"how far a crew is willing to go" You mean how far a director is willing to go, and the rest have to follow and fucking hate it lol No disrespect to Cameron and his vision(s) though, some of my favorite directors, despite making masterpieces, were assholes tbh
I think it also shows a more balanced perspective on Cameron, in that he is pushing people only as far as he pushes himself. He’s not sitting in a chair on the surface barking orders. He’s in it too. Unlike a director like Kubrick, who would actually play psychological games with his cast, Cameron is just pushing everyone including himself. He also apologized to Mastrantonio for not gauging the extent of her distress. This is not to say that he couldn’t have approached some scenes differently, but I’ve always found the legend of Cameron the Asshole to be misguided.
Imagine the mental toll of having to blue your hand like that for all the filming when you already hate the movie you're making. I bet James Cameron made him do it even in the suited scenes!
I saw this movie in a crowded theatre, and when Bud threw his wedding ring into the toilet the entire audience whooped, cheered, and applauded - they HATED Lindsay. But when she drowned, and the crew couldn’t revive her, the audience was deathly silent, everyone was utterly horror-stricken. It’s one of the most powerful audience reactions I’ve ever seen. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio simply doesn’t get the props she deserves for her performance in this movie.
There was no digital film when this was made. They filmed this at the bottom of a silo that was filled with water and covered at the surface with black floating beads to block out sunlight.
From IMDb: During underwater filming, Ed Harris almost drowned. While filming a scene where he had to hold his own breath at the bottom of the submerged set, Harris ran out of air and gave the signal for oxygen. Harris' safety diver got hung up on a cable and could not get to him. Another crew member gave Harris a regulator, but it was upside down and caused him to suck in water. A camera man came over, ripped the upside down regulator, and gave him one in the correct orientation. Later that evening, Ed broke down and cried.
Michael Biehn is such a fantastic actor, you love him as Kyle Reese and Corporal Hicks and absolutely hate his guts in this. And let's not forget Johnny Ringo in Tombstone
@karlmoles6530, I definitely agree about his chops, though I didn't hate the character (even if he turned into the antagonist). While the character was shown to be naturally overbearing, his personality was simply nuked by the psychosis of what he experienced while he was just trying to carry out his mission, so....
This is probably as close to "hard scifi" as we got in the 80s. The fluorocarbon breathing liquid was brand new at the time. The drowning bit, though, reminds me of the thing they say in Antarctica: you're not dead until you are warm and dead. People have survived SHOCKINGLY long times with stopped hearts if their body temperature is low enough.
Yup. Kids in particular tend to have a higher survival rate with this for whatever reason. They’ve been able to revive people up to an hour after drowning from freezing cold water. Never give up too soon.
Where I live they instituted a "no low temperature/no time limit" for trying to revive people, especially children, from being frozen, due to two specific cases of young children being brought back after 5 hours or more.
The real amazing trick about that scene is that he was performing that to a hole in the floor with a camera in it. I haven't seen the scene in like 10 years and can still feel the moment.
The Abyss pretty much began the love affair Cameron had with filming underwater as much as possible. Watching The Abyss you can see some of the early techniques he would use for later films such as Titanic and Avatar: The Way of Water.
The Abyss... A complete and utter nightmare to make. The Abyss: Special Edition... One of the greatest movies ever made. Simone and George reacts to The Abyss: Special Edition... Superb!
It's got a decently written script with a lot of stupid shit and Cameron's signature wacky, over the top villains. We aren't talking about a great work of art here, but a very impressive one all the same, like a very average painting made upside down on a 50 foot canvas. Basically like most of Cameron's films these days.
In the book it’s explained that Bud’s wedding band is titanium, reflecting the strength of his love. When the crane went over the edge, it was trailing almost two thousand feet of cable, weighing many tons. It’s like when, in “Die Hard,” McClane almost gets pulled out the window by the wheel and fire hose. Several underwater movies came out at the same time: “The Abyss,” “Deep Star Six,” and “Leviathan.” Also, Enya’s album, “Watermark,” came out around then. To this day any of the above give me flashbacks. The resuscitation scene is iconic. Everyone has parodied it.
"This movie must have been a nightmare to film." You have *no idea.* Ed Harris said he had to pull over on the way back to the hotel one day during filming because he burst into tears in the car from the stress. Multiple members of the cast and crew were diagnosed with PTSD and most of them swore off ever working with James Cameron again. James Cameron and his brother, who is a camera tech developer, created special waterproof cameras that minimized lens distortion. The movie was shot in the water tank of an unfinished nuclear plant in South Carolina. The water had a large amount of chlorine in it to prevent algae growth and it ended up bleaching some of the cast & crew's hair, irritating their eyes, and giving them mild chemical burns. There were also a handful of near-drownings.
@@captbunnykiller1.0 Terminator 2. He filmed a dream sequence for it that was ultimately deleted. He also was planning to be in Avatar, but ended up getting replaced by another actor.
@@evilscary They made use of the earliest form of Photoshop, but they didn't create it. Photoshop was developed in 1987 by the American brothers Thomas and John Knoll, who sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. Cameron used the earliest version while it was still in its development phase, but it wasn't created because of the movie, John Knoll just happened to be working at ILM (and still does) so Cameron would have access to whatever they were working at with the time. It explains this on Adobe's website
My friend Mikael Saloman was the DP/Cinematographer on The Abyss. He's told me a lot about filming this picture...and yes the technological innovations in shooting were incredible. Lot's of TH-cam vids on that. But what was really hard was being in tanks 12 hours a day...and getting chlorine poisoning, having all your hair bleached white and total freaking exhaustion getting one shot in the can. And yes it was shot on film.
Oh wow, Mikael Salomon is such an accomplished cinematographer. I would love to hear stories from him...but only if were not too traumatic for him to re-live them!
@@Johnny_Socko Ask him about running out of film while shooting the resuscitation scene. It's a good thing Mary didn't have anything sharp and metallic on her. 😱 I guess everyone is allowed one "Battery, Aziz" moment in their career. 😉
@@rbrtck I commented elsewhere that running out of film during a take is not something that I would have expected on a James Cameron set, since he seems to be detail-oriented to the tiniest degree.
After this film came out I read the novelization by Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game). It was based on the special edition which I didn't know about at the time and I kept thinking "I wish this had of been in the movie". I was so happy when I finally saw the Special Edition. But there was one scene in the book which i think is the same in the movie but hard to pick up on. When Coffey is in the sub, just before it falls to his death, he looks at them and the HPNS is gone briefly and he has a moment of clarity about his situation and what he has done. Then the sub falls.
The behind-the-scenes story of this movie is absolutely insane. What Jim Cameron put his cast and crew through was unbelievable, and left them scarred for life. Ed Harris refuses to talk about the movie to this day, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio essentially walked away from mainstream filmmaking after finishing her next couple of movies.
MEM almost walked off the set for good during the resuscitation scene because she had been lying there for hours and hours half naked in the cold with everyone standing around her, because Cameron didn't think it was perfect enough. When she threatened to quit, he said to try one last time and that was the scene. One has to give more credit to the actors and the crew, they did an exceptional job, what a beautiful piece of art. I just wish it did not have to be that hard on all of them.
Well Cameron is a workalohic and he asks as much of his crew and cast as he does with himself. The man also nearly drowned one night cause he was checking the underwater set and was nearly caught under some piece of the set that fell off while everyone was out of the studio with him alone under water. Everyone got PTSD after this movie.
I think MEM is the one that refuses to talk about it to this day. Harris didn't talk about it for a few years but is featured talking about it in the 1993 doc four years later. I'm sure it's not one of his favorite memories or topics though.
@@Mugthraka Yes, workaholics like him should not be given free range like that. It is harming them and others. They need reminding that they are tearing everyone down with them.
They filmed this in an old decommissioned nuclear reactor silo. They flooded it then put thousands of black rubber beads to block the light to simulate the darkness of the deep ocean 😊
The nuclear facility was in North Carolina, if memory serves. They converted the tank and a lot of the buildings into a studio with a nice big underwater tank and places for wardrobe and art department, dressing rooms and so on. The state gave the production massive tax breaks and other incentives because they thought they were going to end up with a nice, shiny new filming facility that would bring revenue to the state but Cameron and the crew basically left the place completely trashed when they finished the movie and it would have taken millions of dollars to clean it up and prepare it for another production so for years the place just sat there rotting. Wonder if anything changed? I lost track of it years ago. 🙁
@@karlmortoniv2951, It's actually in South Carolina. I wish I could tell you the site was converted into something which generated income, but I just don't recall the history.
At this depth, everyone was at ambient pressure. That's why they could have a moon pool, which is just a big hole in the bottom of the rig. The inside air (actually a special gas mixture) is at the same pressure as the ocean at this depth, so the water doesn't rise any higher into the rig. This was why we were shown Lindsey and the SEALs adjusting to the much higher pressure when they came down. It takes minutes/hours to adjust to higher pressure, but hours/days/weeks to adjust to lower pressure, depending on the depth. Going from high to low pressure too quickly gives you the "bends" (decompression sickness), which is gas bubbling out of your blood. You have to give your body enough time to adjust or else you could die. Being at a higher pressure than normal gives some people pressure-induced psychosis. This was why Coffey's hand kept shaking, and why he went even nuttier than he normally would. This is a metaphor for figuratively being under pressure. Up to a point, no special hard suit is needed for people to live and work, because everything is at the same pressure. Only a special gas mixture that has no nitrogen (helium is one of the best substitutes for it) and just enough oxygen must be used. Humans can only take so much pressure, though, even with everything equalized. Eventually compression will become an issue for the lungs, which is why they had to switch to fluid (liquid) breathing for Bud when he had to go really *deep* . It's because that stuff, unlike gases, is incompressible.
Absolutely correct. Nitrogen narcosis is a thing at certain depths, and these guys would DEFINITELY have been at the depths depicted in the movie. So it was highly probable that they breathed a low nitrogen mix. Trained tech divers have had experience over and over with the feelings associated with it. While Navy SEALS are incredibly trained, they don't perfom at such depths USUALLY. It takes loads of training to become accustomed to it, or so I have heard. All of this is done from the surface as well, with the so-called tech divers. They are often seen with three, or even four pressure bottles holding the respective mixtures they need for certain stages, as well as the required amount for the decompression stage. It truly is a science to calculate dive depths, lengths, mixtures, etc so nothing to do on a whim and a moments notice. Any significant pressure changes at depth can and probably will result in extreme physicological as well as psychological consequences, right up to death. The decompression times really take insanely long. Here's a story from my diving instructor for a mere 70m (roughly) tech dive he saw. My diving instructor took us to Hemmoor in Germany and told us quite a few stories of the very early days when the maximum depth in Hemmoor's ex-strip mine, now become lake was around 73m depth. This was a reason why so many tech divers used it either for training dives, or even just for fun. There's an underwater ledge that is almost perfectly flat slopping very, very gradually to the cliff edge where it suddenly plunges down almost 65 meters today, but back then it went to 73m. His diving buddy and him had done a standard dive there to more normal depths, roughly 30 meters, and they rose along the cliff up to the edge slowly for their ascent and safety stop. They popped over the edge, and my diving instructor came face to face with a tech diver, lying on his side, underwater, sleeping. The ledge was perfect for them to lie down onto as it was nearly perfectly at 10m depth, the perfect resting spot without having to really take care not to bob up or down much. Another two sat there playing with laminated cards, another one was sucking food through a straw from a sealed package. All of them waiting for their decompression to end. He found out later the tech divers had another 2 hours to decompress. So, kiddos, never ever take decompression lightly cause the gases in your blood (and joints) will KILL you if you don't take it seriously.
Great comment and good explanation. I was going to explain this but this comment beat me to it. Seems , not surprisingly, that many people who see this movie don’t quite grasp how things have to work when at this depth. This is sci-fi obviously but the concepts are all based on real cutting edge science. Not sure how the movie could explain this without a huge exposition dump that would take you out of the movie. Great comment!
