test for Harlin, who had not made a commercially successful film since Cliffhanger in 1993. Harlin's main goal was to bring the horror genre back to the serious and high-budget production values of films like The Exorcist, Jaws, The Shining, as opposed to the tongue-in-cheek style of subsequent films in the genre. Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien was an influence on the casting process, as Harlin wanted to cast the characters in a way as to make it impossible for the audience to know who was going to die or survive. To achieve this, he combined relatively unknown actors who could deliver solid performances and meet the physical demands of the diving and stunts with a star, Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson, who "anchors the whole piece". Harlin also forced the studio into hiring rapper LL Cool J because he wanted a character who could bring "a lot of warmth and humor to the film without it being joke-type humor". Filming Principal photography for Deep Blue Sea began on August 3, 1998. Most of the film was shot at Fox Baja Studios in Rosarito, Mexico, where the production team constructed sets above the large water tanks that had been built for James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic. Some of the sets were designed so that they could be submerged, while others were built on sound stages with fishtanks used as windows. At Fox Baja Studios, the cast worked with sharks that were either animatronic or computer generated. As the shark used in Jaws was 25 feet long, Harlin decided to increase their animatronic shark to 26 feet. Jackson recalled, "When they first brought it into the lab we were all in awe of the size of this machine [...] It was a real monster. I would walk up to it slowly and touch it and they said it felt like a real shark. The gills moved and it had a mind of its own sometimes." As an added homage to Jaws, the license plate pulled from the shark's teeth by Carter is the same plate found in the tiger shark carcass from Spielberg's film. After the shoot at Fox Baja Studios wrapped, Harlin insisted the team go to The Bahamas to shoot with real sharks. Recounting his experience there, actor Thomas Jane, who played shark wrangler Carter, said, "The first day, I was in a cage, but the next day,