Working with Director Wolfgang Petersen: Russell said Petersen didn’t need to be right there in the water with them in order to be considered a ‘hands-on’ director. “Every shot, every setup, the way the movie is, the style of the movie – everything is Wolfgang’s. Everything. I have collaborated with many, many directors on many, many movies. One of the reasons I looked forward to working with Wolfgang was the collaboration would be a very simple one. ‘What do you want me to do here? What is it you’re trying to do?’ We changed dialogue and stuff like that a lot. He was completely loose with that. But as far as what it was we were going to be doing and all that, we were just realizing Wolfgang’s vision.”
Kurt Russell Compares His Poseidon Character to Others He’s Played: Russell says Robert Ramsey doesn’t stack up well against other iconic heroes he’s played in the past. “I mean, I don’t think he’s a particularly… I think he’s looking for his daughter and he’s a man who’s got a past. I think you find out little bits about this guy. His attitude during the celebration of New Year’s – you can tell his wife and he were a big deal. Obviously when the guy says, ‘You didn’t even make the whole load on New York - whatever it was - when you were mayor. You were the big man and you quit or whatever.’ I don’t know what it was from. There’s a bit of a mystery there and so that’s what that is. It’s a bit of a mystery.”
Kurt Russell doesn’t shy away from talking about his character’s fate in Poseidon so if you don’t want to know if he lives or dies, don’t read any further.
Russell said his desire to work with Wolfgang Petersen and his death scene were the two main reasons he signed on to Poseidon. “Wolfgang was wanting to do this movie and wanted me to play the part. …And one thing that I obviously wanted, I really wanted to do the drowning scene. I thought that was a great [scene]. There’s something fascinating about certain deaths to us and I think that drowning is one of them. I actually studied a lot about it and learned a lot about the different ways that you can drown and what happens to the body, what instinctively and impulsively happens. I chose one to fit into what I thought would be interesting in terms of what his activity is down there.
It wasn’t written that way. I came to Wolfgang and I said, ‘I’d like to do sort of a Bridge Over the River Kwai thing,’ and he says, ‘What is that?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d like to have the audience not know for sure if he was dead before he hits this button to reverse the thing or after - or during it. Or have them say I don’t know, it’s hard to tell.’ He said, ‘Ahh, that’s fantastic. Yeah, I want to do that.’
The difficulty there was that you really have to put your trust in the hands of somebody who’s gonna come in there and give you air when you need it. And that’s psychologically very hard to do, because we were in rooms like these and you could see the ceiling and you can see all the walls. The camera’s the only way out and you can’t get through camera. Also the way it’s lit…you couldn’t really see things well underwater. So you’re psychologically kind of fighting yourself because you’re waiting for somebody to come in to give you air.
In that scene I had to go through all this stuff. To die you have to pass out. In that particular way of drowning, you have to pass out first. And when you pass out, your body relaxes. Then you breathe in water and that kicks you into a second [phase], the drowning phase, where you actually drown. But that’s for just a second, it’s sort of mildly euphoric but it’s very excruciating before that. Then there’s that limbo time where you may be dead or you may not be - and that was when I hit that button. I said to this guy, ‘Hey, I’ve got to do this. So when it looks wrong, come in and give me air because I’m not going to cut it. I’m not going to stop it.’ Wolfgang is like 500 yards away, looking at a monitor above the water.
It’s a strange thing. I said, ‘Look, I’m just going to do this, but I’m going to depend on you to come in at the right time to give me air. But I don’t want to pass out, but I do want to be dead. So when it starts to look wrong, when it starts to really look wrong, get in there.’ That’s hard to do. The guy was really cool and we’d been working together for a number of months. I’d kind of been looking at all these guys and picking the guy, you know?”