Came here to say this. I remember it because The Phantom Menace is the first and only one of the prequels to be filmed traditionally. The rest were filmed digitally
38:56 The reason everyone told you to watch the Special Edition over the theatrical cut is that bigger message was completely stripped from the theatrical cut. And whilst the theatrical cut is a decent movie, The Abyss Special Edition is one of my favourite movies. Its also easily James Cameron's most technically accomplished movie because of the new techniques they had to develop before they could even start filming such as the full re-breather face masks which didn't exist before Cameron needed diver underwater dialogue and had to work with divers to invent the gear.. However its also notorious for quite possibly being the toughest shoot in movie history with those working on the movie nicknaming it 'The Abuse' amongst other nicknames. Amongst trivia you didnt mention are the fact that both James Cameron and Ed Harris almost drowned making it and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio walked off set during the resuscitation scene and was intending to abandon the rest of the shoot until convinced to return by her agent. Also, since the water was sort of murky prior to shooting meaning they couldn't film anything they had to add so much chlorine to the water to clarify it that everyone's hair started bleaching and many developed minor skin burns. Many of the actors refuse to talk about the movie to this day because of the trauma involved. But damn, Cameron made an excellent Sci-fi! And also fun fact, the rat scene was heavily cut for us British audiences so all we got to see was the actors faces. It wasn't until 30 years later when i sailed the high seas and commandeered an uncut copy that i got to see the scene in full.
And the specific reason why Mastrantonio walked off the set during the resuscitation scene was because the camera ran out of film during a take, and the prospect of having to do another take of such an emotionally intense scene (especially because of an avoidable technical reason) was just too daunting. Honestly, getting into a situation where the camera runs out of film seems very unlike the *notoriously* detail-oriented James Cameron...
@@ccdecc6650 Thanks for saying that! I feel that way too. The theatrical cut I thought made the point beautifully with a hopeful ending. The SE just pounds you over the head with it.
The drowning/resuscitation scene. I was 17 when this came out in theaters, so while it was an intense scene, Ed Harris' incredibly powerful and emotional acting didn't quite hit me until I watched this years later having met my wife. The pain and desperation in his voice gets me every damn time. Just extraordinary. EDIT: Spelling
The fictional company that runs the oil rig, Benthic Petroleum, is the same company that owned the abandoned gas station in T2 where John, Sarah, and Arnold hide out in after breaking out of the mental hospital.
Fun Fact: Real oxygenated fluorocarbon fluid was used in the rat fluid breathing scene. Dr. Johannes Kylstra and Dr. Peter Bennett of Duke University pioneered this technique and consulted on the film, giving detailed instructions on how to prepare the fluid. The only reason for cutting to the actors' faces was to avoid showing the rats defecating from momentary panic as they began breathing the fluid. Now, the breathable liquid scene was just filmed with Ed Harris holding his breath for brief windows of filming. Also, the Special Edition version contains 17 extra minutes that was trimmed out of the theatrical release by the studio against James Cameron's wishes. These scenes are key and totally explain the alien's real agenda. Glad to see you guys doing this version because the director's cut of this film has additional footage that makes the story so much better.
I seem to remember the US navy doing actual human trials on fluid breathing, but it required so much effort by the divers to move the fluid in and out of their lungs to do any sort of work, that they would literally bruise and break their ribs. So it's not a practical solution for diving. It might be if the people could be on essentially ventilators.
I honestly think one of my favorite things about that woman’s revival after drowning was how happy everyone was about it, not just her ex. Everyone all movie seemed to hate her but they were honestly relieved that she didn’t die. So they didn’t hate her nearly as much as they claimed to 😂
The part where he slaps her and tells her to fight as he is giving her CPR, probably the best acting I've seen from anyone. I remember this movie vividly I've watched it so many times since it came out in the 80's, that scene still makes me cry.
@@DonDuracellVery true. We do know for a fact that they color graded the film differently. All the deep blue hues of the original have been shifted to teal. For some reason, 4K remasters have all been getting rid of the original beautiful blue tones and opting for teal shades. I won’t have a full opinion on it until I see it, but I’m not much of a fan of that kind of thing. And word from some people who have seen True Lies already say it is filled with DNR that ruins it.
@@warrengday To be fair, some things have to be tweaked and adjusted for 4K because the new level of detail inherently jeopardizes some original choices that suited the tech of the time. Whether or not this regards the blue/teal situation, I have no idea. But generally speaking, it does need to be curated.
“Hippie, stay off my side!” is a line I love to employ. Nobody gets it except my wife. Which makes it even better. This is my favorite Cameron movie btw.
@@RideAcrossTheRiver Well people died because he went back for his rat instead of closing the hatch. The only thing the rat was good for was helping the SEAL demonstrate the breathing liquid.
To the subject of problematic filming conditions; it really is hard to reconcile this being one of my favorite movies with how the cast and crew were treated. Simone is spot on, "I hate that I love this movie". At the end of the day all I can do is appreciate the art for what it is and support productions that treat all with respect.
I said in another comment, honestly I think it would be worse if the end product had been shit, imagine going through all the hell just for a movie to not even be good, so I think it being a good movie and enjoying the movie is probably the best silver lining to come out of it
I love this movie so much. Michael Biehn's family are personal friends of ours. First time I met him, I asked him to sign my copy of the novelization of this film. After all the good guys I'd seen him play, it was great to see him play a villain. He's so good in this! And back in the 80s, I was totally crushing on the actress who played Lindsey. She was also in Robin Hood.
When Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are alone together in the little submersible and it's slowing filling with water--that scene is both the most personal and the most desperate "desperate plan" scene I have ever seen. It is horrifying and beautiful and haunting all at once. The acting is so good: the initial clear-headedness, then the worry rising along with the water level until the final terrifying moment of total submersion. Wow.
The scene with the rat in the fluid is why The Abyss has a tricky release history in the UK as it was deemed cruel as the rat wouldn't have known what was going on and that there is an inherent risk of lung damage associated with the fluid breathing. The fact that all the rats that were used in different takes had no long lasting health issues is besides the point because the production company didn't know that would be the case at the time of filming. The scene was trimmed for early theatrical and home releases but the new 4k version hasn't been granted a release as the studio doesn't want to trim the scene again and the BBFC (UK film ratings board) won't change their stance either
When Channel Four showed the TV premiere of The Abyss they "accidentally" showed an uncut version which included the rat breathing liquid scene. I was happy to finally see the scene in full but many more people were not happy. Not happy at all.
Well, I mean clearly the rats were not having a great time, to the point of pooping themselves due to being distressed. I mean, I'm not a fan of censorship, but at the same time the filmmakers need to be responsible with what they are doing and what they subject their cast (human or otherwise) to
@@gswithen even if it's legal to kill them it doesn't mean it's morally acceptable to publish a movie with a rat being tortured. They are creatures that can feel pain, fear and distress after witnessing a friend death.
@@gswithen This is a domestic rat. Hope you've never taken any sort of medication in your life because most of it is tested on those vermin, pests. There's a HUGE difference between a domesticated lab animal and the animals that invade people's homes, carry diseases, and drive local animals/plants to extinction in areas they've become invasive in.
Interesting fact about James Cameron, he took on film projects with the goal of advancing film making technology and build the credibility to be able to one day be capable of making his dream project. And he eventually was able to when he made Avatar.
I'd love for you to wear heart monitors while watching suspense thrillers like Crimson Tide (1995). Most of this film's visual effects were done in the late 80s, but the tidal wave sequence was completed for the special edition two years after Terminator 2.
Underrated and epic in every way. One of Cameron’s finest hours. I saw this opening day at NYC’s late, great Ziegfeld Theatre (one of the city’s last movie palaces) in all its glory and the resuscitation scene always makes me cry - very powerful and poignant.
You said you'd love to see the behind the scenes for this movie...if you can find it watch "Under Pressure: The Making of the Abyss" it is incredible. I believe no other film was ever more complicated to make. Several people came so close to dying. The actors were put through hell. Mary Elizabeth had to hold her breath and be carried all that way; Ed Harris was dragged by a cable sideways over and over for that descent into the abyss, and the liquid breathing was just him holding his breath in regular water and pretending to "breathe" And James Cameron would be underwater directing for so long he had to go through decompression to surface again. It's seriously the best behind the scenes documentary I've ever seen.
I used to be such a geek like George when it comes to _behind-the-scenes_ stuff. Since I found out about all that trouble that occured during the shooting of this movie, I consider that now a double-edged sword. But here's a fun fact: At the beginning, calling Lindsey "the queen bitch of the universe" was James Cameron's hint to his last movie Aliens (II).
I gotta say, this movie has one of the best on-screen punches I've ever seen when Catfish clocks Coffee right in the face and sends him nearly head over heels. Love it!
Great film! My favorite film from Cameron. The behind-the-scenes footage is fascinating, Cameron and crew conxieved a lot of firsts with underwater communication while filming.
Your body wouldn't get crushed by the increasing water pressure in itself at something like 2,000 feet (~600 meters = ~60 bars of pressure). Most of your body is fluids and solids (blood and bones, etc.), and they don't compress as readily as gasses do. Your concern does start with the gasses you have in your body, ie. the air in your lungs and your cranium. With open-air regulating systems, e.g. SCUBA or the helmets the divers use in the film, as long as you can breathe air at the same elevated pressure as the water around you, you won't get crushed. If there's a difference in pressure between the two, that would easily cause crushing. This also applies to the air inside The Rig, where everything takes place. That air is also kept at the same pressure as the water around it, otherwise the differences in pressure between outside and in would violently implode The Rig, as we see it happen to Michael Biehn's character in the mini-sub. However, diving deep is also severely limited by the way gas compounds interact with the human body at increased pressure, and at these perceived depths, they'd have to employ advanced saturation diving methods. Meaning that they have to change the composition of the internal air on The Rig and the air fed to the divers sporting the helmets. Our normal atmospheric air of ~80% nitrogen (N2) and ~20% oxygen (O2) is no good. If you'd breathe that at 60 bars, it... would kill you. A partial pressure of oxygen higher than 1.6 PO2 is outright poisonous for the human body. Shorthanded that means that you couldn't breathe pure 100% oxygen deeper than 1.6 bars = 6m/20f, before the PO2 would kill you. Atmospheric air with 20% would reach 1.6 PO2 around 70m/230f. (For increased safety, tourist scuba classes teach you to never go higher than 1.4 PO2, usually on 20% O2 natural air.) The big guy had that seizure early on, because the oxygen percentage in his breathing mix got switched to too high and he slipped into an extended coma from oxygen toxicity. Me, I have no idea what exactly the air mix might be inside The Rig, but it's probably at a lower O2 than 20%, and they probably would do away completely with nitrogen and replace it with some other gas, 'cause there's also a separate issue of nitrogen narcosis at extreme pressure (past 100m/330f, say). So maybe there's, like, argon mixed in instead of nitrogen, but I have no idea. It wouldn't be helium (which is otherwise common for saturation diving), 'cause the actors' voices don't sound funny. (EDIT: Some have since suggested to me it might be a hydrox mix with 1% oxygen and 99% hydrogen. That's how little oxygen there'd need to be in the mix at such extreme pressure. I still haven't found any references to what Cameron might've intended the mix to be.) In the film they talk at length about decompression; just to get down into the U/W rig, the group from the surface in the beginning has to sit for 8 hours in their vessel attached to The Rig, while the pressure is gradually increased and their breathing mix is changed to the one internally in The Rig. And to ever get back from that depth after their extended stay (except for the "Deus Ex Machina" switch with the ending), The Rig crew would have to decompress back to lower pressure over a really long time (do they say two weeks, I forget?) also just sitting on their a... and wait. This is because if you breathe air at depth for an extended time, you absorb more of the gasses in your blood per millilitre. SCUBA classes teach you about the dangers of decompression sickness (aka. "the bends"), where you need to return slowly from even shallow depths like 20m/65f, because breathing compressed air at those 3 bars for, say, 20min. on a tourist dive has dissolved more nitrogen in your blood than otherwise at surface pressure, and going straight back to the surface risk having this "residual nitrogen" turn from dissolved in the liquid of your blood to suddenly form gas bubbles in your blood stream, and that... can kill you too. If you return to lower pressure gradually, your body can keep up and wash out the residual compounds just by you breathing normally. For the finale, where Ed Harris' character has to dive much deeper than 60 bars, James Cameron came up with using the fluid breathing tech, which exists in real life in a lab. For those depths, it would be impossible to do it with gasses in your lungs no matter what the mix, but you can (theoretically!) do it with a liquid in your lungs feeding your blood and cells the oxygen instead, again because liquids don't compress as readily as gas does even at insane water depths. There's a lot of really good diving science hidden inside James Cameron's story. He knows his s**t.
