The Abyss could have been better, says James Cameron

James Cameron appeared at Beyond Fest to talk about his “first really big, kind of mega-budget movie,” The Abyss, a film that “wasn’t kind of a slam dunk in the way Aliens was,” he told the crowd (via IndieWire). Cameron admitted his team “didn’t know exactly how it was going to work,” and felt “pulled in different directions” as far as inspiration. “It all made sense to me at the time, that’s all I can say,” he shrugged (per Variety).

Cameron revealed he actually nearly died while filming underwater during The Abyss, in an incident which required him to punch a safety diver in the face and swim himself to the surface to survive. Delivering the film to audiences was less perilous, but still rocky. He experienced his first test screening with The Abyss, but “I didn’t know how to read the cards. I didn’t know how to interpret the data,” he explained. “The studio wasn’t terribly helpful.”

Test audiences saw one version with storyboards of a wave sequence, and one without, though neither got a particularly positive response. “We kind of went, ‘Well, at least it’s shorter without the wave. At least it won’t cost as much to finish,’” the filmmaker recalled. “I didn’t really know how to interpret the data, and I think we overreacted.”

Among Cameron’s titanic achievements in film, The Abyss is one of his relatively less successful outings, though it did win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. “The pseudopod scene is the moment that certainly caught people’s attention at the time. That scene made an impact and showed people what was possible and I think it kicked in the door to the start of the CG explosion,” he said at Beyond Fest (per Variety).

A few years after its 1989 release, Cameron released a special edition with completed visual effects for that wave sequence. “It’s the film I intended to make, if nothing else,” Cameron reflected (via IndieWire). “But I actually think that you see how a lot of the film came together and how it truly is a proper heir apparent to The Day The Earth Stood Still, which was what my intention was.”

Fans will soon be able to see a 4K restoration of the film: “All of the mastering is done and I think it drops pretty soon—a couple of months or something like that,” Cameron shared. “There’s a lot of added material that they’re sticking in there, and it will be available on streaming simultaneously. But I didn’t just want to look at the old HD transfer. I wanted to do it right.”