When you look at James Cameron’s filmography, the man doesn’t have any real missteps. Sure, you can dissect his directorial debut, “Piranha II,” or talk about how “Avatar” has completely dominated his career over the past decade, but by and large, the filmmaker has one of the most successful and influential IMDBs of anyone. But even still, Cameron is willing to point out some of his own flaws, such as with the post-production on “The Abyss.”
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Speaking at a panel at Beyond Fest (via IndieWire), James Cameron talked about “The Abyss,” which might be one of his most underappreciated films. Though a technological wonder at the time, “The Abyss” isn’t a genre-defining work like “Aliens” or “Terminator 2,” so it often gets forgotten. And Cameron admits he realized going into it, “The Abyss” wasn’t a sure thing like “Aliens.”
“Well, this was my first really big, kind of mega-budget movie,” Cameron said. “It wasn’t kind of a slam dunk in the way ‘Aliens’ was. Like, we just knew ‘Aliens’ worked. This one, we didn’t know exactly how it was going to work.”
So, what do you do when you’re unsure about how a film will play with an audience? Well, you test screen it. However, for Cameron, “The Abyss” was his first test-screening experience, having skipped that step in the creation of his previous films. And because of his lack of understanding about the test-screening process, Cameron said he made some mistakes, including cutting out a VFX sequence that was negatively viewed by test audiences.
“I have to say what we went out and we actually screened it twice, once with the wave sequence in and once with it out, because […] the wave sequence wasn’t done,” Cameron said. “It was just a bunch of storyboards and you can’t ask a nonprofessional cinema audience to watch a movie where all of a sudden it just cuts to drawings. They don’t know how to process it. So of course the cards were bad for the wave sequence, and the cards were bad for the non-wave sequence. We kind of went, ‘Well, at least it’s shorter without the wave. At least it won’t cost as much to finish.’ I didn’t really know how to interpret the data, and I think we overreacted.”
He added, “I’ve learned as a result of that how to interpret those cards, and what they really mean, and when to take it seriously, and when to just assume the movie’s not done yet, they’re not getting the full picture.”
It’s clear Cameron has some regrets about “The Abyss.” But for sci-fi film fans, it remains one of his best works and, again, in terms of filmmaking, it’s just as influential as any of his work. And if you missed “The Abyss” and want to experience it for yourself, the filmmaker teased an upcoming 4K remaster of the film, but he didn’t give any release date news.
