The actors faced their own challenges in their own ways. “Leo was such a pussy he wanted heated water,” says Muro. “And Kate needed the cold water for her performance. So there was a big difference.” In the six-foot pool, where DiCaprio and Winslet were to be desperately scrambling for their lives, DiCaprio, who is about six feet tall, would stand. Winslet, breathless, never let her feet touch the ground. “He was such a little funny kid punk,” recalls Muro. “And she was so mature. He would draw the youth out of her and she would bring some maturity to him.” DiCaprio made such a production about getting into the water that Cameron called him a Persian cat. “He’d put one foot in, then pull it out and complain about the temperature, then slowly, over a minute or so, slip down into the water, whinging the entire time,” Cameron says. “It was ridiculously dramatic. I just figured he hated water.” Actually, DiCaprio turned out to be an accomplished scuba diver who didn’t bat an eye at a treacherous underwater sequence where he had a rope around his waist pulling him into the depths. He would later say that filming Titanic “made a man out of me.”7
Winslet, more stoic during the shoot, may have felt its rigors more acutely. During one sequence where she and DiCaprio were to be rushing along the flooding ship, blocked by a closed gate, the actress’s long coat snagged the gate, submerging her and keeping her under. “I had to sort of shimmy out of the coat to get free,” she said. “I had no breath left. I thought I’d burst. And Jim just said, ‘OK, let’s go again.’ That was his attitude. I didn’t want to be a wimp so I didn’t complain.” Though Winslet was not in physical danger—there were safety divers to swim to her rescue—she was badly shaken. “For the first time in my life on a film set I was thinking, ‘I wish I wasn’t here.’ Some days I’d wake up and think, ‘Please, God, let me die.’ “8
By the end, Cameron felt the same way. He shot through the 164th day of production, that night, and into the following day, his last. By 10:00 a.m. he and his crew had worked around the clock and he was left with one task—to kill off Captain Smith. The crew had built a “caisson set” of the captain’s bridge, an air-filled set that is below water level that you access through the top. The set was placed deep enough that the bridge windows were fifteen feet down, which pushed a ton and a half of force against each of the several windows. Electrically fired squibs would shatter the tempered glass of the windows.
The Polish stuntman doubling as the captain was named Pavel Cajzl. They called him Plastic Pavel because apparently he would bend but not break. Cajzl was rigged with two separate air supplies, a “hookah” regulator, which was plumbed up the inside of his leg, and a spare-air tank under his coat. Cameron’s experience with a similar set on The Abyss was that the second the water rushed in, it would pick up dirt, rust, and debris and suspend it in a filthy broth that was impossible to see through. If Cajzl didn’t have his own air source, he would drown, because the safety crew wouldn’t be able to see anything in the murk. The only other person in the set was Cameron, who was going to operate the only manned camera. He had a bail-out hatch right above him and was standing with his back against the wall of the set, wearing scuba gear and hockey pads on his legs, over his wet suit, in case the water forced the window glass into the set hard enough to slash his shins.
Cajzl signaled that he was ready for the shot. Cameron rolled his camera. On the director’s cue, the glass would be blown from the far side of the bridge to the near side, creating a wave effect and sending thirty tons of water into the set in seconds. It was the last shot. Cameron was done. He was exhausted and drained. Postproduction looked like it was going to be a living hell, with an impossible deadline and difficult visual effects that had barely been started. He had enough footage for a four-hour movie, was wildly over budget, and had been told there was zero possibility that the film could make money. His movie was the laughingstock of Hollywood, and the media was pillorying him daily. “I thought to myself, ‘Lord, take me now. It’s a really good time,’” Cameron says. He cued the squibs, which released the avalanche of water. First Cajzl disappeared, and a split second later Cameron was slammed against the wall. His world turned dark brown. When the watery fury subsided, Cameron slowly surfaced and saw that Cajzl was at the top and OK. The director himself was unharmed, and the shot looked good. Postproduction yawned before him. He had finished one impossible task only to face another, but that was tomorrow.
