(Credit: YouTube)
Tue 12 August 2025 3:30, UK
Many directors have warned against the perils of shooting on open water, with everyone from James Cameron to Steven Spielberg making the fabled (yet sometimes fruitful) decision to create sea-based epics.
The complications that arise from shooting on open water are endless and extreme, with cameras being damaged and shots being ruined as water seeps into every frame and destroys a carefully created shooting schedule.
However, while it might be a great source of difficulty, people continue to take a stab at the challenge, with many great actors being sucked into water-based stories and others who narrowly managed to avoid them. Luckily for Harrison Ford, there was one such role that he steered clear of, crossing paths with another actor who had a strangely similar career trajectory to himself.
Harrison Ford is often viewed as the king of the action genre, playing iconic heroes like Han Solo and Indiana Jones and forever marking cinematic history through his swashbuckling additions to the genre. However, these roles don’t come without their challenges, with the actor describing many injuries and complications over the years after hurling himself through caves, crumbling chambers and off cliff faces.
But luckily for him, there was another role of this nature that he narrowly escaped, with his former collaborator Steven Spielberg even warning the creators of the film against making it.
Kevin Costner has always been the kind to march to the beat of his own drum, taking on risky projects that others might hide away from and tackling them with full force. Even if it shouldn’t work, he finds a way to bring his vision to life, even if some of the most infamous directors in the business are telling him to give it a rest.
This was what happened when he set out to make Waterworld, his colossal water-based epic that majorly flopped at the box office and cost millions to make. The demands of the shoot led the budget to balloon to astronomical new heights, becoming one of the most expensive pictures ever made at the time of its release.
But while Costner starred in the film, the actor described how in the early draft of the script, the hero was not the human/fish hybrid that Costner eventually played in the film, with Ford actually being considered for this role instead. When discussing this, Costner said, “I have to confess I was thinking of Harrison Ford. That was one of the brilliant additions of the writers who came after me. I was writer number one of five, and the most significant contributions came from David Twohy. He had this idea of creating this mutation who would have webbed feet and gills. I thought that was brilliant and added a whole new level to the character I hadn’t conceived of initially.”
While it’s interesting to imagine Ford’s presence in the project, the actor’s relationship with Spielberg perhaps warned him against this role, with the director famously advising Costner to abandon the project due to the challenges of shooting in the water. However, regardless of its complications, it became a pivotal project in Costner’s career, with destiny intervening and preventing Ford’s career from becoming intertwined with Costner’s.
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