Stunt gone wrong gives Naomi Watts a taste of tsunami terror

A stunt that went awry on the set of the tsunami movie, The Impossible, gave its star Naomi Watts a taste of what the actual victims of the 2004 natural disaster went through.

"We had a technical problem with the chair that they used to submerge me in the water," the 44-year-old actress said at the Toronto Film Festival last year, where the movie held its world premiere. "And they weren't able to shut it off."

The underwater scenes, which are harrowingly authentic on screen, were filmed in Spain with the terrifying flood sequence shot in a water-tank, measuring 100m by 80m, in which Watts was anchored to a chair which spun her round, fully submerged, for a few seconds at a time before rising to let her breathe.

"I couldn't get out of this chair - it is supposed to come up to let you grab some air but it kept on rotating me and I was really struggling for breath," she recalled.