Digital wasn't a thing when this was made, so indeed it was all filmed on actual film. If something looked nearly impossible or extremely dangerous to pull off, that's because it was. It's a miracle no one died making this movie. Even Cameron nearly drowned at one point on set.
This is my favorite James Cameron movie. Back in the day of cable TV, I would always stop to watch it when flipping through the channels. Which is rough because it's such a long movie. I love the characters. I love the story. That CPR scene traumatized me as a kid. Ugh, now I have to go watch it again.
There is a film from a body recovery team sent to remove the crew from a sunk tug boat off the African coast. It looked like this, but with even more trash floating around. You can see a hand in the water inches away and the diver grabs the hand to pull the body out, then the diver screamed when the had squeezed back. He had found a survivor, trapped in a small pocket of air. They had to quickly plan and mount a rescue, but they saved the man's life. At first the survivor wanted nothing more to do with the sea, but he changed his mind later and became a diver himself. He made his first professional dive with the man who had rescued him. Touching story.
The Abyss is my favourite James Cameron movie you don't know the half of it guys when it comes to the making of this movie the documentary is insane with how they got this movie made it's on TH-cam I recommend it as its just crazy one big thing that was invented by Jim Cameron in this movie was how to direct light underwater they used all these tiny plastic balls so when they directed the underwater sequences they wouldn't get screwed up from the light above he used this exact same method on Avatar 2
This was the first time morphing was used ... then followed by T2 and Jurassic Park ... you just saw the birth of CGI-morphing = the waterfinger squirming and forming a face.
I'm so happy this movie is amazing because the cast and crew went through alot to make it. Atleast their efforts were not wasted. This movie is an emotional roller coaster. I get emotional/cry everytime I see the scene where Lindsay drowns and Virgil works so hard to save her. It's so intense and Ed Harris acting/emotion is so believable and moving that he should have won an Oscar for it. Of course this is a James Cameron movie. Even Michael Biehn aka Kyle Reese from Terminator stars as the unhinged villain. Also this is the first movie at the time to use a new CGI technology to create the water tentacle mimicking Lindsay's face . Yes George that CGI technique was later used to create the T-1000 in Terminator 2.
I saw this in the theater when I was in medical school and to this day I don't think I've seen anyone play a more realistic dead body than Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The pallor and blank stare are still chill-inducing. Not the kind of thing she probably wants to be known for but really impressive. Cheers.
I was so overwhelmed back then at the cinema. Breathtaking, stressful, and just wonderful. I was totally knackered when I left the cinema and physically drained. And it's been one of my favourites since
What they were doing was something called saturation diving. It's where you pressurize the divers to a given depth and all you really need is protection from abrasion and cold. It doesn't take very long for a human body to adjust in pressurizing, but depressurization could take up to two weeks on depending on depth. That was one thing that the movie doesn't make clear. Not everyone adapts to being pressurized, and symptoms can include uncontrolled shaking and paranoia. Basically Michael Biehn's character is having this problem. And Ed Harris' character's wedding ring is made from titanium, because his wife was an engineer specializing in designing underwater equipment, and titanium is a really good material for constructing pressure hulls for deep submersibles, and because of the symbolism of titanium being mostly unbreakable.
To this day Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth mastrantonio refused to talk about making this film the shoot was that hellish. Ed Harris used to have emotional break downs at the side of the road on the way home, after shoots and punched James Cameron once.
The CG water tentacle was the first such use of the tech, it was the first time we had a material that was refractive and realistically integrated into the environment. If you look up the "The Abyss-CGI making of (1989)" they go over the tech and how it revolutionized everything. They used Alias PowerAnimator (grandfather to Autodesk Maya) running on Silicon Graphics workstations running IRIX, a flavor of Unix. I had a chance to use both Silicon Graphics Indigo's (in grabber purple!) and O2 workstations (grabber blue!) when I was in the industry, with the Indigo running a 32-bit R3000 RISC CPU @33MHz. Back then the thing was a beast, and cost over $75000 for a single Indigo workstation. There was a reason all of the computers in Jurassic Park were Silicon Graphics workstations, and it was not just set dec. ;)
Not all subs are massive, but the ones that carry dozens of nuclear missiles are. The reason they are cramped on the inside is that their volume is for the weapons they carry, leaving as little as they can get away with for the crew to live in. It's the same on every military vessel, even humongous aircraft carriers. They squeeze the crew into tight quarters, with many sleeping in tiny bunks in hallways, to make as much space as possible to support like 100 aircraft (on the US super-carriers) of various types, fuel for the aircraft, nuclear power plants for the ship, and enough ammo to sink a small island.
Ohio-class SSBNs as seen in the movie were pretty sweet, though, compared to the previous US SSBNs and Los Angeles-class SSNs. As a civilian tool of the Reagan era military-industrial complex I got to deploy on subs for several weeks several times a year while conducting various tests of things we were developing and the Ohio-class had more creature comforts (eg, much nicer "heads" and galleys), and carrying additional personnel was less disruptive to the crew. On an LA-class SSN the lowest-ranking seamen were already hot-bunking (sharing bunks in shifts) and I always felt bad about displacing a crewman from his regular berth.
@@cpob2013 They were so huge because they carried extra-large missiles. And because the crew size was about the same as that of the American Ohio-class ballistic missile subs, I suppose it's possible that there was more space left for crew comfort. I don't know that for a fact, but I've heard that, too. If true, then it would be an exception to the rule, though, because more empty space means less supplies and ammunition.
9:40 I'm sure that the feeling of drowning must conjure up such a primal state of panic that it wouldn't really matter if you were a rat or a human. Once that feeling of "gotta take a breath" starts everything else but "BREATHE!" goes out the window and you think you're gonna drown, hyper-oxygenated breathing fluid or not
I've been through it, twice, as a kid. It is not good. Both times due to 'pranks' by friends. Both times had to be rescued by passing strangers. Gave me a lifelong appreciation for good samaritans.
Many commenters already mentioned the documentary on how this was filmed and also the tough conditions, but if you want another perspective, Michael Biehn was in Michael Rosenbaum's podcast a few weeks ago and talked about it. I'd say he likes James Cameron a little more than Ed Harris does 😂
Remember this was in 89. All film baby, no digital recording. The water digital effect though, was extremely early "cgi" and what turned into the effects for the T-1000 in Terminator 2. Cameron basically said that this was the prototype effect to see if the T-1000 would be possible.
According to several sources, the wedding ring worn by Bud (Ed Harris) which saves his life by preventing the hydraulic door from shutting is a custom made ring made out of titanium
You guys watch the films I grew up with. I remember this as the most accurate drowning and resuscitation scene in cinema history. And animal rights groups really hated the S out of this movie for the rat breathing liquid scene. 'Cause that was actual oxygenated liquid that the critter was actually breathing. (Ed Harris just held his breath.) And yes, this was a nightmare shoot that is legendary in Hollywood. Everybody lost their damn minds. And all caught on stock film, this is like ten years before the digital breakthrough. And much of the specialized equipment was designed by James Cameron himself. He's a life-long under water nerd, which is why this film was his baby. James Cameron the movie director was the third human being to reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep in a bathyscaphe of his own design in 2012. Try and catch "The Right Stuff" for Ed Harris' big break years before this one.
The guy with the crab crawling out of his mouth is Mike Cameron, James Cameron's brother. He's an engineer (their whole family are scientists and engineers, with Jim being the black sheep, since he's a filmmaker, but then again he is also sort of a scientist, too), and he has designed a bunch of the equipment his brother has used for underwater shooting. He did that for _Titanic_ (1997), and probably did that work for this movie, too.
Bud's ring is made of Titanium. In the bookco-written by Orson Scott Card and Cameron they explain that Bud designed and made their wedding rings out of titanium to symbolized the indestructible permanence of their love. When he throws his ring into the toilet and then goes back to get it he actually saves his own life. A nice touch is that for the rest of the movie Ed Harris has a blue hand from the chemicals from the toilet.
The two water tanks used in the filming of The Abyss were specially constructed to hold large amounts of water. The first tank, based on the abandoned plant's primary reactor containment vessel, held 7.5 million US gallons of water and was 18 m deep and 70 m across. At the time, it was the largest fresh-water-filtered tank in the world. Additional scenes were shot in the second tank, an unused turbine pit, which held 2.5 million US gallons of water. As the production crew rushed to finish painting the main tank, millions of gallons of water poured in and took five days to fill. The Deepcore rig was anchored to a 90-ton concrete column at the bottom of the large tank
The scene of the dead submariner with the crab crawling out of his mouth, was actually Camerons brother who did the scene for real and had to hold his breath numerous times to complete the shot
Saw this in the theaters many times. A super intensive movie with heart racing scenes as you experienced. The scene with her drowning had audience members gasping for air including myself (former lifeguard).
Yes indeed. This movie is considered to be one of the most difficult movies to film both technically and on the crew and actors. I believe they made t-shirts saying they survived it.
BTW, I LOVE the "Heart Monitor" idea for scary or intense movies!!! Another one of James Cameron's "BLUE" movies. The man has an infatuation with filming with the color blue... The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the Avatar movies, Titanic, Aliens, Strange Days, and True Lies. Whether it's film lenses or digital coloring, the guy definitely has a style and mood he prefers.
That drowning scene (and the subsequent resuscitation) was the very first part of this movie that I ever saw; I was channel surfing, and came across it on HBO, right when those two were discussing their options. (I immediately WTF'd at what I was watching.) This whole sequence is one of the most terrifying things I've ever watched.
This was one of only two movies in which the VFX of ship miniatures did not look like crap -- and I guess the reason is because they were not "miniature" at all, lol. (Water does not scale, so miniature-based water effects usually look "wrong" to the eye.) The other movie being "Raise the Titanic". Yes, I thought the miniature VFX looked better in "Raise the Titanic" than in Cameron's "Titanic".
@Johnny_Socko have you seen the footage behind the scenes of the model? it was so big you could walk around on it. it makes you wonder at what point does a miniature cease to be an miniature?
@@synaesthesia2010 It was pretty amazing, I love that model and the whole concept of that ship. Along the same lines, the miniature DC8 they crashed in Die Hard 2 was about the size of a Lear jet. Since it was an accurate model, it generated lift; the only way they could get it to crash the way they wanted was to pull it into the ground using cables.
19:50 I used to scuba dive a lot, and up to 100m deep, you don't need anything special to resist the water pressure to breathe comfortably, or in this case, for that suit to stay seemingly loose. The compressed air you take with you in tanks gets further compressed by the water pressure to precisely the depth you're at, even though the tanks themselves do not compress. When you breathe in the highly compressed air, it presses outwards against your lungs at exactly the same pressure as the water pressing against the outside of your lungs, meaning that it feels like you are breathing normally at sea level, one atmosphere of pressure. You do, however have to continually breathe as you change depths to ensure the air in your lungs and blood system are being constantly saturated with air that is at the same pressure as the water around you, and if you don't your lungs can crush as you descend too quickly, or explode if you ascend too quickly. One atmosphere of pressure change (10m of vertical water) is enough to double or halve the volume of air. You can also get the bends, where the gas in your blood hasn't had time to equalize with the pressure around it, and you end up with nitrogen instead of oxygen in your blood (I think? it's been several decades), which is why every 30m or so you take a break from ascending or descending to equalize, and also at 5m before resurfacing. This means that the suit shown to be loose at that depth must contain air that is as pressurized by the water around it as the air the divers are breathing, and isn't getting crumpled against the diver's body. However, to be more realistic, they'd have to be breathing in air from a closed pressurized system, and breathing out into the suit, or vice versa, because I'm pretty sure rebreather systems wouldn't be able to keep up with such a large open system like this in order for them to reliably breathe in recirculated air and not exhaled air. Rebreather systems are also notoriously unreliable, although this is scifi, so... y'know. Edit: Haven't seen the movie, and just got the end of your vid... idk anything about breathing liquids lol, just air.
The liquid breathing is real, and it really works to prevent the bends. Also, you don't have to cough it up, it will evaporate over a short time as you breath normally. But it isn't used in deep sea diving today because it washes the natural lubricant out of the lungs, making them very suseptable infections and pneumonia. But it is occasionally used to help premature babies breathe while their lungs are developing.
