Samuel L. Jackson hated his big Deep Blue Sea speech, which was originally 7 pages
Aux Features Deep blue sea
“Deep Blue Sea? They ate me! A fuckin’ shark ate me!” shouts Dave Chappelle as Samuel L. Jackson the Chappelle’s Show’s“Samuel L. Jackson Beer” sketch. Two decades later, Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea, by all means a mediocre shark flick, endures in the minds of many for that exact reason: a fuckin’ shark ate Samuel L. Jackson.
Jackson’s death scene is legitimately shocking. Though Jackson wasn’t a lead in the movie—bonus points if you remember it was headlined by Thomas Jane and Saffron Burrows—he was surely its biggest star. When the movie’s genetically engineered super-sharks go on a rampage and the characters finally come to terms with what they’re dealing with, Jackson settles in for a big, inspirational, Samuel L. Jackson-esque speech. For much of the audience, this is what they had paid to see. Jackson, however, doesn’t get to finish that speech, on account of a giant shark jumping out of the goddamn water and dragging him back in. As a new oral history of the scene with Deep Blue Sea’s VFX team reveals, part of the reason Jackson’s death happened the way it did was simply because Jackson was sick of reading his terrible dialogue.
Originally, according to VFX supervisor Jeff Okun, Jackson’s big speech was seven pages long. “It was seven pages of the worst dialogue you’ve ever heard in your life,” he says.
“So, take one, Sam says, ‘Think water’s fast? Have you seen ice?’ And he starts pondering and walking, and then he looks up and he’s in the position, and he says, ‘There were seven of us on that mountain, and only five of us returned’, or whatever it was.
“And Renny goes, ‘Cut, cut, cut.’ He goes, ‘Sam, you’ve got seven pages, you’ve got a long ways to go, you know? Don’t land there before the seventh page…’. Sam goes, ‘Yeah, okay fine.’ But he goes, ‘Renny, have you read this dialogue? I don’t want to say it.’”
Jackson, Okun, and Harlin struggled through the scene, with Harlin unable to push Jackson through the entire speech. Okun, meanwhile, ensured that Jackson hit the mark where the VFX shark could grab him multiple times throughout the scene. After the scene wrapped, he came to a despondent Jackson with an offer.
“So, I finish up all my passes, and I get to the dining hall. And I bee-line it to Sam, and I go, ‘Sam, you know, we can kill you even before you’re at the end of the pool, if you’re happy.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I’m not happy. Just kill me. The sooner you kill me, the happier I’ll be.’”
It took a lot of effort from both Okun and the studio brass to convince Harlin that the movie he shot wasn’t a serious horror movie, and the version where Jackson dies before his speech gets rolling was the more appropriate one. Audiences loved it, and Okun says Jackson was thrilled with the final result, too. “Sam called me up and goes, ‘Best. Death. Ever.’ And he goes, ‘It is my favorite death.’”
You can check out the rest of the article, including the nitty gritty of how the VFX team brought Jackson’s death to life with the best CGI 1999 had to offer, over at Befores & Afters.
99 Comments
Saw this movie in theaters back when it came out, opening weekend. Awful movie. This was the one good bit.(LL Cool J is also in the movie. IIRC, he plays a chef and is supposed to be a bit of comic relief. Instead, he is awful.)
But he has a bird! And it talks and calls him fat! That’s funny right!?
Disagree, the shark holding up his diplomatic immunity card before LL shoots him and says “it’s just been revoked,” is a classic line read
Nope. It’s ace
Definitely a happy accident, that scene was glorious
The Internet keeps reminding me how old I am. First, there was that kid who didn’t know what the dark room in Stranger Things was; now, a web site for pop culture junkies has to clarify that Thomas Jane was the lead in Deep Blue Sea. What’s next to be lost to the sands of time, Stephen Sommers’ classic 1998 romp, Deep Rising?
To be fair, Thomas Jane went from “Next Big Thing” to “Who the fuck is that?” real quick, so a heads up probably does help a few people.
He just wants his kids back.
And there was this, which I think so un-fucking-believable:https://splinternews.com/did-you-know-the-nodding-meme-guy-is-robert-freakin-red-1836221746
Jesus Christ…
I saw Deep Rising at the cinema. Thoroughly fun monster flick. I can keep the flame burning for a while yet.
Also saw Deep Rising in the theater, opening weekend, but I’ve always been a sucker for water-based monster movies. Deep Star Six, Leviathan, Abyss, man, that was a magical summer.Anyway, I’ve got Deep Rising now on a nice Kino Blu Ray, so I’m pleased.
