Virgil: When it comes to the safety of these people, there's me and then there's God, understand?
Virgil: Goddammit, you bitch! You never backed away from anything in your life! Now fight!
Lindsey Brigman: [about the Navy SEALS] These guys are about as much fun as a tax audit.
Virgil: [regarding Lindsey Brigman] God, I hate that bitch.
Alan "Hippy" Carnes: Probably shouldn't have married her then, huh?
Virgil: Hippy, you think everything is a conspiracy.
Alan "Hippy" Carnes: Everything is.
Lt. Coffey: It went straight for the warhead, and they think it's cute.
Lindsey Brigman: So raise your hand if you think that was a Russian water-tentacle.
Lew Finler: Bud, did you know your hand is blue?
Virgil: Finler, why don't you just shut up and put your gear on?
Virgil: When you're hanging on by your fingernails, you can't go waving your arms around.
Virgil: Keep your pantyhose on.
Lindsey Brigman: It's not easy being a cast-iron bitch. It takes discipline, and years of training... A lot of people don't appreciate that.
Bendix: Oh no, look who's with them. Queen Bitch of the Universe.
Lindsey Brigman: Virgil, you wiener.
[to the aliens floating behind the water-curtain]
Virgil: Howdy. Uh... How are you guys doin'?
Lt. Hiram Coffey: Sniff something? Did ya, rat boy?
[after hearing they get three times diver's pay to check out the nuclear sub]
Catfish De Vries: Hell, for triple time, I'd eat Beany!
Jammer Willis: Set me on fire and put me out with horse piss.
Catfish De Vries: It's a bottomless pit, baby. Two-and-a-half miles straight down.
Revealing Mistakes and Continuity Goofs
Revealing mistakes:
When they are reviving Lindsey, there is one point where Bud slaps her and tells her to "fight". The moment before he slaps her you can see her blink in anticipation of the slap.
When the men hanging on the subs jump off to investigate the nuclear submarine, a camera shot pointing upwards reveals the surface of the tank they were filming in.
Near the end of the picture, the alien "city" rises to the surface, carrying with it several sunken vessels. One of the ships, a freighter, is lying on its side with one of its propellers flexing and flopping from the wind (the ship, of course, is a model).
When Bud and Jammer first enter the Montana, a corpse floating in the foreground clearly blinks his eyes.
Continuity:
The Explorer has its name written on its side in some shots, but not in others.
When the rig is pulled to the edge of the abyss by the crane the rig can be seen tilted, yet interior scenes and later exterior scenes remain level.
During the submarine chase sequences, Coffey smashes a tape player with his elbow. A few shots later, it is back in one piece.
The cuts that Coffey gives himself, disappear, reappear and change in number and position many times.
Crew or equipment visible:
When Coffey is looking out of the window after the warhead is discovered, it is possible to see the hand of the camera operator press off the side of the window.[special edition only]
When Bud is staring at the warhead while using his liquid breathing device, you can see the air bubbles from the cameraman reflected in his visor.
When Bud and Coffey are fighting at the pool you can see a hand, on the right side, reach in and grab one of the dangling wires and pull it out of the way. This happens when Coffey, shown from behind, tries to stab Bud for the second time.
When Coffey is assembling a sub-machinegun there are only two people in a small room, but a third person can be seen on the right for a moment.
When the water creature is exploring the war head you can see the square reflective mylar sheet with a stick to agitate it to give the rippling light effect.
Factual errors:
The drilling rig's submersibles are launched from a moon pool and the air inside them must therefore be at the same pressure as the water at that depth. Consequently, when Bud and Lindsey are endangered by a leak, the flooding should rise only as high as the leak, not right to the ceiling.
Although, of course, all the equipment and terrain is fictional and only subject to fictional physics, it is intuitively extremely unlikely that something the size and weight of the fallen crane could pull something the size and weight of the rig along the sea bed, especially when the cable is draped over the edge of the cliff and the crane is presumably bumping along the rocky cliff wall.
No military service would ever describe a course as oh-six-five. "O" is an alphabet letter. All courses with a "0" digit are called out "zero".
Incorrectly regarded as goofs:
As Virgil descends into the abyss near the end of the movie, he is told he has broken the world record for depth. When he types his reply 'call Guiness'. Although Guinness requires two Ns, Virgil admitted earlier he was a bad typist. He also makes numerous other spelling errors during his descent.
Plot holes:
After Hippy discovers Coffey and his partner working on the nuclear weapon, he inserts a tape into a VCR and begins recording. Yet, on the tape, when he plays it back for Bud, it reveals what Hippy was witnessing before he inserted the tape--what we, the audience saw along with Big Geek before he started recording.
