The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  Jack and Rose

  Cameron’s script called for the two leads to be quite young—Rose De-Witt Bukater is seventeen and Jack Dawson twenty. For the director, it was important that Titanic be a story of first love. “There is no purer, more consuming love than first love,” Cameron explains. “For many of us, it is the most heightened experience we will have.” But as written, Jack and Rose would pose perhaps the biggest challenge a young actor could face in 1995—a traditional character. They were retrograde roles, the kind that would have been played by Audrey Hepburn or Jimmy Stewart, actors who didn’t need to chew scenery or suffer inner torment to transfix audiences. They could dazzle without appearing to do a thing.

  Having discovered Edward Furlong for Cameron on True Lies, Titanic casting director Mali Finn had a nose for young talent. The first part she tackled was Rose. It was through Rose’s eyes that the audience would be experiencing Titanic, and the actress who played her would need to be elegant, spunky, and strong. Finn was pushing for twenty-one-year-old rising star Kate Winslet. After her screen debut as a murderous schoolgirl in Peter Jackson’s creepy Heavenly Creatures, Winslet had played a number of notable roles, including in an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility that had earned her an Academy Award nomination at the tender age of twenty. An abundance of period work had earned Winslet the nickname Corset Kate, a major deterrent for Cameron. He likes to discover things, including actors, and lacing Corset Kate up again in period costume struck him as lazy, unoriginal casting. But at Finn’s urging, he met Winslet and filmed a screen test in a small period set the crew had hastily knocked together for the purpose. He was immediately bewitched by the graceful, unaffected young woman. “She was amazing to watch,” Cameron says. “Poised, imperious, vulnerable, raw, tragic, and with the inner steel she would need to convince us all that she could survive that night, in both body and spirit.” Cameron felt quite confident he had found his Rose, but he needed to be sure she had chemistry with the actor who would play Jack.

  The search for Jack led the production to all the young heartthrobs of the moment, including studio suggestions like Matthew McConaughey and Chris O’Donnell. Cameron didn’t see twenty-two-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio as manly enough for the role. “He seemed scrawny and lightweight, not a leading man and not that attractive,” Cameron says. But based on the strength of DiCaprio’s performances as Johnny Depp’s mentally handicapped brother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and a heroin-addicted high-school athlete in The Basketball Diaries, the director invited him to a meeting at Lightstorm. Curiously, Cameron noticed that all of his female office staff chose to attend the meeting, even the accountant and the secretaries. He seated the actor next to the window so he could study how the sunlight played on DiCaprio’s face. As the young man quickly charmed the room, especially the females, “I started to get a glimmer that he might be something,” Cameron says.

  After the meeting, Cameron flew Winslet in from the set of Kenneth Branaghs Hamlet in England, where she was playing Ophelia, and arranged for her and DiCaprio to read together. DiCaprio had earned his first Oscar nomination at nineteen for Gilbert Grape and had just been cast in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. He was starting to get some serious heat in Hollywood and wasn’t especially interested in what looked to him to be a conventional romance. He was also a bit of a punk. When the actor showed up and Cameron handed him the script pages, DiCaprio declared, “I don’t read.” Cameron shook the young actor’s hand, thanked him for coming, and walked away. “Wait,” DiCaprio said. “You mean if I don’t read I’m not even being considered?” Cameron made his policy clear—he doesn’t cast anyone without seeing him work.

  Reluctantly, DiCaprio agreed to play a scene with Winslet. He slouched into the rehearsal room, lit up a cigarette, and glanced at the script pages disdainfully. Sprawling on a couch, the actor turned to face Winslet. Cameron called action, and DiCaprio became Jack. “He transformed in a split second to the guy you see in the movie,” Cameron says. “He was riveting. He was the guy I wrote. And you could see Kate respond, how it sparked her performance. It was instant chemistry and instant character creation.” Just as abruptly, it ended, and DiCaprio slumped back onto the couch. After the scene, Winslet whispered to Cameron, “Even if you don’t hire me, you have to hire him.” The director let Winslet know she had the part. On her way back to England, she sent Cameron a single red rose and signed the card, “Your Rose.”

