The Abyss

by Orson Scott Card

They offered to let me put on a suit and get into the water. Instead, I fled to my motel room and put down on paper the first two chapters of the book. I had been developing Bud and Lindsey in my mind - who they were, how they came to be involved in undersea work, and why they would be on the verge of divorce when they mattered so much to each other. I turned in the chapters to Jim Cameron. He read them. So did Gale Anne Hurd, the producer; so did Van Ling, Jim's research assistant. All three of them responded, and the verdict was clear: I was going to be able to write the novel I wanted to write.

  All three of them became advisers and collaborators in the book. Jim was impossibly busy - our meetings were rare, culminating at last in a midnight phone call on 28 March 1989. I daresay that in person and on the telephone, we spent no more than eight hours working directly together. But that does not give a true picture of the degree of collaboration: Jim and Gale both understand exactly what makes a story work, and so do I, so that we didn't have to waste time trying to teach each other how to read and write a novel.

  Van Ling, who was constantly with Jim through every step of the production, was able to respond to my questions and provide hundreds of bits of information, correcting or elaborating on my assumptions. It was Van who read through every chapter within hours of receiving it, sending me notes explaining what was going on in the scenes I was studying. Since he and Jim had discussed everything from character motivations to the function of every piece of equipment in Deepcore, the hours I spent consulting with Van were as vital to the collaborative process as the time I spent with Jim.

  It's worth noting that almost everything shown in this film except for the builders themselves is either presently feasible or will soon be within reach of current technology. Everything from SEAL training to the ROVs reflects Van's and Jim's deep research and invaluable help from knowledgeable consultants. In particular, you should know that the fluid breathing technique used in Deep Suit has actually been done by the researchers mentioned in chapter seven. When you see Beany breathe underwater, that's not a special effect - it's a real rat breathing fluid and coming out alive.

  My most important source, the clearest possible explanation of what Jim wanted the story to be, was the film itself. Starting with a trickle early in January and culminating with most of the edited film in late March, I had stacks of videotape that showed me exactly what was happening from moment to moment in the story. The film was so valuable that I ended up throwing out everything I had done from the script itself. Only the first three chapters of my first draft survived in substantially their original form, and that's only because they take place before the movie actually begins. I learned for a fact what I had suspected from the start - that a novelization written from the screenplay is worthless compared to a novelization written from the film itself.

  Which brings me to another group of collaborators: the actors. I'm not a starstruck film-lover; I don't get all tingly when in the presence of stars. But I did work for many years as a playwright and stage director, and I do get excited when I see a brilliant performance. The whole ensemble in Deepcore gave virtually flawless performances. Part of this came from the fact that they really were a cohesive group - living in or near Gaffney for six months and working long hours underwater and acting the roles Jim wrote gave them the kind of smoothness together that the Deepcore crew would really have. Whether they loved each other every minute is immaterial - neither do the characters. What matters is they played off each other with astonishing sensitivity, and in the climactic ensemble scenes - in conflict with Coffey, reviving Lindsey, talking Bud down the cliff - they worked with such reality that all I had to do was report what I saw and the scenes would work.

  Every one of the actors brought details of attitude and interpretation that opened up their characters to me, allowing me to make them more real in the novel than they would ever have been from the script alone. Leo Burmester's Catfish became a father-figure, an anchor in the novel, largely because of the way he played the part; Todd Graff's jumpiness and sense of semi-malicious fun as Hippy, Kimberly Scott's quietly seething One Night, John Bedford Lloyd's sweetly dumb Jammer - all of them opened up their characters for me, and are to some degree co-inventors of the novel.

  Coffey and Lindsey were extraordinarily difficult roles to play. Michael Biehn had to play a man who was on the edge of madness but both he and Jim wanted to avoid letting Coffey be a stock villain. When you think of all the movies where the military bad guy mindlessly runs roughshod over the good guys, you can see how easily Coffey might have been played that way. Biehn never crossed the line into caricature. He made Coffey dangerous, yet without a hint of malice. The result was that I could write Coffey as an interesting and in many ways admirable human being, knowing that Biehn's performance would make Coffey seem as complex as I was making him.

  Lindsey Brigman offers a different challenge. In most films, the woman unexpectedly aboard ship would be there solely to be lusted after, rescued, and laid at regular intervals. Jim Cameron already proved in Terminator and Aliens that he isn't interested in such shallow female characters. Instead, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had to create a character who was at once arrogant and intelligent and impulsive and also sympathetic. I take nothing away from the Academy-Award-winning performances of Cliff Robertson in Charly and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man when I say that it is far easier to play a character who is mentally limited than it is to play one who is intellectually brilliant. Most actors who attempt it merely embarrass themselves. Mastrantonio, on the contrary, made me believe that her Lindsey Brigman actually designed Deepcore, and I believed that when her Lindsey said "jump," she was used to seeing people move up and down. But Mastrantonio also showed me the one thing I hadn't been able to discover in the script: why Bud loved her.

