they swam me 30 feet down... Then this guy yanks the breather off me and the water's churning with blood and guts and stuff... It was so terrifying that I don't want to remember it." The idea was to mix footage of real sharks with animatronic and computer generated sharks to ensure a seamless transition between them all. To distinguish Deep Blue Sea from Jaws, where the shark is frequently hidden, Harlin decided to show theirs more prominently because he felt that audience expectations had changed since then. The scene where the cast is trying to get back to the elevator after hooking up actor Stellan Skarsgård to the helicopter is actually an accident that made it into the finished film. As Jackson explained, "At one point three tons of water got thrown on us by accident and we got swept toward those cargo bays and everyone thought we were going into the drink and people were tumbling around this metal grating [...] We scrambled up and kept acting [...] That was not supposed to happen and we didn't have safety harnesses on and we were flailing around on this deck." Jackson was initially offered the role played by LL Cool J, but his management team did not like the idea of him playing a chef, so Harlin created the role of Russell Franklin for him. Additionally, LL Cool J's character was supposed to die early on, but the director ultimately decided to keep him. The production team could not afford to have a fully trained parrot for LL Cool J's character, so they used two parrots: one that was good at flying, and another that could sit on his shoulder. The film's ending was changed shortly before its theatrical release. Originally, Burrows's character would escape the shark infested water and live. However, the test audience, who saw the film less than a month before its release, disapproved of the ending because she was behind the shark experiments and was seen as the film's villain. As a result, the production team did a one-day reshoot in the Universal Studios tank and did some computer generated work on the sharks to change it. In 2009, Harlin explained that Deep Blue Sea was the hardest film he had ever made because most of the shooting days involved the team standing in water or being under water for long periods. According to him,