by Alessandra Haddick
At first glance, the massive underwater world of Avatar seems galaxies away from the South Bay. But for Szilvia Gogh, it was just minutes from home.
For more than two years, Gogh reported to a 250,000 gallon tank in Manhattan Beach Studios, helping to bring James Cameron’s underwater vision to life.
Gogh is a legendary diver. Her abundance of diving experience includes over 7,000 dives in locations spanning all seven continents and ranges from serving as the youngest female PADI course director in the world, later working on 27 Hollywood productions as a stuntwoman and coordinator, training LAPD Dive Team Leaders, and being inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame.
Gogh played a key role in the making of Avatar: Fire and Ash, the epic new blockbuster released in theaters everywhere on December 19. She served as one of the film’s key underwater safety and stunt professionals, overseeing water safety and underwater action. It was a role that required both technical expertise and relentless endurance.
“A typical day started at 4 a.m.,” she said. “We were always the first to arrive and the last to leave.”
Each morning involved preparing the enormous tank — vacuuming it to preserve the visual clarity of the water, setting underwater platforms, and ensuring safety systems were in place. Once filming began, she remained in the water any time the actors, crew, or Cameron himself, entered. Sometimes with as many as twenty people submerged at once.
“If I do my job right, you never see me in the shot,” she said. “My job is to keep everyone alive.”
Though Avatar includes groundbreaking visual effects, much of the underwater movement audiences see is real. “Every action you see underwater, we actually did,” Gogh explained. “The fish are CGI, but the movement is real.”
While some scenes were filmed on location in places like the Bahamas, Catalina, and New Zealand, Gogh´s main role in Avatar: Fire and Ash was on-set safety, training actors in breath-hold techniques, and supporting underwater performance capture outcomes in the Manhattan Beach studio tank instead of traveling on location, something that Gogh has done in other movies such as when she doubled for Drew Barrymore in Big Miracle, which was shot in Alaska. While Gogh has loved the globe-spanning adventure of shooting on location, for this project, she was grateful to have the ability to stay working locally.
¨I had a two-year old baby at the time,¨ she said. ¨I can’t imagine being away, with a husband at home, for two years.¨
The Manhattan Beach studio tank also offered something that ocean shots can’t; control.
¨We could move the bottom of the pool, change the angle – whether we wanted to do those scenes where it’s like the beach, or deep water,¨ Gogh said, referring to the tank. ¨We could create crazy fast currents or giant waves.¨
The technical foundation that made this possible was extraordinary. The primary tank measured 120 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. But the main vessel was just one part of a vast interconnected system — when including secondary training tanks and the massive filtration systems required to maintain optical clarity for cameras, the total water volume reached approximately 680,000 gallons.
Nicknamed the “Swiss Army Tank” for its extreme versatility, the main tank was engineered to simulate various aquatic environments. A 1,000-horsepower pump and 19,000-pound steel wedges generated everything from gentle swells to powerful 10-knot currents and breaking waves. The tank featured a modular deck system that could be raised or lowered to create different depths, including a deeper “sump” area for vertical descents and specific stunt work.
Cameron’s vision, to capture utterly realistic underwater movement, necessitated a revolutionary leap in performance-capture technology. The greatest technical challenge was capturing actors’ movements and facial expressions underwater. Roughly 200 specialized cameras were mounted at various depths to track sensors on the actors’ wet suits, turning the tank into a three-dimensional digital stage. To prevent studio lights from reflecting off the water’s surface and creating interference in the digital data, the surface was covered with small white floating polymer balls that diffused light while allowing actors to safely surface for air.
Gogh knew this underwater labyrinth intimately. She also worked on the previous Avatar film, The Way of the Water. Because The Way of Water and Fire and Ash were filmed simultaneously, along with parts of the fourth film, the tank remained the primary production hub through 2023. This allowed for consistency in the digital “look” of the water and ensured that the actors’ physical performances remained grounded in the same hydraulic reality across the entire trilogy. By utilizing this custom-engineered environment, Cameron moved away from “dry-for-wet” filming, ensuring authentic physics.
In addition to the benefits the tank had for production and filming, it was also essential in creating a safe environment for filming underwater scenes.
¨When you start having twenty people doing breath-hold underwater,” Gogh said, “you want to be in a controlled environment.¨
The tank was an aspect of filming that was crucial during long filming days and the length of the project.
“It allowed safer breath-hold work and consistency,” she said. “On a project this long, that made all the difference.”
Gogh said the long filming process led to a close bond between all the members of the movie.
“It felt like a high school reunion,” Gogh said of the Avatar premiere, which took place at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood December 1. “We spent two years, fourteen hours a day in the water together. When you spend that much time with people, you become family.”
Gogh also speaks of James Cameron with genuine admiration and respect, describing him as both meticulous and grounded.
¨It’s always so nice to see Jim, and the fact that he actually remembers everyone by name,¨ she says. ¨It’s amazing how he pays attention to details.¨
This precision is what sets him apart from other directors that Gogh has worked with.
