Deep Blue Sea: Renny Harlin on the famous Samuel L. Jackson scene and fighting to keep it out of the trailer

Yesterday, we shared a new interview with director Renny Harlin that mostly focuses on his latest film, the action movie The Bricklayer, which was given a theatrical, On Demand, and Digital release earlier this month. But the interview also branches out with mentions of other Harlin projects, including the 1999 shark thriller Deep Blue Sea (watch it HERE), which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. During his conversation with JoBlo’s own Chris Bumbray, Harlin revealed that Samuel L. Jackson’s character – and therefore the famous scene involving that character – was added into the script at the last minute.

Harlin said, “The whole scene has its roots in the fact that I had done Long Kiss Goodnight with Sam, and we sort of made a pact that we would always work together as often as we can. So then Deep Blue Sea came up and Sam called me and he’s like, ‘I hear you’re doing a new movie, what’s my role?’ and I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I don’t have anything for him, this is horrible.’ So I sat down with the writer and I said, ‘We have to create a role for Sam.’ I got my idea, I totally ripped off Alien, where in Alien Tom Skerritt was the best known actor in that movie and he was the captain of the ship and everybody was like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna follow him,’ and the audience was like, ‘Okay, thank God, as long as we have Tom Skerritt we’re going to be okay.’ Then Tom Skerritt tells everybody, ‘I’m going to go around the corner and take care of business, and don’t you worry about anything.’ And he goes there, turns on the light, and there’s the alien and Tom Skerritt’s gone. The audience is left completely rudderless and then they realize they have to rely on Sigourney Weaver, who is this woman who wasn’t that well known at that point and they have to re-calibrate their brains and they realize nothing is safe in this story. I took that and I said, ‘Let’s create a Tom Skerritt character for Sam Jackson so that he comes into the movie, we think he’s the lead, he’s the most famous person in it, he has to be the lead, and then we give him this speech that has to be long enough that you start feeling like, ‘Oh yeah, sure,’ but it’s short enough so that you don’t get bored, and then we’re going to just take him in the middle of it and we’re going to throw everybody off balance.’ It worked and Sam relished that role and we got to work together, but his character was completely added to the story. Nothing like him was in the story until I realized that I had to have Sam in the movie.“

Once he had that scene in the movie, Harlin then had to argue with the studio over whether or not they should spoil it in the trailer. “There was a huge debate with Warner Bros. whether to put that in the trailer or not. I refused to put that in the trailer. They wanted to put it in the trailer because they felt like, ‘Oh my God, that will sell so many tickets.’ We’ll never know if that would have made a difference or not, but to me it had to be a surprise.“

Directed by Harlin from a screenplay by Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers, and Wayne Powers, Deep Blue Sea has the following synopsis: On an island research facility, Dr. Susan McAlester is harvesting the brain tissue of DNA-altered sharks as a possible cure for Alzheimer’s disease. When the facility’s backers send an executive to investigate the experiments, a routine procedure goes awry and a shark starts attacking the researchers. Now, with sharks outnumbering their human captors, McAlester and her team must figure out a way to stop them from escaping to the ocean and breeding.

Jackson is joined in the cast by Thomas Jane, Saffron Burrows, L.L. Cool J, Jacqueline McKenzie, Michael Rapaport, Stellan Skarsgård, and Aida Turturro.

What do you think of that famous Samuel L. Jackson moment in Deep Blue Sea? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.