That "stare into the abyss" quote is pretty famous - GEORGE! Just kidding... But there are people who say there are probably more USO (Unidentified Submerged Object) than UFOs (flying). And since we have explored so much more of the sky, what better place for aliens to hide that deep under the water? And the liquid oxygen does not yet exist in the way seen in this movie - for people. And I love you guys acting like 1989 was ancient Rome or something. That was the year I graduated from high school.
Cameron is an expert in this stuff and an undersea explorer himself, so yes, this movie is very accurate, although obviously he had to take some artistic license at times. For example, he had the actors speak with their normal voices, while in real life they would have sounded like cartoon chipmunks because of the gas mixture that they'd have to breathe at those depths and pressures, which contains helium (mostly helium with just enough oxygen to breath comfortably), just like what is used in balloons that float, for safety (pure helium is potentially deadly). This was done because obviously the audience would never be able to take the movie seriously if everyone sounded like Chip, Dale, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. Another bit of fiction is the fluid breathing. It's real, and that stunt rat really breathed it in the movie, but no human has used such a system in the way it was used here. It turns out that animals larger than rats suffer from distress in the lungs, so it's not practical. But it's cool, and Cameron couldn't resist using this concept. By the way, the rat was OK, and Cameron adopted her as his own pet after the movie was done.
Orson Scott Card wrote an accompanying book (not a novel after the movie but written in full cooperation with the director, screenwriters and actors). It dives deep into the thinking of the aliens and main characters. It shows that the situation is even much more complex. Absolutely worth reading.
Dude. That shot of Lindsey struggling to get air under that circular ceiling before drowning, is one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen in a movie. But like you pointed out, Virgil's side of it would be just as horrifying, just having to watch the life go out of her face. Our VHS copy that we watched as kids didn't have any of the world ending stuff at the end. Virgil just arrives down there, sees them, and they broadcast his words back to him and he's like oh cool. Still seems weird that that was released as the official version. Unless maybe we just filmed it off of cable? I guess that's possible.
Oddly enough an underwater expert once told me the scene where their in the leaking sub ruined the film for him because the leak was low on the wall not overhead and since the sub was at the same pressure as the rig the water would have never gotten higher than the leak
On submarine sizes: You need to distinguish between the *type* of submarine pictured. There's a world of difference between a German Type VII ("Das Boot", 66m), a US Los Angeles class (pictured here, 110m), or a Russian Typhoon ("Hunt for Red October", 175m with two pressure vessels alongside each other). That's why Cpt. Ramius has a cozy cabin for his own and the officers have a dining room, while the officers of U96 were dining squeezed around a table the size of half a bookshelf and the crew took turns using the cots...
AFAIK the water tentacle was the first CGI ever used in a movie. There is a FANTASTIC one hour “Making Of” documentary that came with the original The Abyss CD. It’s by far my favorite “Making Of” documentary to this day. The Abyss remains one of my favorite movies to this day too, and I’m so glad you found the Extended cut, which had the wider Cold War plot and ending slashed for the theatre, because the Berlin Wall fell and Glasnost started while the movie was being made, and the original version was seen as being too provocative while the breakup of the USSR was in its infancy. As well as Ed Harris, James Cameron almost drowned Kate Winslet during filming of the Titanic. He finally got his diving team safety perfected for Way Of Water, with two safety divers for every actor. I don’t know how he sweettalked Winsket into doing Way Of Water for him, she spent years not talking to him after the Titanic near drowning, like Ed Harris. She trained hard, and her freediving record was a 7 min 14 sec breath hold for one scene, surpassing Tom Cruise’s Hollywood record breath hold for Mission Imposdible. The actual World record breath hold is 24 min.
So, most of the underwater shots are real, they built (I think the worlds largest?) a massive tank for the underwater set (outside the Rig etc), but it wasn't dark enough to simulate being that far down, so they ended up pouring millions of black silicon beads into it to block out the sunlight which made it incredibly dangerous to dive in. Then they had to figure out how to film with movie cameras underwater without electrocuting everyone. Also, Ed Harris almost drowned in one of the underwater shots when he was free swimming, he signaled for air but the respirator got mixed up. Apparently he later had a punching match with Cameron afterwards and had a break down when he got home. The CPR scene almost made Mary Mastrantonio quit, the Camera kept malfunctioning and Harris was really screaming at her and slapping her. The scene was finished without her (lots of shots up at Harris when he's shouting) and she was later convinced to come back. Basically the entire cast and crew were miserable throughout, they were sodden wet through the whole process and it took a lot to get the film finished. But my god, what a film it is!
In one of Hunter S. Thompson's books, he met a guy who exited a plane's bathroom with a completely blue dyed hand. He apparently retrieved something of value from the toilet. Thompson also said he met the guy 3 weeks later and his hand was still a pale blue. I appreciate consistency in movies, and if you noticed, Ed Harris's hand was a pale blue throughout the film.
This is basically the point in James Cameron’s career where he knew the stuff he wanted to do was not technically possible via conventional film method. So he just started on the epic journey of inventing his own film equipment, special effects, and deep sea exploration vessels. He actually had the concepts for Titanic and Avatar and other films in his mind when he made this; he just spent decades, figuring out how to actually make them.
There's a medical procedure in which you would have a pipe inserted into your lungs and then a lot of fluid pumped in. It's performed to remove the dust, sand and things like that from the lungs of the people that are working in the mines. It looks like the high pressure cleaning of the kitchen pipes, they do this until the liquid that comes out of the lungs gets clear.
Michael biehn is a fantastic and underrated actor, he is probably most well known as Kyle Reece in the original terminator, and johnny ringo in tombstone but absolutely kills it in everthing he does
I find this to be possibly the most thoroughly satisfying and emotionally earned movies by Cameron. People can nerd out for weeks about the behind-the-scenes etc but the end result I still think is one of the best of 80s sci-fi, no small part because of the performance of the cast.
In order to record the actors' voices while diving in the huge reactor pools where most filming took place, Cameron and his team had to *invent* a system which allows actors to dive and speak and *record* at the same time. They then had to edit out the breathing in post. Cameron has always been a huge underwater genius, and remains one of the few people to have visited the deepest parts of the Oceans of our planet.
9:10 Unfortunately the rat scene is why the UK 4K release has been cancelled. The ratings board here requested it be cut or edited on grounds of animal abuse, while Disney was happy to make the cuts, apparently Cameron refused - even though it had been edited in earlier DVD/VHS releases.
"The Breathing Liquid that is used on the rat is actually real. 6 rats were used to shoot the scene and all survived. For the scenes with Ed Harris, the liquid in his helmet was real but he did not breathe it in."
Definitely watch the documentary about the making of this movie, because it was such a nightmare that no one has ever attempted something similar. It was mostly filmed in an unfinished nuclear power plant where just the exterior of the building had been completed by the time it stopped construction. So they filled it up with water, but then had to find creative ways to keep it covered so the water would look dark while they filmed during the day. The actors ended up having a few health problems because they were in chlorinated water every day for months, and every actor, cameraman, and everyone else on set had to get diving certified and know how to use the equipment, which took another 6 weeks of training for everyone involved. Ed Harris actually had two near death experiences during filming, once when they were filling up his helmet because they used water instead of the breathing fluid (they weren't confident enough in the breathing fluid and didn't want to risk his life on it). So they had him hold his breath during the scene and take the water out immediately afterwards. But it took a while to film and he nearly ran out of breath by the time they called cut. Later on, during the scene where he's falling down the abyss (which was actually filmed sideways so they could reuse sets and make it look deeper), Harris's oxygen mixture had a fault and he started taking in water instead of air. He signaled the safety officer but he missed the signal, and thankfully a cameraman saw what was happening and corrected the problem. Harris then had to walk off set after having a panic attack, but resumed filming the next day. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio also took a day off set after the revival scene, because director James Cameron demanded a ton of different takes, in which Ed Harris had to actually slap her two times for each take. She very nearly caught pneumonia because of being soaking wet and lying on cold steel. They finally stopped filming the scene when the camera itself ran out of film and she walked off set saying "we're not animals!" She has never since worked with James Cameron on another project, likely due to this movie.
Behind the scenes, everyone involved in making the movie from the cast to the crew were required to be certified divers. The fluid breathing scene was indeed real, James Cameron did extensive research on the fluid breathing and even consulted the inventor on how to make it. The fluid was tested with five rats and none has lasting side effects, Cameron kept the one seen in the movie until it died a few years later from old age. All of the equipment from the cameras, lighting and even the dive suits were new technology made for the movie. Cameron specifically wanted dive helmets that were made so that the actors face could be seen. The scenes with the water tentacle was also new CGI technology and lessons learned from this would later be used when creating the T-1000 for Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
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There is a documentary about the making of this movie. It is well worth a watch and really shows how far a crew is willing to go to make a movie.
that documentary is on youtube also
Yeah watched it on TH-cam- tremendous
also how insane a director can be
"how far a crew is willing to go"
You mean how far a director is willing to go, and the rest have to follow and fucking hate it lol
No disrespect to Cameron and his vision(s) though, some of my favorite directors, despite making masterpieces, were assholes tbh
I think it also shows a more balanced perspective on Cameron, in that he is pushing people only as far as he pushes himself. He’s not sitting in a chair on the surface barking orders. He’s in it too. Unlike a director like Kubrick, who would actually play psychological games with his cast, Cameron is just pushing everyone including himself. He also apologized to Mastrantonio for not gauging the extent of her distress. This is not to say that he couldn’t have approached some scenes differently, but I’ve always found the legend of Cameron the Asshole to be misguided.
I always loved the tiny, tiny detail that Ed Harris' hand remains blue for the rest of the film.
Imagine the mental toll of having to blue your hand like that for all the filming when you already hate the movie you're making. I bet James Cameron made him do it even in the suited scenes!
@@monsoon1234567890 Imagine you did a bunch of takes and then found out you forgot to dip you hand that morning.
Epic continuity
I saw this movie in a crowded theatre, and when Bud threw his wedding ring into the toilet the entire audience whooped, cheered, and applauded - they HATED Lindsay. But when she drowned, and the crew couldn’t revive her, the audience was deathly silent, everyone was utterly horror-stricken. It’s one of the most powerful audience reactions I’ve ever seen. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio simply doesn’t get the props she deserves for her performance in this movie.
Just don't ever ask her about this film.
There was no digital film when this was made. They filmed this at the bottom of a silo that was filled with water and covered at the surface with black floating beads to block out sunlight.
From IMDb:
During underwater filming, Ed Harris almost drowned. While filming a scene where he had to hold his own breath at the bottom of the submerged set, Harris ran out of air and gave the signal for oxygen. Harris' safety diver got hung up on a cable and could not get to him. Another crew member gave Harris a regulator, but it was upside down and caused him to suck in water. A camera man came over, ripped the upside down regulator, and gave him one in the correct orientation. Later that evening, Ed broke down and cried.
I heard he punched Cameron in the face after that as well. Not sure if it's true.
*edit* just saw the end of the video where they confirm it.
In an interview he said he was mad at himself for being weak and fearing he might die, which is crazy to me
No wonder he doesn't wanna talk about that movie.
Yeah no way that is true, he can't say what he really want or he wouldn't work again. @@TukaihaHithlec
@@ProtossWannabe1984His crews wear tshirts that say "You can't scare me, I worked for James Cameron!"
Michael Biehn is such a fantastic actor, you love him as Kyle Reese and Corporal Hicks and absolutely hate his guts in this. And let's not forget Johnny Ringo in Tombstone
@karlmoles6530, I definitely agree about his chops, though I didn't hate the character (even if he turned into the antagonist). While the character was shown to be naturally overbearing, his personality was simply nuked by the psychosis of what he experienced while he was just trying to carry out his mission, so....
YASSSSSS I WISH HE WAS IN MORE MOVIES...the only other movie I've seen him in was the Robert Rodriguez Planet Terror 😅
Can't believe I never put this together before: Michael Biehn plays a character named "Coffey"...
Coffey Biehn!
That's not even a Dad Joke. That's more like a Dad Observation. Props to you.
@@WillShakes423 At exactly what point did people start calling puns "dad jokes"? It's a pun. And a good one.
@@vladyvhv9579 Well, there's a video where they had Christopher Judge read some dad jokes in the voice of Kratos, and many of them were puns.
This is probably as close to "hard scifi" as we got in the 80s. The fluorocarbon breathing liquid was brand new at the time. The drowning bit, though, reminds me of the thing they say in Antarctica: you're not dead until you are warm and dead. People have survived SHOCKINGLY long times with stopped hearts if their body temperature is low enough.
