Deep Blue Sea (1999) Online

Cast overview, first billed only:
	Thomas Jane	-	Carter Blake
	Saffron Burrows	-	Dr. Susan McAlester
	Samuel L. Jackson	-	Russell Franklin
	Jacqueline McKenzie	-	Janice Higgins
	Michael Rapaport	-	Tom Scoggins
	Stellan Skarsgård	-	Jim Whitlock
	LL Cool J	-	Preacher
	Aida Turturro	-	Brenda Kerns
	Cristos	-	Boat Captain
	Daniel Rey	-	Helicopter Pilot (as Daniel Bahimo Rey)
	Valente Rodriguez	-	Helicopter Co-Pilot
	Brent Roam	-	Helicopter Winch Operator
	Eyal Podell	-	Boy #1
	Erinn Bartlett	-	Girl #1
	Dan Thiel	-	Boy #2

For one scene, Thomas Jane had to swim alongside a real live shark. He was only allowed to shoot this once he had completed all of his other scenes.

The license plate pulled from the shark's teeth is the same one found in the tiger shark in Lõuad (1975).

The orange colored mini-sub visible in the wet-entry area was the same mini-sub seen in the end of Sphere (1998), also starring Samuel L. Jackson.

Samuel L. Jackson happily signed on for the film, as he had enjoyed his experience working with Renny Harlin on The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996).

The Gen 2 Mako is described as eight thousand pounds, and forty-five feet long. This would make it more than four times the weight, and three times the length, of the largest Mako shark ever recorded, and twice the size of the largest Great White Shark.

Preacher's description of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (Tom Scoggins: "I spent four years at CalTech, and that's the best physics explanation I've ever heard.") is adapted from a quote by Einstein: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."

Shot in the same Fox Studios Baja complex where Titanic (1997) was filmed. Having made Cutthroat Island (1995) at sea, Renny Harlin was determined to make this movie under the most controlled circumstances possible.

Co-Writer Duncan Kennedy noted that in Jaws (1975), the shark was twenty-five feet long, so Harlin had to do Spielberg one better. "He increased (our shark) to twenty-six feet", Kennedy said.

Director Renny Harlin has said that this was the hardest film he's ever made.

Samuel L. Jackson was initially offered the role played by LL Cool J. Jackson's management didn't like the idea of him playing a chef, so Director Renny Harlin created the role of Russell Franklin for him, Jackson stated about Harlin casting him as Franklin "He said, 'Now you're going to be the richest man in the world, and you're going to have the greatest scene in the movie, and it's going to be a shock to everyone!" Jackson recalled. "He sent it back, (and the part) was Russell Franklin, and I was like 'Yeah, this was great.' I've done a lot of different things in movies, or had a lot of things happen to me in the movies, but nothing like what happens to me in this one."

This was the first movie Stephen King saw after his nearly fatal encounter with a van he stated "My first trip after being smacked by a van and almost killed was to the movies, I went in my wheelchair and loved every minute of it."

Russell Franklin's Fantasy Island (1977) Tattoo reference, upon arriving at Aquatica, was improvised by Samuel L. Jackson.

Samuel L. Jackson was interested in marine biology in college before becoming an actor.

The filmmakers watched videos of real Makos swimming frame by frame then borrowed equipment and technology that's typically used in 747s and built the sharks as self-contained units. The remote controlled machines had one thousand horsepower engines, weighed eight thousand pounds, and swam on their own without the use of external wires or apparatus, up to thirty miles per hour. They built four and a half sharks: three fifteen-foot Makos, which played the first gen sharks; and one and a half generation-two sharks, which represented that first generations twenty-six-foot-long progeny, the effect was quite realistic: Stellan Skarsgård remarked "The first time I saw one of those animatronic sharks I thought it was a real one." Samuel L. Jackson recalled "when they first brought the animatronic shark into the lab we were all in awe of the size of this machine. It was a real monster. I would walk up to it slowly and touch it, and they said it felt like a real shark. The gills moved and it had a mind of its own sometimes." Renny Harlin recounted "one shark was sitting in McAlester's room, and just as we were getting the computer programming finished, all of a sudden it leapt up and went through the ceiling. All these 2x4s flying away like matchsticks. It gave us an idea of the awesome power of these creatures and how careful we had to be in terms of the cast and crew being close to them, and how the computer program had to have failsafe procedures so nobody got hurt."

