Letters were exchanged and visas granted, and just weeks later, in August 1992, Cameron found himself in Moscow with Giddings, meeting Dr. Anatoly Sagalevitch and his team at the P. P Shirshov Institute of Oceanology From Moscow the filmmakers flew on an Aeroflot shuttle to Kaliningrad, the industrial home port of the Keldysh, where Cameron was given a tour of the research vessel and treated to Russian hospitality—lots of vodka and a few of the captain’s heartfelt songs accompanied by his guitar. As he sat on the great Russian ship, Cameron had no idea that over the next eleven years he would spend ten months of his life there and dive in the Mirs more than fifty times, to depths as great as three miles. On the 1992 trip, Cameron, Giddings, and Sagalevitch discussed how they could mount a 35 mm movie camera in a titanium housing on the front of the sub, where it would go, and how the lights would work. They talked about how the expedition could be organized and financed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Sagalevitch’s funding had been slashed to almost zero, and he was eager to dive again, even for something as unscientific as a feature film. After many vodka toasts, Sagalevitch and Cameron agreed to work together on something never done before, a Hollywood movie shot miles under the ocean, for real.
Cameron would make True Lies before revisiting the idea of diving Titanic. At any given time, the director has multiple movie ideas, scripts, and treatments saved on his computer or tucked in his desk. Which movie he makes next is decided intuitively based on themes that interest him at the moment, what he needs financially to pull it off, and what new technical or dramatic territories he wants to explore. Often those closest to him, like Lightstorm president Rae Sanchini, simply wait for word of Cameron’s choice. After True Lies, the director was weighing Titanic against another film. “I had a lot of doubts about Titanic,” he says. “Could it be done? Could the deep dive filming be done? Could we create the technology? Would anyone want to see it?” While he was ruminating, he received a fax from Sagalevitch that read, “It is sometimes necessary in life to do something extraordinary.” In Cameron’s mind the line seemed to glow on the page. “Yes, I realized, sometimes you have to do something extraordinary. Something crazy. I called Rae and told her we were doing Titanic. And that was that.”
Love Stories
Cameron is fond of saying that all his movies are love stories, and it’s true—the apocalypse-straddling romance of the Terminator films, Ripley’s maternal love in Aliens, the stale marriages rekindled by potential nuclear annihilation in The Abyss and True Lies. But he had never made a movie in which the love story was the primary reason for the film. And nothing entices him so much as virgin territory. As he had after T2, Cameron began to contemplate a logistically simpler film after True Lies. He told his friend director Guillermo del Toro, “I want to do a small movie next, to prove to people I’m not just about giant movies, about spectacle. I’m gonna do a love story.” Del Toro, believing his friend really was looking for an intimate-scale tale to tell, recommended Cameron read Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the poignant novel about a deaf-mute and a teenage tomboy living in a small Georgia town in the 1930s. Many months later, Cameron would go back to his friend. “Jim said, ‘I’m writing my love story. Do you want to read it?’” del Toro recalls. “‘It happens on the Titanic.’” So much for small.
To Cameron, diving the Titanic wreck was paramount, making a movie incidental. Wreck diving had been a passion of his for years—he loved the romance and the mystery of these human tragedies buried under the sea. And this was the chance to dive the Mount Everest of shipwrecks. “I’m an explorer at heart, a filmmaker by trade,” he says. “There is nothing that Hollywood can offer more tantalizing or powerful than the chance to explore a place nobody has ever seen.” Cameron found the class- and gender-driven math of survival on Titanic fascinating—a woman in first class had a 97 percent chance of living through that bitter-cold night in the North Atlantic in 1912, while a man in steerage had a 16 percent chance. To fund his adventure, Cameron would write a tale of a tragic, life-and-death romance. He would center his story on a first-class female and a third-class male. If great love stories are made of overcoming obstacles, death is surely the biggest obstacle of all. At this point, Cameron figured his love story would cost about $80 million to make, a modest budget by his own record-breaking standards and $40 million less than True Lies had cost. After all, he had to be realistic about the box-office potential of a long, period film where everybody knows the ending—1,500 people die—and there’s no chance for a sequel. There would be no big stars, no car chases, no aliens, nothing audiences had come to expect from Cameron and nothing that obviously spelled success.
