James Cameron is known to be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to making motion picture masterpieces. He is not afraid of taking risks. Well, if you too want to have three of your films mentioned amongst the top ten highest-grossing movies of all time, you sometimes have to risk it all. However, things do get out of hand sometimes.
Even in Titanic, which is arguably the epitome of cinema, James Cameron put lead actress Kate Winslet’s life at risk while shooting underwater. But this was not the first time his cast members had to go through something like this. After the filming of the 1989 film The Abyss, the actors blamed James Cameron for making them go through hell during the shoots, something which the filmmaker denied taking the blame for.
James Cameron Blamed by His Actors
The Abyss stars Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, and more. As per the actors, the shooting for the film was so tedious that they were all mentally and physically drained by the end of it. In fact, Harris even broke down in tears on his way back from work while driving. Mastrantonio also had it up to here while filming a particular scene over and over again and she stormed off the set and refused to do it again.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Harris recalled how James Cameron treated the actors like “guinea pigs.”
“We were guinea pigs, in a way, Jim wasn’t quite sure how this was all gonna go down…[In the drowning scene, I was] screaming at [Mastrantonio’s character] to come back and wake up, and I was slapping her across the face and I see that they’ve run out of film in the camera….and nobody had said anything. And Mary Elizabeth stood up and said, ‘We are not animals!’ and walked off the set. They were going to let me just keep slapping her around!”
Talking to Sunday Mail, Harris stated that the actors had had enough and to let their frustrations out, they started throwing couches out of the windows and smashing the walls.
James Cameron Refused to Take Full Responsibility
While everything that has been said and heard about the miserable time the actors had on the set of The Abyss, Cameron asserted that they all knew what they were signing up for. In a conversation with Kenneth Turan, the filmmaker stated that according to him, the reaction was blown out of proportion. In fact, he stated that he had been absolutely honest with the actors about what was to come, should they sign on. He even told them that filming The Abyss would be worse than a Stanley Kubrick film.
“From my standpoint, that got blown out of proportion. There is a certain aspect of truth to it, because I am very, very tough on people. I believed – and I still believe and I’ll continue to believe – that to do a movie you can’t be good, you have to be great. And when people are presented to me as the highest paid, the best, I expect the best.
On The Abyss, I sat with the entire cast beforehand, one by one, as they were being considered for their parts, and said, ‘Don’t take this if you’re not willing to learn how to be a helmet-rated deep diver, which will take you four weeks. That’s part of your preparation.’ I told them this would be worse than a Kubrick movie.”
Cameron continued that despite his warnings, the actors were really excited to be a part of such a dangerous film. He simply does not understand why then they blamed him for something he had already told them would happen.
“They ended up being stoked about the movie. They were really excited, then on the press junket they said, ‘James Cameron had us diving every day and we almost died.’ It’s like if you go on a raft ride down the Amazon. It’s perfectly safe and they’ve done it a thousand times and you’re with a guy who knows the rapids and it’s really exciting. But what do you say to you friends when you get back? ‘We almost died.’”
Do you think Cameron’s warnings were enough for what the actors would go on to face? Or were they right for criticizing the filmmaker’s hazardous ways?
Source: Terminator Files
