Russell likens the experience to spending “a week and a half inside a box,” and with the duct’s actual dimensions of 36-by-36 inches, it’s a fair assessment. “We were climbing up some sections at 45 degree angles, some straight up. It was very confining.”
Getting lights and cameras into the tight space posed its own problems. Says Seale, “We ended up using anything we could get our hands on, one of which was a little right-angle snorkel lens from Panavision. It took up maybe three inches diameter of room so the actors could scrunch past us or come towards us. Most of the lighting was available.” Ultimately, Seale relied upon the actors’ own hand-held torches, “because with the shiny metal walls we found the torchlight bounced everywhere and did exactly what we wanted.”
“Not just water but fire was a major deterrent,” says Frazier in regard to the survivors’ upward progress. “It blocks them, turns them back, forces them to try a different route.” When the story called for a fuel tank to burst, raining down a flaming waterfall along the escape route, Frazier’s team used a mixture of water and Coleman fuel set ablaze, “for a cascading effect. Then Boyd Shermis just changed the color of the water mixture a bit, gave it a proper tint so it looked like pure fuel,” he explains.
For fire burning atop the water, seen straight-on, they snaked 3/4-inch electrical conduit through the water, force-filled it with liquid propane and ignited it.
The trickiest of all was to create oil-slicked water on fire from Josh Lucas’ perspective as he swims underneath and looks for a safe place to emerge. Since conduit would show, Frazier’s team came up something they called cookie sheets – flat pieces of metal cut into kidney shapes, treated with propane and suspended two inches above the surface. “When ignited, the fire spread underneath the cookie sheet but it couldn’t escape. When you’re under the water looking up it gives the illusion that there’s a big oil slick burning on the water.”
The effects expert also sought to “keep the set alive” with random sparks, patches of flame and smoke throughout the backgrounds, and worked closely with Seale in shooting steam over dry ice to create a density of smoke over the ruined disco.
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