The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  The doctor wanted the sick crew to drink boxes of liquid charcoal, saying it would absorb the poison, whatever it was, from their digestive tracts. Cameron stood up in front of the group with a box of the black sludge and told them they had to drink it. His crew all grudgingly started glugging the charcoal cocktail. “Even when he was completely stoned,” Paxton says, “Jim was still the captain of the ship.” Feeling better and seeing there wasn’t much more he could do at the hospital, Cameron slipped out and headed back to the set. He and Paxton stayed up till dawn, talking about the bizarre night and sharing a six-pack of Budweiser. The workday had been ruined, but nobody had died. The next morning, Landau and Cameron started planning to finish shooting Stuart’s scene. Fortunately, the actress had eaten in a restaurant, so she hadn’t gotten dosed. A toxicology report came in, revealing that a pound of PCP had been dumped in the caterer’s soup. Conjecture swirled that it was a disgruntled worker’s revenge against the despotic director. Cameron’s theory, pieced together weeks later, is that a fired crew member had a beef with the caterer and had dumped PCP into the chowder to get the caterer fired, too. An investigation was inconclusive. No one knows who spiked the soup. It remains an unsolved mystery of Titanic.

  Smells Right

  When Cameron returned from Halifax, one of the first things he did was replace Deschanel, his director of photography. The two strong personalities had clashed, and Cameron wanted to switch to a DP with whom he felt more comfortable. He hired Russell Carpenter, who had taken his licks as the new kid on True Lies and then shot T2 3-D, a film that accompanies a Universal Studios ride, with Cameron. His first day on Titanic, Carpenter asked Cameron what the film should look like. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Everybody knows what these films look like.’” Not much had changed since the endless bathroom shootout scene on True Lies. Cameron still kept his cards close to his vest. The DP galloped off to the art department and scoured the artists’ renderings. Ironically, he also ended up screening Deschanel’s film The Natural for reference.

  Construction crews in Mexico had been working around the clock, and Cameron inspected the sets with pride. Everything was spanking new, just as it had been when Titanic sailed. Cameron stepped into a stateroom belonging to Rose and her imperious fiancé, Cal (played by Billy Zane), a gilded mahogany chamber that Lamont and his crew had labored to reproduce in all its opulence. “Smells right,” Cameron said approvingly. “I can shoot this.” It was as ringing an endorsement as one was going to get from this director. Lamont was thrilled. Of course, all his hard worked would eventually have to be sunk, but he could enjoy it now.

  The sets were so vast that the crew would often get lost in them and holler SOS calls over their walkie-talkies. “You’d say, ‘Uh, guys, I have no idea where I am. Somebody please come find me,’” Carpenter recalls. Eventually, the production created a zone system to minimize the disorientation. There were days, such as the filming of Titanic’s triumphant departure from its Southampton, England, port, when up to two thousand extras swarmed the set, some speaking English, some Spanish. Another scene called for nearly 1,500 people to run toward the aft portion of the tilted set at once, just as passengers had done on the sinking ship.

  The mechanics of the sinking itself were a technical marvel that Cameron accomplished with the help of Tommy Fisher, the physical effects supervisor who had been helping the director toss semis and blow up buildings since T2. The Titanic set, stood on its end, would be nearly as tall as New York City’s Woolworth Building. Cameron came up with the idea of lowering it on cables into a deep pit in the tank. At a meeting at Lightstorm, he sketched his idea on a napkin—cables would support a long platform with the set on it. The cables would run over pulleys connected to large hydraulic rams around the perimeter of the tank. By linking a computer to the rams, they could not only sink the set vertically but program the rams to tilt it at two different angles as it sank.

