DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

“My first trip out after being smacked by a van and almost killed was to the movies. Deep Blue Sea, as a matter of fact; I went in my wheelchair and loved every minute of it.”

Stephen King, author

Sebastian famously sang “Darlin’ it’s better, down where it’s wetter.” This must have clashed with any adults at the cinema who were drowning in nautical terrors at the time. In 1989, Deepstar Six, Leviathan, Lords of the Deep, The Abyss, and The Little Mermaid were showcasing the untapped cinematic world beneath the ocean’s surface. Robert Ballard had recently filmed the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, influencing James Cameron forever, who in turn influenced everyone else.

The tide continued with The Beast (1996), Deep Rising (1998), Sphere (1998), and Virus (1999). The Beast was another aquatic novel by Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws (1975), which set the benchmark for seaside scares. Catching the wave of success from The Abyss and Jurassic Park (1993), on 28 July 1999, Deep Blue Sea aimed to be wetter and perhaps even better.

If the ‘Master of Horror’ praised it, then it must have done something right. Stephen King also hated The Shining (1980), and this is no Stanley Kubrick. But Deep Blue Sea is a hell of a fun time. The detailed production history also illuminates how such a ludicrous premise made it to the big screen.

“There was really not much left of him,” recalls screenwriter Duncan Kennedy of the shark attack victim who washed up near his childhood home. Spurring nightmares of darkened tunnels filled with mind-reading sharks, this wasn’t quite Deep Blue Sea yet. Kennedy needed a second close encounter when he and his wife stayed on a Great Barrier Reef island.

“This huge shark came in close chasing fish in a feeding frenzy, its head visible above water. Halfway to the island it got rough and we almost capsized. Below us we saw eerie tunnels from this abandoned underwater observatory that reminded me of those nightmare hallways. Days later, we stayed on a beef farm that used genetically modified growth hormone shots and they said it made the cattle more aggressive—and DBS was underway.“

Duncan Kennedy, screenwriter

An underwater research facility, Aquatica, is experimenting with growth hormones to extract a potential cure for Alzheimer’s from sharks’ brains. Side effect: the genetically engineered beasts are faster, stronger, and much smarter. A series of disasters leaves the entire complex sinking into the ocean. The sharks take the opportunity to hunt down every member of the crew.

A wild mix of horror, action, and science-fiction, the premise alone stretches credulity, and the set pieces are insistent on jumping the shark. Deep Blue Sea is utterly ridiculous and yet committed to the premise with a 1990s sincerity. Like the underwater base, a solid foundation is needed to prevent the entire concept from sinking like a $60M stone. The writers have spoken at length on wrangling the script in, and there were many writers.

Kennedy, alongside married writers Donna and Wayne Powers, received the credit. Yet all scripts get multiple drafts and revisions. By Kennedy’s recollection, “Team DBS included” Charlie Mitchell, Michael Frost Beckner, Simon Barry, Carty Talkington, and producer Akiva Goldsman. They may not have had a chance for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ at the Academy Awards. Critics even in their positive reviews still regarded it as B-movie trash. There is still a rollercoaster slickness to this film, too busy with outlandish nonsense to be winking at the camera. And it had many course adjustments on the journey out.

The draft we were first presented was much more of a military espionage, high-tech action movie—grenade launchers, that kind of thing,” admits Wayne Powers. “We wanted our team to include more blue-collar types and not to have weapons to fight back.” Deep Blue Sea had enough criticisms of lacking originality without copying both James Cameron’s The Abyss and Aliens (1986). Instead, referencing Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) was the right move, as the skeleton crew of Aquatica all get their moment to shine.

From the raffish shark wrangler Carter (Thomas Jane) to the easy-going chef Preacher (LL Cool J), even senior scientist Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgård) gets introduced “pissing into the wind.” A cast of charismatic actors is always a plus, and their friendliness is crucial to easing audiences through the dense exposition in the first half-hour. After all, if they’re having a good time, then we are too.

Lead scientist McAlester (Saffron Burrows) carries the story with an emotional backstory that fuels her cause, but she could have been far more stereotypical. Initially presented as the “passionate female marine biologist,” she would have clashed with the equally typical Whitlock, who “secretly conducted the unethical/illegal genetic work.” However, Kennedy is quick to add, “No, he didn’t strip to his underwear like the movie Chief Scientist did!” Mitchell would “fundamentally” alter things by allowing the attractive lead woman to tackle the root moral dilemma.

Adding character depth to this high-stakes, fast-paced romp swerves the obligatory romance storyline into something far more engaging. Carter’s roguish past forces him to follow McAlester’s orders.

The inclusion of McAlester’s motivations “had the effect of making the unethical work more sympathetic, though obviously not 100%,” according to Kennedy. The parallels between the two characters eventually fall apart. Carter takes charge of saving everyone and yet no one chastises the male hero for repeatedly turning a blind eye.

Arguably, the other scientists are equally culpable for performing MRIs on the test sharks and never noticing their seemingly enlarged brains.