The seaplane used in this film is the same one as used in Six Days Seven Nights (1998).

Samuel L. Jackson stated "working in the water so much wasn't just unpleasant it actually led to an accident that made it into the final film when we get Stellan Skarsgård hooked up to the helicopter and we're trying to get back to the elevator during the storm the waves are supposed to rush in front of us and behind us at one point three tons of water got thrown on us by accident and we got swept toward those cargo bays and everyone thought we were going into the drink and people were tumbling around this metal grating we scrambled up and kept acting everyone was kind of upset because they hit us full-on with three tons of water that was not supposed to happen and we didn't have safety harnesses on and we were flailing around on this deck, but I thought that was pretty funny when I saw it in the final film I said 'oh, they kept that."

DIRECTOR TRADEMARK (Renny Harlin): (Finland): There is a small Finnish flag in Janice's (Jacqueline McKenzie's) room. In the kitchen there is a dry erase board with a shopping list, and the first item on it is "Finnish pancakes". Helsinki (Finland's capital city) is also mentioned. Finlandia vodka drank in some shots also comes from Finland.

Special effects team headed by Walt Conti spent eight months on the animatronics sharks, "The number one thing about capturing sharks is getting their energy. They're always cruising kind of slowly, then they snap and just go with this incredible burst of energy. In that way, most of the time, sharks are somewhat lethargic, so probably our biggest challenge was replicating that speed and energy for those lunges. Also, a shark's jaws actually float in their skulls, giving them a specific kind of motion. As far as I know, we're the first animatronics team to totally mimic the multifaceted jaw of the shark."

Samuel L. Jackson told the Las Vegas Sun that he was motivated to take the part because "I watched a lot of monster pictures growing up and we would go home and someone would pretend to be Dracula or Frankenstein and chase us and we would run from them. This was an opportunity to finally be in a movie like that and run away from something that's bigger and stronger, with sharp teeth and claws. I got to say stuff like 'Look out, look out! Go this way! Ahhh! Ahhh!' Even though I didn't get to be that panicky."

Some of the sets were built on top of the Baja Studios tanks and were designed to submerge, others were built on soundstages so the production designers put fishtanks full of water outside portholes and lit them to make it appear as though the facility was underwater.

Fourteen different visual effects houses worked on the film's sharks.

Duncan Kennedy was inspired to write the script after he witnessed a "horrific" shark attack on a beach near his home, "there was really not much left of him", the tragedy contributed to a recurring nightmare of him "being in a passageway with sharks that could read his mind". This motivated him to write a speculative script, while acknowledging the challenge of approaching a shark movie without repeating Steven Spielberg's classic Lõuad (1975). Although Warner Brothers bought the script in late 1994, actual development on the project did not start until two years later, coincidentally Samuel L. Jackson worked with Steven Spielberg on the blockbuster movie Jurassic Park (1993) as Ray Arnold.

LL Cool J performed the rap song Deepest Bluest (Shark's Fin) over the end credits.

There wasn't a huge budget for the movie, and Director Renny Harlin stated in the DVD commentary, "There was lots of discussion about should we have the parrot, should we not have the parrot, so we opted to have the bird, but we couldn't afford a Hollywood parrot, a parrot that is fully trained and comes with its professional trainers and does tricks and speaks on cue and so on. So we decided to go with a parrot from Mexico City". The production actually used two parrots one that was good at flying and one that was adept at sitting on LL Cool J's shoulder.

