In Fantastic Voyage, where a miniaturized submarine goes into a human body, Raquel Welch is attacked by antibodies. Her team takes her back into the sub. To save her life, they start grabbing the antibodies off her.
Director Richard Fleischer said:
“To film that scene we had jelly-like goo sewed onto Raquel’s wetsuit. I positioned her on the floor with Stephen Boyd, Arthur Kennedy and Donald Pleasence kneeling over her. I called action and all three actors remained gentlemen. They grabbed everywhere on Raquel's body, except her bosom. It ended up looking like a Vegas showgirl’s rhinestone brassiere.
“It took 90 minutes to sew more antibodies on her wetsuit. I told the actors, ‘Now pull those damned things off her no matter where they are on her body.’ On action, they all dived for Rachel’s tits, grabbing handfuls of antibodies. They looked like a bunch of lustful scientists.
“I finally had to choreograph the shot more carefully on where they would grab. That simple shot took us six hours.”
The original plan for Fantastic Voyage was that it would be an Our Man Flint plot starring James Coburn. But it was soon changed to a more serious drama with Stephen Boyd playing a secret agent like Flint. Some of Flint’s lines were left in the script for humor.
Budgeted at $5 million, it went up to $6 million: $3 million for set construction and $1 million for test footage.
Director Fleischer hired two people he had worked with on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Harper Goff who designed the sub for this movie and the Nautilus in the Disney movie. And diving expert Fred Zendar.
When the Fantastic Voyage characters are miniaturized, they can stay small for only an hour. The movie has the voyage at almost exactly one hour in real time.
No music was used in the movie until the submarine enters the body.
A San Francisco film reviewer wrote: The ending in a tear-jerker, literally. Watch the movie to find out why.
Over the years, there have been several attempts to make a big budget remake by James Cameron, Will Smith and recently Guillermo del Toro. But they went on to other projects.
Raquel Welch said, “When making Fantastic Voyage, I was infatuated with Stephen Boyd, but he declined my advances.”
Six years later, Boyd made a brief appearance in Raquel's movie, Hannie Caulder. We can only wonder if she had more success with Boyd at that time.
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