Being the soggy tale of how James Cameron commandeered an abandoned nuclear reactor, half drowned his cast and delivered the greatest underwater movie ever made. First published in Empire Magazine
The man in the suit was bored. It was hot, and he'd been waiting for hours. And in the middle of Gaffney, South Carolina, there wasn't all that much to look at. Only the odd eruption of bubbles on the surface of the massive concrete tank was evidence of the millions being poured by 20th Century Fox into James Cameron's latest project.
Alarming stories had filtered back to Burbank about overspending, delays and half-drowned actors. There was a $2 million lawsuit pending from the tank owners, and cast members were reportedly threatening to quit. He was here to find out exactly what was going on. Twenty or so minutes after Cameron finally emerged from his man-made lagoon, studio executive Harold Schneider wished he'd never made the trip at all.
The conversation had not started well. He'd suggested a couple of minor changes to crew members that, he thought, might help speed up shooting, unaware that the director was now standing behind him. Cameron was silent for a moment before hissing, "'What the fuck are you doing on my set?" Schneider attempted to mollify him. He'd just been hanging out with the crew he told him, nothing to worry about.
"I never want to see you on my fucking set. I want you off this fucking set right now. If you want to direct the fucking movie, you can direct it. " Alarmed, Schneider tried to pacify the director. "Jimmy," he implored, "Jimmy just..." He didn't get to finish his sentence. "If there's one thing that I hate more than some jerk showing up on my set, it's somebody calling me Jimmy. Don't you ever fucking call me Jimmy again..."
Schneider instinctively reached out to try to calm Cameron. "If there's one thing I hate more than someone calling me Jimmy," the incandescent director yelled, "it's someone touching me. If you touch me again, I'll KILL YOU!" He grabbed Schneider by the collar and pushed him to A-Tank’s rim, pointedly showing him the 40-foot drop.
A few seconds later, after he watched the shaken exec climb hurriedly into his limo, Cameron turned to the assembled crew "Sometimes," he said, suddenly utterly calm, "you have to make a statement." And he walked away to look at the dailies.
It was just another day on the world's toughest film shoot. The crew wiped their hands on their T-shirts and got back to work. Life's Abyss, the legend on the shirts read. And then you dive.
The Abyss had begun for James Cameron when he was a kid in the tiny Canadian town of Kapuskasing (pop. 200), just north of Niagara Falls. A man had come to school and told the class how he had been the first human to breathe fluid through his lungs. The technically-minded 17-year-old was intrigued, and he wrote a short story about a group of scientists who don liquid breathing apparatus and dive, one by one, into the void. He was pleased with the story but filed it in a drawer and got on with becoming one of the world's most successful directors.
More than a decade and a half later, after the triumphant release of Aliens, the white-hot Cameron was looking for a new project that would push the envelope. He saw a National Geographic film with astounding images of small submersibles, or ROVs (remote-operated vehicles), floating around in the inky blackness of the North Atlantic. The images reminded him of his story. A 'scriptment' - a treatment combined with elements of the shooting script - was hammered out, with blue-collar diving engineers replacing the scientist, a subplot about a collapsing marriage and a climax in which undersea intelligences held the world to ransom with huge tidal waves.
Interest in the script was immediate. Mel Gibson was rumoured to be lobbying for a part. He was soon disappointed. Cameron had already begun costing the movie and it was evident that stars' salaries would throw the movie into the budgetary stratosphere. He'd put out the effects shots to tender, guestimating a figure of around $8 million. The lowest figure that came back was $13 million. And there was still the vexed question of where he was going to shoot this thing. Filming everything 'dry-for-wet' a technique in which smoke-filled sound stages double for underwater - had never been an option. He'd toyed very briefly with the idea of shooting under the ocean for real, but remembered what happened when he tried that on his ill-fated debut, Piranha II. Just one night of weak, unpredictable swell had destroyed an entire set.
What they needed was a tank. A big one. Not only was Cameron worried that there wasn't a big enough container in the world for his movie, there were other specs that ruled out those that just might be. It had to be heated - people would be spending whole days submerged. And it needed top-of-the-line filtration. He wanted crystal clear images which the unfiltered (and cold) tank in Malta - suggested because it was the largest in the world - couldn't deliver. The word went out to location scouts: just look for anything big and available.
In 1983, The Duke Power Company abruptly stopped building The Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant, leaving the residents of Gaffney, South Carolina, with something of a concrete eyesore. To Cameron, however, it was manna from heaven. In the middle of a rainstorm, he perched atop an abandoned 170-foot crane, having inched out along the boom, and peered down. The tank he'd been brought to see wasn't quite what he was after, but below him was the containment building, a 200-foot-in diameter concrete cylinder, 50 feet deep, designed to hold the reactor core. Cameron rightly suspected that the building could be converted into a huge freshwater tank. And, at a cost of nearly $2.5 million, the holes were patched, the tank sealed and, as the production crew desperately tried to finish painting, 7.5 million gallons of water poured in.