Yup. Kids in particular tend to have a higher survival rate with this for whatever reason. They’ve been able to revive people up to an hour after drowning from freezing cold water. Never give up too soon.
Didnt the whole "warm and dead" thing become medical standard practice after some lady froze to death but was recovered and brought back?
That revival/resuscitation scene is the best in cinematic history.
@@aimmethodthat whole sequence wrecks me every time.
Where I live they instituted a "no low temperature/no time limit" for trying to revive people, especially children, from being frozen, due to two specific cases of young children being brought back after 5 hours or more.
Ed Harris ''fight fight'' scene was one of the greatest acting performances ever
Masterful. So much so it was hard for the other actors to shoot because it affected them too on set
The real amazing trick about that scene is that he was performing that to a hole in the floor with a camera in it. I haven't seen the scene in like 10 years and can still feel the moment.
Denzel Washington's punishment (whipped for desertion) scene in Glory. Most powerful scene in a movie I've ever seen
I haven't watched this in years and it was surprising how emotional it made me.
The Abyss pretty much began the love affair Cameron had with filming underwater as much as possible. Watching The Abyss you can see some of the early techniques he would use for later films such as Titanic and Avatar: The Way of Water.
Or visiting the Titanic.
Piranha II - The Spawning 😁
@@christermyrberg3661It's funny but that ain't a joke. The underwater shots in that movie are the only good part.
@@KlooKloo I can understand that but to me it has always been a fun guilty pleasure 😁
The Abyss... A complete and utter nightmare to make.
The Abyss: Special Edition... One of the greatest movies ever made.
Simone and George reacts to The Abyss: Special Edition... Superb!
It's got a decently written script with a lot of stupid shit and Cameron's signature wacky, over the top villains. We aren't talking about a great work of art here, but a very impressive one all the same, like a very average painting made upside down on a 50 foot canvas. Basically like most of Cameron's films these days.
In the book it’s explained that Bud’s wedding band is titanium, reflecting the strength of his love.
When the crane went over the edge, it was trailing almost two thousand feet of cable, weighing many tons. It’s like when, in “Die Hard,” McClane almost gets pulled out the window by the wheel and fire hose.
Several underwater movies came out at the same time: “The Abyss,” “Deep Star Six,” and “Leviathan.” Also, Enya’s album, “Watermark,” came out around then. To this day any of the above give me flashbacks.
The resuscitation scene is iconic. Everyone has parodied it.
I had my wedding ring made of titanium and gold specifically because of Bud's ring. I keep waiting for a time I need to keep a door from closing.
"This movie must have been a nightmare to film."
You have *no idea.* Ed Harris said he had to pull over on the way back to the hotel one day during filming because he burst into tears in the car from the stress. Multiple members of the cast and crew were diagnosed with PTSD and most of them swore off ever working with James Cameron again.
James Cameron and his brother, who is a camera tech developer, created special waterproof cameras that minimized lens distortion. The movie was shot in the water tank of an unfinished nuclear plant in South Carolina. The water had a large amount of chlorine in it to prevent algae growth and it ended up bleaching some of the cast & crew's hair, irritating their eyes, and giving them mild chemical burns. There were also a handful of near-drownings.
Yes!
The Abyss aka The Abuse
Making it doubly impressive that Michael Biehn came back to work with Cameron again after that ordeal.
@@jculver1674 I don't think he did though. Which movie are you referring to?
@@captbunnykiller1.0 Terminator 2. He filmed a dream sequence for it that was ultimately deleted. He also was planning to be in Avatar, but ended up getting replaced by another actor.
The CG water tentacle was groundbreaking. Arguably the first photoreal CGI in film.
They *invented* photoshop to create it. That's not even hyperbole.
Corridor Crew did a good breakdown of this recently.
@@evilscary They made use of the earliest form of Photoshop, but they didn't create it. Photoshop was developed in 1987 by the American brothers Thomas and John Knoll, who sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. Cameron used the earliest version while it was still in its development phase, but it wasn't created because of the movie, John Knoll just happened to be working at ILM (and still does) so Cameron would have access to whatever they were working at with the time. It explains this on Adobe's website
Watch the corridor crew episode about this, the pbotoshop elements are nothing compared to the cgi breakthrough made here
It was done before The Abyss, in Disney's "Flight of the Navigator".
My friend Mikael Saloman was the DP/Cinematographer on The Abyss. He's told me a lot about filming this picture...and yes the technological innovations in shooting were incredible. Lot's of TH-cam vids on that. But what was really hard was being in tanks 12 hours a day...and getting chlorine poisoning, having all your hair bleached white and total freaking exhaustion getting one shot in the can. And yes it was shot on film.
Oh wow, Mikael Salomon is such an accomplished cinematographer. I would love to hear stories from him...but only if were not too traumatic for him to re-live them!
@@Johnny_Socko Ask him about running out of film while shooting the resuscitation scene. It's a good thing Mary didn't have anything sharp and metallic on her. 😱 I guess everyone is allowed one "Battery, Aziz" moment in their career. 😉
@@rbrtck I commented elsewhere that running out of film during a take is not something that I would have expected on a James Cameron set, since he seems to be detail-oriented to the tiniest degree.
After this film came out I read the novelization by Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game). It was based on the special edition which I didn't know about at the time and I kept thinking "I wish this had of been in the movie". I was so happy when I finally saw the Special Edition. But there was one scene in the book which i think is the same in the movie but hard to pick up on. When Coffey is in the sub, just before it falls to his death, he looks at them and the HPNS is gone briefly and he has a moment of clarity about his situation and what he has done. Then the sub falls.
The behind-the-scenes story of this movie is absolutely insane. What Jim Cameron put his cast and crew through was unbelievable, and left them scarred for life. Ed Harris refuses to talk about the movie to this day, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio essentially walked away from mainstream filmmaking after finishing her next couple of movies.
MEM almost walked off the set for good during the resuscitation scene because she had been lying there for hours and hours half naked in the cold with everyone standing around her, because Cameron didn't think it was perfect enough. When she threatened to quit, he said to try one last time and that was the scene. One has to give more credit to the actors and the crew, they did an exceptional job, what a beautiful piece of art. I just wish it did not have to be that hard on all of them.
Well Cameron is a workalohic and he asks as much of his crew and cast as he does with himself.
The man also nearly drowned one night cause he was checking the underwater set and was nearly caught under some piece of the set that fell off while everyone was out of the studio with him alone under water.
Everyone got PTSD after this movie.
I think MEM is the one that refuses to talk about it to this day. Harris didn't talk about it for a few years but is featured talking about it in the 1993 doc four years later. I'm sure it's not one of his favorite memories or topics though.
@@Mugthraka If true, that's sure to have been against the safety regs. "No one in without a buddy" is a fairly common rule in dangerous environments.
@@Mugthraka Yes, workaholics like him should not be given free range like that. It is harming them and others. They need reminding that they are tearing everyone down with them.
They filmed this in an old decommissioned nuclear reactor silo. They flooded it then put thousands of black rubber beads to block the light to simulate the darkness of the deep ocean 😊
The nuclear facility was in North Carolina, if memory serves. They converted the tank and a lot of the buildings into a studio with a nice big underwater tank and places for wardrobe and art department, dressing rooms and so on. The state gave the production massive tax breaks and other incentives because they thought they were going to end up with a nice, shiny new filming facility that would bring revenue to the state but Cameron and the crew basically left the place completely trashed when they finished the movie and it would have taken millions of dollars to clean it up and prepare it for another production so for years the place just sat there rotting. Wonder if anything changed? I lost track of it years ago. 🙁
@@karlmortoniv2951, It's actually in South Carolina. I wish I could tell you the site was converted into something which generated income, but I just don't recall the history.
At this depth, everyone was at ambient pressure. That's why they could have a moon pool, which is just a big hole in the bottom of the rig. The inside air (actually a special gas mixture) is at the same pressure as the ocean at this depth, so the water doesn't rise any higher into the rig. This was why we were shown Lindsey and the SEALs adjusting to the much higher pressure when they came down. It takes minutes/hours to adjust to higher pressure, but hours/days/weeks to adjust to lower pressure, depending on the depth. Going from high to low pressure too quickly gives you the "bends" (decompression sickness), which is gas bubbling out of your blood. You have to give your body enough time to adjust or else you could die.
Being at a higher pressure than normal gives some people pressure-induced psychosis. This was why Coffey's hand kept shaking, and why he went even nuttier than he normally would. This is a metaphor for figuratively being under pressure. Up to a point, no special hard suit is needed for people to live and work, because everything is at the same pressure. Only a special gas mixture that has no nitrogen (helium is one of the best substitutes for it) and just enough oxygen must be used. Humans can only take so much pressure, though, even with everything equalized. Eventually compression will become an issue for the lungs, which is why they had to switch to fluid (liquid) breathing for Bud when he had to go really *deep* . It's because that stuff, unlike gases, is incompressible.
Absolutely correct.
Nitrogen narcosis is a thing at certain depths, and these guys would DEFINITELY have been at the depths depicted in the movie. So it was highly probable that they breathed a low nitrogen mix. Trained tech divers have had experience over and over with the feelings associated with it. While Navy SEALS are incredibly trained, they don't perfom at such depths USUALLY. It takes loads of training to become accustomed to it, or so I have heard.
All of this is done from the surface as well, with the so-called tech divers. They are often seen with three, or even four pressure bottles holding the respective mixtures they need for certain stages, as well as the required amount for the decompression stage. It truly is a science to calculate dive depths, lengths, mixtures, etc so nothing to do on a whim and a moments notice. Any significant pressure changes at depth can and probably will result in extreme physicological as well as psychological consequences, right up to death.
The decompression times really take insanely long. Here's a story from my diving instructor for a mere 70m (roughly) tech dive he saw.
My diving instructor took us to Hemmoor in Germany and told us quite a few stories of the very early days when the maximum depth in Hemmoor's ex-strip mine, now become lake was around 73m depth. This was a reason why so many tech divers used it either for training dives, or even just for fun. There's an underwater ledge that is almost perfectly flat slopping very, very gradually to the cliff edge where it suddenly plunges down almost 65 meters today, but back then it went to 73m. His diving buddy and him had done a standard dive there to more normal depths, roughly 30 meters, and they rose along the cliff up to the edge slowly for their ascent and safety stop. They popped over the edge, and my diving instructor came face to face with a tech diver, lying on his side, underwater, sleeping. The ledge was perfect for them to lie down onto as it was nearly perfectly at 10m depth, the perfect resting spot without having to really take care not to bob up or down much. Another two sat there playing with laminated cards, another one was sucking food through a straw from a sealed package. All of them waiting for their decompression to end. He found out later the tech divers had another 2 hours to decompress.
So, kiddos, never ever take decompression lightly cause the gases in your blood (and joints) will KILL you if you don't take it seriously.
Great comment and good explanation. I was going to explain this but this comment beat me to it. Seems , not surprisingly, that many people who see this movie don’t quite grasp how things have to work when at this depth. This is sci-fi obviously but the concepts are all based on real cutting edge science. Not sure how the movie could explain this without a huge exposition dump that would take you out of the movie. Great comment!
@@douglaspatient7112, Well, our new friends provided the physiological magic for the crew. No explanation really needed.
Haha yeah of course this was filmed on film George! The movie is from 1989!! Digital was not a thing in movies until the early 2000s.
Came here to say this. I remember it because The Phantom Menace is the first and only one of the prequels to be filmed traditionally. The rest were filmed digitally
38:56 The reason everyone told you to watch the Special Edition over the theatrical cut is that bigger message was completely stripped from the theatrical cut. And whilst the theatrical cut is a decent movie, The Abyss Special Edition is one of my favourite movies. Its also easily James Cameron's most technically accomplished movie because of the new techniques they had to develop before they could even start filming such as the full re-breather face masks which didn't exist before Cameron needed diver underwater dialogue and had to work with divers to invent the gear..
However its also notorious for quite possibly being the toughest shoot in movie history with those working on the movie nicknaming it 'The Abuse' amongst other nicknames. Amongst trivia you didnt mention are the fact that both James Cameron and Ed Harris almost drowned making it and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio walked off set during the resuscitation scene and was intending to abandon the rest of the shoot until convinced to return by her agent. Also, since the water was sort of murky prior to shooting meaning they couldn't film anything they had to add so much chlorine to the water to clarify it that everyone's hair started bleaching and many developed minor skin burns. Many of the actors refuse to talk about the movie to this day because of the trauma involved.
