Teetering Over the Abyss

Surprisingly, that is the sum total of Cameron's comments about the person who produced his three major films and was his wife from l985 to 1989. When I call him back for amplification, Cameron has nothing to add, saying chat he thinks the situation calls for brevity and discretion.

Although they'd been separated for some time, Hurd stayed on to produce The Abyss. "Jim Cameron is as strong a director as exists, and he's got to have an equally strong producer," notes Scan Winston, makeup-special effects artist on The Terminator and Aliens. "She can stand up to him, and he knows he needs her."

The Abyss is loosely based on a short story Cameron wrote in high school. "l was a science honors student, and, at a seminar, l saw a demonstration by a man who claimed to be the first person to 'breathe' liquid, an oxygenated saline solution, through the trachea. 'Ye gods, it's man becoming a Fish,' " he recalls thinking.

“I centered the screenplay on a marital relationship instead of scientific researchers, and I wasn't sure it was even producable. But Gale was emphatic: 'We muse make this.' "

[Ed] Harris' press agent, John Springer, says his client absolutely would not speak now about the experience. "He thinks he was treated shitty, and he's furious."

"Ed and Mary Elizabeth had to dive again and again into cold water. Sometimes we'd sit in a submersible for eight hours before the cameras rolled. You can't comprehend how hard it is to work on a Jim Cameron movie,” says Biehn, who also appeared in Aliens and The Terminator. "Jim was impassioned, almost in a trance sometimes. I don't think Gale and Jim quite realize how frustrating it is to get into makeup and costume, then spend the whole day waiting around."

Biehn didn't know about most of the technical problems that caused at least some of the misery. Obviously, Hurd and Cameron elected to insulate the performers, which inevitably put them under an even greater strain.

"On the first day of shooting, the main water tank sprang a leak," Hurd relates. "One-hundred-and-fifty-thousand gallons a minute rushed out – it sounded like Niagara Falls. We called in dam-repair experts, who used a special epoxy to seal it without our having to drain the tank." Water hassles of a staggering variety continued throughout the shoot.

"No one had ever worked in that amount of water before," Hurd continues. "We had problems with chlorine, and tremendous ones with clarity. The water was pumped from an algae-filled lake and went through a filtration process before reaching the tanks. Nonetheless, within a couple of hours it could become so murky we couldn't shoot. On the ocher hand, sometimes the water was so crystalline it was invisible, whereupon artificial bubbles and waves had to be created."

If that wasn't enough, "we had enormous pipes, with elbow fittings that had been improperly installed. There was so much pressure going through them that the elbows would blow of. Under those conditions, water becomes a lethal projectile. We were afraid we wouldn't be able to turn (it) off."

Because of unpredictable water visibility, the actors were kept poised to shoot any time – dry or wet, day or night. If water became cloudy, they went topside, dried of and kept going. The cast could barely leave their hotel rooms and sometimes were kept on the set all day without working.

"There was a direct conflict between my desire to do the best possible scene and my terror that someone might get hurt," says Cameron. "Most underwater photography uses ambient light, but ours was completely artificial. When the electricity would go – which happened three or four times – it was pitch black, and the communications system died with the power." Biehn describes what it was like, lace one night, when the lights went out: "It was [absolutely dark], and in the water you have no sense of direction whatsoever. I knew my air was good for 10 or 15 minutes. But everyone had a different level of air and who knew how long we'd be down there?..."

Blackouts were especially traumatic for the actors because they only wore weighted boots to help them move around on the bottom of the tank. If they had run out of air, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to hold their breath long enough to shed their gear and get to the surface.

As insurance, each actor was accompanied at all times by a "bodyguard" (safety diver), and every other extant safety device was available. Additionally, after the first blackout, battery-powered underwater lamps were taken into the water and a procedural drill instituted. In fact, there was not a single accident.

Hurd and Cameron were divorced a couple of months after the completion of the Film's principal photography, and it seems unlikely they'll work together again in the near future. "It's open, but Gale has a lot going on," says Cameron.