Why James Cameron Had To Perform CPR On A Drowned Rat For The Abyss

James Cameron is a pretty devoted director who's willing to go the extra nautical mile to ensure his films are as authentic as possible, but for his 1989 sci-fi film "The Abyss," he did something many people would consider unthinkable: he performed CPR on a rat. While that might sound like something that only happens in the world of, say, Eddie Murphy's "Dr. Dolittle" movies, it turns out that the man behind some of the biggest blockbusters of all time personally resuscitated one of the rodent actors who didn't handle being submerged in breathable liquid all that well. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter (THR), the acclaimed director shared the story behind reviving one of the rats that "drowned" in the liquid and revealed that he kept little "Beady" afterward as a pet. 

In a controversial scene from "The Abyss," a live rat is placed in oxygenated perfluorocarbon emulsion, a kind of breathable liquid. The rat struggles a bit but is ultimately pulled back out of the fluid, alive and well (though definitely not happy about the experience). While the scene was filmed five times with five different rats, apparently one of the rats had a severe reaction to being submerged, leading to Cameron's somewhat uncharacteristic rescue. Shooting "The Abyss" nearly killed Cameron, and from the sound of it, it almost killed Beady too.

According to Cameron, when one of the five rats wasn't breathing following submersion, he started giving it CPR because he didn't want to lose his "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" certification. (According to American Humane, they were never informed of live animals being used and thus were not on set as they should have been.) Though all five rats ultimately survived, many animal rights groups felt the scene was cruel. For his part, it seems that Cameron found it all worthwhile, saying:

"Beady and I bonded over the whole thing. I saved his life. We were brothers. He used to sit on my desk while I was writing 'Terminator 2,' and he lived to a ripe old age. He didn't seem particularly traumatized, though I know the film is outlawed in the U.K. because of 'animal cruelty.' "

While I love the fact that Cameron opened his heart to a rat, because rats are unfairly maligned and make great pets, none of those five rats should have been submerged in the first place. Cameron's technical and research assistant, Van Ling, was insistent in an op ed to the LA Times that the point of the scene was to see the rat survive, so of course they didn't kill the rats, but as Hippy (Todd Graff) says, they definitely didn't "dig it."

While some critics of the animal rights groups upset about "The Abyss" love to point out that rats are frequently used as laboratory animals, there are strict guidelines in place to reduce animal suffering. If Cameron and the people working on the movie were actually scientists studying whether or not oxygenated liquid could really be used in a situation like the movie, that would be one thing, but they weren't. Instead it feels like Cameron's insistence on going down to see the Titanic for real while shooting "Titanic," except he put five tiny lives on the line instead of his own. Thankfully, we don't see Beady's takes in the movie (the rat in the scene is very clearly a girl rat and Hippy even says so), but the rat we do see struggling to breathe the fluid is very obviously scared. Not only that, but when she's picked up so the fluid can drain from her lungs, it's by her tail, which is extremely painful (imagine being picked up by the base of your spine). That's, uh, not great Jim.

"The Abyss" was a wildly ambitious sci-fi film that utilized the newest and best visual tech at the time to create some of its more memorable scenes, and it's a real shame they didn't use puppets or even early computer-generated imagery for the rats. I'm glad Cameron made a cool little friend out of the whole ordeal, but maybe let's not drown rats for entertainment, okay?