Lost at sea: Real-life story of 'Open Water' remains a mystery

Lost at sea: Real-life story of 'Open Water' remains a mystery

Lost at sea: Real-life story of 'Open Water' remains a mystery
Tony Horwitz, New York Times
August 28, 2004 OPEVAR0828



In the film "Open Water," a vacationing couple surface from a scuba dive to find that their tour boat has vanished. Left for hours amid circling sharks, one of the divers finally vents his rage at having been abandoned.

"Unbelievable!" he screams.

Actually, it's not. The movie is loosely based on a real event: the 1998 stranding of two Americans off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The filmmakers, both New Yorkers, are divers and learned of the incident from a scuba newsletter. They borrowed the premise of an abandoned couple but fictionalized the rest, in part because the true story had too many twists to seem credible on screen.






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