In March 1995, Cameron made a simple pitch in the office of Twentieth Century Fox president Peter Chernin. The director had nothing written down. Instead, he brought Titanic: An Illustrated History, a coffee-table book of paintings of the sinking ship by artist Ken Marschall with text by Titanic historian Don Lynch. Cameron flipped to the centerfold image of the ocean liner, lights blazing, bow underwater, lifeboats departing into the black night, and said, “Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic.” That’s all. Titanic was sold, essentially, with one sentence. “Making Titanic was hell,” Chernin recalls, fourteen years after this meeting. “It was as difficult a production as ever happened in the history of Hollywood. Every day I thought I was going to get fired. But my private creative interactions on that film were hands down the best experience of my career, starting with that meeting.” Cameron and Chernin would spend the next few hours discussing the dramatic potential of the Titanic story and the flashback structure Cameron planned to employ. But Cameron’s real sales job would come on the issue of diving the wreck, his primary reason for wanting to make the film in the first place. Before he could climb into one of the Russian subs, the director had to convince Chernin the dives were a crucial part of making the movie. Cameron said he needed the underwater shots of the wreck regardless of whether he captured them for real or created them with CG special effects, and shooting for real would be, if not cheaper, at least not much more expensive than CG. Cameron proposed that the expedition be charged at least partly to the marketing budget, for it would attract more publicity than trotting the cast around the talk-show circuit. At $4 million, the dive budget was relatively minor compared to the kind of preproduction commitments studios make on other films on a regular basis to buy a script or commit an actor. Nevertheless, “there were a few eyebrows raised,” concedes Sanchini. “They didn’t even have a script at that time.”
Planet Ice
Like The Abyss, making Titanic would be a feat of engineering as much as art. The first step in photographing the wreck would be building a 35 mm movie camera that could function at thirteen thousand feet underwater, where the pressure is about five thousand pounds per square inch, enough to crush a scuba tank like a beer can. Prior to Cameron’s shoot, all film work at that depth had been accomplished via the crude method of poking a lens up to the view port of a submersible. Cameron wanted a camera outside the sub that he could pan and tilt and maneuver cinematically. In addition to the camera itself, he would need a remote device and a camera housing. For the task, the director recruited his engineer brother, Mike, who had built the SeaWasp diver-propulsion vehicle used on The Abyss. The Titanic shoot would also require an ROV like the kind Ballard had used in his 1986 dive of the wreck. Cameron conceived of his ROV, which he would name Snoop Dog, as a movie prop more than anything. The little robot would be a character in the present-day section of the film. He promised himself he wouldn’t really go inside the wreck with it. But Snoop Dog would still need to function as a camera-carrying robot in the deep ocean. For that job, he hired Western Space and Marine, the Santa Barbara company that had manufactured the helmets on The Abyss. The race to get the equipment ready was on. The American engineers and the Russian scientists had strikingly different working styles, however. At one point, Mike Cameron faxed Sagalevitch a list of thirty questions about the electrical schemati
cs of the subs. Sagalevitch returned it two days later, saying simply, “Mike, Mir has big power. No problem.”2
In August, the Keldysh scientists and Cameron’s crew began to arrive in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the port from which they would depart on their journey to Titanic. At this point, the project was referred to as Planet Ice—except for a handful of executives at Fox, and the scientists, engineers, and crew involved with the expedition, no one knew a major Hollywood director was boarding a Russian research vessel en route to filming the real Titanic. The largest research ship in the world, the 422-foot-long Keldysh could house a crew of 130 and boasted a pool, a basketball court, and multiple stills for making vodka.3 Not many years before Cameron’s journey, the KGB had bugged the ship. In the new era of openness, the sound system was used for broadcasting music at parties. Cameron wasn’t much interested in the Keldysh‘s recreational options. He had a conference room converted into a projection suite where he could examine test footage from shallow dives. His crew had brought on board detailed models of the shipwreck and the Mirs, and Cameron and the Russian pilots spent hours practicing maneuvers around the model Titanic, Cameron operating a lipstick-sized camera and the Russians steering their tiny subs. The model sessions weren’t just child’s play—it could take ten hours to get down in the sub to the shooting location, and Cameron would only have twelve minutes of film once he got there. Preparation was crucial, or precious time and costly dives would be wasted.
