The original screenplay by Peter Rader was pitched as a children's adventure film, when he was looking for a project he could direct himself. One producer working under Roger Corman said he could get a South-African investor to help with funding if Rader could come up with a good Interceptor (1979) rip-off. Rader then conceived of an apocalyptic story set on the sea, with a lot of mythic and religious overtones. In Rader's screenplay, the Mariner was a human and the chief defender of the Atoll, whose embarrassing secret was that he enjoyed painting pictures of seahorses; Helen had two of her own children along with the adopted Enola, and the Deacon was called Neptune, a campy, silly villain who dressed up like King Trident and sat atop a throne on the Exxon Valdez. He would command a group of subordinates who had all sorts of mutations, like lobster claws, and he punished them by slapping them around the face with a wet fish. Also, Enola's tattoo would give instructions on how to find Water's End (as Dryland was called in his script) by looking for the mountain's outline as a shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. When the script was toted around Hollywood, more and more parties became interested, and subsequent rewrites by David Twohy and Joss Whedon turned the original script into a much more serious action-adventure film.

Film

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