James Cameron punched a diver to save his own life while making The Abyss

A few sci-fi movies have stood the test of time, and one of them is James Cameron’s 1998 The Abyss, which has a jaw-dropping story about an incident while filming.

Cameron is the GOAT when it comes to some of the classics. His works include Terminator, Alien, True Lies, the unforgettable romance tragedy Titanic, and the coveted Avatar. Three years after Aliens, Cameron created The Abyss.

The movie focuses on a submarine encountering something unexpected in the ocean and sinking in the Caribbean. A US team is sent in to recover the sub before it’s too late and the Soviets get there first. But amid the rescue mission, they encountered a non-terrestrial intelligence or NTI.

The movie was a grand success having made $90 Million at the box office. Years later, Cameron revealed an interesting and life-threatening incident that occurred during filming that caused him to punch a diver.

James Cameron saved himself from drowning during The Abyss

While filming in a tanker for The Abyss, James Cameron was forced to punch an “angel” diver to be able to swim to the surface to stay alive.

At the Los Angeles genre festival Beyond Fest, Cameron took part in a Q&A session while premiering The Abyss in 4K. While talking about the movie’s filming, Cameron stumbled into the story of how he almost died. Most of the movie was filmed in an abandoned nuclear power plant in Gaffney. The actors performed underwater with the supervision of “angel” divers.

According to Variety, Cameron explained each actor was being watched over by one or two divers. But, no one was keeping an eye on him. Having to film at the bottom of the tank, Cameron was strapped with weights. He explained that as the tank got lower, it would signal a lack of oxygen and had “a piston servo regulator in it.” It meant that the tank had one breath and nothing more.

“I’m trying to get [underwater director of photography] Al Giddings attention on the p.a. but Al had been involved in a diving accident and he blew out both eardrums so he was deaf as a post, and I’m wasting my last breath of air on an underwater p.a. system going ‘Al… Al…’ and he’s working away with his back to me,” said Cameron.

Finally getting the attention of a diver, they stuck a broken regulator in his mouth that caused him to breathe in 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 overexpand going up. 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,” said the director. It’s safe to say that James Cameron just got cooler.

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