James Cameron Could Have Died While Filming The Abyss - If He Didn't Punch A Guy

They say violence never solves anything, but for James Cameron, a swift punch to the face of one of his crew members may have saved his life.

The incident happened on the set of "The Abyss," according to an anecdote Cameron told at a September 2023 Q&A held after a screening of the film at Beyond Fest (via People Magazine). The film — about a team of Navy SEALS racing against Russian forces to recover a sunken nuclear submarine that contains a surprising secret –  naturally required a whole lot of underwater photography to complete. To accomplish this, Cameron had special equipment built that allowed him to operate his camera underwater, which included weights to keep him anchored to the floor of the studio's tank. One day, while the rest of the crew went about setting up a shot, he realized that he was about to run out of oxygen.

Unable to get the attention of his hard-of-hearing director of photography, Cameron stripped his equipment off and made a break for the surface. The shoot's safety diver tried to help him out by offering him their regulator, but the equipment presented to him wasn't functional either, causing Cameron to repeatedly inhale water.

"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," Cameron recounted. "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." And that's just one incident that occurred during the long, very difficult shoot for "The Abyss."

James Cameron's near-drowning was just a fraction of an extremely difficult shoot. Ed Harris also nearly drowned while filming the movie, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio walked off the set due to shooting conditions and is reported to have suffered a physical and emotional breakdown due to 70-plus hour weeks required by filming. Harris told Entertainment Weekly in 2016 that during the climatic scene in which his character tries to rouse Mastrantonio's back to life by shaking, shouting at, and slapping her, the camera ran out of film and no one called cut on the take. This understandably upset Mastrantonio, who walked away while exclaiming, "We're not animals."

"We were guinea pigs, in a way, Jim wasn't quite sure how this was all gonna go down," Harris told EW. But apparently he holds no grudge against Cameron for the experience, as he praised the director's genius in the same interview, and "The Abyss" has gained a positive reputation as one of James Cameron's best movies.

For those who missed out on the film when it was first released, you can catch the remastered version of "The Abyss" in theaters for one day only on December 6, buy the film in digital on December 5, or snag it for the first time on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-Ray on December 12.