The 80s Movie Podcast
Edward Havens
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The Abyss
On this, our 100th episode, we eschew any silly self-congratulatory show to get right into one of James Cameron's most under appreciated films, his 1989 anti-nuke allegory The Abyss. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. We're finally here. Episode 100. In the word of the immortal Owen Wilson, wow. But rather than throw myself a celebratory show basking in my own modesty, we’re just going to get right into another episode. And this week’s featured film is one of my favorites of the decade. A film that should have been a hit, that still informs the work of its director more than thirty years later. But, as always, a little backstory. As I quite regularly say on this show, I often do not know what I’m going to be talking about on the next episode as I put the finishing touches on the last one. And once again, this was the case when I completed the show last week, on Escape to Victory, although for a change, I finished the episode a day earlier than I usually do, so that would give me more time to think about what would be next. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. All gone. Still have no clue what I’m going to write about. Sunday arrives, and my wife and I decide to go see Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D at our local IMAX theatre. I was hesitant to see the film, because the first one literally broke my brain in 2009, and I’m still not 100% sure I fully recovered. It didn’t break my brain because it was some kind of staggering work of heartbreaking genius, but because the friend who thought he was being kind by buying me a ticket to see it at a different local IMAX theatre misread the seating chart for the theatre and got me a ticket in the very front row of the theatre. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a movie in IMAX 3D, but that first row is not the most advantageous place to watch an IMAX movie in 3D. But because the theatre was otherwise sold out, I sat there, watching Avatar in 3D from the worst possible seat in the house, and I could not think straight for a week. I actually called off work for a few days, which was easy to do considering I was the boss at my theatre, but I have definitely seen a cognitive decline since I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D in the worst possible conditions. I’ve never felt the need to see it again, and I was fine not seeing the new one. But my wife wanted to see it, and we had discount tickets to the theatre, so off we went. Thankfully, this time, I chose the seats for myself, and got us some very good seats in a not very crowded theatre, nearly in the spot that would be the ideal viewing position for that specific theatre. And I actually enjoyed the movie. There are very few filmmakers who can tell a story like James Cameron, and there are even fewer who could get away with pushing a pro-conservation, pro-liberal, pro-environment agenda on an unsuspecting populace who would otherwise never go for such a thing. But as I was watching it, two things hit me. One, I hate high frame rate movies. Especially when the overall look of the movie was changing between obviously shot on video and mimicking the feel of film so much, it felt like a three year old got ahold of the TV remote and was constantly pushing the button that turned motion smoothing off and on and off and on and off and on, over and over and over again, for three and a half hours. Two, I couldn’t also help but notice how many moments and motifs Cameron was seemingly borrowing from his under-appreciated 1989 movie The Abyss. And there it was. The topic for our 100th episode. The Abyss. And, as always, before we get to the movie itself, some more background. James Francis Cameron was born in 1954 in small town in the middle eastern part of the Ontario province of Canada, about a nine hour drive north of Toronto, a town so small that it wouldn’t even get its first television station until 1971, the year his family would to Brea, California. After he graduated from high school in 1973, Cameron would attend Fullerton College in Orange County, where would initially study physics before switching to English a year later. He’d leave school in 1974 and work various jobs including as a truck driver and a janitor, while writing screenplays in his spare time, when he wasn’t in a library learning about movie special effects. Like many, many people in 1977, including myself, Star Wars would change his life. After seeing the movie, Cameron quit his job as a truck driver and decided he was going to break into the film industry by any means necessary. If you’ve ever followed James Cameron’s career, you’ve no doubt heard him say on more than one occasion that if you want to be a filmmaker, to just do it. Pick up a camera and start shooting something. And that’s exactly what he did, not a year later. In 1978, he would co-write, co-produce, co-direct and do the production design for a 12 minute sci-fi short called Xenogenesis. Produced at a cost of $20,000 raised from a dentist and starring his future T2 co-writer William Wisher, Xenogenesis would show just how creative Cameron could be when it came to making something with a low budget look like it cost far more to produce. There’s a not very good transfer of the short available on YouTube, which I will link to in the transcript for this episode on our website, at The80sMoviePodcast.com (). But it’s interesting to watch because you can already see themes that Cameron will revisit time and time again are already fully formed in the storyteller’s mind. Once the short was completed, Cameron screened it for the dentist, who hated it and demanded his money back. But the short would come to the attention of Roger Corman, The Pope of Pop Cinema, who would hire Cameron to work on several of his company’s upcoming feature films. After working as a production assistant on Rock ’n’ Roll High School, Cameron would move up becoming the art director on Battle Beyond the Stars, which at the time, at a cost of $2m, would be the most expensive movie Corman would have produced in his then-26 year career, as the production designer on Galaxy of Terror, and help to design the title character for Aaron Lipstadt’s Android. Cameron would branch out from Corman to work on the special effects for John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, but Corman would bring Cameron back into the fold with the promise of running the special effects department for the sequel to Joe Dante’s surprise 1978 hit Piranha. But the film’s original director, Miller Drake, would leave the production due to continued differences with the Italian producer, and Cameron would be moved into the director’s chair. But like Drake, Cameron would struggle with the producer to get the film completed, and would eventually disavow the film as something he doesn’t consider to be his actual work as a director. And while the film would not be any kind of success by any conceivable measure, as a work of storytelling or as a critical or financial success, it would give him two things that would help him in his near future. The first thing was an association with character actor Lance Henriksen, who would go on to be a featured actor in Cameron’s next two films. The second thing would be a dream he would have while finishing the film in Rome. Tired of being in Italy to finish the film, and sick with a high grade fever, Cameron would have a nightmare about an invincible cyborg hit-man from the future who had been sent to assassinate him. Sound familiar? We’ve already discussed how The Terminator came to be in our April 2020 episode on Hemdale Films, so we’ll skip over that here. Suffice it to say that the film was a global success, turning Arnold Schwarzenegger into a beloved action star, and giving Cameron the clout to move on to ever bigger films. That even bigger film was, of course, the 1986 blockbuster Aliens, which would not only become Cameron’s second big global box office success, but would be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including a well deserved acting nomination for Sigourney Weaver, which came as a surprise to many at the time because actors in what are perceived to be horror, action and/or sci-fi movies usually don’t get such an accolade. After the success of Aliens, Twentieth Century-Fox would engage Cameron and his producing partner, Gale Anne Hurd, who during the making of Aliens would become his second wife, on a risky project. The Abyss. Cameron had first come up with the idea for The Abyss while he was still a student in high school, inspired by a science lecture he attended that featured Francis J. Falejczyk, the first human to breathe fluid through his lungs in experiments held at Duke University. Cameron’s story would involve a group of underwater scientists who accidentally discover aliens living at the bottom of the ocean floor near their lab. Shortly after he wrote his initial draft of the story, it would be filed away and forgotten about for more than a decade. While in England shooting Aliens, Cameron and Hurd would watch a National Geographic documentary about remote operated vehicles operating deep in the North Atlantic Ocean, and Cameron would be reminded of his old story. When the returned to the United States once the film was complete, Cameron would turn his short story into a screenplay, changing the main characters from scientists to oil-rig workers, feeling audiences would be able to better connect to blue collar workers than white collar eggheads, and once Cameron’s first draft of the screenplay was complete, the couple agreed it would be their next film. Cameron and Hurd would start the complex process of pre-production in the
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