little he referred to the cast and crew as being treated like “guinea pigs”.
Things got so intense that Harris even admitted to sobbing uncontrollably in his car driving home one day, such was the hardship of bringing The Abyss to life. Even at that, co-star Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had a much more miserable time. The actor reportedly had a physical and emotional breakdown during the shoot and coincidentally or otherwise never worked with Cameron again. While he didn’t directly address those reports, he did nod towards them when revealing that “I knew this was going to be a hard shoot, but even I had no idea just how hard.”
When the camera ran out of film during the shooting of an intense sequence where Mastrantonio is being slapped in the face by Harris’ character and resuscitated, nobody bothered to inform the actors. As a result, she stormed off the set, but not before shouting, “We are not animals!” to the cast and crew.
Cameron didn’t escape scot-free, either, after his oxygen ran out when he was at the bottom of the huge underwater tank. Offered a replacement breathing regulator that turned out to be faulty, the director ended up ingesting a large amount of water and was forced to punch the safety diver in the face so that he could escape from his grasp and swim back to the surface and to safety.
For what it’s worth, actor Leo Burmester noted that “Jim Cameron is the type of director who pushes you to the edge, but he doesn’t make you do anything he wouldn’t do himself.” By extension, that means he was one of just many involved with The Abyss who weren’t quite the same by the time he called it a wrap.
