Film charts new technological waters

By Nicole Rodriguez

Actor Bill Paxton has one of those ubiquitous faces that has popped up in so many movies that you are sure to recognize him, even if you can't recall his name. However, although his roles have ranged from blockbuster hits ("True Lies") to indie flicks ("A Simple Plan"), Paxton has to admit that no other film in his fifty-seven movie career quite compares to his latest effort: "Ghosts of the Abyss."

"Ghosts," which will be released in IMAX theaters nationwide on April 11, marks the fifth time Paxton has teamed up with Academy Award winning director James Cameron and the second time they have tackled the subject matter that brought them awards and esteem with 1997's "Titanic."

Although "Ghosts" does investigate the same ship wreck site that inspired the 1997 blockbuster, "Ghosts" is a 3-D IMAX documentary rather than the fictionalized love story Paxton and Cameron created before.

"This trip was a great archeological exploration of the ship," Paxton explains as he settles himself comfortably in a chair in a suite at San Francisco's Ritz Carlton hotel. "This time we were not only imaging it with this incredible state of the art 3-D equipment that Jim and Sony had designed, but for the first time since the ship sailed, we went inside. And the audience gets to experience that kind of exploration and discover things as we were discovering them. Most people will never get the chance to do the things we get to do, and it's really cool to be able to share it with them in this way that's almost like a virtual experience."

"We went there in 1995 to make our dives to image the [ship exterior] for the movie ["Titanic"], but nobody had ever explored the interior, so it remained this big mystery that needed to be unraveled," reveals director James Cameron.

"I love exploration and when I finished the movie 'Titanic' we immediately started thinking about how we could explore the interior. It just seemed like the thing that needed to be done."

The problem, of course, was that there was no technology that would allow this kind of photography to be done. In conjunction with Sony Pictures and Director of Photography Vince Pace, Cameron designed the Reality Camera System, which allowed the team to shoot underwater for hours at a time with digital technology, whereas previous film systems only allowed for only minutes of underwater shots.

"If in 1995 2 percent of the interior could be imaged, we wanted to go 100 percent and we had to design a system that could do that," Cameron explains. "So it took us three and a half years and approximately two million dollars to build the vehicle that would make that possible. And the reason for this is that they were designed for different principles and therefore were very different from anything that had come before."

When Cameron was ready to make his voyage back to Titanic, he extended the invitation to all of the stars of the original film to join him, but Paxton was the only member who was able to commit to the shooting time Cameron had planned on.

Paxton feels that one of his previous movie roles in particular helped him to prepare for the challenges he faced going to the bottom of the Artic to film and narrate the wreckage with Cameron.

"I kind of fell back on my 'Apollo 13' experience," Paxton reveals. "It helped me embrace the claustrophobia and give my mind something to picture: I'm the command module again, I'm not in a spacesuit, I'm in the Nomec suit, and you have to wait to be recovered out of the ocean. There's a lot of a parallels."

"Ghosts" also marks the first time that both men have worked in the documentary genre- a challenge they both embraced whole-heartedly.

"I felt it was kind of liberating in a way, even though there was a sense of not knowing what to do," explains Cameron, who had never before attempted an unscripted endeavor.

Both men are confident that this film will be a success because of the incredible technology it boasts, and the subjects it tackles.

"I think the story [of Titanic] is such a fantastic story," explains Paxton. "It has kind of become a modern mythology. Until they found the wreck in 1985... it was almost as if it never existed because its life span was so short. It's one of those stories that, once you've heard it, a seed kind of germinates in your mind and your imagination."