  DiCaprio had spent fifteen minutes auditioning for Cameron. For the next three months, the director would be auditioning for him. Jack was a role most actors in Hollywood would have been dying to play Tom Cruise’s agent had even inquired about it. But DiCaprio didn’t really want it. He didn’t like the character or Cameron’s script. “I just wasn’t used to playing an openhearted, free-spirited guy,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve played more tortured roles in the past. It was difficult to be someone closer to me than anyone else.”4 Fox, meanwhile, didn’t want to pay the actor the four million dollars his agent was demanding and was interested in then-bigger stars O’Donnell and McConaughey And since DiCaprio hadn’t allowed Cameron to tape his reading with Winslet, there were no witnesses to the miracle of the young actor’s creation of Jack. Now Cameron was running out of time. He needed to set his leads, get the green light from the studio, and start building that boat. He met with DiCaprio once more. “I don’t think you’re right for this,” Cameron told him. “You keep looking for a problem, an addiction, a limp. You’re doing what you know, what you’ve gotten acclaim for, playing a retard, an addict. You’re looking for an acting crutch.” Cameron wanted DiCaprio to see Jack as a character who in the past would have been played by Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper, an actor who could make a plain old decent guy so compelling that he owned the screen. “When you can do that, then you are a man, my son. You want to do something more challenging? Believe me, this is the hardest part you will ever play.” Only when he thought of the role as difficult in its own right did DiCaprio decide to take it. There were no real stars in Cameron’s cast by design. The only diva would be the ship herself. And he wanted every penny up on-screen. Winslet earned under $1 million for her role, DiCaprio $2.5 million for his. Cameron’s biggest name was Kathy Bates as the unsinkable Molly Brown. For Bates to get her $500,000 fee on the film, Cameron would have to kick in $150,000 of his own.

  The Hundred-Day Studio

  Although Twentieth Century Fox had helped fund the dives, by the spring of 1996 Chernin had yet to green-light the film formally. It was already becoming clear that Cameron’s initial estimate of $80 million for Titanics budget was too conservative. Feeling they didn’t have a very commercial movie on their hands, Cameron and Sanchini went to the studio with an unusual proposal. Titanic would be a labor of love for Cameron, not a chance for a big payday. He would take a cut both to his front-end fee and to his share of the movie’s gross box-office receipts. Under the deal, if Titanic grossed progressively higher levels, Cameron could catch up. But he would get his full back end only if the movie performed at a very high level of profitability for Fox. On May 28, Chernin green-lighted Titanic at $110 million, provided the director agree to a few things—a PG-13 rating, another studio partner to share the risk, and a summer 1997 release date. The first two would be relatively easy to honor—the raciest moment in the movie would be Kate Winslet posing for a tasteful nude sketch. And Paramount Pictures would eagerly sign on as Titanics domestic distributor, leaving Fox with the international rights. But the very ambitious release date, just over a year away, would be a tricky commitment to keep.

  Cameron had already begun to scout shooting locations with Jon Landau, whom he had hired as a producer after True Lies. They first discussed building the set at a shipyard in Poland, where marine fabrication was cheap, craning it in pieces onto a container ship, and then cruising around in the Baltic while they filmed. The director was taken with the light at that northern latitude—the same light deployed so gorgeously by Sven Nyquist, Ingmar Bergman�
��s longtime cinematographer. But he wasn’t just going to be sailing Titanic; he would be sinking her, which would require a tank. By building the tank set on a seashore, they could rely on distant ocean, sky, and natural sunlight to make the deck scenes look real and camera panning to create the appearance of movement. Cameron and Landau started to hunt for a low bluff within a hundred feet of the ocean with a clear horizon and no islands or busy shipping lanes. The director had long been interested in exploring shooting in Mexico. His theory was that you could use the cheaper labor available there for construction and film crews but get the advantages of being close to L.A. So he brought a model of Titanic and some key members of his production team down to a cliff near the rundown resort town of Rosarito, Mexico, just half an hour south of the U.S. border. Landau was there, along with a half dozen others, including Cameron’s new assistant director, Josh McLaglen, and Peter Lamont, the British production designer on Aliens and True Lies, who had just put off retirement for a chance to build the grandest set of his career. Cameron set the model ship up on a table to see how the light and shadows moved across it at different times of day. He made smoke and watched how the wind took it, studying it for hours, videoing the deck and superstructure from different angles to make sure all the shots he needed would be possible. It was a long day that would determine just where Fox would invest a huge sum of money—and where Cameron and the construction and film crews would spend several taxing months of their lives. His production team waited expectantly to learn what their mercurial director would decide. “We got down to Rosarito in the morning, and Jim hated the site,” Lamont recalls. “By the time we left in the evening, he loved it. He’s a very strange cat.” At one point, Cameron didn’t like the background view, so he dragged the table about a hundred feet north, to the top of a low rise. Someone informed him that he had moved onto a different parcel of land. “Then we need to buy this one, too,” he said.

