02-09-2008, 11:56 AM
|
#1 |
| Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: York, UK
Posts: 1,227
|  Near-tragic brush with jellyfish
Quote:
Two divers suffered excruciating pain and almost died during the filming of Fool's Gold in Australia.
One was a dive double for Matthew McConaughey. Another was, ironically, a safety diver trying to keep others from harm. The culprit was a tiny jellyfish known as the irukandji.
"It shut down this big production -- twice," says director Andy Tennant.
"It's one of the one or two most deadly things on the planet and it's the size of your little fingernail. They say that it's not the venom that kills you, it's the pain. The pain is so excruciating that the only way to survive is that they fill you up with a near-lethal dose of morphine and, even on that dose, the pain is excruciating."
The first diver to be stunned by the irukandji required a midnight airlift. The rescue plane had to land at a rustic island runway where jeep headlights provided the only illumination.
"There was no way he was going to make it through the night," Tennant says of the victim, who did survive. After treatment, Tennant adds, "you just ride it out, apparently, and he did. But, if it were me, I never would have made it. Thankfully, the two guys who did get stung were in incredible shape."
The second incident occurred 1,000 miles south "in an area that they had never seen the irukandji before," Tennant says. The safety diver was suited up from head to toe but, while bobbing on the surface to speak, lifted his mask. He was stung near an eye.
"Australia had its challenges," Tennant says. "I would have preferred to shoot in the Bahamas, where it was meant to be. Ironically, after all this stuff about saving money (by shooting Down Under), we had to spend more money to go back to where it was originally supposed to be shot, because of the jellyfish."
| http://winnipegsun.com/Entertainment...09793-sun.html |
|  |
Linear Mode
