Space.com: "The Abyss" is often a neglected Cameron classic that was a pioneering film in so many ways. What can you tell us about concept art created for it and will there be a high-definition 4K transfer at some point?
Cameron: Yeah, we finished the transfer and I wanted to do it myself because Mikael [Salomon] did such a beautiful job with the cinematography on that film. It is truly, truly gorgeous cinematography. That was before I started to assert myself in terms of lighting and asking the cinematographer to do certain things. I'd compose with the camera and choose the lenses, but I left the lighting to him. He did a remarkable job on that movie that I appreciate better now than I did even as we were making it.
I'd also like to point out that he took one look at the first day's dailies of the underwater lighting and he went out and learned to scuba dive. He came in the following Monday morning, the worst diver in the world, but he reinvented underwater lighting. He went for indirect lighting and he got everybody doing things that were not just outside their comfort zone, they'd never even thought of it. Suddenly the underwater shots start to live up to the surface photography.
So I just recently finished the high-def transfer a couple of months ago so presumably there’ll be Blu-rays and it will stream with a proper transfer from now on. I appreciate what you said about the film. It didn't make much money in its day, but it does seem to be well-liked over time. The designers were basically Ron Cobb on the one hand, and Steve Burg on the other, who was lead designer of the NTIs, the non-terrestrial intelligence, the look of their city and bodies and faces. Steve was a guy that I worked with on "Terminator 2" after that. He was quite young at the time and fairly new to design.
Whereas Ron Cobb was quite well seasoned. He'd done "Blade Runner" and "Alien" and worked with me on "Aliens." Ron did all the lived-in tech of the underwater oil rig. I’m sure there were people that saw the film and thought that we just went and filmed on one of those underwater oil rigs that they have. Which they don't! But it looked real enough that you believed it was a real facility. It looked like the real deal if there ever was such a thing.
Steve of course got to be completely fanciful and use very flourishy design language. I used the same motif I did on "Aliens," which is to cast seasoned artists to do different design cultures. So there’s the human technology culture and then there was the alien culture.
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