It would take five days to fill, and then there was the massive, black tarpaulin that shrouded the set, and tons of black, polystyrene beads that had to be emptied onto the surface to float there like a foot-thick layer of genetically modified caviar guaranteeing that below was pitch black.
Things started to go haywire from day one of what would turn out to be a punishing 140-day shoot. August 8 was meant to be the first day of principal photography, but 'A Tank' was nowhere near ready. Cameron delayed a week and pushed B Tank’s schedule forward, demanding that the smaller tank be ready weeks before it was originally scheduled to be used. When he finally got into A Tank, only hours into the shoot a massive explosion rocked the structure. A main valve had given way leading to a leak that, according to Cameron, "sounded like Niagara Falls". Fifteen thousand gallons of water a minute was escaping, with velocity enough to take a man's head off. It was a foretaste of what was to come. Cameron discovered that the engineering of the complex pumping was way below specification. Pipes would occasionally just explode, sending shards of plastic 100 feet into the air. Elbow joints would blow off with more than enough force to kill a man. Unnerving cracks and bangs would regularly lead to Cameron evacuating A Tank as yet another piece of plumbing gave way.
And then there were the spectacular lightning storms, which caused constant delays and also ripped a 200-foot tear in the black tarpaulin. This led Cameron to make his most unpopular decision. Repairing the tarp would be too time-consuming, so they began to shoot solid nights; divers began to refer to the shoot as 'The Abuse'. Meanwhile, underwater photographer Al Giddings and his crew faced constant visibility problems. In B Tank the water was often, ironically, too clear, leading to debris and a mixture of food dye, walnut shell chips and milk having to be added; in A Tank blooming algae could often reduce visibility to 20 feet in a matter of hours. Over-chlorination led to divers' skin burning, exposed body hair being stripped off and barnets turning alarming shades of green. Meanwhile, the first ADs desperately attempted to schedule a shoot where one pass of the submersibles over the bottom of the tank would stir up so much silt that filming could be impossible for days.
Things weren't much better for the cast, all of whom had to be scuba and hard-helmet certified. "What about going to the bathroom?" one famously asked. "Get used to Divers'Delight," he was bewilderingly informed - Diver's Delight being the pleasantly warm feeling experienced as you piss in your own wet suit. Power outages would plunge the set into total darkness, and, as an added treat, take out the comms system, leaving divers underwater in the darkness with only the sound of their own breathing for company. Cameron took the standard directorial line of shielding his cast from the mammoth technical challenges he was facing. The idea was to avoid distracting them, but a side-effect was that they were often kept on set (periodically underwater) for 18 hours without shooting a frame, and with little clue what was going on. The daily call sheet usually just read, 'Everybody'. Ed Harris, playing chief driller Bud Brigman, reacted particularly badly to Cameron's driven style, reportedly often threatening to walk off the set. Until very recently he refused to talk about the shoot; a magazine that requested an interview at the time received the reply, "He thinks he was treated shitty and doesn't want to talk."
J. C. Quinn ("Sonny" Dawson) found he deeply loathed diving and repeatedly stormed into producer Gale Anne Hurd's office, demanding to be fired. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio stalked off set yelling, "We are not animals." Terrifying sequences in which actors worked without their own air supply, instead relying on a safety diver, left nerves frazzled, particularly when they understandably panicked and felt as if they were drowning (Cameron denies anyone was ever in any danger, remarking on set that, "If anyone gets themselves hurt, I'm going to be real mad at them - that's why we've been safe so far").
When Cameron finally wrapped principal photography on December 14, the movie was both over schedule and around $4 million over budget. And there was still an extensive post-production process to go through. A symphony of every available special effects technique would have to be perfectly orchestrated. And there was additional water unit work to be done - he would still be shooting in April of the next year, in the swimming pool at UCLA.
When the film finally did hit theatres, on August 9, 1989, nearly a year to the day after its original start date, its performance was respectable, if a little disappointing: $54 million to Uncle Buck's $52. But then, as Cameron points out, no one's talking about Uncle Buck a decade later. "The only way to see the movie I want to see," Cameron once said, "is to make it myself."
And, going back to that National Geographic film, he had an idea for a movie he definitely wanted to see. This time he was not inspired by the shots of the little ROVs, but by the pictures of a huge, sunken ocean liner they were bringing back to the surface. He began to suspect he'd be back in the water before too long.
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