  Some of the most harrowing nights of shooting surrounded the tilting poop deck, an eighty-foot chunk of the set that would swing from horizontal to completely vertical, like a teeter-totter. It’s the poop deck to which DiCaprio and Winslet are clinging as they ride the ship down into the ocean. Once the poop deck was in its vertical position, one hundred stunt performers would be dangling and jumping from it. It was a massive undertaking that the stunt crew rehearsed six days a week for several weeks. The risks of messing up were grave—a performer could fall to an impact below or fall on another performer, or a piece of the set could break loose and fall on someone. Much of the set, such as the huge brass bollards and the intake ducts, were made from foam rubber or coated with a thin layer of foam neoprene—it was, Cameron said, a Nerf set. Most of the stunt players were locked in by cables connected to body harnesses. Some had to fall down the set into a bag. It wasn’t just the stunt performers who were tumbling down that deck. When Cameron and Muro were planning how they would shoot it, Muro recalls, “I said, ‘Jim, let’s grab the camera and slide down on our butts and fall into a pad down there.’ Then I thought about it and I got a little nervous. He says, ‘I’ll do it.’ He goes and puts on his knee pads. And he does it.”

  The tilting poop deck was, like so many Cameron action shoots, more organized than it looked. But one night, two falls went wrong. “Somebody zigged when they should have zagged,” says Cameron. A stuntman broke his leg and a stuntwoman missed her landing and hit a set piece, breaking a rib. Cameron began to feel that there was too much risk in what they were doing. He called Rob Legato, who was supervising the visual effects on the film at Digital Domain. Legato had told Cameron he was just on the verge of creating realistic CG people with motion capture, a technique in which the actions of human actors are recorded and used to animate digital character models. Before that, the technique had never been used to show a human looking like a human in a movie—it had been used to create a skeleton, a robot, or a knight in armor. “He called me up and said, ‘Can you really pull this off?’” Legato remembers. “He couldn’t do the stunts he wanted to do. He just couldn’t put anybody through that. He couldn’t get the scene. Now this portion of the movie he thought he could get in camera, he has to do CG.” Even though it would be months before he could prove it, Legato said, “Yeah, we can pull it off.” Cameron deleted a number of shots he had planned and shifted them to the as-yet-unproven technique of motion-capture digital stunt shots. It was another of his digital leaps of faith. “With what we can do now, there is absolutely no excuse for a stunt person to be injured making a movie,” Cameron says. “But at the time, we were still on the cusp of a lot of these techniques.”

  At the top of the tilting poop deck shot were Winslet and DiCaprio. Above them, Cameron was in a basket hanging from a construction crane with Muro, his Steadicam operator, both of them tied in by safety harnesses. The crane operator raised them on the cable at the speed Titanic was supposed to be sinking—fairly fast at that point—and they climbed past Winslet and DiCaprio, very close, and then rose up and up, making the actors appear to go down and down until the cameras were forty feet above them. That put Cameron and Muro more than a hundred feet up, swaying in the crane basket. “When the poop deck went to its peak, the guys jumped off and started bouncing off each other, bouncing off girders,” DiCaprio recalled. “Then you looked and saw, like, eighteen cranes with huge lights shining on you, and Jim Cameron coming from a little spot in the sky, zooming in past your close-up to the people diving below you. Kate and I looked at each other. Our eyes just bugged out and we said, ‘How did we get here? How did we get to this moment in time?’”5

  The Eighth Sunset

  After years of designing bleak future landscapes and grim alien planets, for the first time in his career Cameron was trying to create beauty. For his part, Carpenter was obsessing over the painterly lighting. He was particularly pleased by a scene in which Rose’s mother, played by Frances Fisher, adjusts Winslet’s corset, the warm light dancing on the actresses’ faces. But the DP held his breath while Cam
eron reviewed the scene in dailies. “Mmmhmm, mmhmm,” the inscrutable director said, pausing. “Well, Merchant Ivory can just kiss my ass.” It was a compliment, Jim Cameron style. They were getting there.

  Cameron was determined to capture the shot of Winslet and DiCaprio’s sunset kiss on the bow of the ship with a real sunset, not a green screen. He had eight days of shooting daylight scenes on the deck in which to accomplish it. An hour before dusk each night, Cameron would glance up at the dipping sun and decide whether to move the crew to the bow for the kiss, based on how promising the sky looked. But day after day ended with the sun dropping into the Pacific with no poetry to it at all. On one of the early, ugly days the crew walked through a full rehearsal anyway. Cameron told the actors how he wanted them to kiss, with DiCaprio standing behind Winslet, the actress turning toward him over her shoulder. They got the timing down, the hesitation, the surrender. Her hand went to his hair. It was beautiful—all except the bald sky.