¨He’s one of the only directors who doesn’t just say, ‘Oh, that was great, guys. Let’s just do it again, just better.´ He tells you exactly – two inches to your right – and he tells you exactly what he wants,¨ she said.
Gogh describes how this directing allows even the most demanding underwater shoots easier as its ¨so much easier to please someone who tells you exactly what they want.¨
But Avatar was not just a gig for Gogh. It was part of her larger mission in the world, as an ambassador of the deep.
¨I’m really hoping that Avatar will undo everything that Jaws did to people wanting to be in the ocean,” she says. ¨Thanks to the Avatar movies, I think people are intrigued and curious about what’s below the surface.¨
Diving inward
After decades working underwater around the world, Gogh recently turned inward, publishing her memoir Diving Into Dreams. The book traces her journey through loss, ambition, survival, and self-acceptance — a story she felt compelled to tell after years of being told her success was simply “luck.”
“Luck only gets you so far — it’s a lot of hard work,” she said. “I wanted to show that you can dream big, work hard, and never give up. That’s the life I built.”
Much of the book grapples with difficult chapters such as losing her father at thirteen, living through the aftermath of Chernobyl, and battling cancer while grieving her mother.
“To really appreciate the ups, you have to be down,” Gogh says. One of the central messages of the book is about contentment and perspective.
“Until you find that happiness inside, it doesn’t matter what you achieve,” she said. “It took me nearly fifty years to feel like I have enough — and that I am enough.”
That philosophy also runs through Gogh’s jewelry line, which she started out of frustration of being unable to find jewelry that was both meaningful and functional to keep up with her life. Her travels greatly influenced her pieces as she draws inspiration from her travels and life experiences rather than traditional glamour.
“I don’t design first,” she said. “I travel, find materials, and let the pieces tell me what they want to be.”
Gogh sources pearls from Indonesia, charms from Morocco, and crystals from Himalayan villages, assembling them into wearable affirmations. Many of her pieces incorporate stones like hematite for grounding or turquoise for healing — designed to serve as what she calls “amulets” for others going through their own difficult journeys. Gogh wanted her designs to be more than just decorative but to also be a way to uplift others and a way to spread positivity.
“There was just so much negativity going on in the world and so much self‑doubt, so much depression,” she says. “So I came up with a series of affirmations and made bracelets and necklaces saying ‘I am enough,’ ‘Survivor,’ ‘I am open‑minded’ — things that we all sometimes, every now and then, need a little reminder of.”
What started as a personal creative outlet soon transformed, in 2002, into Gogh Jewelry Design, which carries Gogh’s same mindset of positivity, travel, and honoring each chapter of life. With Gogh’s passion for travel, creating jewelry was also a way for her to live out her nomadic lifestyle and still be able to maintain a business as well.
Gogh also insists on photographing real people — friends and family — without heavy retouching.
“Wrinkles and all — we earned them,” she said. “I don’t Photoshop my photos because I want real beauty.”
Beyond film and design, Gogh is deeply committed to mentoring and service. Through charity work in Watts and other high-violence areas, she introduces inner-city youth to scuba diving.
“Some of these kids have never even seen the ocean,” she said. “Then they go underwater and come up smiling.”
Gogh also runs jewelry-making workshops for students and victims of violent crime, using creativity as a tool for confidence and expression.
Gogh is considering producing an audiobook version of Diving Into Dreams and expanding her public speaking, which focuses on resilience, perspective, and choosing a “cup half full” mindset. But for now, she’s intentionally slowing down.
“Instead of always chasing what’s next, I’m learning to enjoy where I am right now,” she said. “I just want to live a healthy, active life and be present with my family.”
That philosophy of presence and perseverance has deep roots in her life. Born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, Gogh discovered her passion for diving early on when she joined a local dive club at thirteen years old. She competed in orienteering diving, a demanding underwater navigation sport in which you dive in murky lakes where precision and compass outweigh visibility.
But that same year she started diving also marked a tragedy that would cast a long shadow. In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster spread radioactive fallout across Eastern Europe, including Hungary. Gogh’s father was exposed to the radiation. He died when she was thirteen — at age 39.
Three decades later, the invisible legacy of Chernobyl returned. In 2016, Gogh’s mother died of breast cancer at 67. That same year, Gogh herself was diagnosed with the disease — at 39. Her cousin had died of breast cancer a few years earlier, also at 39, the same age Gogh’s father had been when cancer took him. The connection between radiation exposure and cancer is well-documented, and the pattern was impossible to ignore.
But Gogh refused to let the pattern define her. She applied the same “Stop, Breathe, Think, Act” protocol she used for challenging dives to her chemotherapy sessions, treating each infusion as a technical challenge rather than a victimizing event. If she could handle nitrogen narcosis and freezing cave dives, she reasoned, she could handle an infusion chair.
