As production went on, the slow pace and daily mental and physical strain of filming began to wear on the cast and crew. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio remembered, "We never started and finished any one scene in any one day". At one point, Cameron told the actors to relieve themselves in their wetsuits to save time between takes. While filming one of many takes of Mastrantonio's character's resuscitation scene—in which she was soaking wet, topless and repeatedly being slapped and pounded on the chest—the camera ran out of film, prompting Mastrantonio to storm off the set yelling, "We are not animals!" For some shots in the scene that focus on Ed Harris, he was yelling at thin air because Mastrantonio refused to film the scene again. Michael Biehn also grew frustrated by the waiting. He claimed that he was in South Carolina for five months and only acted for three to four weeks. He remembered one day being ten meters underwater and "suddenly the lights went out. It was so black I couldn't see my hand. I couldn't surface. I realized I might not get out of there." Harris recalled: "One day we were all in our dressing rooms and people began throwing couches out the windows and smashing the walls. We just had to get our frustrations out." Cameron responded to these complaints, saying, "For every hour they spent trying to figure out what magazine to read, we spent an hour at the bottom of the tank breathing compressed air." After 140 days and $4 million over budget, filming finally wrapped on December 8, 1988. Before the film's release, there were reports from South Carolina that Ed Harris was so upset by the physical demands of the film and Cameron's dictatorial directing style that he said he would refuse to help promote the motion picture. Harris later denied this rumor and helped promote the film. However, after its release and initial promotion, Harris publicly disowned the film, saying "I'm never talking about it and never will." Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio also disowned the film, saying, ""The Abyss" was a lot of things. Fun to make is not one of them."