The adventure he experienced during the filming of the film “Abyss” that almost cost him his life was revealed in a sold-out question-and-answer session with the audience after the new screening of the film as part of Beyond Fest, the famous director James Cameron.

The film was shot in Gaffney, South Carolina, with filming taking place in an abandoned power plant, as reported by the Daily Mail. However, for the needs of the filming, some of the actors, such as Ed Harris, had to undergo underwater diving training, while the then 30-year-old Cameron was already an experienced diver.

“We were working at a depth of 30 meters. “To be able to move the camera on the bottom, I was wearing weights around my legs and around my waist,” Cameron said, adding that at some point his equipment started to fall apart and none of the crew noticed. Until the “(security) angel divers” saw him.

“The safety diver puts a regulator in my mouth that he hadn’t checked. It had been at the bottom of the tank for three weeks and had a tear in the diaphragm. So I took a deep breath of… water,” he said, while the crowd listened with bated breath.

“At that point the divers hold you down so you don’t have an embolism and you let your lungs overinflate on the way up,” he explained, although in this case, it nearly cost him his life.

“Because he wouldn’t let me go, and I had no way of telling him the regulator wasn’t working I punched him in the face. So I swam to the surface and survived,” Cameron said to a standing ovation from the crowd.