Magic moments in cinema happen for a range of reasons. Sudden inspiration, a magical accident happening on set, or Sam Jackson hating his script and refusing to say a stupid monologue, leading to his greatest on-screen death.
And this magnificent piece of information was revealed by the website Befores And Afters in their excellent oral history of the one and only scene you remember at all from Deep Blue Sea: a speech about, um, the ruthlessness of ice? The water ice, we mean.
Fortunately, that doesn’t matter because this:
Now, there’s a lot to unpack about that monologue – most notably that despite what Jackson says about nature’s cruelty and rage ice does not, in fact, move as fast as water. Glaciers, for example, move at an incremental pace which could accurately be described as “glacial”.
But this was symbolic of the problems with the film: director Renny Harlin thought he was making a serious horror-thriller starring Saffron Burrows as the hero, and everyone else accurately thought it was a shlocky monster film in which Burrows was clearly the villain and needed to be eaten by a shark at some point.
That said, the answer to who thought “hey, let’s let LL Cool J to do a rap at the end?” has yet to be sufficiently answered.
Anyway: it turns out that the people working on the film knew that they had a garbage fire on their hands:
Jeff Okun (visual effects supervisor, Deep Blue Sea): When we got the script pages for this scene, it was seven pages of the worst dialogue you’ve ever heard in your life. And it was a monologue… The night before, Sam called me up, and he goes, ‘Have you read this?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I did.’ And I go, ‘I’m going to really be interested in how you’re going to make this one work.’
Long story short: Jackson hated the script and especially hated delivering the big dumb monologue about ice and death and whatever the hell else was in it, and kept complaining to Harlin that he didn’t like it.
And thus the eventual workaround was to have him chomped by a giant CG shark mid-speech before his little soliloquy even gathers steam.
Harlin initially demanded that all seven pages of script be filmed but it was absolutely hated by test audiences. The new version with CGI sharkteruption via Okun, on the other hand…
“The audiences loved it. Sam being killed became the talked about scene, because it was so unexpected, and it was out of nowhere. Sam called me up and goes, ‘Best. Death. Ever.’ And he goes, ‘It is my favorite death.’”
So there you go. Jackson’s favourite death scene was thanks to a terrible script that he hated delivering. Movie magic!