"What I originally wrote was a very, very crude and simple story dealing with the idea of being in the very deep ocean and doing fluid breathing and making a descent to the bottom from a staging submersible laboratory that was on the edge," Cameron remembers.
"Being on the brink of the bottomless pit, and the title, and the psychological ramifications of returning to the womb, breathing a liquid and falling to your death while simultaneously going back to your birth, much of that symbology is inherent in that first story. That was taken and layered upon and expanded.”
However, the film version of The Abyss almost never happened, though not due to its grand scope or equally inflated budgetary requirements. The story of a crumbling relationship, as played by Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, so mirrored that of the now-divorced Cameron and producer Gale Ann Hurd that The Abyss begs the question, "Did art imitate life or life imitate art?"
"The second. The script preceded any personal problems," Cameron says matter-of-factly. "The situation almost prevented me from making the film because of the scrutiny of my private life, which I protect. Then, I decided I could deal with it, as I am now. It wasn't a big enough disincentive to making the movie, which I wanted to do."
Cameron frequently spent 12-hour stints beneath the water in the tank of an unfinished nuclear reactor, where the better portion of his $50 million dream film was shot. "Twelve hours?” deadpans Cameron. "That's a big exaggeration. Eleven hours submerged. Imagine having a waste basket over your head for 11 hours. That's what it was like. A 28-pound waste basket."
It would seem only a maniac would go to such extremes to make an underwater epic of love and aliens. "Yeah, I think so. It's not a disease I've recently succumbed to just for this project. It has always been that way," Cameron claims. "Terminator and .ALIENS required that kind of energy, too. We had more resources at our disposal on this film and we had a greater challenge, so the net charge was zero. They always seem to balance out. You always seem to get exactly as much as you need and not any more."
For The Abyss, Cameron (who discussed his past career in STARLOG #89 & #110) called upon more outside help than he ever had before. Still, he was the boss. The vision was his, too, but he left the logistics and designing to others. Turning over such important responsibilities didn't come easy. "It was a challenge, and it's one that I worked up to over the years. My first job in professional filmmaking was in special FX," remembers Cameron. "I was an FX cameraman. I have a little of the technical background and I speak a bit of the lingo. I also worked in production design. On ALIENS, I did a lot of the design renderings, about a third of the film. On The Abyss, I delegated much more responsibility to other designers I knew and trusted. I worked through them.
"It was more of a verbal collaboration rather than my drawing what I wanted and their just refining the work. I waited for inspiration from them. I told them what I wanted and painted a word picture. Then, I let the drawings come back and I selected from among them the different elements I thought worked. They went to a second or third generation which finally had the look we wanted. The next stage of the challenge was to create that physical world. A whole different set of people come into play at that point. You try to find the best people you can. It was a long, grueling process, as it always is.
Water Logs
On the set itself, when production commenced, the pressures continued to mount. Concepts had to become realities. Each mistake cost time and money. If an actor dove incorrectly into the water and splashed the camera, the take had to be done again. If a submerged light blew, hours passed before shooting resumed. These and countless other major and minor dilemmas - including weather conditions, timing miscalculations, etc. - forced Cameron to be "on" every moment. The price exacted for his clarity of vision was a reputation as a tough, strict director.
"I'm very specific. That's my way of saying it. I have a very high number of actors who want to work with me again. I think when they see the end result, their view is usually a little different than it may have been," suggests Cameron. "I'm pretty high energy on the set. I'm usually fighting a schedule that, given the difficulty of what we're doing, is tight. I'm not saying 140 days [for The Abyss] is a tight schedule, but given some of the things we were trying to do, where it would take an entire day to light a set-up because you're working with 45 HMIs [lights] and 30 divers, it is tight.
"There was no time to experiment. Basically, I put my faith in the script and in the actors' ability to interpret the material creatively. I'm certainly not inflexible, but the contract I make with the actors is this: The rehearsal period will be out creative period, where we will make our major changes. If you have a proposal, make it then. If you want to alter your character, do it then. If you want to change the course of a scene, do it then. We will incorporate it, and I will be able to make my plan for shooting based on the rehearsal.
"Some actors embrace that. Others don't," Cameron notes. "Others wait for the inspiration of the moment, and if it is good and if it is possible to incorporate what they come up with, I will do it, I will break the plan. But to make a schedule and plan very complex scenes like we were doing, where there are many special FX, you have to stick to the plan."