But damn, Cameron made an excellent Sci-fi!
And also fun fact, the rat scene was heavily cut for us British audiences so all we got to see was the actors faces. It wasn't until 30 years later when i sailed the high seas and commandeered an uncut copy that i got to see the scene in full.
I wasn’t a big fan of the Special Edition over the years, but I have started to come around to it lately.
always watch the special edition.
And the specific reason why Mastrantonio walked off the set during the resuscitation scene was because the camera ran out of film during a take, and the prospect of having to do another take of such an emotionally intense scene (especially because of an avoidable technical reason) was just too daunting.
Honestly, getting into a situation where the camera runs out of film seems very unlike the *notoriously* detail-oriented James Cameron...
That's exactly why the Special Edition is the inferior movie. Its preachy and clumsy with it.
@@ccdecc6650 Thanks for saying that! I feel that way too. The theatrical cut I thought made the point beautifully with a hopeful ending. The SE just pounds you over the head with it.
Bud's hand is in various slowly fading shades of blue for the entire movie. 😂
The drowning/resuscitation scene. I was 17 when this came out in theaters, so while it was an intense scene, Ed Harris' incredibly powerful and emotional acting didn't quite hit me until I watched this years later having met my wife. The pain and desperation in his voice gets me every damn time. Just extraordinary.
EDIT: Spelling
I still get emotional when I watch that scene. And when she breaks down talking to him later.
The fictional company that runs the oil rig, Benthic Petroleum, is the same company that owned the abandoned gas station in T2 where John, Sarah, and Arnold hide out in after breaking out of the mental hospital.
Nice.
It's also a Benthic Petroleum tanker truck that explodes in front of Bill and Jo in Twister.
@@cyberingcatgirls7069 Really?! I love that. Also, that Earth is really going through it, huh? lmao
@@Trepanation21 Either that or Benthic is branching out into the multiverse!
Niiiiice!!!
Fun Fact: Real oxygenated fluorocarbon fluid was used in the rat fluid breathing scene. Dr. Johannes Kylstra and Dr. Peter Bennett of Duke University pioneered this technique and consulted on the film, giving detailed instructions on how to prepare the fluid. The only reason for cutting to the actors' faces was to avoid showing the rats defecating from momentary panic as they began breathing the fluid. Now, the breathable liquid scene was just filmed with Ed Harris holding his breath for brief windows of filming.
Also, the Special Edition version contains 17 extra minutes that was trimmed out of the theatrical release by the studio against James Cameron's wishes. These scenes are key and totally explain the alien's real agenda. Glad to see you guys doing this version because the director's cut of this film has additional footage that makes the story so much better.
I seem to remember the US navy doing actual human trials on fluid breathing, but it required so much effort by the divers to move the fluid in and out of their lungs to do any sort of work, that they would literally bruise and break their ribs.
So it's not a practical solution for diving. It might be if the people could be on essentially ventilators.
Also, if you have a chance, read the book, cause it gives a lot more information about the aliens and from the point of view of the aliens.
They talked about this at the end, read it word for word.
Real: My buddy is a retired navy diver
It's not animal abuse. It's just animal torture.
I honestly think one of my favorite things about that woman’s revival after drowning was how happy everyone was about it, not just her ex. Everyone all movie seemed to hate her but they were honestly relieved that she didn’t die. So they didn’t hate her nearly as much as they claimed to 😂
The part where he slaps her and tells her to fight as he is giving her CPR, probably the best acting I've seen from anyone. I remember this movie vividly I've watched it so many times since it came out in the 80's, that scene still makes me cry.
The Abyss and True Lies will get 4K bluray releases in March!
Finally! But I'm also thinking "Please, please don't screw this up!" 🤞
@@DonDuracellVery true. We do know for a fact that they color graded the film differently. All the deep blue hues of the original have been shifted to teal. For some reason, 4K remasters have all been getting rid of the original beautiful blue tones and opting for teal shades. I won’t have a full opinion on it until I see it, but I’m not much of a fan of that kind of thing. And word from some people who have seen True Lies already say it is filled with DNR that ruins it.
@@NmDPlm31 Why change things, don't they want us to buy them!
Yeah, but not the special edition as far as I know. I hope I'm wrong.
@@warrengday To be fair, some things have to be tweaked and adjusted for 4K because the new level of detail inherently jeopardizes some original choices that suited the tech of the time. Whether or not this regards the blue/teal situation, I have no idea. But generally speaking, it does need to be curated.
“Hippie, stay off my side!” is a line I love to employ. Nobody gets it except my wife. Which makes it even better. This is my favorite Cameron movie btw.
Poor Hippy. He actually had all the saving details but everyone despised him.
@@RideAcrossTheRiver Well people died because he went back for his rat instead of closing the hatch. The only thing the rat was good for was helping the SEAL demonstrate the breathing liquid.
@@jsharp3165 How did you come up with that?
To the subject of problematic filming conditions; it really is hard to reconcile this being one of my favorite movies with how the cast and crew were treated. Simone is spot on, "I hate that I love this movie". At the end of the day all I can do is appreciate the art for what it is and support productions that treat all with respect.
I said in another comment, honestly I think it would be worse if the end product had been shit, imagine going through all the hell just for a movie to not even be good, so I think it being a good movie and enjoying the movie is probably the best silver lining to come out of it
I love this movie so much. Michael Biehn's family are personal friends of ours. First time I met him, I asked him to sign my copy of the novelization of this film. After all the good guys I'd seen him play, it was great to see him play a villain. He's so good in this! And back in the 80s, I was totally crushing on the actress who played Lindsey. She was also in Robin Hood.
She was also in Scarface!
Underrated performance by Michael Biehn. Coffey and Ringo, two best bad guys in his career.
When Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are alone together in the little submersible and it's slowing filling with water--that scene is both the most personal and the most desperate "desperate plan" scene I have ever seen. It is horrifying and beautiful and haunting all at once. The acting is so good: the initial clear-headedness, then the worry rising along with the water level until the final terrifying moment of total submersion. Wow.
The scene with the rat in the fluid is why The Abyss has a tricky release history in the UK as it was deemed cruel as the rat wouldn't have known what was going on and that there is an inherent risk of lung damage associated with the fluid breathing. The fact that all the rats that were used in different takes had no long lasting health issues is besides the point because the production company didn't know that would be the case at the time of filming. The scene was trimmed for early theatrical and home releases but the new 4k version hasn't been granted a release as the studio doesn't want to trim the scene again and the BBFC (UK film ratings board) won't change their stance either
When Channel Four showed the TV premiere of The Abyss they "accidentally" showed an uncut version which included the rat breathing liquid scene.
I was happy to finally see the scene in full but many more people were not happy. Not happy at all.
Well, I mean clearly the rats were not having a great time, to the point of pooping themselves due to being distressed. I mean, I'm not a fan of censorship, but at the same time the filmmakers need to be responsible with what they are doing and what they subject their cast (human or otherwise) to
Rats are considered vermin, pests. They are not protected animals. There would be no reason to remove this scene in the UK or anywhere else.
@@gswithen even if it's legal to kill them it doesn't mean it's morally acceptable to publish a movie with a rat being tortured. They are creatures that can feel pain, fear and distress after witnessing a friend death.
@@gswithen This is a domestic rat. Hope you've never taken any sort of medication in your life because most of it is tested on those vermin, pests. There's a HUGE difference between a domesticated lab animal and the animals that invade people's homes, carry diseases, and drive local animals/plants to extinction in areas they've become invasive in.
Interesting fact about James Cameron, he took on film projects with the goal of advancing film making technology and build the credibility to be able to one day be capable of making his dream project. And he eventually was able to when he made Avatar.
I'd love for you to wear heart monitors while watching suspense thrillers like Crimson Tide (1995). Most of this film's visual effects were done in the late 80s, but the tidal wave sequence was completed for the special edition two years after Terminator 2.
Underrated and epic in every way. One of Cameron’s finest hours. I saw this opening day at NYC’s late, great Ziegfeld Theatre (one of the city’s last movie palaces) in all its glory and the resuscitation scene always makes me cry - very powerful and poignant.
You said you'd love to see the behind the scenes for this movie...if you can find it watch "Under Pressure: The Making of the Abyss" it is incredible. I believe no other film was ever more complicated to make. Several people came so close to dying. The actors were put through hell. Mary Elizabeth had to hold her breath and be carried all that way; Ed Harris was dragged by a cable sideways over and over for that descent into the abyss, and the liquid breathing was just him holding his breath in regular water and pretending to "breathe" And James Cameron would be underwater directing for so long he had to go through decompression to surface again. It's seriously the best behind the scenes documentary I've ever seen.
I used to be such a geek like George when it comes to _behind-the-scenes_ stuff. Since I found out about all that trouble that occured during the shooting of this movie, I consider that now a double-edged sword.
But here's a fun fact: At the beginning, calling Lindsey "the queen bitch of the universe" was James Cameron's hint to his last movie Aliens (II).
And the Lindsey/Bud relationship was based on Cameron's own relationship with his ex-wife, Gale Ann Hurd.
When George looks long at pizza, the pizza does not look back because it will be devoured
I gotta say, this movie has one of the best on-screen punches I've ever seen when Catfish clocks Coffee right in the face and sends him nearly head over heels. Love it!
Water: We can't live without it, nor can we live within it😊
sure we can. With the proper gear.
@@adamskeans2515 Not permanently...
You know, Women and Water begin with the same letter....
@@KronnangDunn with enough of the right gear, sure we can
@@adamskeans2515 Be my guest...
Great film! My favorite film from Cameron. The behind-the-scenes footage is fascinating, Cameron and crew conxieved a lot of firsts with underwater communication while filming.
Your body wouldn't get crushed by the increasing water pressure in itself at something like 2,000 feet (~600 meters = ~60 bars of pressure). Most of your body is fluids and solids (blood and bones, etc.), and they don't compress as readily as gasses do.
Your concern does start with the gasses you have in your body, ie. the air in your lungs and your cranium. With open-air regulating systems, e.g. SCUBA or the helmets the divers use in the film, as long as you can breathe air at the same elevated pressure as the water around you, you won't get crushed. If there's a difference in pressure between the two, that would easily cause crushing. This also applies to the air inside The Rig, where everything takes place. That air is also kept at the same pressure as the water around it, otherwise the differences in pressure between outside and in would violently implode The Rig, as we see it happen to Michael Biehn's character in the mini-sub.
However, diving deep is also severely limited by the way gas compounds interact with the human body at increased pressure, and at these perceived depths, they'd have to employ advanced saturation diving methods. Meaning that they have to change the composition of the internal air on The Rig and the air fed to the divers sporting the helmets. Our normal atmospheric air of ~80% nitrogen (N2) and ~20% oxygen (O2) is no good. If you'd breathe that at 60 bars, it... would kill you. A partial pressure of oxygen higher than 1.6 PO2 is outright poisonous for the human body. Shorthanded that means that you couldn't breathe pure 100% oxygen deeper than 1.6 bars = 6m/20f, before the PO2 would kill you. Atmospheric air with 20% would reach 1.6 PO2 around 70m/230f. (For increased safety, tourist scuba classes teach you to never go higher than 1.4 PO2, usually on 20% O2 natural air.)
The big guy had that seizure early on, because the oxygen percentage in his breathing mix got switched to too high and he slipped into an extended coma from oxygen toxicity.
Me, I have no idea what exactly the air mix might be inside The Rig, but it's probably at a lower O2 than 20%, and they probably would do away completely with nitrogen and replace it with some other gas, 'cause there's also a separate issue of nitrogen narcosis at extreme pressure (past 100m/330f, say). So maybe there's, like, argon mixed in instead of nitrogen, but I have no idea. It wouldn't be helium (which is otherwise common for saturation diving), 'cause the actors' voices don't sound funny. (EDIT: Some have since suggested to me it might be a hydrox mix with 1% oxygen and 99% hydrogen. That's how little oxygen there'd need to be in the mix at such extreme pressure. I still haven't found any references to what Cameron might've intended the mix to be.)
