At the end when Ed Harris puts on that suit and breathes in the fluid. I dunno if Harris actually did that, but a scene previous to that shows a rat that seems to be doing it. Can anyone clarify this?
Ed didn’t, but the rat did.
Fluorocarbons are your friends. Well, kinda.
A couple of previous threads on the same subject:
The Abyss and liquid-breathing: for real?
The mouse that breathed underwater
Ed Harris’ suit was just a mock-up, but yes, the rat really was breathing underwater.
Harris almost drown in that suit. It didn’t supply him with air, he had to breath from a safety diver’s equipment and then just hold his breathe during filming (because there couldn’t be any bubbles seen coming out of that suit). This isn’t as dangerous as it sounds. For most shots the diver was literally right next to him off camera. But for one of the long shots of him falling down the abyss (actually he was being pulled sideways in front of a fake landscape) the shot took a little too long and he almost didn’t get to the safety diver soon enough. The SciFi channel showed some footage of this.
Asked and answered. and anwered and answered…
Can we add this to the Questions Never To Be Asked Collection? eg: why we park on a driveway… -gry and other such moldy oldy questions?