With some encouragement, he takes a breath of the stuff and lurches backward, shocked and acclimatizing to the bizarre feeling.

He gives the rat a kiss in solidarity and affixes the helmet, which slowly fills with the strange pink liquid. And so, with an understandable degree of fear in his eyes, Brigman suits up. In the third act of the movie, wouldn’t you know it, the rig’s foreman, Bud Brigman ( Ed Harris), has to go deep. To Hippy and Catfish’s amazement, after some struggling, the rat breathes the fluid. Using the wire cage as an improvised lid Monk traps the squirming rodent beneath the surface. He snatches Hippy’s white pet rat off his shoulder, submerging the creature. Sensing doubt, Monk upturns a nearby wire cage, spilling metallic bolts across the table. “Oxygenated perfluorocarbon emulsion,” Monk clarifies. “Anyway, you breathe liquid so you can’t get compressed the pressure doesn’t get you.” Leaning in skeptically, Catfish (Leo Burmester) asks for clarification: “You mean you got liquid in your lungs?” Hippy asks what we’re all thinking: how deep, exactly? “It’s classified,” Monk responds curtly. “Fluid breathing system,” responds US Navy SEAL Ensign Monk (Adam Nelson), “We just got them. Circling the outskirts of the station’s loading bay, Hippy’s eyes lock on a small container of unnaturally pink liquid. “What is that stuff?” asks Hippy (Todd Graff), the rig’s resident conspiracy theorist. These military folk bark orders, reek of elitism, and possess fancy, cutting-edge playthings. When the SEAL team first arrives in The Abyss, the merge is not all that harmonious. In the process, they find themselves at the heart of humanity’s intergalactic Judgment Day. When a US submarine sinks into the titular abyss after an encounter with a mysterious foreign object, the civilians, allied with a Navy SEAL team, rush to salvage the wreck before the Soviets. The movie would tell of a group of blue-collar workers, stationed on Deep Core, an experimental underwater drilling platform near the Cayman Trough.

The idea had been wriggling around in Cameron’s creative noggin since scuba diving stole his heart as a teen. Hot off the commercial and critical successes of 1984’s The Terminator and 1986’s Aliens, director James Cameron and his then-wife/producing partner Gale Anne Hurd settled on their next project. Let’s get one thing straight: there are blank checks, and then there’s The Abyss. This entry explains how they shot the breathing fluid scenes in James Cameron’s deep-sea action sci-fi movie The Abyss. Welcome to How’d They Do That? - a monthly column that unpacks moments of movie magic and celebrates the technical wizards who pulled them off.

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