Directing, then, can be an especially lonely task, even if hundreds of people mill around day in and day out. "It is a very strange situation. Any director who claims he made a movie himself is an idiot. You rely very, very heavily on the very best people that you can get and you rely on them to shoulder the responsibility of their immediate area,” he says. "If it is the image, it is the director of photography. I put a great, great deal of faith in my DP on The Abyss, Mikael Salomon, who, I think, is one of the world's great DPs. Other people like Al Giddings, our underwater cameraman, I relied heavily on, on his strength, his knowledge, his support, his experience.
"On the other hand, there's a kind of catalytic center to all these people working together. [Director] Walter Hill told me a story about how he once got sick and had to leave his set. He left his crew with one set-up to do. It was a simple close-up on a 50 millimeter lens. He told them the lens and what he wanted, and he left. It took them three hours to do something that should have taken a half-hour.
"There basically must be, and I think this is true in human dynamics, someone to say, 'Do it that way.' It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. The trick in directing," according to Cameron, "is probably the trick in any operation where you have that responsibility. You make a decision, right or wrong, and you follow it through without equivocation, or else you lose the crew's faith. That will ultimately take its toll. It's one of those things where even if you have doubts, you have to play the hand."
Draining Experiences
During The Abyss' shoot, Cameron often found himself hanging upside down underwater watching dailies while decompressing after 11 hours below the surface. The moment he wrapped one shot and felt he had something useable in the can, he moved on to the next set-up. "Yet, while you are shooting that first shot, you are thinking of what the next set-up will be, where you will move the camera to, what the shot after that will be, how long the actors have been in the water, how long the camera people have been in the water, how close is lunch, how much air do I have left," Cameron says.
"In other words, you really don't have time to get a perspective on the whole thing. Infrequently, there would be a point where, say, we were waiting for some element that had failed. Maybe they had to take the ROV [remotely operated vehicle] out of the water and repair it, so it was easier for me to just wait on the bottom for 15 or 20 minutes, and I would look around at what I thought of as a big train set and then I may have had a chance to reflect on it all and say, 'This is insane.' "
While The Abyss came together, Sean Cunningham's Deep Star Six opened and sank quickly at the box office. Another challenger in the underwater sweepstakes, George Pan Cosmatos' Leviathan, cost millions more than the low-budget (Deep Star Six, but met a similar fate.
"Even if there was a tangible effect on the box office success of The Abyss, it is totally irrelevant to me as a filmmaker what these other films were doing. I'm not living in a cave," says Cameron. "I hired Ron Cobb as a designer for some of this picture's hardware. He worked with me on ALIENS, so it was a natural for me to go back to him. In the meantime, l knew he had worked on Leviathan. I said, 'Ron, don't tell me anything about that movie. I don't want to know, don't want to know negatively or positively. But if I ask you to design something in a certain way and it's similar to something in Leviathan, say so and we'll do something different. Don't tell me what you did, just tell me if I get inadvertently close to an area.' I let him be the judge. I haven't seen Leviathan, so I don't really know the results of our experiment. I didn't look at the rest of the movies. I didn't think of them as competition.”
But they were.
"I'm sure they were. They were competition in that there are X numbers of dollars to be spent and people will decide how they want to spend them. But you can't think competitively as an artist or as a writer. You certainly cannot create a good story by thinking about what the other stories are. The characters tell me the story."
An actor Cameron relies on often to breathe life into his characters is Michael Beihn (STARLOG #148), who battled Arnold Schwartzeneggar in Terminator, assisted Sigourney Weaver in ALIENS, and plays the antagonist of The Abyss. Cameron laughs at the suggestion that Biehn is always playing his alter-ego.
"He is much better looking than I am. In a way, every character you write is an alter-ago in one way or another," Cameron suggests. "Whether it is Michael's characters or Linda Hamilton's character in Terminator or Sigourney Weaver's character in ALIENS or Mary's character here or the blue collar guys on the oil rig or even the greatest heroes, you fantasize yourself into all these different people as a writer.”
Even Schwarzenegger?
"Listen, when I originally got the idea for Terminator, I was sick, I was broke, I was in Rome, I had no way to get home and I could not speak the language. I was surrounded by many people I could not get help from,” says Cameron of his days after shooting Piranha II in Italy. "I felt very alienated and it was very easy for me to imagine myself as a machine with a gun. At the point of the greatest alienation in my life, it was easy to create the character. About the only characters I could not relate to would be the monsters in ALIENS, although I tried to humanize the alien queen a little bit. She was just trying to protect her babies.”