Deep Rising is fucking amazing! One of the best “bad” movies to come along in the last 25 years. Treat Williams was the man!Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is my favorite 21st century “bad” movie. If I ever run into Jeremy Renner (he lives in my town) I will bug him to death about the sequel that will never happen.
My favorite thing about the Stranger Things thing is that they’re apparently too young to know what a dark room is, but also too old to know how fucking Google works, you fucking idiots just Google it
I only know who Thomas Jane is from a Punisher movie I never saw and his cameo in Arrested Development.
The Expanse? He wore a hat! That was his character trait. He had a hat.
The guy from Hung?
I watched both Deep Blue Sea and Deep Rising a few weeks ago, and they are both entertainingly bad in their own particular ways. The CGI monster in Deep Rising . . . wow.
Jesus, I must be really old because when I think of bad underwater sci-fi movies from my younger years my mind goes right to Leviathan which was ‘89. It actually had decent practical effects, though it’s an all around bad movie. It also had Amanda Pays who my teenage self thought was the hottest woman on the planet. Mostly due to Max Headroom… Christ, I’m really dating myself.
Deep Star Six is worse.
I also had a copy of Leviathan on video, watched it a ridiculous number of times. Also great fun.
Deep Rising…I saw that with some friends super high and we could not stop laughing through the whole runtime. I can’t even remember what we were laughing about, but I think it was the fact that everything about that movie was ridiculous and stupid.
While this death deservedly gets all the fun buzz, I really thought when the crew were escaping as the water was rising up that large round vent shaft and that one “disposable” woman was trying to reach the gangway before getting chomped, it was the exact opposite of Harlin’s opening scene in CLIFFHANGER.It’s healthy to poke fun at yourself. I highly recommend it
You might want to rewatch it. I don’t remember a woman eating a shark in Cliffhanger.
You need to watch the director’s cut, highly recommended, it also has a 50 minute interlude with a monkey flying a helicopter to assassinate Sylvester Stallone’s character’s pet iguana who is actually a pirate
Still better than the directors cut of Aliens.
Well, she doesn’t literally eat the shark. You have to read between the lines.
No, he said the _opposite_ of the scene from Cliffhanger. No women get eaten by a shark in Cliffhanger, so the opposite is that someone does get eaten by a shark. It’s like how Kramer vs. Kramer is the opposite of Road House because nobody get their throat ripped out in Kramer vs. Kramer. Not in the theatrical cut, anyway
Aw, that was Jacqueline McKenzie from The 4400. I really liked her.
Since you brought it up; that shark straight up bit her on the crotch. Can we talk about how unbelievably fucked up that is?
The #MeToo movement finally caught up with that shark after several other women complained about crotch biting incidents. Charges are expected to be brought.
Her death scene was by far the dumbest one in the movie. Why the hell was she in the middle of the water and not hugging the side?!?!
You’re bound to be eaten by something if you’re in as many movies as Jackson has been in. He was also dinner for a velociraptor in Jurrasic Park.
…bonus points if you remember it was headlined by Thomas Jane and Saffron Burrows
I remember one of them took off her wetsuit because of electricty?** Also, LL Cool Bean’s hat was like a shark’s fine.
Ah yes, LL playing the world’s most dangerous chef by simple virtue of having a diseased parasite just hanging out inches from where everybody’s food is prepped. I genuinely lost my shit the first time I watched this movie.
I kept waiting for them to reveal that his parrot wasn’t real and was just a figment of his imagination. Like the parrot’s insulting all the time and he tells it to shut up, and the crew’s looking at him like “Who are you talking to, Preach?”
I loved the bird stuff in the “How Did This Get Made” episode about this movie. They brought up exactly that scenario.Actually, I love that whole episode. It is, after all, the one where we learned that “Stellan Skarsgård” autocorrects to “Stellar Skateboard” in Microsoft Word.
“I’M BRIAN FELLOW!”
Please tell me you at least watched it while sitting on the toilet, in that case.
Without question one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen in a movie theater for audience reaction. Everyone went completely bananas.
Yes! The person behind me jumped into my seat!
Did you make out with them? I’m pretty sure that was a not-so-subtle pass at you.
It’s probably the only scene people remember from that movie.
It works so well because it subverts expectations. The movie up to that point had been a dumb by-the-numbers monster movie. So when the big name actor gets set up to do a big long inspiring speech everybody starts to hunker down and wait for it to be over. Then BAM right out of the blue your expectations are shattered. Too bad the rest of the movie reverted back to the mean immediately afterward.
This is probably the best example of subverting expectations since Indiana Jones pulls out his pistol and just shoots the guy.