On the morning of September 8, 1995, Cameron folded his long limbs into the seven-foot-wide cockpit of Mir 1, next to Sagalevitch and a Russian engineer. The three men would share the claustrophobic quarters for the next fourteen hours on their journey to Titanic and back. About the length of a flight from New York to Tokyo, this trip would include no cocktail service or reclining seats, and the bathroom was a plastic bag, which the Russians took pride in never needing. Cameron conserved his energy on the ride to the bottom, napping, reading, and gazing out the small view-port window as the water outside darkened from green to blue. By nine hundred feet, it was completely black. … Just 11,600 more to go. At the surface, the air in the sub had been hot and humid, but as they descended, it grew colder, eventually reaching just above freezing. The men layered on extra clothes they had packed, drank some tea, and began to prepare for their landing. Once they reached the bottom, they located the wreck using sonar, a new type the Russian pilot was still learning to use. Sitting in the pitch darkness, they knew Titanic was ahead of them … somewhere. The Mir was roughly the size of a cement mixer, and Sagalevitch was piloting it by looking out a window six inches in diameter. There was no way to see behind them, to the sides, or above. And they were maneuvering near an enormous wreck—a mass of twisted, jagged steel and draped cables, traps that could snag the sub and pin them to the bottom of the ocean until they suffered a lingering demise by hypothermia. The constant threat of imminent death, incidentally, made the dive terribly fun for Cameron.
First they came upon a mound of clay taller than the sub. Sagalevitch rose up to climb over the mound, and the silt from the thrusters swirled around the ports, blocking their view. When the silt cleared, Cameron got his first look at her—Titanic—a black wall of steel, covered in rivets, coming straight at him about ten feet ahead. They were too close, moving too fast. Sagalevitch hit full thrust back and up, and sediment again swirled in front of the view port. Cameron braced himself for a crash. But instead, the Mir sailed over a guardrail right onto the deck of the ship. The pilot set the sub down, gingerly, and everyone froze. They looked at one another, stunned. They were sitting on top of Titanic. They had seen the ship just in time to avert a head-on collision. “This is when I realized that deep-ocean wreck diving was not a precise science,” Cameron says. His memorization of the wreck, from studying diagrams, deck plans, and the practice model, came in handy immediately. “I was like an astronaut landing on the moon,” he says. “I had prepared and trained myself for the moment so rigorously that I knew the layout of the wreck cold.” When the silt cleared, he was able to discern that they were on the port aft end of the forecastle, looking out over the forward well deck, facing aft on the port side. Sagalevitch lifted up, and they started to explore. In the Mir’s lights, Cameron looked out the view port at the very spot on the deck where the band had played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the water rose over the rails. “It was like a dream,” he says. “I was so pumped and adrenalized and goal oriented that I immediately turned to filming the wreck.” He was working from a shot list that required the other sub, Mir 2, to get in precise positions and rake its lights over the decks or the hull. So they went to work. No time for sightseeing. It wasn’t until Cameron was back on the Keldysh, safe in his cabin that night, that he began to grasp that he had just sailed through the coffin of 1,517 people. He started to shake, and tears came to his eyes. “The enormity of the tragedy, the loss of life, the horror of what it must have been like hit me,” Cameron says. “It was a deeply emotional place, but my reaction was delayed. I made a vow to myself at that moment to stop being an astronaut and to honor the place, and the event, by making time on every dive to take the wreck in.”
