Renny Harlin hired Dolph Lundgren to be a technical advisor on the 1999 film Deep Blue Sea. Between Dolph’s film Sharks in Sweden, in which he trained several sharks, and his thesis paper “Compound Shark Chemicals” that he wrote while at the University of Sydney, Harlin felt his expertise was needed

DBS credits for reference

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I recently learned from Deep Blue Sea - The Podcast, that Lundgren did a lot of advising on DBS.

Renny Harlin and Dolph Lundgren became friends when they starred in the film The Treason of Geraldine Jessup, a little known French film about the catapult craze of the 1970s in suburban France. They two vowed to work together again. That opportunity came when Harlin needed some technical expertise on Deep Blue Sea, so he called his friend for some assistance, because he and the writers were stumped as to how to convincingly show how the sharks were genetically modified.

When Dolph arrived in Mexico (after climbing the Himalayas), he teamed with Walt Conti, the shark effects coordinator, to create a method in which Dr. Susan McAlester could believably explain, and show the audience the genetic modification. Dolph drew from his experience on Sharks in Sweden, a heist film inside an aquarium loaded with genetically modified sharks, to help the DBS team with the Alzheimer’s curing serum. Working a grueling daily schedule that involved two hours of actual work, seven hours of weightlifting, and three hours of golf with Samuel L. Jackson, Dolph spent six weeks writing on chalkboards and using a custom calculator to come up with the genetic modification.

After spending six months (four of those on a golf course), here are the contributions that Dolph made to the production

1. He designed and built the fake shark that McAlester tested on during the famous wet lab scene
2. He was Michael Rapaport’s stunt double
3. The kitchen fight was based on a fight he had with an alligator while he was staying at a timeshare in Tampa, Florida
4. All of the microscopes in the film were part of Dolph’s personal collection
5. Walt Conti’s animatronic sharks are beautiful, but the horsepower was occasionally not enough. So, Dolph would get inside the shark and make them swim.

There you have it! Dolph helped Renny Harlin make Deep Blue Sea a classic.

Submitted April 01, 2021 at 10:52PM by LundgrensFrontKick https://ift.tt/31D7YFB