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".

Hurricane Frederick

There was no Hurricane Frederick in the eighties of real history, but there was a Frederick in 1979. In the film, they call it Hurricane Fred for short.

Hurricane Frederick was the sixth tropical cyclone, third hurricane and second major hurricane of the 1979 Atlantic hurricane season. Frederic was the costliest hurricane to ever hit the U.S. Gulf Coast at that particular time.

Starting with heavy rains and moderate winds over the Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico, Frederic weakened to tropical-storm force across Cuba, regaining hurricane force in the Gulf of Mexico well before landfall in Alabama on the night of September 12, 1979, at Dauphin Island.

References:
cinepad.com
erasingclouds.com
filmtracks.com
imdb.com
jeangiraudmoebius.fr
moviepulse.net
steveburg.com
wikipedia.org

Ocean bottom, blackness, then shafts of light become visible, above a ridge of rock. Flatbed appears, trailing two heavy cables. Behind it, the mass of Deepcore emerges from the darkness, its forward lighting array blazing. Flatbed is towing it like a tug, aided by Deepcore's own mighty stern thrusters.

Inside Deepcore's Control Module, Bud, his feet propped up, uses joystick controls to 'fly' Deepcore, maneuvering against currents and around seafloor obstacles. He is guided by the side-scan sonar display, with Hippy assisting in the sonar shack. Through the front viewport, Flatbed can be seen out ahead. By com line, he instructs One Night to take it five degrees left.

On the ocean surface, the Benthic Explorer is swinging wildly in the wind like a human pendulum. Inside, McBride tears off a sheet of weather-fax from a printer and gets on the video line to Bud. He holds up an image of the hurricane to the camera and informs Bud they're calling it Hurricane Frederick.

Bud jokes that he thinks hurricanes should be named after women. McBride just smiles, then suddenly a blast of wind blows papers from his desk. He looks up as the bridge door opens. Lindsey enters, wet as a wharf rat and twice as pissed off. Maybe Bud is right. She takes over McBride's position in front of the video camera.

Bud is surprised to see Lindsey's face appear on the monitor screen, he thought she was in Houston. She's furious as they exchange words, but Bud is unpreturbed, almost cheerful.

She explains they were close to proving a submersible drilling platform could work and she can't believe he let them grab her rig. Her rig. She designed the damn thing. Bud interrupts it's not her rig, Benthic Petroleum paid for it. So as long as they're hold the pink slip, he goes where they tell him.

The conversation deteriates further as Lindsey accusses him of being bought by the company. He's heard enough, Bud waves bye bye as Lindsey ramps up her rage, and he hits the switch, the screen goes dead.

Hippy looks over him, trying very hard not to crack up. Bud mumble he hates that bitch. Hippy replies sarcastically that he shouldn't have married her then. Bud doesn't reply, just stares fatalistically.

On the Benthic Explorer Deck/Launch Well, ten foot waves crash through the launch-well, sending up geysers of spray. Next to the launch-well, crewman have attached a lifting cable to Cab Three, eighteen feet of ugly yellow submersible. It slams violently as the drill-ship rolls. Lindsey can be seen inside the bubble cockpit.

Cab Three is pulled up and starts to swing violently as the Benthic Explorer pitches. The submersible is then swung out to the center of the launch well. It sways and gyrates above the furious water below. The little sub is swinging like a pendulum on the cable, and the SEALs, jammed in with their equipment in the tiny space, are getting slammed into the walls. Lindsey is calmly flipping switches as she talks.

On the com line, McBride announces they're clear to launch. Lindsey reaches up and grabs a red lever. She warns the SEAL team and pulls the lever hard. Clunk-clang! The shackle-release drops the sub. It freefalls ten feet to the water with an enormous splash and keeps right on going after Lindsey floods the trim tanks. Coffey et al have been slammed hard.

Lindsey cuts on the floodlights and maneuvers the descending submersible so that the umbilical cable is a few feet ahead on her front port. Moving up through her lights, it will guide her down to the rig. Cab Three free-falls into increasing darkness. Soon it is a candle below us in the indigo.

Inside Flatbed, One Night is driving the tug one-handed, pouring coffee from a thermos and rocking out to the great truck-driving song "Willing" on the beat-box she's got propped up on the sonar rig. Fighting white-line fever in the best tradition. She yawns and eventually sings along with the beat-box.

In the Control Module, Bud and Hippy come in for a rousing chorus. Lit up like a proud Peterbilt, the rig crossed the trackless wastes. We hear them singing, carried over.

In total blackness, the Cab Three submersible descends along the rigorous line of the umbilical cable. Two hundred feet below it, the lights of Deepcore resolve out of the darkness. Now we can see the rig crawling over the ocean bottom like some monster lawnmower.

She announces on com line to Deepcore that Cab Three is on final approach. Hippy recognizes her voice. Hippy asks Lindsey if that's her. Bud stops singing and snaps around at the mention of her name. Bud's expression is nothing less than stricken.