In the film they talk at length about decompression; just to get down into the U/W rig, the group from the surface in the beginning has to sit for 8 hours in their vessel attached to The Rig, while the pressure is gradually increased and their breathing mix is changed to the one internally in The Rig. And to ever get back from that depth after their extended stay (except for the "Deus Ex Machina" switch with the ending), The Rig crew would have to decompress back to lower pressure over a really long time (do they say two weeks, I forget?) also just sitting on their a... and wait. This is because if you breathe air at depth for an extended time, you absorb more of the gasses in your blood per millilitre. SCUBA classes teach you about the dangers of decompression sickness (aka. "the bends"), where you need to return slowly from even shallow depths like 20m/65f, because breathing compressed air at those 3 bars for, say, 20min. on a tourist dive has dissolved more nitrogen in your blood than otherwise at surface pressure, and going straight back to the surface risk having this "residual nitrogen" turn from dissolved in the liquid of your blood to suddenly form gas bubbles in your blood stream, and that... can kill you too. If you return to lower pressure gradually, your body can keep up and wash out the residual compounds just by you breathing normally.
For the finale, where Ed Harris' character has to dive much deeper than 60 bars, James Cameron came up with using the fluid breathing tech, which exists in real life in a lab. For those depths, it would be impossible to do it with gasses in your lungs no matter what the mix, but you can (theoretically!) do it with a liquid in your lungs feeding your blood and cells the oxygen instead, again because liquids don't compress as readily as gas does even at insane water depths.
There's a lot of really good diving science hidden inside James Cameron's story. He knows his s**t.
You deserve a thumbs up for your detailed response. Even if I knew all this stuff, I'd be too lazy to share it. Good on ya.
@@michaelturner9154
🙏
Digital wasn't a thing when this was made, so indeed it was all filmed on actual film. If something looked nearly impossible or extremely dangerous to pull off, that's because it was. It's a miracle no one died making this movie. Even Cameron nearly drowned at one point on set.
This is my favorite James Cameron movie. Back in the day of cable TV, I would always stop to watch it when flipping through the channels. Which is rough because it's such a long movie. I love the characters. I love the story. That CPR scene traumatized me as a kid. Ugh, now I have to go watch it again.
There is a film from a body recovery team sent to remove the crew from a sunk tug boat off the African coast. It looked like this, but with even more trash floating around.
You can see a hand in the water inches away and the diver grabs the hand to pull the body out, then the diver screamed when the had squeezed back. He had found a survivor, trapped in a small pocket of air.
They had to quickly plan and mount a rescue, but they saved the man's life.
At first the survivor wanted nothing more to do with the sea, but he changed his mind later and became a diver himself.
He made his first professional dive with the man who had rescued him. Touching story.
The ring was titanium.
"This movie must've been a nightmare to film"
Ohohoho like you wouldn't believe George. 😁
In fact, don't EVER ask Ed Harris to talk about this movie -- he won't!
They should find the documentary and do a reaction to it, that’s a worthy story in itself.
Literally production Hell.
Cameron bears most of the blame
The Abyss is my favourite James Cameron movie you don't know the half of it guys when it comes to the making of this movie the documentary is insane with how they got this movie made it's on TH-cam I recommend it as its just crazy one big thing that was invented by Jim Cameron in this movie was how to direct light underwater they used all these tiny plastic balls so when they directed the underwater sequences they wouldn't get screwed up from the light above he used this exact same method on Avatar 2
This was the first time morphing was used ... then followed by T2 and Jurassic Park ... you just saw the birth of CGI-morphing = the waterfinger squirming and forming a face.
Morphing was used a year earlier for the transformation scene in Willow.
@@tremorsfan Shoutout Willow! Man, this era of filmmaking really was "magic" 🤩
@@Trepanation21Industrial Light and 'Magic' actually. ILM pioneered this technology.
I'm so happy this movie is amazing because the cast and crew went through alot to make it. Atleast their efforts were not wasted.
This movie is an emotional roller coaster.
I get emotional/cry everytime I see the scene where Lindsay drowns and Virgil works so hard to save her. It's so intense and Ed Harris acting/emotion is so believable and moving that he should have won an Oscar for it.
Of course this is a James Cameron movie. Even Michael Biehn aka Kyle Reese from Terminator stars as the unhinged villain. Also this is the first movie at the time to use a new CGI technology to create the water tentacle mimicking Lindsay's face .
Yes George that CGI technique was later used to create the T-1000 in Terminator 2.
I saw this in the theater when I was in medical school and to this day I don't think I've seen anyone play a more realistic dead body than Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The pallor and blank stare are still chill-inducing. Not the kind of thing she probably wants to be known for but really impressive. Cheers.
I was so overwhelmed back then at the cinema. Breathtaking, stressful, and just wonderful. I was totally knackered when I left the cinema and physically drained. And it's been one of my favourites since
What they were doing was something called saturation diving. It's where you pressurize the divers to a given depth and all you really need is protection from abrasion and cold. It doesn't take very long for a human body to adjust in pressurizing, but depressurization could take up to two weeks on depending on depth. That was one thing that the movie doesn't make clear. Not everyone adapts to being pressurized, and symptoms can include uncontrolled shaking and paranoia. Basically Michael Biehn's character is having this problem. And Ed Harris' character's wedding ring is made from titanium, because his wife was an engineer specializing in designing underwater equipment, and titanium is a really good material for constructing pressure hulls for deep submersibles, and because of the symbolism of titanium being mostly unbreakable.
To this day Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth mastrantonio refused to talk about making this film the shoot was that hellish. Ed Harris used to have emotional break downs at the side of the road on the way home, after shoots and punched James Cameron once.
The CG water tentacle was the first such use of the tech, it was the first time we had a material that was refractive and realistically integrated into the environment. If you look up the "The Abyss-CGI making of (1989)" they go over the tech and how it revolutionized everything. They used Alias PowerAnimator (grandfather to Autodesk Maya) running on Silicon Graphics workstations running IRIX, a flavor of Unix. I had a chance to use both Silicon Graphics Indigo's (in grabber purple!) and O2 workstations (grabber blue!) when I was in the industry, with the Indigo running a 32-bit R3000 RISC CPU @33MHz. Back then the thing was a beast, and cost over $75000 for a single Indigo workstation. There was a reason all of the computers in Jurassic Park were Silicon Graphics workstations, and it was not just set dec. ;)
Not all subs are massive, but the ones that carry dozens of nuclear missiles are. The reason they are cramped on the inside is that their volume is for the weapons they carry, leaving as little as they can get away with for the crew to live in. It's the same on every military vessel, even humongous aircraft carriers. They squeeze the crew into tight quarters, with many sleeping in tiny bunks in hallways, to make as much space as possible to support like 100 aircraft (on the US super-carriers) of various types, fuel for the aircraft, nuclear power plants for the ship, and enough ammo to sink a small island.
Ohio-class SSBNs as seen in the movie were pretty sweet, though, compared to the previous US SSBNs and Los Angeles-class SSNs. As a civilian tool of the Reagan era military-industrial complex I got to deploy on subs for several weeks several times a year while conducting various tests of things we were developing and the Ohio-class had more creature comforts (eg, much nicer "heads" and galleys), and carrying additional personnel was less disruptive to the crew. On an LA-class SSN the lowest-ranking seamen were already hot-bunking (sharing bunks in shifts) and I always felt bad about displacing a crewman from his regular berth.
I've heard soviet akula subs are spacious, largest in the world
@@cpob2013 They were so huge because they carried extra-large missiles. And because the crew size was about the same as that of the American Ohio-class ballistic missile subs, I suppose it's possible that there was more space left for crew comfort. I don't know that for a fact, but I've heard that, too. If true, then it would be an exception to the rule, though, because more empty space means less supplies and ammunition.
9:40 I'm sure that the feeling of drowning must conjure up such a primal state of panic that it wouldn't really matter if you were a rat or a human. Once that feeling of "gotta take a breath" starts everything else but "BREATHE!" goes out the window and you think you're gonna drown, hyper-oxygenated breathing fluid or not
I've been through it, twice, as a kid. It is not good. Both times due to 'pranks' by friends. Both times had to be rescued by passing strangers. Gave me a lifelong appreciation for good samaritans.
@@AnonEyeMouse You need new friends. 😕
Many commenters already mentioned the documentary on how this was filmed and also the tough conditions, but if you want another perspective, Michael Biehn was in Michael Rosenbaum's podcast a few weeks ago and talked about it. I'd say he likes James Cameron a little more than Ed Harris does 😂
Remember this was in 89. All film baby, no digital recording. The water digital effect though, was extremely early "cgi" and what turned into the effects for the T-1000 in Terminator 2. Cameron basically said that this was the prototype effect to see if the T-1000 would be possible.
According to several sources, the wedding ring worn by Bud (Ed Harris) which saves his life by preventing the hydraulic door from shutting is a custom made ring made out of titanium
You guys watch the films I grew up with.
I remember this as the most accurate drowning and resuscitation scene in cinema history.
And animal rights groups really hated the S out of this movie for the rat breathing liquid scene. 'Cause that was actual oxygenated liquid that the critter was actually breathing. (Ed Harris just held his breath.)
And yes, this was a nightmare shoot that is legendary in Hollywood. Everybody lost their damn minds. And all caught on stock film, this is like ten years before the digital breakthrough.
And much of the specialized equipment was designed by James Cameron himself. He's a life-long under water nerd, which is why this film was his baby. James Cameron the movie director was the third human being to reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep in a bathyscaphe of his own design in 2012.
Try and catch "The Right Stuff" for Ed Harris' big break years before this one.
The guy with the crab crawling out of his mouth is Mike Cameron, James Cameron's brother. He's an engineer (their whole family are scientists and engineers, with Jim being the black sheep, since he's a filmmaker, but then again he is also sort of a scientist, too), and he has designed a bunch of the equipment his brother has used for underwater shooting. He did that for _Titanic_ (1997), and probably did that work for this movie, too.
Bud's ring is made of Titanium. In the bookco-written by Orson Scott Card and Cameron they explain that Bud designed and made their wedding rings out of titanium to symbolized the indestructible permanence of their love. When he throws his ring into the toilet and then goes back to get it he actually saves his own life. A nice touch is that for the rest of the movie Ed Harris has a blue hand from the chemicals from the toilet.
The two water tanks used in the filming of The Abyss were specially constructed to hold large amounts of water. The first tank, based on the abandoned plant's primary reactor containment vessel, held 7.5 million US gallons of water and was 18 m deep and 70 m across. At the time, it was the largest fresh-water-filtered tank in the world. Additional scenes were shot in the second tank, an unused turbine pit, which held 2.5 million US gallons of water. As the production crew rushed to finish painting the main tank, millions of gallons of water poured in and took five days to fill. The Deepcore rig was anchored to a 90-ton concrete column at the bottom of the large tank
The scene of the dead submariner with the crab crawling out of his mouth, was actually Camerons brother who did the scene for real and had to hold his breath numerous times to complete the shot
Saw this in the theaters many times. A super intensive movie with heart racing scenes as you experienced. The scene with her drowning had audience members gasping for air including myself (former lifeguard).
Yes indeed. This movie is considered to be one of the most difficult movies to film both technically and on the crew and actors. I believe they made t-shirts saying they survived it.
BTW, I LOVE the "Heart Monitor" idea for scary or intense movies!!!
Another one of James Cameron's "BLUE" movies. The man has an infatuation with filming with the color blue... The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the Avatar movies, Titanic, Aliens, Strange Days, and True Lies. Whether it's film lenses or digital coloring, the guy definitely has a style and mood he prefers.
That drowning scene (and the subsequent resuscitation) was the very first part of this movie that I ever saw; I was channel surfing, and came across it on HBO, right when those two were discussing their options. (I immediately WTF'd at what I was watching.) This whole sequence is one of the most terrifying things I've ever watched.
Everyone in the theater cheered at the end of the crane drag sequence. This movie was the pinnacle of sci-fix cinema for quite a while.
the song they sing is Willin by Linda Rondstat
The 4k release is March 12th.
Finally, after 3000 years...
@@pirwzyWill there be any "additional" footage at the end? To convey what Cameron sought -and felt he had failed- to show?
fun fact: the wide shots of the Bentic Explorer were a miniature that was so large that they had to legally register it as a vessel
This was one of only two movies in which the VFX of ship miniatures did not look like crap -- and I guess the reason is because they were not "miniature" at all, lol. (Water does not scale, so miniature-based water effects usually look "wrong" to the eye.)