He dried off, feeling utterly depleted, and had a few toasts with the remaining crew. Someone produced a bottle of tequila, which Cameron promptly confiscated. He walked to the edge of the tank, where the set of the ship sat angled into the water, frozen in the act of sinking. It would be torn down as soon as his taillights faded out of sight heading north. Cameron sat and drank about half the bottle, saying his good-byes to the set, the tank, the entire adventure. Then he got up and went to the van that would drive him back to L.A. He was asleep before they pulled out of the studio.
Better Than Good
With each of his movies, Cameron has edged closer to the editor’s chair. He’s gone from standing back entirely on The Terminator to making some of his own splices on Aliens to learning how to use an Avid, the then-new digital editing system, on True Lies. On Titanic he was a full-fledged part of the editing team, which was rounded out by Richard Harris, who had schooled Cameron on the Avid on True Lies, and Conrad Buff, who had worked with the director since The Abyss. Cameron had the Avids set up at his Malibu home, which had become a kind of postproduction compound. He would deal with visual effects and other issues during the day and at night, alone, start cutting. Sometimes he recut the other guys’ work; sometimes they recut his. Cameron made the final decisions, but it was a collaborative process. All three bodies would be needed for the workload: On a typical three-hour drama, editors have between six hundred and eight hundred thousand feet of film from which to cut. Cameron had shot well over twice that.9
The special effects were also overwhelming. Digital Domain couldn’t handle the massive workload. Titanic ramped up from one special-effects house to seventeen to try to speed the process along. Cameron was trying to use the technology in a new way. Titanic wasn’t T2, where the stunning special effects drew attention to themselves. This time his goal was to create a time and place in absolutely unassailable realistic detail, to have the effects go undetected by an audience immersed in the story. Digital Domain pushed the envelope of motion capture for the film’s digital crowds, but there were hitches. The clothing never looked real, with rubbery folds at the knees and elbows. Faces looked like masks. Cameron used the shots wisely and didn’t overplay his hand.
By May, it was becoming clear that the July release date was going to be a serious problem. Cameron still had to deal with looping the actors’ dialogue, the musical score, the final sound mix, color timing, and hundreds more unfinished effects shots. He called Chernin and told the executive a summer release would mean a compromised film. Chernin asked for a day to think about what to do. Fox bit the bullet. The studio pushed the release date from July 2 to December 19. The change bought Cameron some breathing room, but not without new pressures. In the middle of the turmoil, the director ran into News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch at the studio. “I guess I’m not your favorite person,” Cameron said to the media baron. “But the movie is going to be good,” he promised. “It better be a damn sight better than good,” Murdoch told him.
This was a period of some change in Cameron’s personal life. Linda Hamilton, whom the director had dated on and off since T2 in 1991, had struggled with mood disorders for years. After the birth of their daughter in 1993, she had suffered severe postpartum depression. “I think Jim said to me once, ‘I like who I leave in the morning, but I don’t always know who I’m going to come home to at night,’” Hamilton told Larry King in 2005.10 During the making of Titanic, Hamilton had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, had begun treatment, and was seeing improvement. Cameron saw an opportunity for a fresh start for the couple, and they married
in July 1997. It was his fourth marriage, and like the others, it wouldn’t last.
The Secret Song
Cameron’s composer on the film was James Horner, with whom he had shared the miserably rushed postproduction experience on Aliens. When Horner met with him about the Titanic job, they devoted less than five minutes to addressing their respective disappointments about that score. “I apologized and he apologized,” Horner says. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, man. It’s history. It’s gone. Let’s talk about this movie.’” They discussed what Cameron wanted on Titanic—a score with a tremendous amount of heart. And what he didn’t want. “There was gonna be no song, dammit, in my movie,” Horner says, recalling Cameron’s certitude. “That was a closed issue.” Cameron had snuck one song into T2—“Bad to the Bone,” played when Schwarzenegger enters the biker bar—over his editor’s protestations. But the director rarely uses songs in his films. “They never seem to fit tonally,” he says.