As a stuntwoman, her body was her livelihood, and cancer threatened to fundamentally alter that relationship. Instead of viewing herself as broken, she returned to the water as quickly as possible, using diving as physical therapy to prove her spirit remained unsinkable. By surviving past 39 — the age that had claimed her father and cousin — she transformed what could have been a source of fear into a source of power. Every year beyond 39 became what she calls “the gift of aging.” She now understands time as a non-renewable resource and uses that knowledge every day to dive deeper, travel further, and help others find their own air.
“Cancer has changed me… I don’t want to just exist; I want to live,” she wrote on Miss-Scuba.com. “I have no time to waste.”
The teacher
Her adventure began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would lead her to the watery parts of the world.
Gogh was 13. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the people of Eastern and Central Europe could finally see the West. By the time she became a college student, Gogh jumped at the opportunity to travel. She had never seen the ocean before. She spent a summer in Malta while still in college – where she studied marketing management and also attended an art school, learning goldsmithing – and earned her scuba diving certificate in which she then spent her early years managing a dive center in Thailand.
However, in an era when diving was overwhelmingly male-dominated, Gogh faced constant stereotypes and skepticism based off of both her gender and nationality.
¨A lot of people think a girl who wears a red bikini and has a European accent cant be a good diver,¨ she wrote in Diving into Dreams. ¨They´re wrong.¨
Refusing to be sidelined, Gogh continued refining her skills and eventually became not only PADI´s youngest female course director in the world, but the first woman to hold title course director — the highest professional rating, the teachers of teachers — who was from Hungary.
Even as her career advanced, Gogh was aware of how women’s voices were still largely absent from media, leadership, and product design of scuba diving. Inspired to create a community in which women could have representation in the diving community, she created Miss-Scuba.com, an online community dedicated to female divers that allows them to have the opportunity for gear, resources, and travel. What began as a modest blog quickly grew into an international hub including dive travel, gear reviews designed for women, and discussions about confidence, risk, and belonging underwater. In Diving into Dreams, Gogh describes Miss Scuba as both a professional turning point as well as a personal act of defiance, a way to prove that women could be skilled, adventurous, and authoritative in a field that often underestimates them, as well as normalize the idea that leadership underwater doesn’t have a single look.
With more than 7,000 logged dives and over 1,300 divers certified, Gogh not only scaled the professional world of scuba diving but also shattered expectations about what women could achieve underwater. Her diving expertise soon carried her into Hollywood, where she has worked as an underwater stunt performer and water safety instructor on major film and TV productions from Big Miracle to Avatar.
As a diver, Gogh is able to connect to Avatar´s underwater worlds on a visceral level. She hopes that the movie will inspire audiences to rediscover their curiosity about the ocean. This is the throughline between her work on Avatar and as a dive instructor. The ocean has been Gogh’s greatest teacher, and she hopes to share its instruction.
Her own lessons were often hard-won.
One of the most striking came from her experience with the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami while she was living and working in Thailand. She was on Phi Phi Island during the event and transitioned from a dive instructor to a relief coordinator overnight. The aftermath became what she describes as the ultimate humility lesson, witnessing an environment she knew intimately — the reefs and coastlines of Thailand — transformed in an instant by a force that no human skill or equipment could counter.
“The tsunami was a wake-up call,” she wrote in her Miss-Scuba.com profile. “It taught me that we are not in control. One moment you are living your dream in paradise, and the next, nature reminds you how fragile everything is.”
Those early orienteering dives in Hungary’s freezing, pitch-black lakes had prepared her for this understanding. In those dives with zero visibility, she navigated purely by touch and compass. She says this forced her to master what she calls her “internal compass” because there was nothing external to rely on.
“In the lakes of Hungary, I learned to dive with my soul, not just my eyes,” she wrote in her Gogh Jewelry Design blog. “When you can’t see anything, you have to face yourself. There is no room for ego when you are alone in the dark.”
In her professional training, she recalls managing a panicked student during a dive. In that moment, she realized her experience didn’t make her superior — it simply gave her the responsibility to be the calmest person in the water.
“I always tell my students: the moment you think you are a master of the ocean is the moment you are in the most danger,” she told Scuba Diving Magazine. “We are always students of the water.”
On her website, Gogh describes the ocean as a place that demands humility, where control is an illusion and awareness is essential. She hopes that viewers walk away from Avatar with a similar mindset of not seeing the ocean as hostile or unknowable, but as a living environment that invites understanding.
“The ocean is the greatest teacher of humility,” she writes. “No matter how many thousands of dives I have under my belt, the moment I submerge, I am reminded that I am just a guest. You cannot control the current, the visibility, or the marine life. You have to let go of your ego and your need for control. The ocean teaches you to be present, to be patient, and to respect a power far greater than yourself.”
For more information or to order Diving Into Dreams, see SzilviaGogh.com. ER
Such an impressive journey. I bought her book and found her story to be extraordinary! Recommended.