Written, Directed by: James Cameron
Produced by: Gale Anne Hurd, Van Ling
Music by: Alan Silvestri
Cinematography: Mikael Salomon
Editing by: Conrad Buff
Joel Goodman
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Lightstorm Entertainment
Release date(s): August 9, 1989
Running time: 146 min
(171 min) (special edition)
Country: United States
Language: English
Budget: $43,000,000
Gross revenue: $90,000,098
Cast:
Ed Harris as Virgil 'Bud' Brigman
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
as Lindsey Brigman
Michael Biehn as
SEAL Lieutenant Hiram Coffey
Leo Burmester as Catfish De Vries
Todd Graff as Alan 'Hippy' Carnes
John Bedford Lloyd as Jammer Willis
J.C. Quinn as Arliss 'Sonny' Dawson
Kimberly Scott as Lisa 'One Night' Standing
Captain Kidd Brewer Jr. as Lew Finler
George Robert Klek as Wilhite
Christopher Murphy as
Schoenick, SEAL Team Member
Adam Nelson as
Ensign Monk, SEAL Team Member
Dick Warlock as Dwight Perry
Jimmie Ray Weeks as Leland McBride
J. Kenneth Campbell as DeMarco
Reaction
The Abyss was released on August 11, 1989 in 1,533 theaters where it grossed $9.3 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $54.4 million in North America and $35.5 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $90 million.
Awards and nominations
The Abyss won the 1990 Oscar for Best Visual Effects. It was also nominated for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography and Best Sound.
The studio lobbied hard to get Michael Biehn nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but to no avail. Denzel Washington won the award in the end.
The Abyss was nominated for many other awards, such as by Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films and the American Society of Cinematographers. It ended up winning a total of three other awards from these organizations.
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The Abyss (1989) - James Cameron: Writer, Director
Production
The idea for the The Abyss came to James Cameron when he attended a science lecture about deep sea diving in high school. He subsequently wrote a short story that focused on a group of scientists in a laboratory at the bottom of the ocean. The basic idea did not change but many of the details evolved over the years. Once Cameron arrived in Hollywood, he quickly realized that a group of scientists was not that commercial and changed it to a group of blue collar workers. While making Aliens, Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd decided that The Abyss would be their next film.
He started writing the script, basing the character of Lindsey on Hurd and finishing it by the end of 1987. Cameron and Hurd were married before The Abyss, separated during pre-production, and divorced in February 1989, two months after principal photography.
Pre-production
The cast and crew trained for underwater diving for one week in the Cayman Islands. This was necessary because 40% of all live-action principal photography took place underwater. Furthermore, Cameron's production company had to design and build experimental equipment and develop a state-of-the-art communications system that allowed the director to talk underwater to the actors and dialogue to be recorded directly onto tape for the first time.
Cameron had originally planned to shoot on location in the Bahamas where the story was set but quickly realized that he needed to have a completely controlled environment because of the stunts and special visual effects involved. The film was shot at the Cherokee Nuclear Power Station outside of Gaffney, South Carolina. It had been abandoned after a local power company spent $700 million in construction. The underwater sequences were filmed in two specially constructed tanks. The first one held 7.5 million gallons of water, was 55 feet deep and 209 feet across.
At the time, it was the largest fresh-water filtered tank in the world. Additional scenes where shot in the second tank which held 2.5 million gallons of water. The Deepcore rig was anchored to a 90-ton concrete column at the bottom of the large tank. It consisted of six partial and complete modules that took over half a year to plan and build from scratch. The two working craft, Flatbed and Cab One, were specially manufactured for the film by Can-Dive Services Ltd., a Canadian commercial diving company that specialized in "saturation" diving systems and underwater technology. Two million dollars was spent on set construction.
Principal photography
On the first day of shooting, the main water tank sprang a leak and 150,000 gallons of water a minute rushed out. The studio brought in dam-repair experts to seal it. In addition, enormous pipes with elbow fittings had been improperly installed. There was so much water pressure traveling through them that the elbows blew off. The principal underwater sequences were shot by Al Giddings, known for his work on The Deep. He used three cameras in watertight housings that he specially designed. Another special housing was designed for scenes that went from above-water dialogue to below-water dialogue.
The filmmakers had to figure out how to keep the water clear enough to shoot and dark enough to look realistic at 2,000 feet. Cameron wanted to see the actors' faces and hear their dialogue and so he hired Western Space and Marine to engineer helmets which would remain optically clear underwater and installed state-of-the-art aircraft quality microphones into each helmet. Safety conditions were also a major factor with the installation of a decompression chamber on site, along with a diving bell and a safety diver for each actor. The breathing fluid used in the film actually exists and was tested on a scientist who almost died.
Over the last 20 years it has been tested on several animals which survived (including a rat, the scene being featured in some cuts of the film). Ed Harris held his breath inside a helmet full of liquid while being towed 30 feet below the surface of the large tank. He recalled that the worst moments were being towed with fluid rushing up his nose and his eyes swelling up. Actors played their scenes at 33 feet, too shallow a depth from them to need decompression and they rarely stayed down for more than an hour at at time. Cameron and the 26-person underwater diving crew sank to 50 feet and stayed down for five hours at a time.
To avoid decompression sickness, they would have to hang from hoses halfway up the tank for as long as two hours, breathing pure oxygen. The cast and crew endured over six months of grueling six-day, 70-hour weeks on an isolated set created a lot of stress among the cast and crew. Cameron himself admitted, "I knew this was going to be a hard shoot, but even I had no idea just how hard. I don't ever want to go through this again". For example, the scene where portions of the rig are flooded with water, he realized that it was too dangerous and initially did not know how to minimize the danger.
It took him four-and-a-half hours to set up the shot safely. Actor Leo Burmester said, "Shooting The Abyss has been the hardest thing I've ever done. Jim Cameron is the type of director who pushes you to the edge, but he doesn't make you do anything he wouldn't do himself". Some of the actors did not like the slow pace of filming. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio remembered, "We never started and finished any one scene in any one day". Michael Biehn was frustrated by the waiting. He claimed that he was in South Carolina for five months and only acted for three to four weeks.
He remembered one day being ten meters underwater and "suddenly the lights went out. It was so black I couldn't see my hand. I couldn't surface. I realized I might not get out of there". Harris said that the daily mental and physical strain was very intense and remembered, "One day we were all in our dressing rooms and people began throwing couches out the windows and smashing the walls. We just had to get our frustrations out".
There were reports from South Carolina that the actor was so upset by the physical demands of the film and Cameron's dictatorial directing style that he said he would refuse to help promote the motion picture. Harris later denied this rumor and helped promote the film. Cameron responded to these complaints by saying, "For every hour they spent trying to figure out what magazine to read, we spent an hour at the bottom of the tank breathing compressed air".
Post-production
The special visual effects was divided up among seven FX divisions with motion control work by Dream Quest Images and computer graphics and opticals by Industrial Light & Magic. Cameron hired ILM to create the alien water pseudopod. The company spent six months to create 75 seconds of computer graphics needed for the creature. The film was to have opened on July 4, 1989 but its release was delayed for more than a month by production and special effects problems.
Studio executives were nervous about the film's commercial prospects when preview audiences laughed at scenes of serious intent. Industry insiders said that the release delay was because nervous executives ordered the film's ending completely re-shot. There was also a question of the size of the film's budget. One executive claimed $47 million while The Wall Street Journal reported a figure of $60 million.
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