On Titanic, Horner never gave it another thought. He had his marching orders. But as he grew close to finishing the score, Horner was stumped about how to end the movie musically. “The score is such an emotional roller coaster architecturally, compositionally” Horner says. “How am I gonna write another piece when the end credits roll that means anything?” The composer decided the way to solve his dilemma was with intimacy—a solo voice. And then he wrote a melody and quietly enlisted lyricist Will Jennings to collaborate on it. “And within two days it spun out of my control into a song,” Horner says. He had an idea who might be right to sing it, an old friend whom he tracked down where she was performing in Las Vegas—Celine Dion. Horner flew to Vegas and sang his song for Dion, who loved it and was eager to record a demo. “I explained to her that I was in verboten territory here, that if Jim ever found out he’d have my head,” Horner recalls.
Secretly, Horner flew to New York to meet Dion in the studio. There were supposed to be just four people there, but all of Sony’s top brass showed up, nearly twenty people in all, including the record label’s chief, Tommy Mottola. Dion sang a complete take of the song, “My Heart Will Go On.” When she finished, the room was hushed. Some of the executives were dabbing their eyes. “She came out and said, ‘Well, so what does everybody think?’” Horner recalls. There was universal approval from the Sony entourage, who disappeared in their limos while Horner made four copies of the recording. He brought it back to L.A. but felt he couldn’t play it yet for Cameron. He was waiting for the right time to explain this concept of a song. Every few days, Horner saw Cameron to go over some aspect of the score, and the time never seemed right. Dion’s camp anxiously checked in. Had Jim heard the song? Did he love it?
One day, Cameron seemed a little happy—or at least not gruff. Some special-effects sequence had come back and it hadn’t been screwed up. Horner seized the moment. “He asked me if I was in a good mood, and I said, ‘Of course not. What’s the question?’” Cameron recalls. With some trepidation, the composer played his song for Cameron. “I thought, ‘Oh, no, he’s pushing a song,’” says Cameron. “A song! Would you put a song at the end of Schindler’s List? There’s not going to be a song at the end of Titanic. This is a serious historical drama.” But as the song progressed, Cameron noticed how cleverly Horner had reorchestrated the main romantic theme of the score and how emotionally affecting the lyrics were. The song embodied the dramatic themes of the movie perfectly. He was won over within the length of one playback. Horner asked if Cameron recognized the singer, and the director said no. Told it was Celine Dion, Cameron said, “Oh, she’s big, right?”
A Hat on a Hat
The first test screening for Titanic was at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Cameron flew there ahead, alone, ostensibly to test the audio systems, while Landau, Sanchini, and eight or nine Fox executives rode in on the corporate plane. Cameron had roped off seats for himself at the theater. He likes to sit in the middle of the audience, but not next to an audience member who might recognize him and definitely not next to an executive, so Sanchini was his buffer. Cameron almost always projects an image of complete confidence around studio brass. Some of the time, he’s faking. That day, he was terrified. His reputation, Fox’s and Paramount’s money, people’s jobs were all riding on Titanic’s being better than good. “He said, ‘Someday I’m going to die at a preview screening of one of my films. I’m just going to have a heart attack and die. I know it. This is where it’s gonna end for me,’” recalls Sanchini. Cameron had rigged the audio so he could ride the volume the whole time—to focus on anything but the anxiety. When the lights went down, he whispered to Sanchini, “We’ll know in the first few minutes if this has all been worth it.” The movie started, with its sepia-treated titles and the deep dive footage of the wreck, and the audience was wooden. No reaction. “We’re fucked,” Cameron whispered to Sanchini. “It’s all over. There’s no point.” But by ten or fifteen minutes in, the crowd started responding—a special-effects transition from the wrecked Titanic to the ship in its pristine period drew a “wow,” and DiCaprio earned some chuckles. The film seemed to get over some kind of a hump with the audience, and Cameron exhaled.
