James Cameron Had To Punch A Safety Diver In The Face To Survive Filming ‘The Abyss’: “It Was Almost Check Out Point”

James Cameron recently revealed that he nearly didn’t live to see his 1989 sci-fi film The Abyss come together after almost drowning while filming.

According to Variety, the Oscar-winning director opened up about the traumatic experience during a Q&A following a rare screening of the two-hour-and-51 minute Special Edition of the film at Beyond Fest. He explained that actors needed to be trained and prepared to film underwater.

“We had the ‘angels,’ which were the safety divers that were right there, and each one was assigned to one or two of the actors and just kept them in sight the whole time,” he continued. “[But] they weren’t watching me.”

He dove further into the story and revealed that they “were working 30 feet down,” and he had to wear “heavy weights around [his] feet, no fins [and] a heavy weight belt around [his] waist” in order to move the camera while submerged. According to The New York Times, filming took place in a tank filled with 7.5 million gallons of water.

“When the [oxygen] tank gets low, you get a warning that you’re about to run out of air,” Cameron added. “Well, this thing had a piston servo regulator in it, so it was one breath… and then nothing. Everybody’s setting lights and nobody’s watching me. I’m trying to get [underwater director of photography] Al Giddings attention on the PA, but Al had been involved in a diving accident and he blew out both eardrums so he was deaf as a post, and I’m wasting my last breath of air on an underwater PA system going ‘Al… Al…’ and he’s working away with his back to me.”

After he removed his gear, the “angels” ended up being more harm than help to Cameron when one stuck “a regulator in [his] mouth that [they] didn’t check” beforehand. A regulator is a piece of dive equipment that controls breathing gas pressure.

“It had been banging around the bottom of the tank for three weeks and had a rip through the diaphragm — so I purged carefully and took a deep breath… of water,” he said. “And then I purged it again, and I took another deep breath… of water.”

Cameron noted, “at that point it was almost check out point, and the safety divers are taught to hold you down so you don’t embolize and let your lungs over-expand going up.”

He clarified, “But I knew what I was doing. And he wouldn’t let me go, and I had no way to tell him the regulator wasn’t working. So I punched him in the face and swam to the surface and therefore survived.”

Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.