Trivia / Underwater

• Actor-Inspired Element: Kristen Stewart suggested Norah's shaved head, feeling she would keep her hair short for health and safety reasons. That, and she always wanted to do it, with the film giving her a perfect excuse.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Kristen Stewart hadn't done an action role before and agreed to the film for this reason, also thinking it would be fun to do something that would force her to face her fears (see below).
• Box Office Bomb: The film reportedly cost between $50 – $80 million dollars to make, and grossed only $40.9 million at the box office.
• Creator Backlash: While Kristen Stewart thinks the film itself is fine, she has said in a couple interviews that she didn't really like the overall experience of making it. She has a genuine fear of being underwater which made underwater scenes problematic. ^note Kristen was under the impression they were going to CGI everything like in Aquaman (2018). Sets kept coming undone, and the underwater armor suits malfunctioned. She also injured her arm while inside one of the suits, and didn't really like having to spend a large portion of the film running around in her underwear. ^note She was originally going to just be wearing a skin tight scuba suit.
• Enforced Method Acting: The suits the cast had to wear were extremely heavy, at about 45 kg, which helped with their performances.
• Face Your Fears: A bit of a real-life example in that Kristen Stewart is absolutely petrified of water, and had signed on under the impression that the diving scenes would be done via CGI (spoiler: they weren't). But despite being faced by her literal nightmare, Stewart pushed on and completed the shoot. No word on whether she's still afraid of the water (this film probably wouldn't have helped - or it might have, depending on how you view it), but just getting the film done deserves kudos.
• Orphaned Reference: While Word of God hasn't revealed exactly what plot elements were cut, the scene where Norah finds the captain's old locker has references to some details that were cut from the final release. Apparently some more direct Shout Outs to the Cthulhu Mythos were among them.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Downplayed with Vincent Cassel, who usually shows up in Hollywood films as the French Jerk, making it surprising to see him as the fatherly captain.
  • Jessica Henwick is likewise best known for Action Girl roles. Here she plays the less action-oriented scientist.
• Prop Recycling: The same set stood in for both Roebuck and Kepler Stations, with the portions reorganized.
• Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: Kristen Stewart had been wanting to buzz her hair for a while, and suggested it to the director, feeling Norah would keep it short for health and safety reasons. Due to the release delay, it had grown back by the time the film was out.
• Screwed by the Network: After spending time on The Shelf of Movie Languishment (see below), Disney finally scheduled the film for release in January 2020, a month already saturated with horror films (The Grudge, The Turning, Gretel and Hansel). January is a dump month notorious for bad horror films, which likely lowered critical and audience expectations for the film. Even worse, the film opened the same weekend as the wide release of major Oscar contender (and eventual nominee) 1917, which stole Underwater's thunder as a tense thriller. Finally, the film was left out of 20th Century Fox's splashy rebrand as 20th Century Studios, cementing the lack of studio respect. The film ultimately became a Box Office Bomb. (The poor treatment may have been due to the presence of T.J. Miller in the cast, who tanked his career with a series of outrageous actions shortly after production and has not had a big-budget role since.)
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The movie was filmed in 2017, then put on the shelf due to Disney's acquisition of Fox. It was finally released on January 10, 2020.
• Troubled Production: The film's biggest issue came from its star, Kristen Stewart. The movie has a ton of underwater scenes, and Stewart took the gig under the mistaken impression that those scenes would be done with CGI like in Aquaman (2018), when they were actually done with mostly practical effects. Why was that a problem? Because Kristen Stewart is absolutely terrified of being underwater. Shooting the movie was a nightmare for her, and it compounded other production snafus like sets coming undone and suits malfunctioning, culminating in Stewart injuring her arm while filming one scene. Once the film was finally completed in 2017, it sat on The Shelf of Movie Languishment for three years, seeing release in 2020.
• What Could Have Been:
  • For the opening scene where Norah helps a spider escape the sink, the creature was going to be a moth, but Word of God said a moth felt "a little too Guillermo del Toro".
  • There were plans to keep Norah wearing her glasses throughout the film, but they soon realised there was no feasible way to do so with the action that was going to follow. Kristen Stewart then chose to play a few scenes to suggest Norah's vision was impaired from not having them on.
  • Paul was initially down to carry around a live pet rabbit, that in the finished film becomes a stuffed one. TJ Miller actually believed the toy was just a stand-in and treated it as if it were real (as they had shot some scenes with a real one).
  • According to the original script, Cthulhu wasn't originally going to be in the movie; instead the crew would encounter a variety of nightmarish (albeit unrelated) deep-sea monsters including a twenty foot tall spider crab, a creature resembling a long-limbed skeletal human walking on all fours, a blob-like fish that looks like a Bedsheet Ghost, a giant bioluminescent shark, and a colossal creature with a number of smaller creatures attached to it. Elements from the giant monster and skeletal monster would later be repurposed into Cthulhu and its spawn.
• Word of God: The chief monster is not a Cthulhu Expy. It's Cthulhu itself. Stewart's character literally punched out Cthulhu (at great cost).

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