  Less than two weeks after Chernin’s green light, thousands of Mexican and American construction workers descended on that patch of dirt on the Baja peninsula to build the first major Hollywood studio constructed since the 1930s. Fox had decided to make the beachfront tanks and stages a permanent asset of the studio, a site to be known as Fox Studios Baja. Crews had only one hundred days to hammer together a forty-acre facility with five soundstages, the world’s largest outdoor filming tank, the world’s largest indoor filming tank, the world’s tallest soundstage, a wardrobe building, an actor’s building, offices, and mills. And in not much longer than that brief window of time, the crews were building a facsimile of Titanic that was nearly as big and grand as the original ship, a monument to Gilded Age excess that had taken fourteen thousand men more than three years to construct. Cameron and Lamont had designed a ten-story, 775-foot version of Titanic. The set was 100 percent to scale but shortened by about ninety feet by removing some small, repetitive sections in the middle so the ship would fit on the land Fox owned. The height of the decks and the size of the doors, portholes, and boat davits were all accurate. This Titanic was finished on one side only—to convey the illusion of the other side, Cameron would flip the film picture, requiring every sign, uniform, and logo to be created in mirror image. The construction schedule was so tight that the sets were often being built concurrently with the soundstages that housed them—Lamont’s crews hammered away on the dining room and grand staircase while workers finished the roof over their heads. Every weekend a new building went up, like a gold-rush town.

  The sets themselves were exquisite and authentic right down to the sconces and the carpets. The china and furniture in the first-class dining room were faithfully reproduced, with enough settings for five hundred people. There was a degree of obsession in Cameron’s dedication to the details, from the ship’s stationery to its White Star Line–stamped ashtrays. He had always been a stickler for the little things, but diving the Titanic wreck had infused him with a messianic meticulousness. The end result was grand-scale craftsmanship of the kind Hollywood hadn’t seen since Vivian Leigh swept down Tara’s staircase in Gone with the Wind. Because there were very few existing photos of the actual Titanic interior, the sets were mostly based on its sister ship, Olympic. At one point, Lamont had four art departments working on the film, one in England, one in Mexico City, one in Rosarito, and one at Light-storm in Santa Monica. The book by Ken Marschall and Don Lynch that Cameron had used to sell the movie to Chernin became the set bible, and its authors were invited aboard to walk the decks and survey the construction. The grand staircase was made with real oak columns and paneling, its carved balustrades molded from pieces of the Olympic that Marschall had collected over decades and loaned to the production. When the artist stood at the foot of the staircase he had studied as a painter, so faithfully and beautifully reproduced, he nearly wept.

  Who Ate the Chowder?