Director Renny Harlin asserts in the DVD commentary that a lot of this information regarding sharks is very accurate obviously "Because it's a movie, we take license with some of the stuff they're doing. The fact is sharks have been used a lot to study and find out why these creatures have been around for four hundred million years, and why they never get cancer, why they never sleep, why they never stop moving." And maybe it was accurate at the time, but now we know that sharks do get cancer, and although they don't sleep like humans, they do have periods of rest. The idea that sharks never stop moving comes from the idea that they need to keep water flowing over their gills or they'll die, but that doesn't apply to all sharks. As the Makos develop the ability to swim backward, and as Janice notes that this is in fact the physical impossibility. No matter how big a shark's brain is, that's not going to change. You can enjoy a more thorough takedown of the film's "science and leaps in logic here."

An uncredited Ronny Cox doesn't get any lines at all in the one scene in which he appears.

Despite the fact that this was filmed in Super 35, "Filmed in Panavision" is listed in the end credits.

Director Renny Harlin picked J. Paul Huntsman as the Sound Designer after doing Terrence Malicks World War ll movie Peenike punane joon (1998).

Three of the main cast members are reunited through the Marvel Cinematic Universe films and television shows: Samuel L. Jackson starred as Nick Fury in several Marvel films such as Tasujad (2012), which also starred Stellan Skarsgård as Dr. Selvig. Saffron Burrows starred in the spin-off television series S.H.I.E.L.D.i agendid (2013) as Victoria Hand. Additionally, Thomas Jane played the Marvel character The Punisher in Karistaja (2004), but that film is not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Thomas Jane's breakout performance.

Samuel L. Jackson and LL Cool J appeared in S.W.A.T. (2003).

The sharks (portrayed in cgi or animatronics) have roughly 5 minutes of screentime.

The February 11, 1998 draft of the script credits the following writers: Duncan Kennedy and John Zinman, Simon Barry, Michael Frost Beckner, C.M. Talkington, Donna Powers and Wayne Powers. Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers and Wayne Powers are the only writers credited in the final film.

Samuel L. Jackson golfed during breaks from filming.

(At around one hour and eleven minutes) Preacher (LL Cool J) reveals that his full name is "Sherman Dudley". This is the only time it is mentioned.

The seaplane that Susan and Franklin fly to Aquatica in is a De Havilland DHC-2 Beaver.

Renny Harlin: As one of the workers of Aquatica that are heading home for the weekend on the supply boat.

The three sharks are killed in the same ways as the three sharks in Lõuad (1975), Jaws 2 (1978), and Jaws 3-D (1983): blown up, electrocuted, and incinerated, respectively.

Renny Harlin admitted that the idea of abruptly killing off Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson) at two-thirds of the movie was borrowed from the similar fate of Tom Skerritt in Tulnukas (1979). Both men were the natural leaders of their respective groups, leaving the remaining survivors in utter despair, and both were the best-known actor in the cast at the time, thereby making their premature demise extra shocking and unexpected. The impact of Jackson's sudden death scene was intensified by making his preceding speech somewhat long and corny. After watching the scene with an audience for the first time, and hearing them scream in horror and fear, Harlin said that this scene paid off for the entire movie.

Originally, Saffron Burrows was to be the hero of the film. However, after viewing the first cut of the film, Renny Harlin thought that her character was more or less the evil genius of the film, and had to be punished for it at the end. He purposely cut out some earlier scenes of Burrows to make her less sympathetic. It was also his idea to make LL Cool J the hero, citing that everyone liked him, and that he was a "pretty cool guy".

A deleted scene made it more obvious that Janice (Jaqueline McKenzie) and Dr. Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgård) are in a relationship, and it also revealed that Janice is pregnant with their child. Renny Harlin cut the scene, because killing off a pregnant character "didn't feel right".

Body count: nine (four by shark attack, four by explosion and one by drowning). Ten if you include the bird.

Preacher (LL Cool J) killing the shark by blowing up the gas-filled kitchen with a Zippo lighter is similar to Visa hing 2 (1990) when John MCclane uses a Zippo lighter to ignite the fuel from the airplane blowing up and killing everyone on board. Both movies were directed by Renny Harlin.

Neither of the two seemingly most heroic characters which are played by Samuel L. Jackson and Thomas Jane kill any of the sharks.

Preacher kills the first and last shark, while Susan only killed one.