What was the attraction in doing this film – the action or your character’s interesting arc?
Cole Hauser “The immediate thing that jumped out when I read the script was the cave diving aspect of it. I didn’t know people did this stuff. I didn’t know they would go 24 hours underwater and find caves and study plants and species, so that shocked me and I thought it was a cool idea for a Sci-Fi film. And then I thought Jack was an interesting guy in the sense that’s he’s a leader, which is fun to play as an actor. And then he goes through an enormous change from a guy who you’d want to be around and trust, to making that change [when the creature begins to take over]. The transition was difficult for me, should we do prosthetics, should we just do the eyes, should we do nothing and just let me act? It was a whole journey in itself, and we found a happy medium.” Did anyone get hurt during the production?
Hauser “I got a little messed up a couple of times, but it wasn’t from the underwater stuff, it was doing the wirework. I had a trial-by-fire three-day program on how to do wirework, which takes a long time to understand how to do it. We had the guys that did The Matrix, and they were great, but the thing is when you’re depending on somebody else to pull you and make sure that you’re going to fly over something, and they don’t do it exactly when you do it, it’s human nature that there’s going to be problems, so I got flung into the wall a couple of times. I didn’t break any bones, just bruises and bumps.”
Was it claustrophobic in the cave?
Hauser “There was one portion that was a little claustrophobic for me and that was when I was going into the scorpion cave. I got stuck in it, and in the scene it actually works because you really would get stuck. I asked Wes (Skiles) and Jill [Heinerth, the underwater technical advisors], why they do this work, and the coolest answer came from Wes, who said, ‘I’m Earth’s astronaut.’ That kind of hit me and I understood why they do it.”
Did you work with the creatures as puppets or were they all CGI?
Hauser “Obviously, in Sci-Fi there’s a lot of pretending. Morris (Chestnut), Lena [Hedley] and Eddie [Cibrian] got the effect as far as being able to struggle with it and fight with it, because they had a scene where the creature tries to attack them and they all gang up on him. The only thing that I really did was the CGI jump where I hit the creature and then spun around. When I was doing it I was like, ‘This is weird, this doesn’t look right.’ Then you see it with all the effects in it, and you go, ‘Wow, that’s pretty insane.’”
by Judy Sloane |