  While construction continued in Rosarito, the contemporary Titanic scenes would be shot back on the Keldysh off the coast of Halifax. Cameron had some old friends aboard, including Bill Paxton playing the treasure hunter, Brock; his dive buddy Lewis Abernathy as Brock’s sidekick; and his trusted Steadicam operator, Jimmy Muro. He also had some new colleagues to get to know, including cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, whose idyllic lighting on The Natural and The Right Stuff made him seem a perfect hire for Cameron’s first period film. Deschanel had begun to direct himself, however, and as a DP was accustomed to working with filmmakers who left him alone with his light meter while they worried about the actors. The partnership wasn’t a natural fit for a photographically hands-on director like Cameron. Another feisty newcomer to Cameron’s circle was Gloria Stuart, there to play the character of Old Rose, Kate Winslet’s hundred-year-old counterpart. A once-glamorous blonde who had been a favorite of classic horror director James Whale, appearing for him in The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House, Stuart had been off the Hollywood radar for decades. Acerbic and prickly at times, the eighty-six-year-old would be one of the few people on the set who successfully pushed back at Cameron. One night, the director wasn’t ready to shoot her close-up until 3:00 a.m. When Landau knocked on Stuart’s trailer door, Paxton recalls, “she said, ‘How dare you?’ She read Jim and Jon the riot act. They were cowed by her.” Producer and director decided to let Stuart have her beauty sleep and film the close-up another night.

  On what was supposed to be their last day of shooting in Nova Scotia, Cameron enjoyed a big bowl of the caterer’s mussel chowder. After the meal break, the director was back on set with his AD, Josh McLaglen, lining up a shot of Stuart, when a female stand-in’s eyes rolled back and she fell to the floor. Suddenly, Cameron also began to feel woozy. He immediately flashed on the bowl of chowder he’d just eaten and asked the set medic for some ipecac, so he could induce vomiting. “I’m figuring maybe I can chuck this out and not have to lose the day,” Cameron says. The medic didn’t have any, so Cameron stalked off to the men’s room upstairs, bottle of water in hand, to induce vomiting the hard way. He succeeded, but the violent purging left his eyes as red as a Terminator’s. When Cameron returned to the set, no one was there. And the director was starting to feel very odd. “It was like the Twilight Zone,” he says. “And I’m processing information very slowly now. I know I need to get out of the set, but I can’t seem to remember how.” Finally, a grip walked in and led Cameron to the dining area, where the whole crew was gathered. McLaglen was dividing them into two groups—“Good crew over here!” he said, waving to one side. “Bad crew over here!” At this point, bad crew—those feeling nauseous, dizzy, and disoriented, as Cameron was—consisted of about seventy-five people, 90 percent of the unit. When Cameron staggered in with his blood-red eyes, the crew really started to worry. He had been the first in the chow line. “They figured I was what they were all going to look like soon, like it was some kind of zombie virus,” he says.

  The teamsters—who must have skipped the chowder—started whisking the crew to the nearby hospital in vans. Cameron and his sickly party
of seventy-five descended on a Canadian emergency room with one nurse and one doctor. And then things got really strange. People began moaning, crying, wailing, and collapsing on tables and gurneys. Deschanel, the DP, was leading a number of crew members down the hall in a highly vocal conga line. Muro, the Steadicam operator, was demanding to speak to a priest. Cameron was beginning to suspect a street drug was to blame and told Landau his theory. The producer, who hadn’t had the chowder, patted Cameron on the knee, humoring him, thinking he was out of it. At this point, doctors were suspecting shellfish poisoning. Cameron looked up to see his second AD, Kristie Sills, talking to the doctors, giving them the names of various crew members. Realizing that she was also sick but was acting as the point person instead of getting treated herself, Cameron reached for his walkie-talkie. “Kristie, what’s your twenty?” he said. Sills pulled her walkie from her hip and crisply replied, “I’m at the hospital, talking to the doctors.” She was ten feet away, looking right at Cameron. “And what are you telling them?” he asked. Still staring right at her boss’s face, she responded that she was giving them the names of the crew. “Kristie, you know you’re talking to me on your walkie,” Cameron said. “And I’m standing right in front of you. You’re just as fucked up as we are.” At that point, Sills leaped across the gap between them and stabbed Cameron in the face with her pen. The hospital staff tackled her and dragged her off, and Cameron sat, bleeding and laughing. Sills’s drug-induced stabbing didn’t stop Cameron from hiring her on his next Halifax-based film, Ghosts of the Abyss.