  On the last possible day they could shoot the kiss, it had been mostly overcast all afternoon. An hour before sunset, dark clouds filled the sky, with a little, silvery opening at the horizon. It looked like another bust. But based on either hope or instinct, Cameron moved the crew to the bow. After a couple of false alarms earlier in the week, no one was moving very fast. They positioned the camera crane and placed some lights, added an orange gel to fake a sunset glow. “It all felt fairly cheesy and compromised, but I had to shoot something, and Fox was already coming unglued at how much time the shooting was taking,” Cameron says. Winslet went to change her wardrobe, typically a two-hour process due to her elaborate corset, makeup, and hair needs, but the beauty departments had been warned to make it fast tonight.

  Suddenly, as everyone was trudging along, the sun started to peek out. Cameron yelled for Winslet—now! Minutes later, she bustled out, her pit crew running alongside, pinning her dress and powdering her nose. The actors were lifted to the bow set on a platform, and Winslet climbed over the railing. Just then, the golden sun burst through the dark purple gray clouds and Winslet screamed, “Shoot! Shoot!” as she and DiCaprio leaped into their rehearsed positions. The focus puller hadn’t had a rehearsal. He was going to be winging it. Carpenter yelled for an adjustment to match the artificial light to the golden orange of the sun. There was no time for the wind machine, but a nice breeze was blowing, and from the right direction. Cameron, who was operating a camera by remote, cued the crane that carried it and yelled “action.” The camera closed in, and Winslet dropped her hands to DiCaprio’s at her waist and turned slightly toward him. DiCaprio leaned in, they hesitated a beat as rehearsed, and then closed for the kiss as the camera arced around them. “I could almost hear the score,” says Cameron. “My heart was pounding and I was trying not to blow the framing.” Just as the scene finished, the sun ducked behind a cloud. The sky stayed red, and they shot another take, but it lacked the magic of the first. The next day in dailies they learned that take one was “a little buzzed.” The focus was soft. But Cameron liked it. And that’s the take that’s in the movie. The image, the most remembered in Cameron’s career and one of the most iconic in cinema history, is actually a bit blurry. Later, they would return to shoot close-ups and add some visual effects for certain portions of the scene—to the point where the actors were sick to death of it. Winslet in particular had good reason to be. “Leo and I had this agreement where, if ever we had to do any kissing, we would say, ‘OK, we won’t smoke, no onions, no garlic, no coffee, OK? Deal.’”6 DiCaprio would then engage in all the forbidden activities right before the kiss scene. He became known as “stinky Leo.”

  Despite the brushing up that was done through special effects, in the end the memorable image was accomplished with the very low-tech combination of planning, teamwork, and luck. Reflecting on the serendipity of the shot, even Cameron, the industry’s biggest advocate for CG, wonders if something is lost in the perfectly controllable environment that computers now afford filmmakers. “We could do that sunset now easily as green screen,” he says, “and schedule it for Tuesday morning. But would I imagine that sunset? Those particular colors? Now we can create whatever we can imagine. But is our imagination up to the task? I don’t know.”

  Money Money Money

  The hundred-day Baja studio had been the beginning of Titanic‘s budget spinning out of control. Initially, Fox had planned to lease the land and slap up temporary structures, but when the studio attempted to finalize the lease terms, the landowner demanded that the studio buy it. Forced into purchasing the land, Fox had shifted quickly to building a permitted facility. That meant heavier construction costs and a change to many of the sets. At the same time, Cameron’s fixation on accuracy kept the art, prop, and costume departments churning through both time and money. Duplicating a model of Gilded Age excess turned out to be pretty excessive. “Some of it was Jim’s appetite, which was boundless,” Chernin says. Paramount, concerned about overages, had negotiated an agreement that capped its contribution at $65 million, leaving the heavy burden of the mounting budget on Fox’s shoulders alone. “I was clearly considered the stupidest person in Hollywood,” Chernin says.