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The Abyss Trivia
* Director James Cameron contacted Orson Scott Card before filming began with the possibility of producing a book based on the film. Card initially told his agent that he doesn't do "novelizations", but when she told him that the director was James Cameron, he agreed to consider it. The script arrived, and Card signed on after receiving assurances from Cameron that he would be free to develop his "novel" the way he wanted to.
After a meeting with Cameron, Card immediately wrote the first three chapters, which dealt with events concerning Bud and Lindsay Brigman that occurred before the events in the film. Cameron gave these chapters to Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who used it to develop their characters.
* Cast members had to become certified divers before filming began.
* The masks were specially designed to show the actors' faces, and had microphones fitted so that dialogue spoken at the time by the actors could be used in the film. The noises made by the regulators in the helmets were erased during sound post-production.
* Most of the underwater filming took place in a half-completed nuclear reactor facility in Gaffney, South Carolina, including the largest underwater set in the world at 7 million gallons.
* The crew frequently spent enough time underwater to force them to undergo decompression before surfacing. James Cameron would often watch dailies through a glass window, while decompressing and hanging upside down to relieve the stress on his shoulders from the weight of the helmet.
* The tank was filled to a depth of 40 feet, but there was still too much light from the surface, so a giant tarpaulin and billions of tiny black plastic beads were floated on the surface to block the light. During a violent storm the tarpaulin was destroyed, thus shifting production to night time.
* Fluid breathing is a reality. Five rats were used for five different takes, all of whom survived and were given shots by a vet. The rat that actually appeared in the film died of natural causes a few weeks before the film opened. According to James Cameron, the scene with the rat had to be edited out of the UK movie version because "the Royal Veterinarian felt that it was painful for the rat". James Cameron repeatedly assures that the rats used for this take didn't suffer any harm.
* Michael Biehn's character gets bitten on the arm by another character. This happens to him in every James Cameron movie he's in - see The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986).
* Director Trademark: [James Cameron] [title fade] at the beginning of the movie, the blue "Y" from the opening credits extends and then fades to the underwater scenery with the submarine.
* Director Trademark: [James Cameron] [feet] when the soldiers arrive at the supply ship and jump out of the helicopters. See also Aliens (1986).
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* James Cameron's brother, Mike Cameron, plays a dead crewman inside the sunken submarine. To accomplish this he had to hold his breath under 15 feet of water while also allowing a crab to crawl out of his mouth.
* The first movie released under the THX Laserdisc Program.
* Very few scenes involved stunt people. When Bud drags Lindsey back to the rig, that's really Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio holding her breath. When the rig is being flooded and characters are running from water, drowning behind closed doors, and dodging exploding parts of the rig, those are all actors, not stunt people.
* The scene with the water tentacle coming up through the moon pool was written so that it could be removed without interfering with the story, because no one knew how the effect would come out. The actors were interacting with a length of heater hose being held up by the crewmen. When the effects were completed, though, they exceeded everyone's expectations and wildest hopes.
* During the TV news report of the US and Russian ships colliding, the accompanying pictures are actually those taken of ships from the British Task Force hit during the Falkland Islands campaign.
* During the rigorous and problematic shoot, the cast and crew began calling the film by various derogatory names such as "Son Of Abyss", "The Abuse" and "Life's Abyss And Then You Dive". Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio reportedly suffered a physical and emotional breakdown because she was pushed so hard on the set, and Ed Harris had to pull over his car at one time while driving home, because he burst into spontaneous crying.
* The original theatrical version was forced to cut the pre-credits quote "...when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you" by Friedrich Nietzsche because Criminal Law (1988) used it, and they didn't want to seem like imitators. The quote was restored in the director's cut.
* The company mentioned in the film is named Benthic Petroleum. In oceanographic terms, the word "benthic" means on or in the ocean bottom.
* For financial reasons, the "Deepcore" set was never dismantled. It stands in the abandoned (and drained) South Carolina nuclear power plant, where the film was shot. 20th Century Fox has posted signs around the set informing potential photographers that Fox still owns the set (and the designs) and that any photographs or video shooting of the set is prohibited by copyright law. Their official copyright information is on the Deepcore rig itself.
* In the end shot where the alien ship surfaces, it's supposed to be spring or summer. However, the film was being shot towards the beginning of winter, so the actors put ice cubes in their mouths so they wouldn't breathe out mist.
* Actor Joe Farago, who plays the news anchorman reporting on the escalating world events, also played a similar role in a previous James Cameron film, The Terminator (1984).
