<i>The Abyss</i>: The Nuts-and-Bolts Approach to High-Pressure First Contact

The Abyss (1989). Written and directed by James Cameron. Starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn.

Back in the 1970s, the energy company Duke Power began constructing a nuclear power plant outside of Gaffney, South Carolina. The Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant was never completed; of the three planned reactors, only one was partially finished by the time construction stopped in the early ’80s. The unfinished reactor sat around for a few years until the property was purchased by an unlikely new owner: Earl Owensby (E.O.) Studios, which planned to convert the site into a film and television studio.

That’s not exactly what ended up happening. E.O. Studios did find somebody who wanted to make a movie at the site, but only one film would ever be made at the abandoned Cherokee plant.

And it was a film with some very peculiar filming requirements… the sort of requirements that would never be replicated because, in all honestly, nobody else would be crazy enough try.

I read a lot of wild film production stories while researching movies for this column, but I don’t think any of them have made me stop and think, “I’m sorry, you did what?” more than James Cameron’s The Abyss. I guess I have always sort of known, in the back of my mind, that this movie had some bonkers production lore, but I think it’s subsequently been overshadowed by the bonkers production lore from Cameron’s Titanic (1997). Sure, the Titanic production was bigger and messier and more expensive and also involved the cast and crew being hospitalized after eating lobster chowder laced with PCP.

But I genuinely think the production of The Abyss was more outrageous, because an estimated 40% of the principal photography took place underwater.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean special effects sequences, miniatures and models, or green screen backgrounds against which dry actors would perform. That means principal photography. The sets were underwater. The actors were underwater. The director, director of photography (Mikael Salomon), an underwater supervisor (Al Giddings), camera operators, assistants, and other members of the crew were underwater at depths below 50 feet for five hours at a time; they had to refill their air tanks during the shift and decompress for hours afterward.

Also, that scene of the rat breathing liquid? That was real.

Let’s back up a little.

Cameron wrote the first version of the story that would evolve into The Abyss when he was a teenager. He attended a lecture about experiments around trying to make it possible for humans to breathe incompressible liquid instead of air. (Liquid breathing is still an ongoing area of research with potential applications far beyond diving—such as in neonatal pediatrics—but it started back in the ’60s with the experiments of the U.S. Office of Naval Research.) That was the start of Cameron’s lifelong fascination with deep sea exploration; you probably remember that in 2012 Cameron piloted a submersible to the deepest point in the world’s oceans. But before all of that, back when he was just a Canadian teenager, he wrote a short story about a group of people studying the ocean depths.

Cameron kept that story in the back of his mind when he went to Hollywood. He started out working on visual effects—he made the matte paintings in Escape From New York (1981)—before he started directing movies. Cameron’s directorial feature debut came about when he was brought on mid-production to take over the 1982 horror movie Piranha II: The Spawning, a film about murderous piranhas who have learned how to fly. It is apparently so bad Cameron refuses to count it as his first film. I have not seen it so I’ll take his word for it, but I think everybody should watch the trailer, for our communal edification.

Luckily for him—and for all movie lovers—Cameron’s second and third feature films were a little bit better.

With producer Gale Anne Hurd, Cameron made The Terminator (1984) (which Hurd and Cameron also co-wrote), then they made Aliens (1986), a killer one-two punch of incredible cinema that very much made up for the flying piranhas. The Terminator was quite successful upon release, but Aliens was a true smash hit, which means that when Cameron and Hurd were thinking about their third film, they were pretty much able to do what they wanted.

And what they wanted was to dunk a bunch of people in a giant tank in an abandoned nuclear power plant. That’s how we got The Abyss.

I don’t think I’m going out on any critical limbs when I say that The Abyss is not exactly the most profound sci fi movie in the world. The aliens look pretty cool, thanks to the work of visual effects supervisor John Bruno and his team, as well as the work of Dennis Muren and the folks at Industrial Light & Magic, who put together the computer animation sequence with that watery tentacle. But in terms of their narrative role, the aliens aren’t terribly interesting. Cameron said he wanted to tell a story with nicer aliens than the ones in Aliens, but we’ve seen that sort of shimmery benevolence done before and better in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

The special edition director’s cut expands the role of the aliens, as well as adding a great deal more Cold War tension and global peril in the form of enormous tsunami, but the additional visuals and minutes don’t really add any depth. (No pun intended.) The build-up to the aliens works pretty well, but both versions flounder at the end, with the reveal and deus ex machina, partly because the solution is very abrupt, and partly because the everything’s-all-right-now ending doesn’t really match the gritty tone of the rest of the movie.

I don’t really mind a flimsy final ten minutes, though. I still enjoy this movie quite a lot, mostly because I think the aliens are irrelevant. In fact, I think the external stakes of the plot are largely irrelevant. All of the drama, all of the tension, all of the narrative twists, everything that matters happens under the water—which is exactly how it should be for a disaster film setting defined by extreme isolation and inhospitable conditions. It may be dressed up in first contact trappings, but the real core of the story is a very different old school sci fi plot: We Have To Survive In This Impossible Place, But We Have A Problem.

