Adventures on the flip side

THE site: Stage 16 on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank.

The scene: A glitzy New Year’s Eve party inside the ornate main ballroom of the luxury ocean liner Poseidon.

The action: Lights flicker, the ballroom begins to shake, and suddenly windows shatter and torrents of water come crashing over the partygoers as broken gas lines trigger flash fires.

Poseidon has just been struck by a towering “rogue wave,” rolling the 20-story vessel upside down, and imperiling hundreds of passengers who are now trapped in an airtight ballroom below the waterline.

The task of creating the wet, inverted world of “Poseidon” required director Wolfgang Petersen and his crew to blend computer wizardry with old-fashioned steel-and-concrete building know-how -- not to mention tons of water -- on sets far from the ocean. The big-budget popcorn thriller, which opens Friday, is a remake (with a new story line) of producer Irwin Allen’s classic 1972 disaster film “The Poseidon Adventure,” and it stars Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Josh Lucas, Emmy Rossum, Jacinda Barrett, Mia Maestro and Jimmy Bennett.

To reimagine the “Poseidon” story, Petersen returned to Stage 16, where he made another perilous ocean adventure, “The Perfect Storm,” five years earlier. Stage 16’s enormous water tank, which can accommodate up to 1.3-million gallons, has been used over the years for such films as “The Old Man and the Sea” and “PT 109.”

Additional soundstages -- the production used five in all -- were renovated to house the other extensive sets used on “Poseidon.” Wood flooring was replaced with concrete, and new plumbing was installed so that the huge volume of water needed for the scenes could be recycled among the soundstages.

The sets themselves are unusual. Some were built right-side up to capture the scenes before the wave struck the ship, while those used in post-impact shots were constructed upside-down.

Stage 16 housed the upside-down ballroom, and neighboring Stage 19 held an identical but right-side-up replica. Crews built the ship’s five-story-high upside-down lobby, featuring a collapsed elevator shaft that stretched across a three-story drop to the stage floor, also on Stage 16, and a right-side up lobby on Stage 21.

An inverted version of the ship’s galley was built on Stage 15, while the Warner Bros. commissary became its right-side-up counterpart. And a long ship’s corridor where a flash fire occurs in the film was shot on Stage 20.

For the scene in which Poseidon’s immense ballroom is inundated with seawater, the filmmakers used 10 8-foot diameter culvert pipes to send 90,000 gallons of water spewing from the shattered windows. “When they broke those windows, the volume of water actually shook the ground,” recalls producer Duncan Henderson.

He notes that the ballroom scene was a composite of live action and visual effects. “We did it three ways,” he says. “It was completely clean, nobody in there at all, when we blew every window. There was a huge rush of water, so much water that it pulled the floor right off the set.... Then we shot the scene again with [set] pieces and real stunt people. Later, we augmented it with visual effects.”

Some sets could be mechanically rolled from one side to the other with hydraulically operated two-axle platform gimbals that tilt at various degrees. The ship’s bridge was so large, the filmmakers note, that it could not be rotated 180 degrees in one piece inside a sound stage without scraping the ceiling, so it was built and filmed in two sections, each atop its own gimbal.

And pity the poor actors who suffered from vertigo as they had to navigate their way across a narrow plank high above the ground with flames licking their heels. “It was not for the faint of heart,” Henderson says. Instead of having nets below, he says, the actors were attached from above to safety cables, which won’t be visible on film.

Equally challenging for the actors were scenes requiring them to swim fully clothed underwater for long stretches. “Dreyfuss was really nervous,” Henderson recalls. “He wasn’t gung-ho to be doing it.... Emmy Rossum was a little nervous at the beginning, but she did a great job. We offered her a lot of training. She really went through more training than she needed for what she did on camera. Some guys could hold their breath quite a long time, like Kurt and Josh. Mia was comfortable in the water.

“What was really tough was doing it day after day. The [underwater] scenes were all pushed to the very end of the picture. There was a 10-day stretch [that involved] swimming for long hours.”

The producer says the water was warm and “crystal clear -- cleaner than city water. When you give it back to the city, they don’t want polluted water.”