  Once construction began, there were constant attempts to rein in spending. The elegant first-class lounge, where a sullen Rose was to take tea with her mother, would have cost $250,000 to reproduce with accuracy. Instead the short scene was filmed against a green screen, saving a six-digit sum. Great care had been taken to build the hydraulic set so it could change angles twice to represent two stages in the sinking. Cameron eliminated the middle jacking position and went only from level to six degrees—saving costly production days they would have lost waiting for the change in position. To approximate the other angle, he dutched the camera and had actors lean as they walked. “We did nothing but pare down,” says Sanchini. “Jim took a lot of heat for the overages on that film, but actually he did nothing but compromise.”

  There were some places where it was impossible to economize, like the lighting order, which was staggering. The ship had more than six hundred portholes, each requiring a light. Then there were the practical lights that were a part of the set—lamps on tables, sconces. Certain lights had to work above water, others below, and they all had to be safe and equipped with ground fault interrupters. The production placed an order for more than forty miles of cable, more than one thousand movie lights, and more than one thousand practical lights. “Fox sent us back a letter that said you’re ordering too much, you really don’t know how to manage your resources correctly, we’re going to send down experts,” Carpenter recalls. The studio dispatched two lighting veterans, who walked the ship and came back to Carpenter at the end of the day. “Their conclusion was, you don’t have enough lights,” the DP says.

  Media buzz on the movie began to swirl around Cameron’s apparent ravenousness with money. Variety launched a regular “Titanic Watch” column to detail the set’s excesses, and Time ran a piece headlined “Glub, Glub, Glub … Can James Cameron’s Extravagant Titanic Avoid Disaster?” It didn’t help that Waterworld, Kevin Costner’s $170 million high-seas adventure released in July 1995, was widely regarded as a costly misfire. Early efforts to market Titanic were challenging, too, including finding enough material to present at ShoWest, the Las Vegas convention of theater exhibitors, in March 1997. Almost none of the special-effects shots were done. It was decided to use a long, linear trailer instead of a bunch of quick-cut scenes. On a Sunday night, before she was to view the material, Sanchini got a call from a studio executive at Paramount. “I just saw the trailer, and I’m throwing up on my shoes,” he told her. Paramount was expecting something Cameron-esque—chases, explosions—not a little old lady narrating a story about a necklace. Meanwhile, the production was dragging way behind schedule. Meant to take 135 days to shoot, Titanic would actually require 165 days of production. Titanic the movie appeared to be mirroring Titanic the ship—a creation that was far too large, a product of man’s hubris barreling toward an iceberg
.

  Cameron tuned out the media hum, but the budget pressures weighed on him. “I felt very strongly that I had let these guys down,” Cameron says of Fox. “I had told them I would do it for a certain amount of money, and I’d failed to deliver on that.” In a series of exchanges during the making of the movie, Cameron kept offering to give Fox back money, first his front-end fee, then his entire share of the back end. Twentieth Century Fox president Bill Mechanic, the unfortunate Fox executive charged with reining the production in, told Cameron the back-end offer was a noble but ultimately hollow gesture, because the film would never see a dime of profit. He countered by suggesting that Cameron should not only surrender all his points on Titanic but give back half his points on the next film he did for Fox. This conversation happened in Cameron’s living room. Mechanic’s counteroffer didn’t go over well. “Get the fuck out of my house,” Cameron replied. The director rescinded his offer of the back-end points. “Nobody ever gives back money in Hollywood,” says Chernin, Mechanic’s boss at the time. “On the one hand, Jim was killing us. On the other hand, here was a man of great conscience.” In the end, the filmmaker and his studio agreed on one thing. “We kept saying, ‘Our only hope is to make a great movie,’” Chernin says.

  Killing Off the Captain

  As the shoot ground into months five, six, and seven, everyone was exhausted. The sinking sequences, wet and dangerous, were particularly taxing. Cameron was taking vitamin B12 shots and drinking wheat-grass to keep up his strength—he had sworn off caffeine on an earlier film, finding it just exaggerated his already intense personality. At first, the crew had staggered around the tanks in hip waders, but they had soon realized that if they tripped on a cable or a sandbag and their waders filled with water, they were doomed, so many had switched to wet suits.