In the dream, De Bont saw a cruise ship crashing into an island, with predictably devastating results. Given that De Bont had made the hit disaster flick Twister in 1996, it seems possible that the director’s nightmare vision was born from that film. Whatever its origins, it was an image De Bont found so indelible that he demanded that it be used as a basis for his Speed sequel.

“It’s always fun to destroy things that look and appear to be very expensive,” De Bont would later reason. “It’s a lot more fun than destroying a paper box. And what would be better than to have a five-star luxury cruise liner basically end up in the middle of a hotel?”

With the unlikely setting of a cruise ship now chosen, screenwriters Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson were brought in to reverse engineer a story with De Bont’s apocalyptic vision at its end. They came up with a new villain, John Geiger, a wild-eyed ex-employee who decides to reprogram the computer of a luxury cruise liner so that it’s set on a collision course with an oil tanker. Along for the ride are Jack and Annie—Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock’s characters from the first film.

Unfortunately for De Bont, Reeves didn’t want to do the sequel. At the time, De Bont said in interviews that Reeves wasn’t interested in making another action movie after having just completed another film in the genre, Chain Reaction, which had gone through drastic script changes during its production. Or maybe it was because Reeves didn’t like the idea of all those action sequences in the water.

“We met several times about the project, and at the beginning, we were all very excited about it,” De Bont said back in 1997. “Then something happened—I think it had to do with the movie he was working on at the time, Chain Reaction—and Keanu started getting worried about all the physicality of this. In this movie, he needed to do all this stuff underwater, and I think that scared him.”