Question: How exactly did they make the whole underwater fight scene work?
Top Secret! (1984)
2 questions
Directed by: David Zucker, Jim Abrahams
Starring: Val Kilmer, Peter Cushing, Jeremy Kemp, Lucy Gutteridge
Continuity mistake: When Nick is singing "Spend This Night with Me", he brings up a girl from the audience. Watch the background. When it shows another girl from the audience, in the next shot, you can see a speaker that wasn't there before. Moreover, when he picks the girl, we can see that there isn't anyone at her left side. But a few seconds earlier she was sitting between two girls (the one at her left was wearing a white shirt). (00:42:05)
Hillary Flammond: I know a little German. He's sitting over there.
Trivia: Just in case some people don't know, most of the "German" in this movie is total gibberish. Some sentences are perfectly correct and properly spoken, as with the welcoming speech, the German soldiers and platform announces at the station, the "Ich liebe dich, mein Schatz", etc. But the learning tape, the conversations at the Culture Hall during dinner and the East Germany Anthem are just a bunch of "German-dutch sounding noises." Of course, it's even funnier to know that there are subtitles for all these with content that has nothing to do with it.
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Chosen answer: The actors were weighted down with lead plates. Oxygen tanks were kept just out of picture, and the actors used them to breathe between takes. The takes were short enough to allow the actors to hold their breath through them. The short takes were then cut together to appear as one long fight. Sound effects were added post-production.