Samuel L Jackson on shark thriller Deep Blue Sea: ‘I've had many deaths – but everyone remembers this one'

The Guardian

24-03-2025

I'd always wanted to be killed in a movie by something big that was chasing me. I missed out on my death scene in Jurassic Park because a hurricane destroyed the set in Hawaii, so I never got to go down and get eaten by a velociraptor. When Renny Harlin told me he was making a horror movie with killer sharks, and that I was going to be the first person to die, I said: 'Great!' It was a good idea – once he'd killed me, it meant any character's life was up for grabs.
I had no idea I was going to be as wet as I was. I was in water for a month: it was kind of wild. For the storm scenes, they were dumping water down on us from towers, like big-ass waves flying everywhere. After Stellan Skarsgård has his arm bitten off and we're out on the deck trying to get him on the helicopter, we didn't know they were going to throw that much water. The rehearsals had been very different.
As a kid, you go to movies, you watch people die, then you play games where you act out death scenes of your own. You bounce off the walls and stagger around, fall over, pick yourself up off the floor, say something, finally fall down for good - give it a bit of James Cagney. I've had very varied deaths in movies, but everyone remembers this one. It was great being at the premiere, having not told any of my friends, and seeing them react. Usually in movies like that, all the black people get killed early, but in Deep Blue Sea, LL Cool J is the last one alive. That felt like a small victory.
I'm making a new movie with Renny, the fourth we've done together, but I hear he's also working on another one involving sharks. I've not had the call about that yet. Maybe he'll bring back the shark that ate me in Deep Blue Sea and have it regurgitate me so I can come back and fight another day.
The screenplay reminded me of other films I loved, such as Alien and The Poseidon Adventure – people faced with a huge challenge in a contained space. We shot it with the water tanks that had been built for Titanic at Baja Studios in Mexico, constructing sets that could be sunk on a hydraulic platform. We had hundreds of crew and cast working in wetsuits, and for the first week everyone would religiously get out of the tank whenever they needed to go to the bathroom. But it's horrible climbing in and out of a cold wetsuit, and by the second week, people only seemed to leave the pool for lunch. By then, it had become a giant tank of urine.
I wanted the sharks on the screen. We knew about the problems the Jaws crew had with their mechanical shark, which is one of the reasons you see so little of it. CGI was still in its infancy in 1999, but we used it for some of the attack scenes, which now look pretty dated by today's standards. We also shot some footage of Thomas Jane (who played Carter) swimming alongside real sharks in the Bahamas.
A company in San Francisco built us fully remote-controlled sharks that would do almost anything we needed: a seven-metre model and two smaller ones. The big one had a 1,000-horsepower engine and must have weighed a ton, so although it was great to have something convincing that the cast could interact with, we had to make sure no one got in its way.
Sam and I had become friends making The Long Kiss Goodnight and made a pact to carry on working together. When he heard I was making Deep Blue Sea, he called and said: 'So who am I playing?' I thought: 'Now I'm in trouble.' And we had to add the part of the CEO who financed the research facilities and pays a visit when things start going wrong.
Sam's death scene was inspired by Tom Skerritt's in Alien. Tom, playing Dallas, appears to be the hero until he suddenly gets killed halfway through. So that's what we did with Sam – just as it looks like he's about to lead the other characters to safety, we kill him in the middle of his cliched hero speech. At the test screening, people were screaming, then laughing. I had to fight the marketing team, though. They wanted to put that bit in the trailer. I said: 'No! It has to be a surprise.'
One thing that didn't go down well with test audiences was the original ending, where Saffron Burrows, as head scientist Susan, was one of the survivors. Deep Blue Sea presents sharks as innocent creatures of the wild and humans as the bad guys, messing with Mother Nature. Hundreds of test cards came back saying Susan deserved to be punished – despite the good intentions, her genetic engineering had caused the sharks to become smarter, leading to all the chaos. I also wonder if her upper-class-sounding English accent was a factor, in that American audiences felt they were being lectured.
We had to fix that at very short notice – one day's extra shooting, a few new visual effects, the shark gets Susan and LL Cool J ends up the hero. He wrote a song to play over end credits, too, and I directed the video, which is something I don't usually do. We got away with having his character's foul-mouthed parrot get eaten. I think the reaction would have been different if he'd had a cute little puppy.
Deep Blue Sea is out now on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Arrow Video