How Movie Stars Perform Underwater Without Going Out Of Breath

In Hollywood, there are a number of ways to act the part underwater, and most of them involve CGI magic. However, to appear like you’re one with the ocean, you will need to truly be immersed in it.

In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, for instance, Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta Mejía spent two minutes submerged in a water tank, without breathing, as his character rallied his sea people to prepare for battle. Supporting actor Mabel Cadena could only hold her breath for about 30 seconds initially, but by the end of her training on day one, she managed to stay underwater for six-and-a-half minutes.

Kate Winslet, whose famed on-screen character had kept her head above water in the Titanic, broke Tom Cruise’s record by going seven minutes and 15 seconds without air in Avatar: The Way of Water. Meanwhile, her Avatar co-star Sigourney Weaver accomplished the feat for over six minutes.

For a performance that translated swimmingly on screen, Avatar director James Cameron developed a technique for “underwater performance capture” so actors playing the ocean Metkayina clan would appear at home with their marine habitat. The stars and crew were fully immersed in a tank stretching 120 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet deep, and could hold over 250,000 gallons of water. To look the part of true-blue ocean-dwellers, they were all taught by instructors specialized in preparing people for spearfishing and competitive free-diving, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“We didn’t want to simulate it,” details Avatar producer Jon Landau in a statement published by the Walt Disney Company. “We didn’t want to do what people called ‘dry for wet.’”

“We wanted to put Zoe Saldaña, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, and others in water—to have them feel the current, the movement, the waves, and to give a performance.” 

Chris Denison, a stunt coordinator and free-dive instructor enlisted for both Wakanda Forever and The Way of Water, tells WSJ that training broadened the actors’ depths both mentally and physically, in terms of lung capacity.

Stars were taught to visualize their lungs running low on air as the light on a car’s dashboard that tells you when it’s low on gas. The body’s warning signals—like the contractions of the diaphragm and feelings of panic that kick in to caution you about a potentially dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in the body—are much like the indicators of low fuel in a car. The secret is to harness that fuel reserve, or leftover oxygen in the bloodstream, and learn when to take a breath.

Denison says that when actors become comfortable with “their low-fuel light being on,” their brains will override those sensations and eventually tell the body to “kick on the light” much later.

Huerta of Wakanda Forever notes that training allowed him to improvise underwater because his body wasn’t so desperate for oxygen.

It should be stressed that these methods shouldn’t be attempted in your own pool without professional supervision.

All actors were accompanied by instructors, along with stunt doubles. On top of that, they were assigned lung-expanding exercises, taught efficient swimming strokes, and had “breathe-up” sessions before entering the tank.

Winslet describes the sensation of mastering the water as liberating. “You could just kind of drift away,” she remarks.

Cameron says Avatar 2 amplified everything he’d done with water so far. “We were doing water simulations back on Titanic, but [now] it’s taking it not just to the next level, but up five levels.

“The beauty of it is, if you can solve water for this movie, you can do all water anytime—until the end of time. These tools become incredibly important for the effects industry at large.” 

The way of water is the way.

[via Wall Street Journal and The Walt Disney Company, cover image via Avatar]