There would be eleven more dives before the expedition was finished. Eventually, Cameron couldn’t resist the opportunity to take Snoop Dog inside the wreck. Roving around inside the bones of the great ship, he saw once-luxurious suites overgrown with deep-sea animals, a woodwork fireplace with a crab crawling over the hearth, silt streaming through intricate bronze-grille doors. The footage would be used not only for the present-day re-creation of the Titanic wreck, but also for the period Titanic. “It set a level of excellence for the rest of the movie,” Cameron says. “Sets and costumes had to live up to the example set by visiting the real wreck.”
The worst of the dives came to be known as “the bottom storm.” On Cameron’s third trip down to Titanic, an unusually rapid current swirled the sediment, dropping visibility to less than ten feet and shoving the Mir around like a pebble at the beach. Sea stars bounced across the ocean floor like tumbleweeds. The veteran Mir pilot had never seen the odd and dangerous conditions before—it was like a sandstorm at the bottom of the ocean. But Cameron still wanted to shoot. At forty thousand dollars per dive, he couldn’t conceive of wasting the trip. The poor visibility prevented him from filming any wide shots, but he could capture close-ups of anchors and portholes. At one point the turbulence kicked up so strongly that it blew the nickel-steel sub right off the wreck and set it down more than a hundred yards from the ship. The sub had landed in the lee of Titanic, which shielded it from the current so the Mir 1 crew could idle on the bottom and ponder what to do next while Sagalevitch held them in place with the thrusters. They had been utterly focused on jockeying around the wreck in the storm and not watching their power levels, which had been drained due to the extreme conditions. “Anatoly said, ‘Oh, no,’ something you never want to hear a pilot say, and we locked eyes for a second,” Cameron recalls. Then each began shutting down power to his respective systems. They needed to abort the dive immediately, and the pilot started pumping ballast with what remained of the power. As the sub lightened, it rose sluggishly, the wheeee-chung, wheeee-chung noise of its power winding down. Finally, Mir 1 gave a last feeble cough and stopped. They were rising at only a few feet per minute and dead out of power. Cameron saw the bottom falling away with agonizing slowness. At this speed, Mir 1 might need ten hours to ascend. But at least they were going up. When they reached eighty feet from the bottom, however, the sub stopped and started to descend again. “I thought, ‘What the fuck? That’s not supposed to happen,’” Cameron says. They bumped back down on the ocean floor.
Stuck two miles from the surface in a storm, the Mir crew thought the battery might get enough of a bounce to run the ballast pump a little if it was given a break. So they sat in the dark, waiting, no one saying a word for half an hour. It seemed entirely possible Titanic was about to claim another three victims. Eventually, the pilot tested the pump. It g
roaned a few weak strokes and then quit, but they started to rise again. Curiously, at eighty feet, again they stopped, falling back to the bottom with a clunk. They sat for another half hour and tried again. What the Mir 1 crew didn’t know was that they were in a kind of downdraft caused by the current blowing over the huge shipwreck. Each time they rose, they would hit the downdraft and get thrown back to the bottom. But each time they were blown a little farther from the wreck. On the third try, Cameron held his breath as they got to eighty feet and slowed … and then kept rising. Soon their rate sped up a bit, though they were still traveling at snail’s pace. A normal ascent would have taken them two and a half hours from that depth. At this rate, they would reach the surface in about ten hours. It was going to be a long, cold, dark return. Sagalevitch started pulling up the floor of the sub. He reached his arm down in the darkness and grabbed a handle. “Maybe we should release some emergency ballast,” Cameron recalls the pilot saying. “What? We have emergency ballast? And we’d had it all along!? I said, ‘Yes, by all means, let’s drop some emergency ballast.’” They began to rise a little faster. It would be only five hours to the surface.
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