Trailer
Plot summary
By the year 2500 the melted polar ice caps have drowned every continent, and the people who remain live on floating atolls built from scavenged material, most of them treating Dryland as a myth. The Mariner, a lone drifter, sails his trimaran to one atoll to trade dirt for supplies. When the residents see the gills and webbed feet that mark him as a mutant, he kills one of them in self-defense, and the atoll sentences him to drown in a vat of organic sludge. The Smokers, a pirate gang that raids atolls, attack while he is held there. Helen, an atoll resident, frees him on the condition that he carries her and her young ward Enola away with him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Waterworld (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Universal authorized a $100 million budget for Waterworld, but cost overruns pushed the final tally to an estimated $175 million, making it the most expensive film production in history at the time.
- Kevin Costner nearly died during filming when he got caught in a squall while tied to the mast of his trimaran, after spending 157 days on set working six days a week.
- Rough seas kept pushing the camera crew out of position and sank one of the floating sets, which had to be repaired, stretching the shoot from a planned 96 days to over 150.
- Composer Mark Isham had already left about a quarter of his score unrecorded when Kevin Costner rejected it as "too ethnic and bleak" and refused to let him try again, bringing in James Newton Howard to write a replacement score.
- Joss Whedon was flown out to do last-minute script rewrites on set, later calling the job "seven weeks of hell" that amounted to editing in Kevin Costner's ideas without changing them.
- Director Kevin Reynolds walked off Waterworld before its release after heated clashes with Kevin Costner over creative control, though he kept full directing credit; the two didn't work together again until the miniseries Hatfields & McCoys almost twenty years later.
