Along with confirming the 4K restoration work of his 1989 film “The Abyss” is done and will be hitting home release in the coming months, filmmaker James Cameron has also shared more details about the making of the underwater epic.
Cameron appeared in person at a screening of the film in Los Angeles this week and participated in a Q&A with moderator Jim Hemphill discussing the movie.
Video of the full Q&A has gone online with more quotes and details revealed. In one interesting discussion, he says the blend of love story, alien encounters and Cold War politics had obvious influences from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to submarine movies.
However, there was one big film influence that he says “stands above the others” in the mix:
“‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ which is a philosophical sci-fi film that asked the question ‘are we worthy if we were to be judged by a higher intelligence?’ That had a big impact on me as a kid and I wanted to do my own version of that but set it underwater because I was fascinated by the underwater world.”
The film was famously shot in an abandoned nuclear power plant with Cameron revealing that he almost died during production when, out of air while 30 feet down, a regulator failed and a safety diver unaware of the malfunction held him under to prevent him from risking lung rupture. What did Cameron do? “I punched him [the safety diver] in the face…and therefore survived.”
Cameron has previously dubbed the theatrical cut of the film one of his career failures and still seems to look back on it more as a lesson in filmmaking than anything else and one that informed his work on subsequent films:
“I didn’t quite achieve what I wanted to achieve, what was in my mind. But I don’t think I could have done ‘Titanic’ if I hadn’t been through the process on ‘The Abyss.’ I’m talking about understanding where the beating heart of a movie lies and not getting distracted by the imagery.”
He adds he couldn’t physically do “The Abyss” these days, which involved being underwater for 600 hours across 10 weeks.
As previously reported, Cameron has finished his work on restoration and mastering of the 4K UHD release of the Special Edition version of the film with the release expected to arrive in the coming months.
Source: The Los Angeles Times