I remember the scene where a shark swam backwards and crossed my arms in irritation. (I make no apologies for what sort of nerd I am.) And then Jackson’s speech happened and joy returned to the universe.
I can’t believe I saw this in theaters. Genuinely one of the funniest moments I have ever seen in my life.
This was one of the movies I saw on a day where I went to the local multiplex and saw 6 movies in a row. SLJ getting eaten by the shark was the highlight of all 6 movies. (I’d already seen everything good that was out, so the day’s list was: The 13th Warrior, The Astronaut’s Wife, Dudley Do-Right, Inspector Gadget, Universal Soldier: The Return, and Deep Blue Sea.)
I saw this, Bowfinger and Detroit Rock City one after the other on the same day.What a weird day.
Weird, but far from a bad day for goofy fun.
This and “Deep Blue Sea” make a helluva double feature.Although my favorite double feature is “Goodfellas” followed by it’s unofficial sequel, “My Blue Heaven.”
Good god, I’ve seen most of those movies. How did we get out of the 90’s alive with such dreck?
13th Warrior was entertaining enough without being colossally stupid. Astronaut’s Wife was just boring as fuck, and the other four were all just, as you say, dreck.
Holy mother of God was The Astronaut’s Wife boring. Since they spoiled that Johnny Depp was possessed by an alien in the ads, you get angry at Charlize Theron because it takes her freaking forever to cotton onto what’s going on. Only memorable part was the woman electrocuting herself in the tub with a toaster, because that’s such a cliched image you can’t believe someone’s actually doing it in a serious movie.
If only all those movies had featured Samuel L. Jackson being eaten by a shark.
To be honest, all movies should feature Samuel L. Jackson getting eaten by a shark.
Wow – there aren’t many days in which you watch six films and can legitimately say that Deep Blue Sea was the best of them.
You couldn’t be more wrong. “One of?” This is the single greatest scene in the history of cinema. I didn’t see it in the theater, but a bunch of friends rented it. After this scene, everybody was screaming “holy shit! Rewind! We have to see that again!”
To me this is the 2nd greatest shark movie ever. Yes even better than Jaws 3-D or Spring Break Shark Attack with Peta Wilson
“To me this is the 2nd greatest shark movie ever.”I know trying to compete with Spielberg is a mug’s game, but this really is a damning indictment of the shark movie industry.
It is, but The Meg was surprisingly funny. It leaned into the tropes knowingly and with deadpan, but still funny.
What? How could anything ever top this?
The Shallows is better than either of them, although still not anywhere close to Jaws. And not just because Blake Lively is a bikini for 95 percent of the movie.
Steven Seagull got robbed of a Best Supporting Actor oscar.
Even better than Avalanche Sharks, that involved ghost-y sharks appearing on a mountain because someone moved some Native American totems and I can’t recall why this had anything to do with sharks?
I don’t know that one but Syfy’s “Ghost Shark” was fun too, I’m pretty sure from a concept by their head of programming’s seven year old daughter
I agree! Richard Moll, AND a ghost shark. I also now randomly recall the amusement gained from Mississippi River Sharks (there were sharks, and they were in a river/swamp at the very least) where the protagonists managed to snag one and drag it into a wood chipper or something similar, except one guy stupidly stood around where it would deposit all the remains and was killed when the shark’s teeth were fired out.
You lied to me. Peta Wilson isn’t in Spring Break Shark Attack.
Oh shit you’re right. Peta Wilson is in Malibu Shark Attack (with creepy goblin sharks), that is the one that I like
It’s so easy to get the stupid shart attack movies confused when you watch so many of them.
I just did a 2700+word post on Deep Blue Sea called “The Samuel L. Jackson scene alone is worth it” about two weeks ago on my blog.
http://afilmaday.com/2019/07/deep-blue-sea-1999
On the flip-side, a falling air conditioner was supposed to take out the Gene Hackman character in ‘Hoosiers’ in the middle of his big speech, but at the last minute they realized the team would’ve been too traumatized to realistically finish the basketball game–audiences wouldn’t buy it.
I still think it was a mistake to have Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow killed by a runaway golf cart halfway through the movie.
True. It was a nice way to avoid the cliche shot-repeatedly-in-a-car thing, which has been done to death. No one expects an electric golf cart.
Patches O’Houlihan should have been so lucky.
I know this movie is legit terrible, but I have really fond memories of it. In the summer of 99′ my wife and I had just gotten married and were both waiting to start graduate school. We saw a lot of movies during that last, responsibility free summer. One of those was Deep Blue Sea, and it was a really fun time. Some good horror/jump scare cheese and a theater full of people that lost it when Jackson was suddenly devoured. Really fun.
