Kurt Russell and Josh Lucas battled fire, water -- and injuries -- on the set of Poseidon.

HOLLYWOOD -- When German filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen set sail for Poseidon, his remake of the seminal 1972 disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure, he was not anticipating a near mutiny.

"They all turned out to be whiners and girly-men. They whined almost every day on set and they're still whining now," joked Petersen, 65, during interviews for his $150-million US summer movie about a luxury liner that capsizes at sea.

By the time Peterson met with journalists for the round-table interviews, his stars Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Emmy Rossum, Richard Dreyfuss, Mia Maestro, Jacinda Barrett and Mike Vogel had detailed a litany of accidents and ailments they endured during the five-month shoot.

"No one came away from this one unscathed," says Barrett, who plays a single parent with a young son (Jimmy Bennett).

"Jimmy gave us a real scare when he fell down a flight of stairs one day and I got scraped when I went under the propeller blades.

In Poseidon, the disaster occurs on New Year's Eve when the liner is hit by a massive rogue wave.

"Rogue waves are not something they dreamed up for the movie," says Barrett, 30. "They exist and they really do hit out of nowhere. We saw documentaries on them.

Rossum, 19, insists her work on 2004's disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow was a piece of cake compared to Poseidon.

"There's no question Poseidon is the hardest thing I've done in my life," says Rossum. "By the end of the shoot I was purple with bruises."

It was the swimming sequences that took their toll on Rossum and her fellow cast members.

When the Poseidon capsizes, it begins to sink, filling hallways and rooms with water.

Eight passengers band together to work their way up to the bottom of the ship, so they can escape through one of the propeller shafts.

The movie was filmed in huge water tanks on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles.

"We were in six metres of water. All of your senses are distorted. You can't see anything. You can't hear anything," says Rossum. "I'm a good swimmer, but I kept bumping into set pieces and furniture."

In one of many harrowing escape sequences, Russell, who plays Rossum's father, had to piggyback her from one balcony to another using a fire hose suspended between them.

"We actually did that stunt. We were held to the ceiling by wires. Kurt is so fearless that I wasn't nearly as afraid as I thought I was going to be," says Rossum.

Russell, 55, recalls he went from "having a touch of Asian flu to a sinus infection to full-out walking pneumonia.

"The whole time we were filming the scene in which we try to get through and up the elevator shaft, I could barely breathe," says Russell. "Once that scene was over, Wolfgang rearranged the shooting schedule so I could take a week off to recuperate."

As taxing as Poseidon may have been, Russell insists the experience paled next to his 1990 experience filming the firefighting drama Backdraft.

"The water scenes in Poseidon were just really uncomfortable because by the end of the day the water would get really cold.

"On Backdraft, we were working with fire and that's really dangerous."

Like Russell, Vogel, 26, caught pneumonia, but he also suffered a severe case of swimmer's ear.

"You get water trapped in your ear canals and every time you go back in the water it feels like your ears are going to burst," he says. "It's really hard to concentrate on anything but the pain."

Maestro, 27, who plays a stowaway who joins the escape group, says it was not the water scenes that proved most harrowing for her.

At one point, the passengers have to climb up through an air-conditioning shaft.

"I'm not claustrophobic but, like everyone else, I had my panic attacks, especially when they started filling the shaft with water."

Maestro, who plays Jennifer Garner's sister on Alias, says she was the only cast member who didn't get hurt during filming. "I was trained well on Alias. We had to do so many stunts on that show that I knew how to protect myself on Poseidon."

Dreyfuss, 58, confesses it wasn't the water that proved most demoralizing.

"Poseidon is an old-fashion Hollywood movie where the actors turn up every day and put themselves through gruelling routines for 12 hours.

"This is exactly the kind of movie I avoided in my 30s when I was actually fit enough to survive them.

"Now, I'm carrying around a lot of extra body fat. All that crawling up tunnels and shimmying up elevator shafts really got to me."

Dreyfuss was most frightened filming a sequence in the ship's kitchen that has become a mini-inferno.

"There was a lot of smoke and flames and sharp debris everywhere. I was sure I was going to get sliced to pieces.

"It was at that point I really wished I had signed up for the sequel to My Dinner With Andre."

Though each cast member was eager to share their war stories, they all conceded it was Lucas who suffered the most and has three permanent scars to prove it.

"I ripped the tendons in my hand and had to have my thumb reconstructed," says Lucas, 34.

The injury occurred in a scene where he opens a hatch that lets in a gush of water. The water stream was so powerful, Lucas twisted in the air and slashed his hand and thumb. He is also sporting a scar above his eye.

"Kurt, Mike and I were swimming to rescue Mia. You can't see a thing underwater, so they had these strobe lights we'd swim towards.

"Kurt had a metal flashlight and I got too close and he swung it into my head," recalls Lucas. "When I got out of the water, the blood was gushing out."

Neither of these incidents terrified Lucas as much as the moment he really believed he was drowning.

"It's the scene in which I try to rescue Jimmy, who's trapped in a makeshift cage.

"I went down and got caught on a wire that was holding a mannequin. I couldn't break away.

"My two safety divers were around the corner out of camera range and didn't see me flailing for them."

With his lungs aching, Lucas broke free and came shooting out of the water.

"I was so scared and panicky and angry and filled with rage that I yelled at Wolfgang.

"I told him he'd better have gotten the shot he needed because I was not ever going back down there."

Petersen told Lucas the camera focus was too soft, so he didn't get the scene.

Lucas swallowed more pride than water and shot the rescue scene again.