The two most entertaining characters also developed significantly. Preacher wasn’t involved in the experiments. “Barry created a funny Jamaican chef,” Kennedy acknowledges. Cut in a subsequent draft “[He was] then resurrected by the Powers who hugely expanded him,” making Preacher the most entertaining cast member. He called upon God for strength, traded witty remarks with a loveable parrot, and even shared the recipe for perfect omelettes in his video will.

“He was originally shark meat quite early on,” Harlin admitted, but LL Cool J “was so good we kept him around.”

An easygoing performance can ultimately make the middle section’s tension feel a little too relaxed when things get serious. The shark manages to eat a flying bird more easily than it does the bumbling chef. Our comic relief shouldn’t be faring this well.

Any pretence of taking Deep Blue Sea seriously evaporates when the hapless Preacher hides in an oven, which gets turned on with a well-aimed snout nudge. The Mask (1994) wasn’t the only ’90s film drawing inspiration from Looney Tunes.

Harlin complimented the actor who complained the least, saying: “He had some very uncomfortable situations and even ends up in the shark’s mouth. He was really determined to show he’s a real actor who wants to do something really powerful and interesting.” I wouldn’t complain either if I got to kill the first shark and have two of my rap songs in the credits.

“Deepest Bluest” is the icing on the cake as LL Cool J raps from the sharks’ perspective, making it clear that “my hat is like a shark’s fin.” Trevor Rabin composes a similarly bombastic score, reminiscent of John Williams’s great Jaws and Jurassic Park works. Along with Harlin’s direction, the music builds a cinematic scope when so much is confined to half-flooded concrete corridors.

That isn’t to say the scale isn’t evident. The director of Die Hard 2 (1990) and Cliffhanger (1993) knew how to stage a blockbuster for a modest budget… until the budgets kept growing with each film. Estimated as high as $82M, Deep Blue Sea proved a test for Harlin, whose last success was Cliffhanger, six years prior. The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) underperformed, and Cutthroat Island (1995) remains one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office flops.

Jaws climaxed with an explosion. You’re never going to get a bigger bang in another shark movie, and Harlin kicks off the action with one here. Aquatica is established, along with the cast. Laboratories, living quarters, and even the elevator shaft are all given their moment of grandeur. A surprise birthday party further sells the calm before the storm.

It makes sense, of course, that for the sharks to get in, there has to be water. Harlin delivers a stellar disaster film with a sinking facility. Hyper-intelligent mutant sharks are an added bonus. Someone clearly saw The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and thought it wasn’t scary enough without the added fear of being chomped. The beautiful hook of Deep Blue Sea is that so many shark movies are either set in or out of the water. Here, that constantly changes as those poor actors are rag-dolled through the Fox Baja Studios tanks, once built for Titanic (1997). The sets may have been fake, but the water was brutally real.

“I was wet every day for two months. That storm sequence was no joke. we did that scene for over a week. There is always a certain point in the night when you’re tired and hate to get soaking wet again. The salt water stung your eyes and things happen. three tons of water got thrown on us by accident and everyone thought we were going into the drink, we didn’t have safety harnesses on and we were flailing around on this deck. I thought that was pretty funny when I saw it in the final film.”

Samuel L. Jackson, actor.

Jackson turned down the initial offer for Preacher, which led to them rewriting Russell Franklin into a role befitting the star. Franklin is the “very powerful, very smart” benefactor who issues a 48-hour deadline for results. Harlin “knew the audience would be groaning ‘Oh, come on, this is pompous,’ but it had to be for the surprise to work.” His avalanche survival backstory is not-so-subtly mentioned in every other scene. But, “it had to take you to a place saying, ‘these filmmakers are stupid, they think we’re going to buy this.'”

“The only person we really recognise is Tom Skerritt, he’s going to lead us to safety,” Harlin explained with his Alien influence. “He gets taken away, and it’s a shock and you don’t know what to trust.” The emphasis on Franklin in the first act coerces the audience into believing he’s the protagonist. Carter’s introduction provides some intrigue but he has far less dialogue early on. This leads to the iconic turning point where Franklin delivers a truly absurd hero speech that borders on schlock. A rallying cry cut off mid-sentence when he steps too close to an open body of water. A shark jumps out and Franklin is dead.

Jackson boasted “I’m basically like Janet Leigh or Drew Barrymore in Scream.” But an interview with VFX supervisor Jeff Okun revealed how close they came to messing this up. Okun had read “seven pages of the worst dialogue you’ve ever heard in your life” and got a late-night call from Jackson, someone he’d worked with three times now. His thoughts were the same. Okun offered “I can kill you much earlier.” Jackson requested only “the sooner you kill me, the happier I’ll be.”

The set that day was tense. Jackson would begin his monologue, “You think water’s fast…” and then jog into position. Harlin would call “Cut!”—far too fast, it’s seven pages. Jackson told him outright he wanted it cut short. Harlin disagreed. 20 takes later, “the editor pieced together a whole sequence so the seven pages could be delivered. We tested the movie. Some person sitting in the front row stood up, turned around, and yelled to the entire theatre, ‘Renny Harlin, you suck!'”