  In particular, though, I must single out Ed Harris as one of the co-authors of this book. He has long been an actor's actor, one who has the respect of his peers even though he has not yet achieved the public prominence he deserves. I don't know whether casual audiences in the theater will realize what an extraordinary achievement his performance as Bud Brigman is. Every moment he's on screen, Harris's Bud is alert and alive. He gave Bud gestures, habits, mannerisms, turns of phrase that couldn't be written into a script - but because of Harris's performance, they're in the book. He gave a spin to his dialogue that enriched it. Dozens of times as I watched him work, I laughed aloud in delight as I realized, "That's why Bud says that!" Harris opened up Bud's soul for me - and yet not once did I detect him playing for the camera. Many of the most-honored actors in film today annoy me beyond endurance because I constantly catch them performing, showing off, strutting, as if they were tugging on the audience's lapels, trying to draw us closer, making sure we see them acting. By contrast, Harris made me believe that he was that simple, sometimes-confused, humble yet deeply noble man named Bud Brigman. If I hadn't had a few glimpses of Harris out of character in the uncut scenes, I would have believed that he wasn't acting at all, that he was just being himself. Not so. He was being Bud Brigman, and because of that, the Bud Brig-man in this book is richer than he would otherwise have been.

  There are other people who contributed to this novel. Sally Peters, my editor at Pocket, was heroic in her restraint, as we passed all the deadlines that normally apply to books. At any point she could have said, "Turn the book in now or refund the advance" - my contract allowed that - but instead she helped me hold off until the absolutely last possible moment so that I could see almost the entire film before turning in the book. The pressure on her was enormous, but she was careful to make sure that I felt as little of it as possible. As a result, the book is far better as I turn in the final version on 3 April 1989 than it would have been a month or two months or - I shudder - the four months earlier that the contract required.

  Peter Weissman, Pocket's copy editor, did a thorough and helpful job under very tight deadlines. My noble assistant, Julie Hamilton, got sore feet from standing for hours at the copy machine. Gale Hurd re
scued me from last-minute interference by meddlers who wanted to get their fingers into the project. Christa Vausbinder was always helpful and patient as she helped keep lines of communication open. And Van Ling long ago passed from being a resource to being a friend.

  My own resident editor, my wife, Kristine, read and responded to every word of the book, and with her clear vision has helped shape this novel as she has everything I write. She also worked impossible hours, including getting up at six in the morning to send manuscripts off on Piedmont Airlines' courier service - just as I was going to bed after printing out and duplicating it. Through all this she went through a pregnancy, a miscarriage, a five-year-old in a body cast, an eight-year-old with chicken pox, and a husband alternately on the verge of madness and exhaustion. Together we are trying to create both a family and a contribution to literature; I can't imagine myself doing either without her.

  You have probably already read this novel, and if you haven't yet seen the movie, I hope you will. Then you'll be in a position to judge whether Jim and I succeeded in our goal of making this book, not a novelization as the term is usually understood, but a novel that stands on its own and yet complements, illuminates, and fulfills the movie. Though the story is and always has been, at its roots, Jim Cameron's, it has long since ceased to be possible to go through this book picking out which idea, which nuance, which phrase came from Jim, which from me, and which from the actors. For good or ill, this novel is as close a collaboration between filmmaker and novelist as any other since the collaboration between Kubrick and Clarke in creating 2001: A Space Odyssey - and I hope you will forgive our ambition in hoping that you will find that both book and movie compare well with that watershed of science fiction film.

  Because this book is a far more solid artifact than the ephemeral credits that roll past at the end of the film, I am including a cast list; the names of all the actors belong here, because they are co-creators of both the book and the film.

  Bud Brigman - Ed Harris

  Lindsey Brigman - Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

  Lt. Hiram Coffey - Michael Biehn

  "Catfish" De Vries - Leo Burmester

  Allen "Hippy" Carnes - Todd Graff

  "Jammer" Willis - John Bedford Lloyd

  Arliss "Sonny" Dawson - J.C. Quinn

  Lisa "One Night" Standing - Kimberly Scott

  Lew "Bird Dog" Finler - Capt. Kidd Brewer, Jr.

  Wilhite - George Robert Klek

  Schoenick - Christopher Murphy

  Ensign Monk - Adam Nelson

  Dwight Perry - Richard Warlock

  Lupton McWhirter - Mike DeLuna

  Tommy Ray Dietz - Robert Searle

  Captain Kretschmer - Peter Ratray

  Aaron Barnes - Michael Beach

  Executive Officer Everton - Brad Sullivan

  Navigator - Frank Lloyd

  McBride - Jimmie Ray Weeks

  Commodore DeMarco - J. Kenneth Campbell

  Kirkhill - Ken Jenkins

  Bendix - Chris Elliott

  Reporter - Chris Anastasio

  Construction Worker- Thomas F. Duffy

  Anchorman - Joe Farago

  Newscasters - Wendy Gordon, Marcus Makai

  Reporter #1 - Gale Anne Hurd

  Reporter #2 - Emily Yancy

  Dr. Berg - Michael Chapman

  Older Woman - Robin Montgomery

  Young Woman - Polly Cross

  The Guy - Patrick Malone

  Irate Man - Charles Stewart

  News Helicopter Pilot - David Hicks

  Crew Members - Phillip Darlington, Joseph Nemec III