Filming Poseidon Wasn’t a Piece of Cake: “The most difficult scene for sure was the underwater corridor where we had to swim through the hallway,” said Vogel. “I have little Jimmy Bennett on my back and a pair of cowboy boots. We had to start training for it actually early on in the movie. When we first started to do it, I could only make it halfway through the corridor, which wouldn't necessarily work.
As time went on, just stretching your lungs out and swimming with a lot of weight on my back and practicing, we managed to do it by the end of it all. You don't realize that. You get to a point where like, ‘Yeah, I can do it once.’ ‘I can do it twice.’ ‘Eight times!’ ‘What?!’ It gets so hard. It gets to the point where they're literally just waiting down there with air for you because you're not going to make it back up. That was definitely the toughest part of the movie.”
The Physical Toll of Working on Poseidon: Vogel joked, “You actually want me to come in and read off a list of injuries to you? I was paralyzed several times... No. You know, I managed to escape all right. I had pneumonia several times and swimmers ear throughout the whole thing, which wasn't too fun. You have to get down 20 feet and clear your ears and it just feels like your brain's heading out through your ears.
Poor Josh Lucas just got the crap kicked out of him. He got his eye split open by Kurt [Russell] right before we're all pulling me out of the water. You just couldn't see in front of you. I managed to see Kurt's hand coming at me and I ducked and Josh didn't. I guess that's the difference there, but I managed to escape all right.”
Josh Lucas admitted he got to the point where he actually told Petersen he wouldn’t do more takes of a scene. Vogel said it never came to that for him. “I think being the younger of the bunch I had a lot to prove, so showing the weakness wasn't easily [a possibility] for me. Josh and I had asked Wolfgang, ‘Why are we waiting? Why are we doing all this water stuff at the end of the movie?’ He said, ‘Because if one of the actors dies, then I've shot the entire movie.’ There was a little nervous laughter, then you look at him and he's not laughing. You think that there's probably a little bit of seriousness in his answer there."
Vogel added, "I looked forward to it. It was difficult, but who gets to wake up and do that every morning? It was truly a wild experience.”
The Morale on the Set: Vogel credits director Petersen with keeping the mood as light as possible, given the circumstances. “Thank God Wolfgang was there. He's done a few boat movies that have succeeded, so he kind of understands this a bit. I think one thing - shooting the entire thing here on Warner Brothers [lot and] letting the crew go home at night to their families - was huge. We never worked past 6:30 at night, I believe. He wanted to be home for dinner with his wife every night. I think that will help you out a lot.
His demeanor, walking on the set for the first month, there's definitely that nervous energy that everyone's really uptight. Big movie, big movie, and Wolfgang just comes skipping in, ‘Good morning everyone! How are you? How are you? Is it soup time yet?’ You know, he has 11:00am soup every day. From what I understand, it's being adopted by other directors now. Other crews that have worked with him on Troy and other movies, have gone on to different movies and said, ‘You have to do this at 11:00 every day. Soup time.’ So it's little things like that, I think, that kind of help ease everyone's nerves.”
Wolfgang Petersen Made Things as Real as Possible on the Set: “Yeah, and only someone like Wolfgang would have the flexibility to do something like that. It helped us as actors. You know at first, ‘We're really shooting all this on soundstages? How are they going to do that?’ I mean there is no way it'll ever look real enough. They pull it off!
One person came in and said, ‘Wow these sets make Titanic look chintzy.’ That's definitely attributed to the set designers and dressers. They did such a great job that at one point Kurt and I were sitting here, you know, surrounded by these dummies and then intermingled with real people that have been done up to look dead. Kurt and I are just sitting here staring at this one woman. He's like, ‘Do you think she's real?’ I said, ‘She looks pretty waxy, dude. There's no way she's real.’ Then the woman breathed and I felt real good after that. But you know they did such an incredible job with it. You couldn't tell the difference.”