When the focus-group leader interviewed the crowd after the film, it came out that the audience thought they were going to be seeing Great Expectations. That’s what they had been told, for reasons of security. They thought the first few minutes were a trailer for Titanic. Aside from the source of the confusion, Cameron learned something else from the audience. The reaction cards were off-the-charts good, except for one scene. “We thought people wouldn’t like all the slow, mushy stuff in the beginning, but they did,” says Sanchini. “They thought the movie was too long in the sinking.” Originally, Cameron had larded the film with plenty of action he thought audiences and studios expected from him. He had spent three days and well over a million dollars on a soggy, angled set shooting a virtuoso chase scene and gunfight in the middle of the sinking. But the preview audiences felt a gunfight in the middle of the sinking of Titanic was wrong. “It was supposed to be a Jim Cameron moment,” Sanchini says, “but they didn’t want it.”
To the shock of almost everyone who had worked on it, Cameron cut the chase scene. “I liked it,” he says. “It was a technical marvel.” But he realized he had successfully created a strong enough sense of jeopardy from the sinking ship that the idea of additional peril from a guy with a gun was superfluous—“a hat on a hat.” To close a gap created by the cut scene, Cameron filmed a quick pickup shot with Winslet and DiCaprio running downstairs from the dining room to the corridor. He locked the picture at three hours and fourteen minutes.
King of the World
Cameron had indeed made another “most expensive movie ever,” this time with a budget topping $200 million. But at the moment before Titanics release, he also knew he had made a good movie. Cameron’s fingerprints were all over Titanic, right down to Jack’s sketches, which he had drawn himself. He was satisfied as a filmmaker and proud of the accomplishment, not just for himself but for the huge team who had helped him. Titanics biggest surprise, however, was yet to come, as the movie exploded at the box office, and in the strangest way possible.
Titanics reviews were mostly positive. Roger Ebert called it “flawlessly crafted,”11 and the New York Times Janet Maslin said Titanic was “the first spectacle in decades that honestly invites comparison to Gone with the Wind.”12 But some critics felt the spectacle had come at the expense of the script. The Los Angeles Times’s Kenneth Turan was particularly scathing, writing, “What really brings on the tears is Cameron’s insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only is it not, it is not even close.”13
On its opening weekend, Titanic took in $28.6 million, beating the James Bond film it was up against by a hair. But then it began to build from weekend to weekend, seemingly defying gravity. It just wouldn’t come down. Titanic‘s box office peaked on Valentine’s Day 1998, when it earned $13 million in a single day, seven weeks into i
ts release. Teenage girls, in particular, were driving the box-office numbers and embracing Titanic with Beatlemania levels of fervor, going to see the movie over and over again in packs. Within two months of Titanics release, 45 percent of women under twenty-five who had seen the movie had seen it twice. Some held Titanic parties, where they convened to listen to the soundtrack—and cry. But it wasn’t just young women propelling the movie’s success. Young men, the traditional box-office drivers, still showed up for the action. And older audiences of both genders represented an unusually large number of ticket buyers. In the middle of a decade culturally marked by cynicism and irony, an utterly earnest movie was drawing audiences in droves. What people around the world really needed, it seemed, was a good old-fashioned wallow. Laughter is regional, but audiences from Tokyo to Rome to Mexico City were all crying in the same places. A graduate student in Cairo named Rania al-Razaz told the New York Times that she had waited more than a week to get a ticket to Titanic in April. “It is not an American movie,” al-Razaz said. “It’s a human movie.”14 Former New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael sniffed to Newsweek that Titanic was “square in ways people seem to have been longing for.”15
The movie’s cultural influence spread far beyond the multiplex. Libraries couldn’t keep Titanic titles on their shelves, and Walter Lord’s 1955 book A Night to Remember and the 1912 Senate inquiry into the sinking were both reissued. The J. Peterman catalog sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of replica Titanic paraphernalia, including life jackets, blueprints for the ship, and a fifteen-foot anchor with a $25,000 price tag. Restaurant chefs promoted Titanic menus, and cruise lines, curiously, reported a surge in ticket sales. Titanic, once a symbol of man-made tragedy, was now synonymous with romance. Cruise-ship passengers kept trying to ride the bow as Jack and Rose had, before learning, sadly, that this was prohibited on most vessels. Many did, however, inquire about the number of lifeboats aboard.
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