ICYMI — Behind The Scenes: Inside Sam’s Dramatic Water Rescue
When Dr. Klein tossed Sam in the Port Charles harbor, Patient 6 instinctively jumped in the water to save her. But the sequence actually required a good deal of planning on GH’s part. “The script came in at the end of August and we shot it the first week in October,” reports the episode’s director, Gary Tomlin. “It’s always good to have that kind of time for something like this so we can figure out what we need to pull it off.”
In this instance, that meant a tank with a depth of 7 feet. “You don’t always need that depth, but we needed it here because Steve [Burton, Patient 6] had to dive in,” Tomlin explains. “A tank like that takes up a lot of room on the set, and there are only certain places on the studio floor where you can put it, because of the weight and everything involved. That includes stands around it for the camera people, platforms where the actors can jump from and do their stunts.”
And don’t forget about the water heater. “Even 75 degrees is too cold when actors are in the water for a long time, and Steve and Kelly [Monaco, Sam] were in the water for about two hours. We had to make sure to get the temperature up, and I think we got it to around 98 degrees.” Which, to hear Burton tell it, was maybe a little too warm. “I was in my clothes and it was very hot,” he reports. “I hated it! I actually got out a few times to cool off.”
Unlike typical soap scenes, which are shot with three cameras, GH captured the critical underwater shots with a single GoPro. Burton says, “It was kind of just shot by shot of, ‘This is you swimming straight toward her, trying to pick her out of the water, but she’s stuck on something.’ We’d do that, then come up for air, then do it again, or move on to the other actions we were supposed to do.”
The director praises both Burton and Monaco for being “so game for anything. They weren’t afraid of the water; they were excited to be doing it and they wanted to make it work.” By and large, everything went off without a hitch. “We lucked out,” Tomlin nods. “We got the shots of them each going into the water on the first take. There were a few shots we had to do more than once when they were in the water — of course, once they’re underwater, you can’t say, ‘Move a little this way,’ because they can’t hear anything! They both did a really great job.”
Especially impressive? Monaco’s lung capacity. Before shooting Patient 6 getting Sam’s foot unstuck, Tomlin recalls, “I told Kelly, ‘We’ve got to get that shot of you while he’s working on your feet, so I need you to go under and hold your breath.’ She said, ‘How long do you need me to hold my breath?’ I said, ‘Oh, a minute and a half, two minutes.’ I was just joking around! She said, ‘Okay.’ She goes underwater, we get the shot, and I said, ‘We can cut now.’ The stage manager said, ‘How am I supposed to tell her that?’ ” Picks up Burton, “Gary was like, ‘Bring her up, bring her up!’ I had to go down and grab her and tell her, ‘That’s enough! You don’t have to kill yourself for the shot!’ ”
Burton says that his biggest challenge came from limited vision. “I wear contacts and I was going to do it with them in, but then I was like, ‘If one pops out, then I’m really screwed.’ So, I took them out, but once they were out, I couldn’t see anything underwater! The pool was all blacked out, the sides were all blacked out, so it was really hard to know where the camera was; the GoPro is only half the size of an iPhone. We had a stuntwoman in a white T-shirt and I could barely see her! But honestly, it was a really fun day. I love doing stunts, and Kelly and I had a great time joking around and hanging out between shots.”
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