The other movie being "Raise the Titanic". Yes, I thought the miniature VFX looked better in "Raise the Titanic" than in Cameron's "Titanic".
@Johnny_Socko have you seen the footage behind the scenes of the model? it was so big you could walk around on it. it makes you wonder at what point does a miniature cease to be an miniature?
@@synaesthesia2010 It was pretty amazing, I love that model and the whole concept of that ship. Along the same lines, the miniature DC8 they crashed in Die Hard 2 was about the size of a Lear jet. Since it was an accurate model, it generated lift; the only way they could get it to crash the way they wanted was to pull it into the ground using cables.
19:50 I used to scuba dive a lot, and up to 100m deep, you don't need anything special to resist the water pressure to breathe comfortably, or in this case, for that suit to stay seemingly loose.
The compressed air you take with you in tanks gets further compressed by the water pressure to precisely the depth you're at, even though the tanks themselves do not compress. When you breathe in the highly compressed air, it presses outwards against your lungs at exactly the same pressure as the water pressing against the outside of your lungs, meaning that it feels like you are breathing normally at sea level, one atmosphere of pressure.
You do, however have to continually breathe as you change depths to ensure the air in your lungs and blood system are being constantly saturated with air that is at the same pressure as the water around you, and if you don't your lungs can crush as you descend too quickly, or explode if you ascend too quickly. One atmosphere of pressure change (10m of vertical water) is enough to double or halve the volume of air. You can also get the bends, where the gas in your blood hasn't had time to equalize with the pressure around it, and you end up with nitrogen instead of oxygen in your blood (I think? it's been several decades), which is why every 30m or so you take a break from ascending or descending to equalize, and also at 5m before resurfacing.
This means that the suit shown to be loose at that depth must contain air that is as pressurized by the water around it as the air the divers are breathing, and isn't getting crumpled against the diver's body. However, to be more realistic, they'd have to be breathing in air from a closed pressurized system, and breathing out into the suit, or vice versa, because I'm pretty sure rebreather systems wouldn't be able to keep up with such a large open system like this in order for them to reliably breathe in recirculated air and not exhaled air. Rebreather systems are also notoriously unreliable, although this is scifi, so... y'know.
Edit: Haven't seen the movie, and just got the end of your vid... idk anything about breathing liquids lol, just air.
The liquid breathing is real, and it really works to prevent the bends. Also, you don't have to cough it up, it will evaporate over a short time as you breath normally. But it isn't used in deep sea diving today because it washes the natural lubricant out of the lungs, making them very suseptable infections and pneumonia. But it is occasionally used to help premature babies breathe while their lungs are developing.
This movie was so innovative for its time, absolute classic.
That "stare into the abyss" quote is pretty famous - GEORGE! Just kidding... But there are people who say there are probably more USO (Unidentified Submerged Object) than UFOs (flying). And since we have explored so much more of the sky, what better place for aliens to hide that deep under the water? And the liquid oxygen does not yet exist in the way seen in this movie - for people. And I love you guys acting like 1989 was ancient Rome or something. That was the year I graduated from high school.
Cameron is an expert in this stuff and an undersea explorer himself, so yes, this movie is very accurate, although obviously he had to take some artistic license at times. For example, he had the actors speak with their normal voices, while in real life they would have sounded like cartoon chipmunks because of the gas mixture that they'd have to breathe at those depths and pressures, which contains helium (mostly helium with just enough oxygen to breath comfortably), just like what is used in balloons that float, for safety (pure helium is potentially deadly). This was done because obviously the audience would never be able to take the movie seriously if everyone sounded like Chip, Dale, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.
Another bit of fiction is the fluid breathing. It's real, and that stunt rat really breathed it in the movie, but no human has used such a system in the way it was used here. It turns out that animals larger than rats suffer from distress in the lungs, so it's not practical. But it's cool, and Cameron couldn't resist using this concept. By the way, the rat was OK, and Cameron adopted her as his own pet after the movie was done.
Orson Scott Card wrote an accompanying book (not a novel after the movie but written in full cooperation with the director, screenwriters and actors). It dives deep into the thinking of the aliens and main characters. It shows that the situation is even much more complex. Absolutely worth reading.
No it's not. It's incredibly misogynist and does a huge disservice to the character of Lindsay.
@@obato76 Dude, find some joy in your life before it's too late.
@@captbunnykiller1.0Dude, talk to a woman for once in your life.
Dude. That shot of Lindsey struggling to get air under that circular ceiling before drowning, is one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen in a movie. But like you pointed out, Virgil's side of it would be just as horrifying, just having to watch the life go out of her face. Our VHS copy that we watched as kids didn't have any of the world ending stuff at the end. Virgil just arrives down there, sees them, and they broadcast his words back to him and he's like oh cool. Still seems weird that that was released as the official version. Unless maybe we just filmed it off of cable? I guess that's possible.
I love your initial reaction to the RAT was "EEEWWWW!!", but not long after, being like NOOOO!!! SAVE THE RAT!!! The rat can't die!!
Rats get a bad rep. They're actually very social and if you let them get up from the sewers even hygienic. Just like us, really.
There is a difference between Cinebinge and me.
We both looked into the abyss, but when it looked back at us, Cinebinge blinked.
Song is “Willin” performed by Linda Rodstandt. Love this one! Rough filming conditions. Also…..”The Fountain” 2006
Oddly enough an underwater expert once told me the scene where their in the leaking sub ruined the film for him because the leak was low on the wall not overhead and since the sub was at the same pressure as the rig the water would have never gotten higher than the leak
On submarine sizes: You need to distinguish between the *type* of submarine pictured. There's a world of difference between a German Type VII ("Das Boot", 66m), a US Los Angeles class (pictured here, 110m), or a Russian Typhoon ("Hunt for Red October", 175m with two pressure vessels alongside each other). That's why Cpt. Ramius has a cozy cabin for his own and the officers have a dining room, while the officers of U96 were dining squeezed around a table the size of half a bookshelf and the crew took turns using the cots...
AFAIK the water tentacle was the first CGI ever used in a movie. There is a FANTASTIC one hour “Making Of” documentary that came with the original The Abyss CD. It’s by far my favorite “Making Of” documentary to this day. The Abyss remains one of my favorite movies to this day too, and I’m so glad you found the Extended cut, which had the wider Cold War plot and ending slashed for the theatre, because the Berlin Wall fell and Glasnost started while the movie was being made, and the original version was seen as being too provocative while the breakup of the USSR was in its infancy.
As well as Ed Harris, James Cameron almost drowned Kate Winslet during filming of the Titanic. He finally got his diving team safety perfected for Way Of Water, with two safety divers for every actor. I don’t know how he sweettalked Winsket into doing Way Of Water for him, she spent years not talking to him after the Titanic near drowning, like Ed Harris. She trained hard, and her freediving record was a 7 min 14 sec breath hold for one scene, surpassing Tom Cruise’s Hollywood record breath hold for Mission Imposdible. The actual World record breath hold is 24 min.
I was laughing at water-Simone on the thumbnail for like 10 minutes straight before I watched this!
So, most of the underwater shots are real, they built (I think the worlds largest?) a massive tank for the underwater set (outside the Rig etc), but it wasn't dark enough to simulate being that far down, so they ended up pouring millions of black silicon beads into it to block out the sunlight which made it incredibly dangerous to dive in. Then they had to figure out how to film with movie cameras underwater without electrocuting everyone. Also, Ed Harris almost drowned in one of the underwater shots when he was free swimming, he signaled for air but the respirator got mixed up. Apparently he later had a punching match with Cameron afterwards and had a break down when he got home. The CPR scene almost made Mary Mastrantonio quit, the Camera kept malfunctioning and Harris was really screaming at her and slapping her. The scene was finished without her (lots of shots up at Harris when he's shouting) and she was later convinced to come back. Basically the entire cast and crew were miserable throughout, they were sodden wet through the whole process and it took a lot to get the film finished. But my god, what a film it is!
In one of Hunter S. Thompson's books, he met a guy who exited a plane's bathroom with a completely blue dyed hand. He apparently retrieved something of value from the toilet. Thompson also said he met the guy 3 weeks later and his hand was still a pale blue. I appreciate consistency in movies, and if you noticed, Ed Harris's hand was a pale blue throughout the film.
This is basically the point in James Cameron’s career where he knew the stuff he wanted to do was not technically possible via conventional film method. So he just started on the epic journey of inventing his own film equipment, special effects, and deep sea exploration vessels. He actually had the concepts for Titanic and Avatar and other films in his mind when he made this; he just spent decades, figuring out how to actually make them.
There's a medical procedure in which you would have a pipe inserted into your lungs and then a lot of fluid pumped in. It's performed to remove the dust, sand and things like that from the lungs of the people that are working in the mines. It looks like the high pressure cleaning of the kitchen pipes, they do this until the liquid that comes out of the lungs gets clear.
I wanna see it done
Michael biehn is a fantastic and underrated actor, he is probably most well known as Kyle Reece in the original terminator, and johnny ringo in tombstone but absolutely kills it in everthing he does
You missed Corporal Dwayne Hicks in Aliens:)
I find this to be possibly the most thoroughly satisfying and emotionally earned movies by Cameron. People can nerd out for weeks about the behind-the-scenes etc but the end result I still think is one of the best of 80s sci-fi, no small part because of the performance of the cast.
In order to record the actors' voices while diving in the huge reactor pools where most filming took place, Cameron and his team had to *invent* a system which allows actors to dive and speak and *record* at the same time. They then had to edit out the breathing in post.
Cameron has always been a huge underwater genius, and remains one of the few people to have visited the deepest parts of the Oceans of our planet.
9:10 Unfortunately the rat scene is why the UK 4K release has been cancelled. The ratings board here requested it be cut or edited on grounds of animal abuse, while Disney was happy to make the cuts, apparently Cameron refused - even though it had been edited in earlier DVD/VHS releases.
"The Breathing Liquid that is used on the rat is actually real. 6 rats were used to shoot the scene and all survived. For the scenes with Ed Harris, the liquid in his helmet was real but he did not breathe it in."
Remember that this movie is from the 80's, digital didnt exist back then (first movie to use digital cameras was The Phantom Menace).
Definitely watch the documentary about the making of this movie, because it was such a nightmare that no one has ever attempted something similar. It was mostly filmed in an unfinished nuclear power plant where just the exterior of the building had been completed by the time it stopped construction. So they filled it up with water, but then had to find creative ways to keep it covered so the water would look dark while they filmed during the day.
The actors ended up having a few health problems because they were in chlorinated water every day for months, and every actor, cameraman, and everyone else on set had to get diving certified and know how to use the equipment, which took another 6 weeks of training for everyone involved.
Ed Harris actually had two near death experiences during filming, once when they were filling up his helmet because they used water instead of the breathing fluid (they weren't confident enough in the breathing fluid and didn't want to risk his life on it). So they had him hold his breath during the scene and take the water out immediately afterwards. But it took a while to film and he nearly ran out of breath by the time they called cut. Later on, during the scene where he's falling down the abyss (which was actually filmed sideways so they could reuse sets and make it look deeper), Harris's oxygen mixture had a fault and he started taking in water instead of air. He signaled the safety officer but he missed the signal, and thankfully a cameraman saw what was happening and corrected the problem. Harris then had to walk off set after having a panic attack, but resumed filming the next day.
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio also took a day off set after the revival scene, because director James Cameron demanded a ton of different takes, in which Ed Harris had to actually slap her two times for each take. She very nearly caught pneumonia because of being soaking wet and lying on cold steel. They finally stopped filming the scene when the camera itself ran out of film and she walked off set saying "we're not animals!" She has never since worked with James Cameron on another project, likely due to this movie.
Behind the scenes, everyone involved in making the movie from the cast to the crew were required to be certified divers. The fluid breathing scene was indeed real, James Cameron did extensive research on the fluid breathing and even consulted the inventor on how to make it. The fluid was tested with five rats and none has lasting side effects, Cameron kept the one seen in the movie until it died a few years later from old age. All of the equipment from the cameras, lighting and even the dive suits were new technology made for the movie. Cameron specifically wanted dive helmets that were made so that the actors face could be seen.
The scenes with the water tentacle was also new CGI technology and lessons learned from this would later be used when creating the T-1000 for Terminator 2: Judgment Day.