Again, that’s not a knock against The Abyss. That’s exactly what I like about this movie! I like that it’s a simple survival story told in a straightforward manner, and it saves all of its complexity and movie magic for the mechanics of the production. It was an absolutely outlandish choice to decide to make an underwater film and not fake it—but that’s exactly what Cameron did.

Cameron and Hurd were making The Abyss during a weird little Hollywood epoch in which several underwater movies were produced, but many of them were fairly terrible, so it wasn’t like there was any guaranteed audience or success. (John McTiernan’s The Hunt For Red October was in production around the same time, but would come out in 1990.) And there certainly wasn’t an expectation or precedent for filming an underwater movie actually underwater. From the various interviews and articles that came out at the time, it seems like the crew did have some idea what they were getting into before they started, although the cast perhaps did not.

The cast, by the way, absolutely hated making this film. That was so widely reported at the time there were even rumors that Ed Harris wouldn’t participate in promotions—which were incorrect, he did promote the film, but he and the rest of the cast also talked at great length about how painful the whole process was.

That brings us back to the abandoned Cherokee nuclear power plant. The film production used two enormous tanks on the site. The smaller of the two, a turbine pit, was used mostly for filming the exterior shots of late, lamented USS Montana. But most of the principal photography took place in the would-be reactor’s containment tank, which was 209 ft (70 m) across and 55 ft (18 m) deep, and held 7.5 million gallons (28,000 m³) of water. Remember that this was an unfinished, abandoned power station—which meant the tank was not watertight. They had to bring in dam engineers to fix it up. Then they had another problem: daylight. Because the film takes place in the inky darkness, they had to cover up this enormous tank. They used both an enormous tarp and a layer of floating black beads to block out the light. And, when the tarp blew away, they resorted to filming at night. (A lot of the info about the technical aspects of the film’s production come from an excellent on-set report from Starlog #146, and another article from The New York Times. There was a lot of contemporary press about the movie precisely because of the technical nature of the production.)

What did they put into that tank besides millions of gallons of water? Well, pretty much what we see on screen. The film’s Deepcore rig is a real structure submerged in the large tank. The production brought on a commercial diving company to design and build two working submersibles—Cab One and Flatbed—as well as a third full-size mock-up. The large, transparent globe-like windows through which we often see Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and Flatbed operator “One Night” (Kimberly Scott) were designed specifically to allow for the characters to be filmed from the underwater exterior.

They also needed to see the actors when they were wearing the dive suits, as diving scenes accounts for a great deal of the film’s runtime. The cameras were protected by custom-built waterproof housings, with another housing used for the scenes that switch between underwater and above water, often including dialogue. The production brought on an engineering company to design working dive helmets that would also allow for lights, cameras, and microphones. The helmets and dive suits had to be custom fit to each actor, as well as balanced and weighted to allow them to move about as they needed. Most of the cast had basically no diving experience beforehand; they spent a week in the Cayman Islands learning the basics before production began.

Important note: They may have made the rat breathe liquid for real, but they didn’t do the same with Ed Harris. Instead, they made him hold his breath for a very long time while they filled his helmet with water.

That on-set report in Starlog describes the filming of one of the movie’s best, more harrowing scenes: the part where the crane from the surface dislodges Deepcore and the rig begins to flood. It’s a tremendous sequence in the film, packed with panic, confusion, and tragedy as the characters rush to seal off parts of the flooding rig. It should come as no surprise by now that this scene was filmed by sending a flood of 50,000 gallons of water into the set, where the actors were slammed and drenched and tossed around.

And, of course, they had to do it at least three times, because nothing is ever perfect on the first take.

So, was it worth it? It depends on who you ask. In all interviews, then and now, Cameron seems to think it was. Members of the cast have always been less enthusiastic. I do think the film’s real-for-real production adds a great deal to the end result and makes all of the strong elements of the story—the disaster, the escalating danger, the problem-solving—carry even more weight. But I wasn’t the one getting full-body slammed by 50,000 gallons of cold water multiple times in a row to make it look good.

I guess in the end I find myself appreciating The Abyss much in the same way I appreciate Tron (1982), or any other movie with complex, innovative, but ultimately one-of-a-kind productions. I’m glad they did it, as the result is a great deal of fun to watch, and the amount of knowledge, skill, and craftsmanship that went into the production is truly impressive. And I do think the realism of the production does enhance the tone of the story. If there were too many traces of falseness in the setting, we simply wouldn’t be able to immerse ourselves (pun intended, this time) in the movie in the same way.

But I can also see why nobody ever did it quite the same way again.

What do you think of The Abyss? I mostly talked about the production, because I find it so fascinating, but feel free to share your thoughts on the story or the different versions as well! How do you feel about that ending?

Next week: Let’s try to save Earth with Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, Fandango, and more.