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Updated
4/9//03 We're Hangin' With..... "TITANIC" DIRECTOR...AND ACTOR JAMES CAMERON and BILL PAXTON THEY RETURN TO TITANIC FOR 3-D FILM GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS by: Lynn B. For the
3-D, IMAX format documentary film Ghosts of the Abyss, filmmaker
James Cameron and actor/director Bill Paxton (Aliens, Apollo 13, Titanic)
returned two and a half miles straight down to the legendary North Atlantic
wreck site of the Titanic where nearly 1,500 people lost their lives almost
100 years ago. This time they left Kate Winslet and Leo behind and went
with Jake and Ellwood, two compact little ROV vehicles, created by Cameron's
inventive brother Mike. These little fellas were equipped with cameras
and could spy into parts of the ship Cameron couldn't reach on his earlier
dives while exploring the wreck for his feature film. After we saw the incredible 3-D or "stereo" film as Cameron likes to call it, we spent an afternoon at a Universal City hotel near the theater and spoke with the director and his pal Paxton who went along on the expedition as our eyes and ears; just an ordinary guy who could represent most audience members on this journey of a lifetime and narrate the film. Don't hear the word "documentary" and think borrrrring! Cameron was determined to use totally new film technology to bring us along and keep us interested. "There had to be a way to make history and science and oceanography more exciting, especially for kids. So, how do we do that? How do we pump it? How do we turn the volume up a little bit but still be absolutely truthful?" The answer is a super cool new camera system that Cameron and a team of scientists and filmmakers had to work the kinks out of on site. By trial and error the system was perfected aboard the Russian explorer vessel the Keldish which was used as Bill Paxton's exploration ship in the feature film. "We call the camera the 'Reality Camera System', says Cameron. "We're trying to share the reality we had. You can feel like you've made that dive with us". Cameron went on his dives in one submersible while Paxton was in another. Only the Russian explorers have two diving vehicles as Cameron told us. "If you want a shot of what the sub is doing, you've got to have another sub. The sub can't film itself". So, the Russian pals Cameron made on his feature film made the dives for this film with him as well. It's a good thing there is now a complete film record of the wreck since, in 30 years, it might dissolve completely. As Paxton explains, "The ship is being eaten. On Titanic, an organic, bacterial process is literally eating the steel of the ship and the residue is the rusticle growth (growths that look like the inside of a cave). I wish they would stop". Don't expect to see the gruesome skeletons of Titanic victims in the murky depths. "The skeletons dissolve. Anything below 9,000 feet and the bones dissolve away. Titanic is at 12,000 feet so you'll see no skeletons", Cameron explains. What you will see in the debris trail are shoes, eyeglasses, other personal effects and loads of dishes. "You see thousands of teacups. Those people drank a lot of tea", jokes Paxton. "All the teacups had righted themselves. It almost looks like this eternal tea party going on down there. It's creepy". Cameron tells of more wonders. "We went into staterooms, saw their beds, their sinks, mirrors. We went into the dining room and saw the beautiful leaded glass windows that are still intact. The elegance of the Titanic still exists." Dives in the two Mir submersibles lasted about thirteen hours. Each taking about two hours to get to the ocean floor. Okay, we had to ask. How did these guys go to the bathroom? Paxton explained that it wasn't quite like Apollo 13 with cool spacesuits to handle the problem. "They have like a big glass beaker thing. It looks like something from a 1939 Frankenstein set, with a big stopper on it", Paxton frowns. "I would hardly drink anything the whole time I was down there because I didn't want to deal with it". The actor says he didn't get seasick while underwater but returning to the surface was another story. "When you're on the surface it's like being in a gyroscope, bobbing all around". At one point, the two little submersibles came back in a storm, Paxton was nauseous and a Russian diver had to literally hop onto the top of the sub to help hook it up to be lifted onto the mothership. "God, I wanted to buy that guy a car by the time we got on board!" There was no script, no pre-planned story, so why would an actor make such a dangerous and stomach churning trip? " I've known Jim for about twenty-three years", Paxton reveals. "He'd mentioned the dive to me in passing and then I thought 'gee, I don't know'. I've gotten to pretend a lot of things. I got to go around the dark side of the moon with Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 and in your subconscious mind, you've really kind of done these things but who wouldn't go down to see the Titanic? I watched this guy (Cameron) go through incredible trials to make his motion picture. He went to the bottom of the sea to shoot images for the film. I wanted to go to support him. It's the opportunity of a lifetime".
"Ghosts" was shot in the late Summer and Fall of 2001. When September 11th came, Cameron was down on a dive and Paxton was on the ship above and tells the tale. "Ed Marsh came up from Mission Control and said 'there's been an attack on New York and Washington'. We had to wait for the satellite to go over and then we saw all the images that everyone saw of the plane hitting the tower. Jim kept asking 'should I abort the dive? Do I abort the dive?' His brother said 'no, no do not abort' . He stayed down. Had he known the magnitude of it, I'm sure he would have come back up. For the rest of the day we started hearing reports over the BBC out of Africa that the Russians had put on the intercom system". The filmmakers decided to turn their cameras off. "See, we're not real documentarians or we probably would have kept shooting through all of that", Paxton recalls. "We felt the hammer blow like everybody. It was very odd to be at Titanic making a documentary about a catastrophe that was to the 20th Century kind of what 9-11 is, so far, to the 21st Century. That brought it all home."
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So
what, besides teacups, did Paxton really see down there? "You go
down amidships and you're at the boat deck level which would have been
about a hundred feet from the keel, and shine one of those lights down
the side and it's suddenly so big that you go 'oh my God, it's just going
to swallow us'. That grabbed me. I felt the hair on my neck stand up.
You can see all these decks where the ship just tore in half all the way
down to the boilers and you just go 'oh, God'. That brought home the real
violence of the tragedy. I had to think about keeping a certain reverence
and respect. I was just there to kind of bear witness. I'd be on the Mir
Two as it's landing on the starboard boat deck of the Titanic and sit
there eating a cheese sandwich and thinking 'this is the most surreal
moment anybody can possibly imagine'".