Fun fact: during Jackson’s speech, I turned to my friend and whispered, “If I wrote this, I would have a shark eat him right here,” which was immediately followed onscreen by Samuel L Jackson being eaten by a shark. This remains my proudest accomplishment.
7 pages? Was he reading his PhD dissertation that landed him his shark researcher job or something?
“What is a shark? The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for “shark” describes it thusly…”
Seven pages? Are we still operating under the old “one page of a script is one minute on screen” axiom, because I don’t think I could take seven minutes of that speech.
That axiom doesn’t hold up if the pages are only dialog and not much direction. It can be a lot less or a even more depending on how the dialog is delivered. Even given that, a seven page monologue is fucking absurd. I’ve read a lot of scripts way back when I took some screenwriting classes, and since, and I can’t remember a single one that has seven pages of uninterrupted monologue.
By comparison, the Indianapolis speech in Jaws is three pages.
Thank you, Capeo!
The biggest takeaway from this, which explains everything one needs to know about Renny Harlin, is that he actually envisioned this script as a dramatically serious horror movie. He was treating Jackson’s monologue, which includes the nonsensical phrase, “Think water’s fast? Have you seen ice?” as though it was Shaw’s monologue in fucking Jaws.
“Ice, motherfucker, have you seen it?”
Theres no way a movie was going to stop for 7 minutes to do an inspirational speech
Fun fact: Jeff Okun was the inspiration for Brent Spiner’s Dr. Okun character in Independence Day – the resemblance is uncanny! https://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/jeffrey-a-okun/
In fairness, I’m with Sam on this one. The speech starts off with “Think water’s fast? Have you seen ice?”
That is literally the opposite what ice does. Ice is literally frozen in place. Just getting to the shark was the best decision.
Right? Anything being pulled downhill by gravity is probably going pretty fast, and an avalanche isn’t any faster than a flood.
The line that gets me is “It moves like it has a mind of its own.”
NO IT DOESN’T. It literally moves at a glacial pace, which is to say almost not at all. Notice how all the synonyms for ice don’t involve movement!
Mediocre shark flick!? Samuel L. Jackson gets eaten by a shark! And, LL Cool J kills a shark! This is like 2nd to Jaws in the shark flick genre!
Haha this VFX guy Jeff Okun spoke at my school! He’s awesome! He said that if you watch his work on The Last Samurai closely, all the background soldiers were actually penguins because he knew he could sneak them in. He also told us the hilarious story of how Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer got restraining orders against each other while filming Red Planet, and how much of a headache that made his work into as there were still plenty of scenes where their characters had to be in the same room together.
Wow, that CGI…
I’m pretty sure he’s not even “in” the shark’s mouth, and it looks like he knows that.
“By all means mediocre”??? Clearly we didn’t see the same film. Deep Blue Sea is a hoot. Love it. Now “The Meg”, that is a mediocre, disappointing shark movie.
This scene is worth it for the commentary track for Deep Blue Sea (yes, I watched the film again to listen to it). It features Renny Harlin and Samuel L. Jackson, and they have a good back-and-forth going. Then Jackson’s death scene happens, and Jackson says good-bye and leaves the commentary. It wasn’t a surprise to Harlin, who thanks Jackson and says good-bye. But it comes out of nowhere – nothing had been mentioned in the commentary up to that point that Jackson was only sticking around until his character died.Then Harlin does the commentary for the rest of the film by himself. It is not as entertaining.
My husband and I saw this in the theater because what we wanted to see was sold out. I’d recently seen something going around the internet inserting SLJ’s usual vocabulary into the Star Wars prequel script. So part way into this speech, I turned to my husband and said “Yoda told you no motherfucker!”We both started laughing and almost at the same time the shark came up and ate him. Which only made us laugh more. Everyone around us looked more shocked by our laughter than the death scene.
Three things I remember about this movie (four if you include the knowledge that it sat on the shelf for at least a year): SLJ’s interrupted speech, Safron in her underwear BECAUSE PLOT AND SCIENCE, and the bit where they think they can trap the sharks because sharks can’t swim backward and then there’s an FX shot of the sharks swimming backward and they’re all dang, movie, you got us.
Also, finding out that Harlin didn’t understand that his movie was funny makes perfect sense. I’ve always said DBS was his best work because his cold-blooded handling of action scenes worked better with sharks than with humans.
Oh man I went to see this movie with my sister, we both practically jumped out of our seats! Lol. She was like, “WHAT THE FUCK??!!” One of the best scares I’ve ever gotten from a movie.