That editor then refused to recut the film after disastrous studio notes. Frank Urioste was brought in to firmly establish a solid tone: “Campy is what the mission was,” according to Okun. Balancing the B-movie charms with Harlin’s A-budget summer flick worked out. “When we tested the new version of the movie, the audiences loved it,” Okun breathes a sigh of relief. “Sam called me up: ‘Best. Death. Ever.'”

We have to talk about the sharks. They are a genuine cinematic achievement in Deep Blue Sea. A mixture of real-life footage, VFX that has held up well, and animatronics that are still breath-taking. In the prologue, the shark head breaks through the boat and the fin cuts through the surface—all stuff seen 24 years earlier in Jaws. What Steven Spielberg infamously struggled with was showing “the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.” Harlin’s approach was “no more hiding sharks. This time you’re going to really see them. We’ve seen sharks on the Discovery Channel. We know what they look like.”

Using equipment from Boeing 747s, the team at Edge Innovations built 8,000-pound units powered by 1,000hp engines that could reach 30mph. These were self-contained, remote-controlled, and could swim as freely as a real shark. Skarsgård thought it was a real one. Jackson would walk up to it slowly and touch it; it felt like a real shark. He also claimed that the animatronics “had a mind of its own sometimes,” which Harlin would recall vividly.

“All of a sudden it leapt up, went through the ceiling. All these 2x4s flying away like matchsticks. It gave us an idea of the awesome power of these creatures and how careful we had to be in terms of the cast and crew being close to them, and how the computer program had to have failsafe procedures so nobody got hurt.”

Renny Harlin, director.

With the incredible animatronics, Sam Jackson’s impactful demise, and the revised tone, Deep Blue Sea was less than a month from release. Yet, test audiences still loathed it. McAlester’s multifaceted attempt to combat Alzheimer’s by tampering with nature? Harlin “had test cards that said, ‘kill the bitch.'”

“In their minds, she was the bad guy and, in our minds, she was the heroine. Holy shit, we’re in trouble. How do we fix this?” Franklin and Carter had their tangled pasts: one an illegal looter, the other admitting the two lost in the avalanche weren’t killed by the ice. Neither of these plotlines went anywhere. The men got off scot-free, while McAlester was called a “stupid bitch” by her colleague. Who expected audiences to wrestle with moral complexities after LL Cool J blew up a shark in his kitchen?

Harlin salvaged his film with a last-minute idea: “When she falls in the water, what if she doesn’t survive?” And, crucially, recognising “LL Cool J is the hero. Everyone likes him, and Thomas Jane.” With a single day’s reshoot at the Universal water tanks, Saffron Burrows was eaten by a CGI shark.

Deep Blue Sea now had a satisfying climax. The culmination of various writers, drafts, and solutions led to moderate success, grossing $165M worldwide. Moderate, that is, compared to the summer’s jam-packed line-up, which Harlin admitted was fierce competition. Just in July 1999, audiences had The Blair Witch Project, American Pie, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace. Even Runaway Bride joined the party, each film exceeding expectations with $200M box office takings, with some skyrocketing past that by year’s end.

If people wanted horror they had the revolutionary Blair Witch, science-fiction was back with Star Wars. Meanwhile, Deep Blue Sea was stuck fighting another creature feature Lake Placid… which fared worse than this film.

Critics were ambivalent towards the B-movie conventions, though they praised Renny Harlin’s signature flair for pacing and suspense. The credited writers wouldn’t flourish, with Duncan Kennedy resorting to another shark film, Bait (2012), and Donna and Wayne Powers writing the guilty pleasure Valentine (2000) and little else. A film like Deep Blue Sea had a strong chance of falling into the forgotten depths of shark movies. Yet, it has persevered through nostalgia. Two direct-to-video sequels were belatedly released in 2018 and 2020 with scant resemblance to the original’s story, scope, or talent. That wouldn’t stop the cast and crew from attending anniversary screenings. They even publicly supported a fan campaign to release the original ending with McAlester surviving.

“Are we Jurassic Shark? Golly, I don’t know,” Akiva Goldsman pondered. “Are we Jaws‘ errant godchild? Yeah, if we’re lucky.” That’s all any shark film can aspire to. Deep Blue Sea is a novel, peculiar, and unpredictable experience. The Shallows (2016), The Meg (2018), and Under Paris (2024) are all vying for their own unique angle. Jaws was the definitive shark film. Deep Blue Sea was the film that proved adding sharks to any other scenario guarantees an entertaining time. I’m sure most films aspire to make people feel so grateful to be alive, even Stephen King.

USA • MEXICO | 1999 | 105 MINUTES | 2.39:1 • 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • SPANISH

Cast & Crew

director: Renny Harlin.
writers: Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers & Wayne Powers.
starring: Saffron Burrows, Thomas Jane, LL Cool J, Jacqueline McKenzie, Michael Rappaport, Stellan Skarsgård & Samuel L. Jackson.