Ed Harris wears a Seiko 6309

James Cameron nearly drowned his cast making The Abyss (1989). Most of it was shot inside the containment vessel of an unfinished nuclear power plant in South Carolina, flooded with roughly seven and a half million gallons of water, and the ordeal left marks: Ed Harris has said he broke down in his car after some days of shooting, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had a breakdown of her own on set. Cameron wrote the script himself; it follows a civilian oil-rig crew pressed into helping the Navy recover a downed nuclear submarine at crushing depth, where they meet something none of them can explain. Michael Biehn plays the Navy SEAL who cracks under the pressure.

On the wrist of foreman Bud Brigman, and clearly visible in close-up, is a Seiko diver: a black-dialed automatic in the cushion-shaped steel case that collectors call the Turtle. It is widely identified as the reference 6309, the 150-meter Turtle that Seiko built from the late 1970s, the kind of tool watch a working oil-platform diver would actually own.