Filmmakers die in helicopter crash

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainme...205-1qzvm.html


THE Melbourne filmmaker of the most successful Australian movie of 2011 has died in a helicopter crash at Jaspers Brush in southern New South Wales.

Andrew Wight, the writer-producer of the 3D film Sanctum, which was shot on the Gold Coast and took just over $100 million worldwide on a $30 million budget, was piloting a helicopter on Saturday afternoon with fellow filmmaker Mike deGruy on board.

The aircraft, a seven-year-old Robinson R44 four-seater, is believed to have crashed on take-off, killing both men.

The cause of the accident is unknown, but the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has four investigators on site.

Late yesterday producer James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) released a statement expressing his sorrow at the loss of two colleagues and friends.

"Mike and Andrew were like family to me,'' it said. ''They were my deep-sea brothers, and both were true explorers, who did extraordinary things and went places no human being has been."

Wight was "kind and loyal", Cameron said, and above all a careful planner. "It is cruelly ironic that he died flying a helicopter, which was second nature to him, like driving a car would be to most people."

Cameron said the pair had died "doing exactly what they loved most, heading out to sea on a new and personally challenging expedition, having fun in the way they defined it for themselves, which was hardship and toil to achieve something never done before".

Their deaths were ''a tremendous loss for the world of underwater exploration, conservation, and filmmaking".

Wight, who lived on a rural property at Culcairn, just north of Albury, and American deGruy were believed to have been working on a 3D feature-length documentary about Papua New Guinea with Cameron, an executive producer of Sanctum.

The fatal accident comes less than three weeks after Cameron announced the opening of a Melbourne office of his 3D production company, Cameron Pace, to be overseen by Wight.

The future of the office - which was to mount a large-scale push into local 3D film and

television production - must now be uncertain given how central Wight was to its operation.

Mike deGruy, 60, was a former marine zoologist and experienced diver who specialised in underwater cinematography. Among his credits are the David Attenborough series The Blue Planet, The Life of Mammals and Life in the Freezer.

Wight, 52, was a former agricultural scientist whose interest in diving similarly led him to underwater cinematography, and eventually to his friendship with the world's most financially successful filmmaker.

Soon after he finished filming Titanic, Cameron sought a filmmaking diver to help him make a documentary about the wreck. "And my name kept coming up," Wight told The Age in November 2010. "I was pretty much on a shortlist of one."

In 2001, Wight began working with Cameron's Earthship Productions on a range of dive-related films for IMAX and TV. His credits include Ghosts of the Abyss, Expedition Bismarck, Aliens of the Deep and Last Mysteries of the Titanic.

Wight was also integrally involved in the development of the 3D technology that Cameron deployed on Avatar. The cameras used on Sanctum were, in fact, hand-me-downs from Avatar.

Wight's screenplay for Sanctum was based on his own near-death experience while potholing in the 3.2-kilometre-long Pannikin Plains cave system beneath the Nullarbor Plain.

In 1988, he was in a party of 15 explorers who hit trouble when a flash flood raced through the underwater system after a storm. He and a colleague watched as 13 others were swept away. They spent the next two days frantically trying to rescue them; remarkably, no one died.

But deGruy could perhaps go one better in terms of narrow escape yarns. In 1978, he was diving with a fellow scientist in the Marshall Islands when they were attacked by a grey nurse shark. DeGruy lost part of his right arm.

Convinced he was about to die, deGruy lay on his back, used his good arm to try to stem the blood flow and kicked his way to the boat, a couple of hundred metres away. He and his colleague both survived.

Now, though, luck has finally run out for the intrepid pair.

"Andrew was a true adventurer, a man of great personal courage," said David Russell, an artist who worked on Sanctum with Wight. "The industry has lost a singular talent."

Wight's death would be "really terrible for the industry, with Australia just being put on the filmmaking map in 3D terms", said another friend of the filmmaker's, who asked not to be named.

Wight is survived by his wife, Monica, and their infant son, Ted. Mike deGruy is survived by his wife, Mimi, and children Max and Frances.