A haunted house at the bottom of a lake? This is the original concept of the genre film The Deep House, and made it a tour de force to be discovered indoors since Wednesday. It must be said that the duo of French directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo did things well and surrounded themselves well: a 9-meter-deep pool at the Lites studios in Belgium, the cinematographer Jacques Ballard specializing in filming underwater and already at work on The song of the wolf, a couple of professional divers to double the main actors Camille Rowe and James Jagger, and a complete and clever camera system (drone, GoPro, manual camera) which allows to multiply the points of view in mode found footage.
If they are not, literally, wet, the directors have had a few sweats, as is often the case with underwater shoots. Isn’t that true James Cameron?
“Abyss”, “Titanic”, “Avatar” … James Cameron the unsinkable
The Abuse, you know ? This is the nickname given by part of the team, and even printed on t-shirts, to the film The Abyss because of his nightmarish shoot. With 40% of the film underwater, director James Cameron had, as usual, seen the big picture. As big as using the tank of an abandoned nuclear power station and filling its 13 meters deep with 28 million liters of water. A technical challenge, and several advances for the 7th Art, “but also physical and emotional”, comments producer Gale Anne Hurd in the documentary Under Pressure: The Making of The Abyss, cited by the site
Allocine.
Water leaks, power cuts, hair bleached by chlorine, submerged several hours a day, tensions with James Cameron … The shooting has chained the incidents, not helped by the behavior and the perfectionism of the director, to the point that the actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had a panic attack, which her sidekick Ed Harris almost drowned. James Cameron also put his life in danger. “I knew it would be a difficult shoot, but even I had no idea how much,” he explained, before adding: “I never want to go through this again.”
Except that the sequel will make him lie, with Titanic of course, but also soon Avatar 2 who will explore the underwater world of Pandora. With already a feat: Kate Winslet has beaten
the hollywood freediving record with 7 minutes and 14 seconds, against 6 minutes for Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.
James Bond, “47 Meters Down”… The Underwater Stage in London
James Cameron is perhaps the best known, the most “specialist”, of the directors to have shot underwater, but he is not the only one, with also Tim Burton on Dark Shadows and Miss Peregrine, Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Alien, the Resurrection, without forgetting James Bond and especially shark films. As the journalist François Cau details in a special report in the magazine Mad Movies, underwater filming has developed with a specialization and professionalization of certain cinematographers, most of them self-taught and resourceful. Following the example of Jacques Ballard on The Deep House, but also Mike Valentine (several James Bond, The Lost City of Z), Denis Lagrange (Point Break 2015, Dark Tide), Simon Christidis (The Reef, Godzilla vs Kong), etc.
There is even a studio entirely dedicated to underwater filming at Pinewood Studios near London: the Underwater Stage, open since 2005, with water at 30 ° C, UV filtered to be completely transparent and thus facilitate the work of the teams. Several blockbusters, series and clips use it, and we recommend the diptych 47 Meters Down and his shark cage.
“Underwater”, “Aquaman”, “The Shape of Water” … Spin without getting wet
“I was hardly ever in the water except in the morning under my shower”, reveals Vincent Cassel about the aptly named Underwater, released in early 2020. However, this monster film takes place well underwater, at best in the shelter of an underwater base, at worst in a wetsuit in the depths. “We filmed in a dry place, everything was created in postproduction and I was the first to be surprised by the result”, specifies the actor. If you are no doubt familiar with the American night technique, which consists of shooting outdoor scenes that are supposed to take place at night by day, there is an equivalent for underwater scenes, called the ”
dry for wet “.
Green background, filters, lights, smoke, slow motion … A whole range of effects are available to simulate water in postproduction, as in The Shape of Water by Guillermo Del Toro, or Aquaman by James Wan. If the purists tick in front of this technique and the rendering on the screen, it allows more security and also to make the impossible possible. Because Aquaman has neither a bottle nor a diving suit, and it is hard to see Jason Momoa going into snorkeling for 2:30. Well, unless the film was directed by James Cameron.