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* The studio pushed hard for an Academy Award nomination for Michael Biehn as best supporting actor.
* There are no opening credits save the title of the film.
* Since the "Benthic Explorer" model ship was so large and filmed on open seas, the production company was required to register it with the Coast Guard.
* The fictional company "Benthic Petroleum" also owns the gas station shown in James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and the flying oil tanker in Jan de Bont's Twister (1996).
* To heat the water in the unfinished nuclear power plant, James Cameron brought in several tanker trucks of natural gas, and attached them directly to burners.
* The American Humane Association rated this film "unacceptable" because of the rat that was submerged in oxygenated liquid in one scene. It wasn't an effect. The rat really was "subjected to the anxiety of being submerged in this liquid, where it panics and struggles and is then pulled out by its tail as it expels the liquid from its lungs."
* The role of Commodore DeMarco was originally meant for Lance Henriksen, but he couldn't appear due to a scheduling conflict.
* The sequence in which Catfish fires a submachine gun into the moon pool at a departing Lt. Coffey was filmed using live ammunition. The underwater camera was locked down and unmanned, and extreme safety precautions were in effect.
* The sub called "Flatbed" in the movie was built around a real submarine called "Deep Rover" which was designed by the Canadian company Nuytco Research.
* The mini-subs in the wide shots were actually models suspended on wires in a smoky environment and filmed in slow motion.
* The water in the two tanks was chlorinated heavily, to prevent microbes growing in it. This caused many of the actor's hair to become green and even white.
* A scene at the beginning showing the crew rounding up at the moon pool had to be re-shot, because the Flatbed submersible was parked in the pool. Flatbed was supposed to be out in the water pulling the rig during that particular scene.
* The first feature film to have used an early version of Adobe Photoshop.
* In the original storyline, when Lindsey is talking to Bud during his descent, she explains why she is always so hard on people. Lindsey grew up in a family with five older brothers, and she had to fight for everything, even to be noticed.
* The scene with the water tentacle was one of the first to be filmed. This was done so as to give the effects team the maximum amount of time available to develop the CGI over the course of filming the rest of the movie.
* James Cameron's two choices for Bud Brigman were Ed Harris and Jeff Bridges.
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The Abyss FAQ
I've heard that the set with the Deepcore rig still exists.
Yes, it does. The set was build inside the containment building of an abandoned nuclear power project in Gaffney, S.C., and left behind after filming. You can actually spot it on "Google Earth" by entering the coordinates 35° 2' 13.2" N, 81° 30' 43.2" W .
After Lindsey drowns, isn't it impossible for her to still be alive after having her heart stop for so long?
Just like Bud says, swimming in freezing cold water can slow the body's metabolism drastically. This is called cold water drowning. There are rare but documented accounts of people surviving drowning for extreme lengths of time. One 18 year old man survived for 38 minutes under water.
Deep Hypothermia is used in medicine, especially during surgeries which require stopping circulation for repairs, such as Aortic Arch reconstruction and giant cerebral aneurysm clippings. The body is cooled to less than 18 degrees Celsius and the heart is stopped. Studies have shown this can be done up to 45 minutes without neurologic damage.
Why did Coffey go crazy?
He was suffering from High Pressure Nervous Syndrome, which causes hands to shake and also causes a state of paranoia. After salvaging a nuclear bomb from the submarine, Coffey slowly starts to lose his judgment and reasoning. After Lindsay insists she saw an alien, Coffey believes it to be a threat and insists they must be destroyed. The team is heavily against this as Lindsay earlier asks Coffey of the magnitude of the bombs if detonated, Coffey responds "Five times Hiroshima". Eventually, Bud and Linsday decide they must kill Coffey to save the aliens and also Bud's crew. After a long fight, Coffey "sub-ship" is eventually knocked off 'the abyss'. Due to the pressure, the ship breaks and Coffey is killed.
Why was there no blood after Coffey's ship implodes in the abyss?
Well this may be because of the film rating at the time. When it was first released The Abyss had a PG-13 certification so only so much violence and gore could be shown in a PG-13. Another thing could be that Cameron didn't want to show any gore or little blood and gore as possible and thats why there are no blood in the bubbles as Coffey's ship implodes.
What are the differences between the theatrical version and the Extended version of the movie?
Comparable to James Cameron's effort to recreate "his" preferred version of Aliens, he began working on an Extended version of The Abyss that has been released on VHS, Laserdisc and DVD and includes several extended scenes missing in the theatrical version like the original ending but also several prolonged plot sequences throughout the movie have been added.
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