Damp Ends
Many directors shoot just enough footage to tell their story. Cameron tends to film more than he can cram into a release print. The Abyss runs nearly two hours and 20 minutes in its final form. Cameron screened a two-hour-and-50-minute version for 20th Century Fox executives, who then recommended he trim a half-hour. Mastrantonio has publicly expressed regret that some of the footage deleted contained important emotional moments which further established the Harris/Mastrantonio relationship. There were some beautiful scenes that were taken out," Mastrantonio says. "I just wish we hadn't shot so much that isn't in the film." Harris has said he too misses the footage Cameron cut, arguing that if the film's core is the love story between his oil rig team leader and Mastrantonio's tough rig designer, then more time should have been devoted to it.
The excised Abyss footage of most interest to SF fans involves Harris' contact with the aliens. As it stands in the final version, Harris meets the NTIs after a five-mile freefall to the abyss' bottom. There, what appear to be angel-winged manta raylike creatures hover over him. They communicate by scrolling the messages that Harris sent Mastrantonio up a wall of water. Once enlightened, Harris types another message on his portable keyboard, telling his crew he has made several new friends.
Cameron's original denouement included additional interaction between the aliens and Harris, and promoted an anti-nuclear stance as well. The director insists the current ending, in which the NTls' underwater city rises to the surface – dredging up Harris' damaged rig, several ships, and Harris and his crew, who suffer no ill effects from not decompressing – delivers the message as he wished.
“What emerges in the winnowing process is only the best stuff. And I think the overall caliber of the film is improved by that,” Cameron maintains. "I only cut two minutes of Terminator. On ALIENS, we took out much more. I even reconstituted some of that in a special [TV] release version.
"The sense of something being missing on ALIENS was greater for me than on The Abyss, where the film just got consistently better as the film got along. The film must function as a dramatic, organic whole. When I cut the film together, things that read well on paper, on a conceptual level, didn't necessarily translate to the screen as well. I felt I was losing something by breaking my focus. Breaking the story's focus and coming off the main characters was a far greater detriment to the film than what was gained. The film keeps the same message intact at a thematic level, not at a really overt level, by working in a symbolic way.”
As with any action film attempting to develop a relationship angle, there are traps. Certain cliches go hand in hand with the genre. In one sequence, Mastrantonio begs Harris not to free dive to another vessel. The dialogue runs along the lines of: "Somebody has to go." "Why you?" "Somebody has to do it, and I'm that somebody."
Cameron smiles.
"I never thought of [that dialogue] as a necessary evil. Maybe I should have a talk with the writer,” he laughs, “tell him to come up with better stuff. For me, it felt organic to the moment. I tend not to be worried too much about what other films have done. If a moment works, for me, it works."
Yet, in such a massive movie, Cameron still found room for several of the exposition-type scenes Mastrantonio lamented losing. In one, Harris snores loudly while lying on his back. Mastrantonio, sitting just in front of her soon-to-be ex-husband, simply and knowingly says, “Virgil, turn on your side,” which he immediately does. “You have to fight for moments like that because the conventional wisdom would say, `Your film is too long. You have a boring moment where nothing is happening, take it out,' ” Cameron says. "But it was such an important moment. It had to be there. You had to show the mileage between these two people.
“I've seen the film with paying audiences, and I was terrified before it started, not really knowing how people were going to respond,” admits Cameron. “When they applauded the scene in which Ed brings Mary back to life, I felt good. That, to me, is the picture's heart. If you buy that scene, you will buy him, you will buy her, and hopefully what happens after that scene will make sense.”
Cameron also found satisfaction in the lack of applause following Biehn's demise. “That was important. We tried to humanize him and evoke a little feeling of pathos for a guy under the strain of his overdeveloped sense of duty,” Cameron says. “That the audience doesn't always cheer in that rock-'em, sock-'em action movie way actually meant the film works tonally. The Abyss does not strike me as an audience participation picture like Terminator and ALIENS. In a way, that is good, really.”
Now that The Abyss has reached the big screen, where it played to a generally positive critical response and earned respectable, if not blockbuster, results at the box office, Cameron can return to his private life for a while. The highlight of his break will be his impending marriage to fellow director Kathryn (Near Dark) Bigelow. As for future films, Cameron can only speculate. ALIEN Ill will be helmed by Renny (Prison) Harlin Terminator ll may happen, possibly with a script by comics writer Frank Miller, “but I probably will not be involved. If it happens,” Jim Cameron concludes, “it would be Gale's project.
"Look, you run a marathon, and at some point, you snap the tape and you don't have to run anymore. I was running for 18 months on The Abyss. The body has to catch up to the fact that you no longer have this great pressure. There's a great relief, actually, in releasing The Abyss to the public. And the version you saw is the one that satisfies me the most."
© Starlog Magazine (January, 1990)