A pal of mine ( and former Diving Superintendent for Can Dive Services Ltd. - Phil Nuyton's Canadian arm of Oceaneering Intl. )
was hired as the diving co-ordinator for that film.
He has related several stories of the project. I was interested to know the majority of the u/w filming was set in a 60 million gallon, former nuclear reactor cooling reservoir.
He said the actors were terrific to work with & eager to learn the ins n' outs of surface-supplied helmet diving, though most had never been certified in scuba! One common complaint they had though was that conventional diving helmets hid most of their faces, & they asked my buddy to modify them to accentuate their fine features. The result was the helmet used in the movie. He said they were a quick study in the use of the s.s. gear & became very proficient in its' use over the course of filming.
From a deepsea point of view, most of the technical aspects of the film were accurate ( no doubt my buddy's influence there ), though they did take some license with the phenomena of h.p.n.s.; & we are a few years away from putting drilling rigs on the bottom of the sea ( makes for good cinema though ). The helmet design, though flattering to the actors, would not be used in the deepsea...too much dead air space inside ( must be used in free-flow mode or CO2 builup is likely ) & too costly in terms of gas useage.
Remember the scene where the former husband & wife are in the flooding submersible & she drowns & is hustled back to the "rig" for resucitation? The "submersible" is actually a deck decompression chamber we used to use in the Arctic for surface decompression. During that dramatic scene, if you look closely at the wall of the chamber, you will see a "Can Dive" sticker we stuck there in the "submersibles" former life...
All I know is no one as good lookin' as that actress was ever in that chamber when I was doing my decompression!
Regards,
D.S.D.
was hired as the diving co-ordinator for that film.
He has related several stories of the project. I was interested to know the majority of the u/w filming was set in a 60 million gallon, former nuclear reactor cooling reservoir.
He said the actors were terrific to work with & eager to learn the ins n' outs of surface-supplied helmet diving, though most had never been certified in scuba! One common complaint they had though was that conventional diving helmets hid most of their faces, & they asked my buddy to modify them to accentuate their fine features. The result was the helmet used in the movie. He said they were a quick study in the use of the s.s. gear & became very proficient in its' use over the course of filming.
From a deepsea point of view, most of the technical aspects of the film were accurate ( no doubt my buddy's influence there ), though they did take some license with the phenomena of h.p.n.s.; & we are a few years away from putting drilling rigs on the bottom of the sea ( makes for good cinema though ). The helmet design, though flattering to the actors, would not be used in the deepsea...too much dead air space inside ( must be used in free-flow mode or CO2 builup is likely ) & too costly in terms of gas useage.
Remember the scene where the former husband & wife are in the flooding submersible & she drowns & is hustled back to the "rig" for resucitation? The "submersible" is actually a deck decompression chamber we used to use in the Arctic for surface decompression. During that dramatic scene, if you look closely at the wall of the chamber, you will see a "Can Dive" sticker we stuck there in the "submersibles" former life...
All I know is no one as good lookin' as that actress was ever in that chamber when I was doing my decompression!
Regards,
D.S.D.
